Poor Maeve McGilloway! On her first visit back home after spending three weeks at college, the Middlebury freshman made a horrifying discovery.

Says an assistant professor of cultural anthropology, of his students who arrange to have their marriage proposals surreptitiously photographed: "They both want to be famous and they want to be authentic, and yet there's something in their striving to archive their lives that's inauthentic ... It's almost like if it's not on Facebook, it didn't happen." Uh huh! And when the Times contains sentences like, "Whether inspired by tenderhearted sentiment, the desire to record history in the making or something more narcissistic, some marriage-minded men are remaking one of humanity's most private moments," it's almost like the last 30 years of the women's movement didn't happen! [NYT]

Rupert Murdoch appeared at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference yesterday (uh, WTF, Goldman Sachs, was Communapalooza taken?) and strongly hinted that he was going to take the Wall Street Journal's website free. He also outlined the ways in which News Corp. would use the paper to bolster its new Fox Business Channel.

"Why Is Bob Herbert Boring?" It's something we ask ourselves every Tuesday and Saturday; While Herbert probably has the second most-interesting personal life of all Times op-ed columnists (after MoDo), he rates an absolute first for utter dullness. [Washington Monthly]

That white witch Alessandra Stanley doesn't like the CW's "Gossip Girl." In today's Times, she faults the show for not being as good as the books; while they "are often criticized as a devolution from Judy Blume's coming-of-age novels, they are actually closer to children's literature. Like 'Peter Pan,' 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' or the 'Harry Potter' series, these novels are fantasies and projections of an imaginary world where parents are dead or peripheral, and lost boys and girls struggle on their own with good and evil, or in this case, Bergdorf Goodman and evil." Oh yeah? Screw you, Bruno Bettelheim, you don't mess with the most amazing show OF THE YEAR. [NYT]

Sad about today's passing of TimesSelect? Are you one of the few people who actually paid money for it? Well, turn that frown upside down! The New York Times is going to give you a full (pro-rated) refund AND "complimentary access to Times Reader from now through December 31, 2007." TimesReader is the crappy digital version of the paper that reads just like the regular paper. Unless you have a Mac, in which case it doesn't read at all, because it only works for PCs. What a fabulous way to say "Thank you," Mr. Sulzberger! Full e-mail follows.

Perhaps influenced by The New York Times recently setting its Web site free, Rupert Murdoch chimes in, saying "Me too." He's still leaning towards banishing the Wall Street Journal's online subscription model. [Reuters]

The New York Times Book Review is expanding its bestseller lists as of next week; now there'll be 110 bestsellers all told. Paperback listings will be broken out into mass market and trade paperback categories. The expansion comes at the cost of an editorial page. Why the change? "'It's completely ad driven,' says a top executive at one of the major houses. 'People want to buy a position next to the lists.' Publishers are also more likely to buy ads—whether in the weekday books pages of the Times or in the Book Review—when their titles are New York Times best sellers." [New York Business]

Each morning we wake up, open the front door, grab the newspaper, look at the forecast for the day's high temperature, and dress based on that forecast. (Occasionally we also shower.) And every day, around noon, we find ourselves complaining that we're too hot because the paper was completely wrong. So we asked Intern Mary to track the weekday results of the city's three major papers and the New York Sun against the actual high temperatures over a two-week period. She also looked at the online predictions, for those of you who get your news that way. Her findings may surprise you!

When Times TV critic Virginia Heffernan wrote that "'K-Ville' opens with a silly in- medias-res chase sequence—meant, presumably, to grab you by the lapels—which turns out to be a dream," she had no idea how in medias res she really was: "A television review yesterday about 'K-Ville,' which had its premiere on Fox last night, critiqued the wrong episode. It was about next week's show, not last night's premiere." [NYT]

Steph Jespersen, the "director of advertising acceptability" for the New York Times, is being forced to answer questions from readers during the worst possible week—while some small crazy percentage of BlogAmerica™ is still exercised about how MoveOn got a 'cheap rate' for their ad about Iraq. So the poor guy has to respond to idiots writing questions like "Is the NYTimes anti-labor? Or is advertising just another kind of editorial?" and, super-nuttily, "Let's say I would like to purchase a full page ad in your newspaper and beat the #@*& out of Hillary Clinton. All proper and no foul language. Would you allow that?" These he handles with dignity and patience (the ad rate MoveOn got is a standby rate, and the conspiracy the conservative cranks were digging for was not, like, real). But then he stumbles and falls on a question from an actual non-crazy.

Just now we hear that Wednesday will officially bring the announcement of the death of TimesSelect. Hooray! Congratulations, everyone!

Jeff Bercovici thinks TimesSelect, the extremely annoying partial pay wall of the New York Times, is ending this week. Please God please, yes. [Portfolio]

Those bleeding heart liberals at the New York Times want to make it absolutely clear: People are out of work because of slashed payrolls, not because they want to be. Okay?

In-house memo from Larry Ingrassia, the New York Times Business editor: "I am pleased to say that Peter Goodman, who has been the international economic correspondent at the Washington Post, is joining Business Day as an economics reporter."

The Times finally gets around to noting this coming Sunday's launch of Page Six The Magazine. New York Post magazine editor Col Allan notes that the Post isn't just aiming at the New York Daily News; the Times itself is a target. Why? Well, the Times reminds you, "The Times' Sunday magazines—a century-old weekly, and four new, less frequent ones—attract a lot of ads and are important money-makers for the newspaper." Duly noted! And clearly necessary! Another Rupert Murdoch publication, the Wall Street Journal, has announced its launch of a glossy magazine resurrecting the "Pursuits" rubric. Robert Frank, the paper's chronicler of rich people, is expected to play a large role in the monthly mag. It's just so nice to see everyone at every newspaper on the same page (as it were). Maybe later they will start making money on the internets!

"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Gabriel Delahaye's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.

In one of the odder contretemps of our time, New York Times perfume critic Chandler Burr has gone off on gossip sheet Page Six over their description of Out magazine as a "gay-lifestyle mag." Says Burr: "'gay lifestyle' is a purely political term with a purely political meaning, and it's simply, factually inaccurate." We're siding with him on this: Out is obviously a "gay lifestyle magazine" but it is not a "gay-lifestyle magazine." We find Burr's understanding of hyphenation and compound adjectives rather unspeakably hot, and now we would very much like him to criticize our perfumes, if you know what we mean, wink wink. But more importantly: Is the "gay lifestyle mag" in trouble? Its ad pages are looking rough.

Kurt Eichenwald antagonist Debbie Nathan writes that the former New York Times reporter "not only gave money to a child pornographer, but did business with him and even signed on to an illegal porn website as a member and administrator, documents unsealed yesterday in a federal criminal proceeding in Nashville reveal. He claims in one court document, he only 'posed' as a pedophile." Three predictions: Things are going to get a lot worse for Kurt Eichenwald. Debbie Nathan is going to get sued. We are still going to feel icky about this whole thing. [Counterpunch]