The newspaper, first launched as the "Standard" in 1827, said the number of circulated copies would rise to over 600,000 a day from 250,000, which would in turn pull in more advertisers.

"I am confident that more than doubling the London Evening Standard's circulation and maintaining its quality journalism is what London deserves," Lebedev said in a statement.

"The London Evening Standard is the first leading quality newspaper to go free and I am sure others will follow."

At least two universities have picked up Suzette Martinez Standring's "The Art of Column Writing" book for use in their opinion/column-writing courses.

That's according to "The Columnist" newsletter from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, of which Standring is a former president.

The two universities are DePaul in Chicago and the University of Southern Maine.

A student faces disciplinary action after two people threw green whipped cream pies at New York Times columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman as he began an Earth Day speech at Brown University. A video of the Tuesday incident posted on YouTube.com shows Friedman telling the audience, "It's great to be back here at Brown," shortly before Margaree Little, a senior English literature major, and an unidentified man storm the stage.

Friedman managed to avoid most of the cream, although his shirt and the back of his head were splattered and he appears to slip on cream on the stage. He left the stage to clean himself off before resuming his speech. He said Friday he was not pressing charges. "I'm leaving it for Brown to decide what kind of values they want to uphold on their campus," he said.

Little, who's scheduled to graduate in December, said she was undergoing disciplinary action by the dean's office and expulsion was "not off the table." She declined to identify the man who was with her or to say whether he was a Brown student.

Little, 22, said Friedman's brand of environmentalism is a "sham" because she believes he supports things like biofuels that reduce the availability of food and displace thousands in Haiti and other developing nations. Friedman, an environmentalist, has written about taking a careful approach and ensuring biodiversity is preserved in areas where biofuel crops are grown.

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece - not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home. A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly. Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet. To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves - and are being well-compensated for it. "I haven't died yet," said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Mr. Arrington says he has gained 30 pounds in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. "At some point, I'll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen." "This is not sustainable," he said.

CBS, the home of the most storied news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its newsgathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday. Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who were granted anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations.

Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS's newsgathering capacity while keeping its frontline personalities, like Katie Couric, the CBS Evening News anchor, and paying a fee to CNN to buy the cable network's news feeds. Another possibility, these people said, would be that CBS would keep its correspondents in a certain region but pair them with CNN crews. But, these people cautioned, no deal was imminent. Through a spokesman, CBS declined to comment. A CNN spokeswoman said, "we don't comment on speculative business matters."

For CNN, a deal with a broadcast network would mean a new revenue stream without having to add much in additional costs. For CBS, an arrangement with a cable channel would allow it to cut costs while maintaining the CBS News brand, although in a much pared down fashion. CBS is mired in last place amid the continuing struggles of Ms. Couric, who was given a $15-million a year contract, to attract new viewers.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary announced this month that it has committed punctuational genocide, eliminating 16,000 hyphens from its pages. Either by combining two words into one or simply uncoupling them-severing the corpus callosum between them-editors of the dictionary's sixth edition have seen fit to knock hyphens from its pages like so many teeth from a hockey goaltender's mouth. So, ice-cream becomes ice cream and chick-pea chickpea.

But wait, how many of us were still hyphenating ice cream anyway? Does this announcement merely remove the fig-leaf (sorry, fig leaf) barely covering the fact that the Shorter OED was in major need of some long overdue updates? "The dictionary reflects the language as it's being used today," concedes Jesse Sheidlower, Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary. "In general you'll find that most dictionary editors are extremely progressive. As with any change like this, there's some point at which you want to be a little conservative. You don't want to change an entry the second there is some change in the language." (The Shorter OED is essentially the OED without its supporting quotations and most obsolete words. It was last updated in 2002; the OED itself has been updated only in part and only online.)

This particular change suggests that British English, which the OED catalogs, is becoming increasingly Americanized. How many Limeys were running scared of bumble-bees in their gardens this summer? Sheidlower stresses that the changes were based on findings made combing through British, not American, published texts. "We would use the most formal, most edited evidence," he says. "We incorporate American evidence, but the dictionary is edited in England and does represent British standards."

