The Wall Street hostilities directed at West 43rd Street are heating up! Influential investment advisor firm Institutional Shareholder Services (better known by the slithery acronym ISS) issued a report yesterday advising that NYT Co. Class A shareholders withhold votes for the four directors that are up for election later this month. The Class B shareholders—those are largely Sulzberger family members—control the votes for the remaining nine directors on the board. So by telling Class A shareholders to withhold their votes, ISS is, obviously, telling the non-family shareholders to tell the Times that they don't like the way the company is being run. Meouch! What else does ISS have to say? And why is this a big deal, anyway?

New York City Plans to Promote Circumcision [NYT]
Earlier: Gawker's coverage of penises

Alice Mathias, the Dartmouth senior who's blogging for the NYT, has a very interesting resum , especially for someone so young! Did you know that she won a research grant from Dartmouth for a project called "Neighbors of the Animal House: A Screenplay About the 'Girls Next Door'"? And her dad also went to Dartmouth, which is really sweet. She also wrote a bunch of columns ("Alice Unchained") for the Dartmouth paper before, come November, she didn't anymore. Let's take a gander.

• Sewell Chan to start new Times blog about brutal rapes, pandas. Also, the Times is moving to a new building. [NYO]
  

If you have no Times Select, you may not have noticed a new Times blog called "The Graduates." It's written by a bunch of college seniors who are all columnists or editors at their schools' newspapers. And, whoa, they're totally nervous about the future! Haven't these people ever seen Kicking and Screaming? There's this one chick from Dartmouth, Alice Mathias? She's written a lot of words about—well, we're not totally sure. Fuck corporate America! Hurricane Katrina! Iraq! Confusion! She seems torn about what to do after college, since most of her Dartmouth friends are going to be "crunching numbers at places like J.P. Bored-Again, Bored-Again Stanley, Merrill Lynching, Deutsche Bag, or Lame-Man Brothers. The other option is to do consulting at Bane." Those names sound funny, don't they? Well! "Note: these are fake names. Real names have been withheld to ward off any more competition for my well-paying job."

Ah, the Knoll 'Life' chair! It's like an Aeron, but without that Silicon Alley taint. It's a chair that says, don't worry, darling, this company will still be around in 18 months! Light, yet solid. Just like the ones they have in the Harvard law library—so many of your next crop of interns will feel right at home when they schlep from campus life to the new Times building. What's more, the Times' ergonomist approves of them for "the vast majority of body types"!

Hot Times news! (Maybe! Google isn't telling us if it's been announced elsewhere. Damn you, stupid python.) In the course of one of those "Talk to the Newsroom" conversations with Metro editor Joe Sexton (they do too cover New York!), the following question comes over the wire:

Pity the "Amazing Girls" of Newton North. Their heroic struggle to be smart and pretty was detailed on the front page of yesterday's Times. They are "encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities!" They might not get into the exact pricey private college they would like to attend! It's very hard. Perhaps the most troubled of these overachievers is Esther Mobley (center), who is "a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive tense in Catullus and on Kierkegaard's existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North's top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group."

More fun at the Times!

"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.

Like berry-colored lipstick and chunky-heeled Steve Madden boots, caring a lot about Jane Austen is a fad that needs to be left in the 90s where it belongs. Sadly, an Austen biopic starring Anne Hathaway will be released this August, doubtless spawning a bunch of trend articles with "it is a truth universally acknowledged" leads and paragraphs that open by addressing the reader as "Reader." The Times got into the game early with not one but two columns in yesterday's Week In Review section (which is usually about, like, war and stuff, right?) that link that film to a contested Austen portrait. Charles McGrath concludes that Austen "probably wasn't much of a looker," while Verlyn Klinkenborg op-editorializes that we're shallow for even wondering: "It is a failing to read Shakespeare and feel impoverished by the lack of biographical detail. It is no less a failing to read Austen and wonder what the mirror said when she looked into it. I cannot think of anything that would make "Emma" richer than it is." Conclusion: whoever was in possession of the responsibility for putting this section together must be in want of a clue.

