Los Angeles-based New York Times Hollywood writer Sharon Waxman will be going on leave this summer to write her next book, Stealing From the Pharaohs. We understand she won't be going back to her old job when she's done with the book. Word is that Waxman has been interested in a position on the Metro desk, but Metro editor Joe Sexton has not committed to hiring her. 'Times' culture editor Sam Sifton would not comment on personnel matters; Waxman did not respond to a telephone call.

A tipster who just tried to email Sheryl WuDunn—better known to you as Mrs. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, but also a Pulitzer-winning journalist in her own right (okay, she won with her husband! But still)—has left the Times to write a book... with her husband, as per her auto-reply.

A few months ago, the Times decided to ramp up some of their more lucrative "verticals" on their website—including Fashion and Style. They had lots of ideas, which they put on the company wiki for everyone to read and comment on. But did all of their plans come to fruition? Well, let's just say we were spared the disaster that inevitably would have been an Alex Kuczynski blog. The wiki, and what really happened, follow.

So remember that Times column yesterday that basically came out and said CNN populist and honorary Minuteman Lou Dobbs was basically full of misinformation and deliberate inaccuracies? Well, CNN wasn't exactly pleased.

In related news, Raines-era managing editor-apparent Patrick Tyler has sent Bill Keller an e-mail saying he "already knows how to walk." [NYO]

We knew there was discontent about the new New York Times building—so much so that the internal newspaper, Ahead of the Times, published an article reassuring everyone that things weren't so bad. But were things really that dreadful? We got hold of the Times internal wiki for the new building, where complaints about the building from the staff were being consolidated. And we learned that for every feature of the new building, there's a Times staffer with beef about it being broken. A selection follows. (We sure hope they got the urinals on the 9th floor working!)

"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.

Today the New York Times held its "Throw Stuff at Bill" (that would be Keller!) meetings—one this morning and two this afternoon. We got a report about the early afternoon session, and learned that the future of the Times is all about Sewell Chan, among other things.

Seems as though not everyone on the Metro desk possesses the same alacrity of mind, and typing skills, as the recently departed Sewell Chan. (Departed for NYT blog-land, that is! Not departed-departed.) Anyway, things have gotten so bad that Metro Editor Joe Sexton was inspired to send out a memo to his underlings outlining his discontent. The subject was in all caps—DO NOT TRASH THIS—but the post itself? All lower-case! We have a friend who says that when a guy writes you in all lower-case letters, it means he's trying to get in your pants in a non-threatening way (crafty!), so we can only imagine what Joe Sexton was thinking when he sent this out.

One Times writer calls another's work "riddled with errors and misperceptions, to the point where it is actively misleading." [Dave Kehr]

First among the horny critters were fucking horses, pornstar ducks, humpy frogs, and zoologist-jerked tortoises. Now it's animals who aren't getting any. Last week it was the sexually stymied chickens. Today, meet the shark who got so desperate, she fertilized her own egg and had a baby with herself!

Times morgue too messy to merit space in fancy new office building. [NYO]

All is not well at the new New York Times headquarters. It seems the inmates are not pleased with their new asylum, and thus an "it's not so bad!" feature went up on Ahead of the Times, the in-house party paper of choice, to quell the brewing discontent. A highlight, regarding the sound the toilet makes when flushing: "Some people liken it to a small animal being strangled. Personally, I hear a couple of high, whiny notes from the Sopranos' theme music." Delightful! The article—rather great!—follows.

NYT Biz finance editor the latest Portfolio victim-volunteer. [Romenesko]

Those who caught the early edition of David Carr's Times column today probably noticed a new bit of reporting on the Page Six incident. Page Six had said that Ian Spiegelman's allegation that Page Six editor Richard Johnson had accepted $3,000 in bribes from restaurateur Nello Balan was incorrect, because Johnson had actually only accepted $1,000. In the article that ran in today's paper, Carr had originally reported that the other $2,000—intended for Page Six staffers Jeane Macintosh and Sean Gannon (now the Business editor)—had gone to pay for staff drinks. But that allegation was missing in the late editions of the paper, and is no longer online. So what's the deal?

This week's Sunday Styles contained the most embarrassing, wince-inducing Modern Love yet in that column's history of personal betrayals and rampant oversharing. It's the story of Kevin, an impecunious freelancer, his wife Julie, and Frank, Julie's ex-husband. Kevin is incredibly insecure that Frank, who left Julie at the age of twenty-four because he was tired of being a full-time husband and father, wants his wife back, even though they are all old people now. Kevin compares himself to Frank in many regards and finds himself on the short end of every comparison. But how did Frank feel about the whole thing?

"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.

As the employees of the New York Times make their way into their new headquarters (many of them will migrate today!), there are several changes they will, undoubtedly, note. For one: Editors have offices in the middle of the newsroom floors, in glass-enclosed pod-like structures, instead of tucked away on the sides of floors. Goodbye, privacy! But there's one place on every floor where you can get some peace and quiet: The "Room of Silence." (Very "Superman.") But some Times employees are not-so-affectionately referring to them as the Crying Rooms.

If it is true, per Carrie Bradshaw and Intern Alexis of De Jure Altarcations, that the Times wedding announcements is "the straight woman's sports pages," then surely the Times Sunday Real Estate section is the sentient man's Mutual Funds Report. Consider, for instance, Suzanne Slesin's "Window Shopping" column today: in a few compact inches, every factor that could possibly go into judging a person's worth is introduced and discussed. Ideological attachments w/r/t architecture? Check. Thoughts on (de)merits of adaptive reuse? Check. Snide praise of decorator-charlatan Philippe Starck? Check. Subtle revelation of writer's own net-worth situation? Ding.

In tomorrow's "On Language" column (not yet online), the linguist William Safire concludes that "In borrowing, as speakers of Standard English do, cool words and phrases from hip-hop and rap ('You the man!' 'You go, girl!'), we should recognize the savvy sociopolitical methods behind its dialectical formulations." Which is to say, those people/rappers are not just making random sounds after all. What brought about this revelation? An e-mail from an English professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, who thought it was pretty funny that her students were using phrases like "back in the day" and "old school" in reference to things like the first-generation iPod. Intrigued, Safire took the ball and ran it all the way down, tapping not one, not two, but three "serious students of hip-hopese" to explain the phenomenon.