The move is an acknowledgment by The Times that making Web site visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising. "We now believe by opening up all our content and unleashing what will be millions and millions of new documents, combined with phenomenal growth, that that will create a revenue stream that will more than exceed the subscription revenue," Schiller said.

*****

TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors. The company expects to record a "substantially increased number of unique users referred to and accessing the site" once TimesSelect disappears, it said in a statement.

TimesSelect includes online access to 23 news and opinion columnists as well as several tools to customize the Web site. It also offers access to the Times archives back to 1851. Starting on Wednesday, access to the archives will be available for free back to 1987, and as well as stories before 1923, which are in the public domain, Schiller said. Users can buy articles between 1923 and 1986 on their own or in 10-article packages, the company said. Some stories, such as film reviews, will be free, she said.

In a complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Hilton alleges that Hallmark has, among other transgressions, misappropriated her image and invaded her privacy with the card, a copy of which you'll find below. According to the lawsuit, the greeting card, which purports to show Hilton's "first day as a waitress," was first distributed earlier this year and remains on sale. Hilton is seeking at least $500,000 in actual damages and a permanent injunction barring Hallmark from further exploitation of her name and likeness.

Editor's Note: The clues in this puzzle are a little more playful and involve more wordplay than in a typical crossword. You have been warned. -- WILL SHORTZ

"This is a sad turn of events for book reviews. AP reviews, even small, ran far and wide, and always helped sales," said a book-company publicist who alerted Editor & Publisher to AP's decision. The publicist requested anonymity.

When E&P asked AP about the decision, Linda M. Wagner, the wire service's director of media relations and public affairs, said in a statement today: "AP is revamping its Lifestyles coverage to focus more resources on topics like food and parenting, and as a result we are discontinuing the book-review package that had moved through that department." She added that AP "remains as committed as ever" to covering books—via reviews, features about authors, etc.—through its Arts and Entertainment Department.

"In addition, there is a full-time reporter on AP's national staff, Hillel Italie, whose beat is publishing and books," Wagner said. "[And] we've written a healthy number of spot-news stories related to books, including the announcements of the final Harry Potter installment and the next book pick by both Oprah Winfrey and Starbucks, the National Book Critics Circle finalists, the Newbery-Caldecott prize winners, an obituary of author Tillie Olsen, and a piece about George McGovern's plans to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln."

For instance, Ben Sargent of the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman and Universal Press Syndicate showed Ivins' tombstone engraved with the word "Farewell!" A kid at the site says: "Molly Ivins can't say that, can she?" -- a reference to the title of one of the late columnist's books.

Signe Wilkinson of The Philadelphia Daily News and the Washington Post Writers Group drew a man in a cowboy hat walking past Ivins' grave. He says: "But if everyone thought like her, we'd NEVER start misbegotten wars we can't get out of." Mike Keefe of The Denver Post and the Cagle Cartoons (CC) syndicate showed President Bush with smoking feet no longer held to the fire because they were freed from a feet-holding device with the late Ivins' name on it.

Pat Bagley of The Salt Lake Tribune and CC drew two people looking at a statue of Ivins. The statue's inscription has Ivins saying: "The President does not have the sense God gave a duck -- so it's up to you and me." But the "and me" is crossed out. And Mike Lane of CC showed a whip with Ivins' name on it descending from the clouds and snapping at Bush's heels. "We are the deciders!" is written in the sky as an alarmed Bush asks: "Is that you, God?"

Tracy admirers have flocked to the Chester Gould-Dick Tracy Museum in this quaint northern Illinois town this month to mark the 75th anniversary of the comic strip hero and remember his creator, Chester Gould.

Gould, who lived for about 50 years in Woodstock, launched the cartoon in October 1931 and drew the strip until 1977. He died in 1985, aged 81, but his creation lives on.

