It's so fun to see the media wars play out in actual tiffs between actual human beings in actual rooms together. Take this passive-aggressive clash between Google's Larry Page, programmer, and IAC's Barry Diller, onetime movie mogul.

Disgraced, impeached Illinois governor and media joker Rod Blagojevich thinks he would do well in New York because no one has yet told him to go fuck himself. Not to his face, at least. [New Yorker]

The New Yorker Festival is coming up! It's Lollapalooza for the urban intelligentsia. Tickets go on sale today at noon, and if you don't buy them immediately then forget seeing the good stuff. A guide to the good stuff, below.

In your finally Friday media column: Army profiles of journalists are a huge waste of money, a special journalists asks for a special job, the New Yorker hires someone expressly to make you jealous, and newspapers lose billions again.

Media wise man Steven Brill is busy saving (HEH) the newspaper industry with micropayments—but not so busy that he couldn't write up a long New Yorker article about NYC teachers. Hey, it's good to be good at something.

We're Tarantino fans for sure, but a WWII movie about Nazi-killing Jews? We're a little skeptical, and the critics aren't helping our confusion.

Yesterday we told you that McKinsey-driven Conde Nast was firing all of its receptionists. A blow to the company's editorial glamor, yes. But the dragnet has also seized the New Yorker's whimsical, overqualified "jack of all trades!" [UPDATE: Maybe not!]

There are so many great things about Don Draper, but let's just choose one: his product pitches are so evocative. His vision and lyrical description imbues every product not only with a sense of luxury but a sense of necessity.

In the new issue of the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell delves into what really caused the collapse of Wall Street. His conclusion: It had more to do with cocky banker egos than it did institutional failure or general dumbassery.

That dang Seymour Hersh. The New Yorker scribe is always running saying crazy things to scare the bejesus out of us and, unfortunately, he's always right. Just like when he mentioned that Dick Cheney was running a CIA "death squad."

Big Ideas Author Malcolm Gladwell, a Manhattanite of the New Yorker, has issued a smackdown review of Free, the book from Big Ideas Author Chris Anderson, a Berkeleyan of San Francisco's Wired. If that's not provocative enough, Gladwell sounds downright grumpy.

This week's New Yorker features a 7600 word profile of Leon Panetta, Obama's choice to lead the CIA. Most notable among those 7600 words: Panetta's been wondering the same thing many have about the depths of Dick Cheney's dark soul.

Al Qaeda may be aggressively growing its ranks by recruiting European white men to carry out attacks, a move New Yorker writer and Al Qaeda expert Lawrence Wright says allows the group to "transcend its stereotype." [The Stimulist]

In a move that sort of reeks of desperation more than it does slick PR, Newsweek's Jon Meacham announced that Stephen Colbert will be the magazine's guest editor for the issue hitting newsstands on June 8.

"Jorge Colombo drew this week's cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in Times Square." [New Yorker]

These tweets are made for venting. Joanna Pearlstein, Susan Orlean, Jim Louderback, and other media twits found plenty to complain about on Twitter:

Our dreams have come true! New Yorker contributor and Twitterati regular Susan Orlean is whaling away on whiny, blogorrheic ex-staff writer Dan Baum on Twitter. Grab some popcorn, follow @susanorlean and @danielsbaum, and enjoy!

Yesterday we told you about ex-New Yorker scribe Dan Baum using Twitter to tell the story of his hiring and firing at the magazine. On Monday he filed the second chapter of his Tweet-narrative.

On Friday ex-New Yorker scribe Dan Baum began telling the story of his employment at the magazine through a medium rarely synonymous with narrative storytelling—-Twitter. As of this writing he's up to 1399 words!

Julia Allison thinks she has something to prove, Zillow CEO Rich Barton thinks he personally brought down AT&T, and MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall think she's a neutral vessel for news. Other delusions of the Twitterati: