The op-ed page of today's Times no doubt brings heartbreak to some 3,799 college students nationwide; Nick Kristof's column carries the news that he has picked someone else to go on a free trip to Africa with him this summer. The lucky winner? 23-year-old Casey Parks, of Jackson, Miss. Casey, a graduate j-student at the University of Missouri, won Kristof over with her tale of a hardscrabble youth and a desire to see the world. She wrote: "I saw my mother skip meals. I saw my father pawn everything he loved. I saw our cars repossessed. I never saw France or London." (Or, apparently, the merits of parallelism.) Casey's full essay is available on Kristof's website, along with essays by the other 12 vanquished finalists, including our own precocious Henry the Intern. But the best part on Kristof's site is the video clip of him calling Casey with the big news. You'd think a man who can swashbuckler through Africa and buy sex slaves' freedom in a single bound wouldn't seem quite so profoundly awkward when tasked with making a simple phone call.

This morning we called your attention to a Sunday Styles piece on the increasing popularity of fitness clubs — who knew? — and the interesting selective anonymity granted within the article. Writer Guy Trebay purported to spend 24 hours at the Crunch on Lafayette Street, and he proudly mentioned among its clientele Calvin Klein, Matt Damon, Sandra Oh, and James Iha. Four others were left anonymous.

As we were flipping through Saturday's Times Business section, we realized that it had been quite a week for the paper of record:

Did you see Sunday Styles yesterday? If not, you missed the big news, carried over thousands of words jumping from the top of the front page, with lots of art and graphics and philosophical musing, that — and we hope you're sitting down — more people go to gyms now than did 20 years ago. (Who knew?) To commemorate this blatantly obvious fact, Guy Trebay spends 24 hours the Crunch on Lafayette, his local gym, and delivers a piece that in no way at all conveys the experience of spending 24 hours in your local gym. He does, however, catalogue the celebs who work out there, in an oddly bifurcated roundup that names some while granting others anonymity. Why this split, we wondered? And, more important, who are the unnamed celebs?

A Hell's Kitchen resident emails to report that on her walk across 43th Street to work each morning she often notices a certain sweet aroma as she passes the Times Building. She put together a bit of doggerel announcing her finding and speculating on its cause, which we pass on to you now:

• Networks sue FCC to make it stand up to Parents Television Council right-wing nutjobs. One can dream. [WSJ]
• Joanne Lipman wants to steal James Stewart from The New Yorker for her new Conde biz mag — which nearly has a name. [NYP]
• More books were sold in 2005 than 2004. A sales uptick for a print medium? How unusual. [NYT]
• Former Conde editorial director James Truman has a prototype for his new Culture & Travel, which is not — not at all, he says — the art mag Si wouldn't let him do. [NYP]
• Mike Wallace once tried to kill himself. [NYDN]
• Hachette to launch Shock mag next week. It's "Life magazine for the new millennium," says founder Mike Hammer, formerly of Maxim and Stuff. We suppose this means its gross pictures — such as one of a rotting human head in the first issue — are shot by Margaret Bourke-White and Alfred Eisenstaedt. [WSJ]
• In his forthcoming bio, Ed Kosner is not very nice to Mort Zuckerman. We're just shocked. [WWD]
• Jack Shafer, de facto Times ombudsman, doesn't care for Howell Raines' new memoir. [Slate]
• NYTer Sharon LaFraniere wins $25K Michael Kelly Award. [Kelly Award]

Second prize, of course, is 72 hours in Syracuse.

We have no idea how the Jenny 8. finagled a 9-inch story on an insignificant trend — people naming their babies Nevaeh, which is "heaven" backwards — with an entirely inscrutable headline, no explicative display type, and insufficient heft to merit any jump space at all, from its rightful home deep inside a weekend section to its prominent placement on the bottom of today's front page. But we must say we're impressed. Good work, kid.

One of the major new features promised when the Times announced an exciting new redesign of its website at the start of April was the MyTimes personalized homepages — enriched with the expertise of real, live Timespeople. Of course, MyTimes wasn't actually available then, and, six week later, it's still not. But good news: It's getting close! A memo to Times staffers yesterday afternoon announced it is finally being introduced internally. ("Please do not distribute information about it outside the company," the memo says. So: Shhh!) Invitations will go out to those readers who signed up to be notified in a week or two, and it'll go to all readers a bit later. We can barely contain ourselves till then.