For the "funny pages," the Tracy strip was a departure from the usually upbeat fare. It offered often violent reflections of Prohibition-era lawlessness in a fictional city modeled on Chicago.

Big Boy, the strip's first villain, stood in for legendary gangster Al Capone. Later came memorable grotesques such as Flattop Jones, Pruneface -- and Mrs Pruneface -- and the Brow.

"The success of Dick Tracy is in the characters. Tracy holds up the tent, and the characters act as a three-ring circus down below," said Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Dick Locher, 77, who now draws and writes the strip for Tribune Media Services.

Usage: 'Google' as noun referring to, well, us.

Example: "I just love Google, they're soooo cute and cuddly and adorable and awesome!"

Our lawyers say: Good. Very, very good. There's no question here that you're referring to Google Inc. as a company. Use it widely, and hey, tell a friend.

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.

Example: "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting."

Our lawyers say: Well, we're happy at least that it's clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to "Google" means "to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web."

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.

Example: "I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting."

Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only "Google" on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to "search" on Yahoo or any other search engine.

The fellowships, often referred to as "the genius awards," recognize people in a broad range of disciplines who show exceptional creativity and the potential for continued innovative work.

Each award provides $500,000 over five years and comes with no stipulations, allowing each fellow to use the money as he or she sees fit. No one may apply for the MacArthur Fellowships. Each year the foundation chooses several hundred people from diverse fields who serve anonymously as nominators. A 12-member selection committee then recommends final candidates to the foundation's Board of Directors.

David Carroll, 64, author and illustrator, Warner, N.H. He has written several books on the ecology of New England's deciduous hardwood forests and wetland habitats, providing detailed descriptions of creatures that live in swamps, bogs, and other areas threatened by human development.

Adrian LeBlanc, 42, narrative journalist, New York. She specializes in "immersion reporting," spending 10 years with a family in the Bronx before she wrote Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx, which was published in 2003.

David Macaulay, 59, author and illustrator, Norwich, Vt. His illustrated books on architecture, engineering, and other disciplines "demystify the workings and origins of objects as mundane as a stapler and as monumental as a cathedral."

Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York. Her works include "Passion Play: A Cycle," in which she traces the politics of religion from the Elizabethan Age to modern times, and "Orlando," an adaptation of the novel by Virginia Woolf.

George Saunders, 47, professor of creative writing, Syracuse University, N.Y. His short-story collections combine seemingly discordant elements, including satire, surrealism, and colloquial language.

Search engine giant Google has sent off a series of legal letters to media organizations, warning them against using its name as a verb. The California-based company is becoming concerned about trademark violation, with a spokesman confirming that it had sent the letters, saying, "We think it's important to make the distinction between using the word Google to describe using Google to search the internet, and using the word Google to describe searching the internet. It has some serious trademark issues."

In June, Google won a place in the Oxford English Dictionary, while "to google", with a lower case "g", was included last month in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, America's leading reference book. Meanwhile, the online service WordSpy, defines "google" as: "To search for information on the Web, particularly by using the Google search engine; to search the Web for information related to a new or potential girlfriend or boyfriend." This is also what pops up first if you type "googling" into Google.

In an attempt to protect the company's trademark, the letters have raised sneers after they were leaked on to the web, with bloggers making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

However, according to the Independent's report, eyebrows may be raised, too, in the publishing and media industries, which are worried about Google's encroachment on their intellectual property via its Google News pages and its plan to put every book ever published on to the web.

Moved more than a dozen times, Carroll had closer contact with Sunni insurgents - including those associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - than any American who has lived to tell the tale.

Under the constant threat of death, Carroll was required to interview her captors. She learned she had not been their only hostage. Her captors instructed her about the mujahideen worldview and the shadowy activities of the Iraqi insurgency.

Carroll describes the motives of her captors, whose primary enemy, the US, was replaced by an even greater hatred for Shiites. The US military in Iraq announced on Aug. 9 that four of the men believed to have been involved in Carroll's kidnapping had been arrested.

