Eighteen-year-old N.Y.U.ster Rachel Helson has done some very impressive work for the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation: she's about to produce her third benefit performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this time on Broadway, with all proceeds going to the charity! And she's managed to recruit some A-list Broadway talent, too, like Neil Patrick Harris and Wicked's Kate Reinders. But that's not even the most charitable part. Helson, who the Times described today as "perky" (later: "Perky is almost too mild a word"), will also be generously donating her own time on the night of the performance, starring in the production as ingenue Janet Weiss. "Students at Tisch are by nature ambitious," said Tisch dean Mary Schmidt Campbell, adding that "in terms of the scale of her ambition, this rates up there 10-plus."

Today at Counterpunch (subscription only, hence the handy partial guide that follows), reporter Debbie Nathan retells the Justin Berry narrative. It's another version of the story of the teen hustler turned adult pornographer turned government witness that Kurt Eichenwald told in the New York Times in December, 2005—a retelling she undertook as his was constituted from what she calls "deficient reporting." This will undoubtedly incite Eichenwald into some lawyerly frenzy.

Fire sale! Now that the paper is moving to the new building, it's time to get rid of all the old crap clogging up the building on West 43rd St. From a memo that just went out to employees:

"In December 1996, inspired in part by [Tony] Randall's well-publicized late fatherhood (his wife was 26 at the time), I wrote an article for The New York Times about men having children at a stage in life when their peers were usually contemplating a move to Florida or their next cardiogram. One proud papa dubbed them start-over dads, or SODs for short.... Under the circumstances, it seemed natural to check in with some of the same fathers 10 years later to see how they are faring in their eighth or even ninth decade."

Here are some selected non-stunning facts about Project Runway's endearingly and perpetually concerned fashion coach, per Eric Wilson's Styles paean.

In a blatant bid for "most-emailed" status, the Times has published an article about whether some cars are more homosexual than others. Well, it's a step up from all those "College: Will Your Child Get In, Or Did You Fuck Up Your Life And Hers?" articles! Anyway, "Gay By Design, or a Lifestyle Choice" left some questions unanswered. So we asked them of a Gay.

Quick! If you can get over to West 43rd St. by 10:45, you'll witness what will undoubtedly be an awkward presentation featuring several NYT executives and some car people unveiling the Times' new "plug-in hybrid sprinter van" before it takes its very first drive from Midtown to the Times printing plant in Queens. Truly, this is an historic moment, but really, until Sewell Chan gets a Prius we're not convinced that the paper is really doing anything to help the environment. The internal memo (what, no press release?) after the jump.

Guess what? The New York Times is super proud of TimesSelect, that whopping success for which 218,000 (hey, that's .0007% of the U.S. population! Uh, if our math is good!) have signed up. We know this because they're trotting out Editorial Page Editor Andy Rosenthal to do a dog and pony show in today's Observer. Andy is beaming about the assload of contributors he's signed up to offer web-only content (Stanley Fish, Will Leitch, the dude who played guitar for former Bad Company lead singer Paul Rodgers during the recent Queen reunion tour). And blogs? They've got TONS of blogs! They've got blogs about blogs!

Poor Bernard Weinraub's all upset because the New York Times—his old paper— gave his very first play, which is about the Holocaust, a bad, mean-spirited review, and he went running to his old bestie Nikki Finke to complain. He's upset because, since he used to work at the Times, the paper assigned a freelancer to review it, and the review was so awful (at least in Bernie's eyes) that he simply had to assume a conspiracy was afoot. After all, such publications as Newsday and the New York Sun (which, let's face it, would probably give a rave review to a backyard performance by a bunch of goats if it was about the Holocaust) liked it! So what the hey, Times?

• Can Don Imus maintain his moneymaking capabilities? 'Cause otherwise he's just some loudmouth hick in a hat. [NYT]
  

Sex! It's all over the Times Science section today: how genetic preferences guide it, why people stop having it when they get old, and what makes people want more of it—"'Listening to Noam Chomsky,' said a psychologist in her 50s, 'always turns me on.'" Believe it or not, though, that quote is not the least hot thing about this special section. No, that would have to be this deeply awkward and wink-and-nod-less video of Science editor David Corcoran interviewing Dr. Helen Fisher about desire. Like Roxy Music, Dr. Fisher believes that love is the (ok, "a") drug. Check out David's shifty-eyes when he's talking about the differences in the ways men and women respond to desire. The hot electric signals emitted by his spinal tendinous reflexes are palpable.

• In his memoir, former Time Inc. EIC Norman Pearlstine paints NYT honcho Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., as a lightweight for that whole "not caving to federal prosecutors like Time did" thing. [NYP]
  

The New York Times has been all up in this Don Imus racist-talk craziness, with David Carr's fully huffy article about the show and then Maria Newman's midday update today. The New York Times formerly advertised on Imus's show—the paper was one of five major sponsors. (Others are Newsday, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and the New York Stock Exchange.) According to a Times spokeswoman, the paper "does not currently advertise on Imus in the Morning. We have not for months and have no plans to do so." Smooth timing! This morning Times standards editor Craig Whitney felt compelled to send out a communiqu to the paper's reporters reminding them that they should consider, very carefully, whether or not to make a radio, TV, or "Internet" appearance that might bring shame upon the House of Sulzberger.

Another great moment in the intersection between the classes from today's Metropolitan Diary.

While the rest of us are drinking and snoozing, the television is trying to transmit important information into our homes. Today, our special correspondent for T.V. punditry catches us up on the week in chat shows. Because we totally wouldn't watch that shit if you paid us. Get your tinfoil hats on!

"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's Sunday Styles leads with a story by Alex Williams called "Rise of the Takedown," which claims that "heckling" is no longer considered the business of hooligans—that it has become, thanks to YouTube and other important cultural factors, a mainstream mode of criticism and personal expression.

Here at Gawker, we don't do much celebrating. It's always "Joe Morgenstern is a lazy piggy" or "Man, whoever made this slideshow on the T website is so lame." Never a kind word to be heard around here—see below, generally speaking—the posts never not poker-faced and always possibly reactionary to the point where it might be considered harmful.

For some reason there's a whole pile of media stories in today's papers, so we thought we'd take a page from our weekday friends and start the morning off with one of our famous Gawker media news round-ups. Let's ease into things today.

Author Judith Warner was at first "sick at heart" to read about those high-achieving girls whose high achievements still weren't enough to get them into their first-choice colleges. And then she realized: "It's probably the best thing that could have happened to them." In her TimesSelecty burst of awesome today, Warner breaks it all down.