From the front page of today's Times Business section:

• Jacob Bernstein reports that ineffectual Times public editor Barney Calame is considered either: "[L]ike Kenneth Starr," unable "to step back and ask what any of it means"; unable to see the forest for the trees; like a "mosquito," always biting but never wounding; an "umpire," merely calling balls and strikes; or "a judge, not a prosecutor." None of these are compliments. [WWD]
• CBS Evening News wasn't in third place last week for the first time in years. To reward Bob Schieffer for this significant accomplishment, naturally they're replacing him. [USAT]
• Bids are in to buy Knight Ridder's two Philadelphia papers from McClatchy, and Mort Zuckerman and his Daily News crew are among them. [NYT]
• Alessandra Stanley is no more accurate when covering politics than when covering television. [Wonkette]
• AMI loses a top exec, and faces circ trouble across its titles. Fun! [NYP]
• Jack Shafer is tired of magazines' anniversary issues. [Slate]
• To be clear: Endeavor agent Ari Emmanuel is not backing Radar. [WWD (last item)]

One can only hope there were j-school-trained reporters around to adequately reflect the racists' views.

Remember the consolidation of the Times regional sections we mentioned before? Apparently, it's not going so well. Sure, providing the same stories for New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut might make economic sense, but West Orange guidos are completely different from Bayshore guidos, and there's no way a single piece can do justice to the rich palette of tones and colors that those two divergent groups display. In any event, folks at the NYT have realized this, and restored some local reporting.

Like many a vagina-bearing being, Intern Alexis is a sucker for the heartwarming animal stories. Specifically, tales of interspecies BFFs — inseparable kittens and puppies, for example — really gets her menses going, so this week's edition of the Times Book Review was especially coo-worthy with its children's book section focued on interspecies mingling. Lest you think this week is all fluff, however, there's plenty of whiny bitches and anal musings from Dwight Garner. After the jump, Alexis' guide to faking your own literacy.

Two views of recently deceased NYT executive editor Abe Rosenthal. First, from yesterday's memorial service:

One of those tiny ads on bottom of the Times front page today:

Beginning Sunday, the Times will expand its Automobile section, introducing three new half-pages of editorial content. Come Monday, the expansion will hit online; the dot-com complement will include "additional car reviews, added video features, a national directory of car clubs and an interactive events calendar."

• Three years ago today, the Times published its Jayson Blair, and things went from bad to worse for Howell Raines (and from good to better for Seth Mnookin). [E&P]
• A short (and very Maer-friendly) history of Radar magazine. [NYRM]
• Incoming Pulitzer chairman Paul Steiger wants more focus on online web-based journalism. We'll be waiting for our public-service award. [E&P]
• The coolest kids at the Ellies didn't go black tie. [WWD (second item)]
• Even more Reege, now on NBC, too. Sigh. [B&C]

We haven't entirely decided how we feel about the buck-naked Amazonian kid who was looking up at us from the front page of the Times this morning. On the one hand, it seems sort of dirty and exploitative, and weirds us out. But on the other hand, dirty and exploitative pix for only a buck? Nice.

The legendary — and legendarily difficult — executive editor of the Times from 1977 to 1986, and de facto top editor since 1969, Abe Rosenthal, died at Mt. Sinai Medical Center on the Upper East Side this evening. He was 84 years old and suffered a stroke two weeks ago. Considered a brilliant if mercurial editor, he's credited with creating the modern Times during his editorship, creating the ad-rich features sections that have kept the paper alive as a business while also steering the paper's hard-hitting coverage of Watergate and the Vietnam War and overseeing publication of the Pentagon Papers. He was an op-ed columnist from his retirement until 1999, when he left, as he made clear at the time, not of his own choice. Rosenthal was succeeded as executive editor by Max Frankel, who was subsequently followed by Joe Lelyveld and then Howell Raines. Rosenthal's son, Andrew, who has had a long career at the paper and currently serves as deputy editorial page editor, relayed the news to managing editor Jill Abramson late today.