Istanbul's second criminal court of first instance ruled yesterday that an article defending the rights of a conscientious objector amounted to "heavy criticism conveyed within the scope of freedom of expression" and did not constitute a crime.

In her column, published in the weekly Yeni Aktuel magazine last December, Magden defended conscientious objector Mehmet Tarhan who was sentenced to a record four-year term in a military prison for disobedience after refusing to wear his military uniform. She argued that Turkey needed to establish a civilian service as an alternative to compulsory military conscription.

*****

Magden is one of a string of writers and journalists to stand trial for expressing opinions. Earlier this month the case against the bestselling author Elif Shafak, charged under Article 301 for "insulting Turkishness" in her latest novel, was reopened.

The novelist Orhan Pamuk faced similar charges for commenting on the mass killings of Armenians by Turks around the time of the first world war. The charges against Pamuk were dropped for technical reasons late last year amid intense international pressure.

[T]he extensive use of Times material from so many writers has drawn at least some grumblings among staffers. In addition to not being paid for their work to be re-used, some are miffed that they are not even being told what material from their past is included. Although each item, from single-paragraphs to lengthy article reprints, is fully credited, none of the items are indexed by author. "Due to the sheer number of entries, we cannot write each one of you and tell you exactly what yours is," Ward wrote contributors in an e-mail last month. "Secondly, with very few exceptions, there is no payment. (A handful of writers whose entries formed a significant part of a particular section will be notified separately and receive an honorarium.)"

Anthony Napoli, a representative of the Newspaper Guild of New York, which represents Times staffers, said the paper is not legally obligated to pay for the use of material that has already appeared in print. "If they are doing it as a regular employee, it belongs to the New York Times," he said about such material. "The content belongs to them."

*****

"I prefer being paid to not being paid," said Eric Asimov, a wine writer whose views on vino fill several pages of the new book. "I don't think anyone would argue with that." Columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose opinions on hybrid cars from a previous column span several pages in the guide, said the book is the latest in a growing move to make more money from the paper's work. "There is certainly more of an effort to use the brand and find ways of taking control and making money off of it more systematically," said Kristof. "It is nice if they can include some benefit to the writers."

David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winner who had at least one small item in the guide, said he was not troubled by the lack of payment or information on which materials were used, but knew why other writers were. "I understand why some people are and I can see why," he told E&P. "Some people probably feel they should be paid for it."

Need tips on how to groom a unibrow or soul patch? Just google it. Or get a mouse potato to do it for you. If you're still lost, grab the latest edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary for a definition of those and about 100 other words that have made their way into its pages. But be warned: you might come across a drama queen (a person given to often excessively emotional performances or reactions), an empty suit (an ineffectual executive), or a himbo (an attractive but vacuous man _ think "male bimbo".)

"We try to have a mix that addresses the wide range of people's information needs when adding new words," said John Morse, president of the Springfield-based dictionary publisher. "It could be a technical term or some light-hearted slang that sends people to a dictionary." To make it into the dictionary, a word has to be more than a flash-in-the-pan fad. It needs staying power.

"We need evidence that the word is showing up in publications that people are reading on an everyday basis," Morse said. Lexicographers comb through national newspapers, entertainment magazines, trade journals and Web sites in search of new words and phrases. As has been the case during the past several years, Merriam-Webster's lexicographers have been largely preoccupied with technology and computers for its latest edition, which will be widely available at the end of the summer.

The dispute was prompted by revelations that a publishing house in Milan had to pay £10,000 to reprint 30 lines from the first speech by the Pope following his election in April, after the Vatican transferred copyright on papal texts to its own publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana. The Vatican also plans to charge rights on any papal texts of the past 50 years.

"I am perplexed," said Vittorio Messori, who has co-authored two books with two popes. "The Church is an organisation that exists to spread the word of God and levying a duty on those words, putting a smell of money on it, seems to me to be a very negative thing." The Union of Catholic Booksellers and Publishers has also complained.

