Remember Look Book victim Lisa Falcone, the hedge fund wifey with her dressed-up twins? Come on, how could you forget? She was probably one of the twattiest Look Book subjects ever, spouting out gems like "When they're sleeping, I plan their outfits for the next day. I constantly see kids dressed casual, and I just feel that if I teach my kids to be casual, then fashion will die. And I'm not going to let that happen on my watch!" and, perhaps most tellingly, "I started out modeling. When I met my husband, I started freelance editing, and now I'm writing a novel."

• Evil, Inc.'s Rupert Murdoch and Liberty Media's John C. Malone kiss and make up. [NYT]
  

A front-page story in the New York Times today brought an important trend to our attention: more and more parents are sharing the marvels of the Great White Way with their children, starting at ever-earlier ages. Kids in the audience are especially common at musicals aimed at them (stunner), like Mary Poppins and Tarzan and the rest of the Disney musicals. What a cute trend! Why, just listen to how adorable and precocious Cindy Gerathy's kid was:

Fashion designer Helmut Lang's got his lederhosen in a bunch over some stuff the New York Times printed about him recently. And what exactly seems to be the problem? Lang has "requested a correction for 'false reporting and incorrect statements' in an article that appeared in the Thursday Styles section on Nov. 2," according to WWD. Wait, you mean Thursday Styles just makes shit up? We simply refuse to believe it.

On Monday the Observer reprinted a memo sent to New York Times staffers from Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., concerning the paper's gift policy. It read as follows:

In one of those rich-people settlements where the accused gets off but everyone totally knows he's guilty anyway, Anthony Marshall, whose own son accused him of abusing and neglecting his mother, the 104-year-old socialite Brooke Astor, has been cleared of all charges. He's also required to fork over $11 million of his mother's money, and he's not the only one who's going to be out a couple of bucks:

• Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger set to retire at the end of next year. [NYP]
  

• Lachlan Murdoch's former lair at 11 Spring St. gets ready for its last close-up before being turned into soulless, bloodsucking condos. [Curbed]
  

Not to get all self-referential, but we couldn't help noticing an article in Sunday's Week in Review that blamed the coarsening of standards in American public life on a combination of Anna Nicole Smith, Michael Richards, O.J. Simpson, Britney's vag, and, uh, us:

"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.

Another day, another fawning profile of Park Slope-dwellin', blog-havin', NYU-teachin' (well, when possible!) Ghost Maps author Steven Johnson. What's different about this one, though? Hmmm, let's see. Blah blah Johnson's fondness for blogs, his own websitey/bloggy endeavors, he was "among the first to have a Mac in college," — yeah, where's the new information here? Oh, here it is:

It's got to be tough to work at the Times right now: Rumors are swirling about a change in ownership, the paper's relevance is being questioned by both the right and the left, and it's holiday time, which means your chances of getting ass-grabbed by a jolly Bill Safire have increased exponentially. To top it all off, Bill Keller - sounding like a man who has suffered a serious beating at the hands of the circulation department - has just announced that deadlines are being moved up half an hour. The idea is that if more customers in the suburbs can get their papers earlier in the morning, circulation will magically rise and Pinch won't be forced to sell more space in the new Times tower. What does this (probably futile) move mean for you? Basically nothing: You read the paper on line, much like everyone else here in the twenty-first century. Full memo after the jump.

• Arthur Sulzberger may try to take the New York Times private rather than see it fall into the hands of Hank Greenberg or Jack Welch. [BW]
  

So the big news in media circles, if you care about that sort of thing (and, really, what's more exciting, Danny DeVito drunk on 'The View'? We think not.), is Maurice "Hank" Greenberg's plan to buy the New York Times. This morning's Post reported that the "billionaire insurance titan" has been "buying huge blocks of New York Times stock to break the Sulzberger family's stranglehold on the media empire." This afternoon, CNBC's Charlie Gasparino (yeah, just pretend that you know who he is) advanced the story, claiming

• We think it's kind of tacky to mock a Parkinson's patient for writing a doddering, fogeyish column about the Internet. So we'll let Wonkette do it. Anyway, our guess as to the mystery journalist is Kaus. [Slate]
  

In a Black Friday column bemoaning the state of patriotism and consumerism (or something, it's Clyde Haberman, so it's hard to tell), Clyde Haberman mentioned an excursion

• Supreme Court allows federal prosecutors to look at Judy Miller's phone records. Why do we even bother with a First Amendment? [NYT]
  

"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.

And we officially have ourselves a trend! At least in the Times, which, as Seth Mnookin points out, is following up its Pulitzer-baiting "Class Matters" series with an incisive series of reports on "the plight of those who only break the top one percent of American wage earners." Today's entry in the saga is the Louis Uchitelle weeper, "Very Rich Are Leaving the Merely Rich Behind." A brief taste after the jump: It's a bit on how the superrich manage to keep it real.

Former New York Times managing editor Gerald Boyd, who was forced to resign in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, died of lung cancer yesterday at the age of 56. Though his career pre-Blair was storied — he was the youngest journalist ever chosen for a prestigious Nieman fellowship, and a series he worked on as the Times's first black city editor won a Pulitzer — his race and his position linked him inextricably in people's minds to Blair's dramatic plagiarism flameout. Especially in the minds of CNN.com's copyeditors, apparently.