Pretty Words, Jane, Would That You Were Too [NYT]
If Jane Austen Were Among Us Now, Whom Would She Cast As Herself? [NYT]

As regular readers/depressives have no doubt surmised, most every weekend around here is about reading the New York Times — that is, ogling the pictures and sniffing the newsprint — and convincing ourselves that, just like Harry Hurt, we could do interesting things if we wanted to, that we aren't just inputs to an industrial contraption presently on a 48-hour cigarette break. The glossy girth of the Sunday Times serves such purposes quite well (so stay in your lane, weekday colleagues); the flimsy flaccidity of Saturday, not so much. Take today's Arts section, which contains reviews of four television programs premiering this weekend. Three of them — 75 percent! — are shows about animals.

This weekend brings another issue of T magazine, the New York Times Magazine ancillary publication that keeps multiplying thematically like a Styles section on steroids. And what have the Sunday brunching citizens of the city to look forward to this weekend?

Posters were scotch-taped up outside the elevators in the New York Times building today. (Some of the signs also seem to depict downward-plummeting bar graphs, but those may just be leftover materials from Hassan Elmasry's PowerPoint presentation.) From here on the outside, it's not clear whether these are company-sanctioned amusements regarding the paper's move or just bitter commentary, but either way somebody might want to check Jon Pareles' desk, see if he's alright.

The Times wants to harness the creativity of its employees for the naming of the conference rooms in their shiny new office building. To that end, they're holding a contest, for which the winners will receive "$100 on his or her cafeteria Zipthru account." In an effort to put some meat on the bones of the hungry folks at 43rd Street (you know what happens when the blood sugar gets low) we offer the following suggestions, which they should feel free to submit as their own.

Yoga mogul Rodney Yee, whose alleged studentfucking addiction attracted our attention not too long ago, contributes his two cents to a Thursday Styles piece on face yoga today. He's concerned that these classes, which claim to reduce wrinkles, are offering students false hope. "We've not discovered the fountain of youth, though people are always trying to obtain it... Yoga will add radiance to your face and relax you, which will make you look younger, but to just focus on the face is too specific and sounds more like a marketing ploy," And marketing ploys are to be disdained! Disdain them while shopping at the Rodney Yee Store.

In a column for Slate that feels just as tossed off as this very post is sure to be, media critic Jack Shafer offers a list of suggestions for the soon-to-be-vacated position of New York Times Public Editor. Shafer wants to see "somebody who is under 40, whose worldview hasn't been Lasiked blind by decades inside a newspaper newsroom, and who writes the way fire ants bite." His nominees include blog empress Elizabeth Spiers (who apparently has gas), some lady from the New Yorker, and the dude from Talking Points Memo, who is a Princeton alum. In that spirit we've come up with our own slate of candidates.

Albert Podell has a problem. Well, maybe a quite a few problems, but this is the one today's House 'n' Home section sent Joyce Wadler to hone in on: even though he is a rich lawyer, ladies tend to run when they see his scary, tiny, rent-controlled apartment. In an article full of precious gems (hot decor tip: "No stuffed animals, even if you are dying." On someone's prospective suitor: "He was very cute, but then I realized he was totally unsuccessful") Mr. Podell is the shiniest jewel. He actually thinks that it is okay to have sheets from 30 years ago patterned with "intergalactic battles or pink hippopotami or the Beatles," and to stock his kitchen cabinets with nothing but a six month supply of powdered milk for his cereal.

• Are Ron Burkle & Eli Broad back in the Tribune game? How will Sam Zell's bid work? When will this fucking story ever end? [LAT]
  

Mary Ann Giordano, the victim of that Styles-bashing, can apparently dish it out as well as she can take it. Our inbox is abuzz with stories about how's she wonderful and motherly, etc., but, under deadline pressure, can be sort of a bitch. "I know one veteran reporter who started to have panic attacks because Mary Ann was coming down so hard on her." Also? She's apparently... a kickboxer? "She could have bounced skinny mini-Wintour across the room," said one emailer. That kind of restraint is admirable. Maybe Anita "Bonecrusher" LeClerc was just in a bad mood because she hadn't eaten lately or something.