The Vatican has said that papal texts have always been subject to copyright but that the rules were often not observed. Transferring the copyright was to protect papal works and ensure that the rules would be applied more rigorously, a spokesman said. He denied that the charges were excessive and said there was a sliding scale of 3% to 5% in royalties on books which used extracts from the Pope's teachings. But the newspaper La Stampa claims that the Milan publishing house which printed an excerpt from the Pope's first speech had to agree to pay 15% in royalties and £2,000 in legal costs.

A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

The American Dialect Society chose the word Friday after a runoff with terms related to Hurricane Katrina, such as "Katrinagate," the scandal erupting from the lack of planning for the monster hurricane. Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, said "truthiness" means "truthy, not facty."

Bill Gates says that in technology, things that are supposed to happen in less than five years usually take longer than expected, while things that are supposed to happen in more than 10 years usually come sooner than expected. Ten years ago, when I went to work for Microsoft, the newspaper industry was in a panic over something called Sidewalk -- a now-forgotten Microsoft project to create Web site entertainment guides for a couple dozen big cities. Newspapers were convinced that Microsoft could and would put them out of business by stealing their ad base. It didn't happen. The collapse of the Internet bubble did happen. And, until very recently, the newspapers got complacent. Some developed good Web sites and some didn't, but most stopped thinking of the Web as an imminent danger.

Ten years later, newspapers are starting to panic again. But merely slobbering after bloggers may not be enough. In 1996 the oldest Americans who grew up with computers and don't even understand my tiresome anecdotes about how people used to resist them ("What's a typewriter, Mike?") were just entering adulthood. Now they are most of the working population, or close to it.

The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn't within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.

No one knows how all this will play out. But it is hard to believe that there will be room in the economy for delivering news by the Rube Goldberg process described above. That doesn't mean newspapers are toast. After all, they've got the brand names. You gotta trust something called the "Post-Intelligencer" more than something called "Yahoo" or "Google," don't you? No, seriously, don't you? Okay, how old did you say you are?

Tom Ford's stint as creative director of Vanity Fair's Hollywood issue is getting messier by the minute. West Coast sources say the former Gucci designer's frequent fits and imperious manner during photo shoots have forced the magazine's battle-weary fashion stylists to take extreme measures. According to a source close to the L.A. set, Ford's finicky taste in designer labels has run his staff so ragged, they now remove the tags on all garments before Ford can see them. "It was getting comical," says our spy. "He would like a dress and then look at the label and send it back because he hates that particular designer. Eventually, somebody got the idea to just cut out all the labels so he couldn't tell what was what." Meanwhile, back in New York, sources say editor Graydon Carter is getting concerned. "Graydon's a conservative guy, and Tom's out there telling people everyone in the issue's going to be naked and bringing in all these outside photographers who've never worked at VF, like [debauched downtown snapper] Terry Richardson. It's been one disaster after the next, and I think at this point he's just praying Tom doesn't embarrass everyone." A Vanity Fair spokesperson could not be reached.

Because Wikipedia allows anyone to add onto existing postings or create new ones, Chase's original note on Seigenthaler had been changed several times since May, adding vulgar epithets, Seigenthaler said yesterday. He said there may be Web sites that still post the original Wikipedia profile of him. Seigenthaler said he doesn't plan on pursuing legal action against Chase but said the experience has left him hurt.

"I was a close friend of Robert Kennedy, and I worked closely with the president. I had lived with Robert Kennedy and helped edit his first book. We were close friends until his death, and the most painful thing was to have them suggest that I was suspected of their assassination," Seigenthaler said. "I do not favor more regulations of the Internet, but I fear that Wikipedia is inviting it by its allowing irresponsible vandals to write anything they want about anybody."

The incident has raised questions about the reliability of information on Wikipedia, a popular research tool, and the Internet, and how those wrongly portrayed can hold Web sites accountable, especially when access is unrestricted.

Jimmy Wales, who founded Wikipedia, told The New York Times that the site would make more information about users available to make it easier to lodge complaints. He said the episode does not indicate a systemic problem. "We have to continually evaluate whether our controls are enough," he said, the newspaper reported.

The word, of course, is derived from a combination of "broadcasting" and the Apple listening device "iPod." Some have said they resent the Apple branding and proposed "audioblogging" or "blogcast" or some such as an alternative, to no avail.

Oxford apparently will define the word as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the internet for downloading to a personal audio player." The term was coined, according to the BBC, by journalist Ben Hammersley. Podcast was considered for the honor last year, but didn't gain wide use until this year.

"A rootkit is a set of software tools frequently used by a third party (usually an intruder) after gaining access to a computer system. These tools are intended to conceal running processes, files or system data, which helps an intruder maintain access to a system without the user's knowledge. Rootkits are known to exist for a variety of operating systems such as Linux, Solaris and versions of Microsoft Windows. A computer with a rootkit on it is called a rooted computer."

"The rootkit concept is the dominant controversial aspect of the 2005 Sony CD copy protection controversy, which has made the previously obscure concept of a rootkit much more widely known in the technology community, and to the general public."

Ian Frazier: I’ve done a lot of pieces about New York over the years, and it was coming up on 30 years since I had started writing pieces about the city. As I looked at pieces that I had done, I saw that there were some themes that kind of ran through them all. There was the World Trade Center. I had done a piece about the guy who climbed it. It was just part of everybody’s biography if you were in New York. You thought of yourself in terms of this building, like I was there when it went up and I was living here when it went down. For this book, a lot of things like that came together.

*****

The Book Standard: What advice do you have for young writers who are in New York or who would like to move to New York?

Ian Frazier: Walk. Wear comfortable shoes. Look at everything. And keep notes. Everybody that’s written about the city has walked it. It’s a great place to be by yourself. It’s a great place to discover who you are or what you want to invent yourself to be. For example, I just read this thing a couple days ago about a movie that Madonna made when she first came here. It said her name then was Louise Marie Madonna Ciccone—and then she became Madonna. I remember when she was on the Lower East Side and suddenly she was this fabulous, exciting performer. She’s from Rochester, Michigan. I knew people who knew her, and the transformation is astonishing. A friend of mine was friends with her brother. And you suddenly say, "Wait a minute, that’s her!" Why? Because this is a place of reinvention. If you’re young, this is a place to come to reinvent yourself. New York is sort of like the machine that will create this transformation.

Comic cartoonists have cooperated to do "theme days" on rare occasions. But this may be a first for editorial cartoonists, said J.P. Trostle, news editor of Editorial Cartoonists.com -- the Web site of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists.

The site will publish the Dec. 12 cartoons criticizing the job losses. The AAEC also hopes newspapers will publish the cartoons and syndicates will distribute them. Trostle told E&P that he does not yet know how many cartoonists will participate. The AAEC has more than 300 members, with perhaps a third of them affiliated with daily newspapers and/or major syndicates.

He added that some cartoonists may do a protest cartoon just for the AAEC site (the drawings are due Friday) and then create their usual cartoon for Dec. 12. Others may make their one and only Dec. 12 cartoon the protest one. Trostle said it remains to be seen if any newspapers will balk at running these protest drawings.

Among the reasons for the protest: "The Tribune Co.'s attitude has just flummoxed us," said Trostle, referring to all the cartoonist jobs lost or unfilled at that chain's newspapers.

Many papers have been losing circulation at alarming rates across all age groups. Newspaper profits and the stock prices of the companies that own them were also down during the first half of 2005. The biggest newspapers are cutting staffs, closing foreign bureaus and taking other steps to meet their owners' profit goals.

Most of these dire trends are nothing new. Deep thinkers have prophesied for years that newspapers are on a glide path to irrelevance or extinction. Since the advent of the Internet, a common version of the doom forecasts has the ink-on-paper news being supplanted by something not-quite-yet-describable on the Web.

"a defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end. Inspired by Tom Cruise's recent behavior on Oprah. Also see 'jump the shark.'"

The cremated remains of the eccentric Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas writer, who was a huge fan of explosives, will be shot into the air over his Woody Creek home.

Johnny Depp, who played the author in the movie adaptation of the drugged up novel, has paid for a memorial platform which will house the cannon, and has hired a Hollywood events planner to oversee the event, which will be closed to the public.

For instance, "interactivity" is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport - the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show "normal" mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. "Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn't do anything? Didn't everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?"

"Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration."

"What was the Restoration again, please, miss?"

"The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back."

First of all, realise that it's very hard, and that writing is a gruelling and lonely business and, unless you are extremely lucky, badly paid as well. You had better really, really, really want to do it. Next you have to write something. Unless you are committed to novel writing exclusively, I suggest that you start out writing for radio. It's still a relatively easy medium to get into because it pays so badly. But it is a great medium for writers because it relies so much on the imagination. You will learn a tremendous amount from it, and maybe get some useful exposure.

"Heteroflexible" is someone who is usually -- but not always -- heterosexual.

"Supersize," the fast food menu word for big portions, can now be both an adjective and a verb, as in "supersize me."

And to "go commando" means "to wear no underpants."

At times, it helps to think of writing as carpentry. That way, writers and editors can work from a plan and use tools stored on their workbench. You can borrow a writing tool at any time. And here's a secret: Unlike hammers, chisels, and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened, and passed on.

[Y]ou're going to do right by her. You have to. Sure, you can't write an obituary -- they won't even let you be in charge of movie listings, for crying out loud, even though you could do it twice as well as that pothead they hired last year -- but you do get to come up with a headline for that Anne Brancroft obit that came over the AP wire. And that's no small matter, you think to yourself.

There's that part where Simon and Garfunkel croon, "Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson." Why not just that? Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. It's so simple, but it says everything.

You get your stuff together, get ready to head home. But first you want to check out the competition. You don't normally want to know what other headlines are out there, but it's different this time. It means something this time. On Google News, you discover that a lot of people liked your headline -- there are variations of it all over the web. Doesn't matter, you figure -- it just means it's the best. You're just about to shut the computer down when you stumble onto a headline from the Belfast Telegraph. As it dawns on you what it says, you feel something in the back of your head snap. "The Oscar-winning actress who hated being called "Mrs. Robinson" dies aged 73."

You look back at your headline, now posted on the Web. Too late to change it. Everyone would think you the fool if you tried.

But here's the problem. It takes time to make a living from arts and letters. It really helps to be unencumbered in your 20s. In the past, these folks would live in group housing, make money waitressing or driving a cab, and squeeze in their creative stuff wherever possible. Many would save a couple thousand bucks and take long trips abroad. They were free to invest in themselves, and it paid off.

It's much harder to invest in yourself this way if you emerge from college with big debt. Or graduate school with bigger debt. The 20-somethings I know are diving for money right away. Many of them know that good money at 25 leads to dead-ends a decade later. It's no secret that those entry-level jobs in banks and brokerages are vulnerable to computers and body shops in Bangalore. But while they'd love to follow their passions, too many of today's young cannot afford to postpone paydays. Sounds strange, but being a poor struggling young artist or writer is all too often a privilege of the well-to-do. Everyone else has to make real money.

• Autographed Advance Reading Copy of Creepers (CD Books), the spine-tingling upcoming thriller from multiple New York Times bestselling author David Morrell.
  
  
• Autographed copy of Forced Mate by Rowena Cherry (Dorchester), the steamy futuristic romance novel which was a finalist for Best Futuristic Romance at the PEARL Awards.
  
  
• Set of two books: Sandstorm by James Rollins (Avon) with the new lenticular special edition cover and Map of Bones by James Rollins (William Morrow). These two exciting thrillers from the New York Times bestselling author are the perfect summer reading for fans of Dan Brown and Michael Crichton.
  
  
• Advance Reading Copy of the upcoming mystery Relics by Mary Anna Evans (Poisoned Pen Press), in which an archeologist finds more than she bargained for while investigating a centuries-old ethnic group which seems to have strange immunity to most modern diseases, including AIDS.

How hard could blogging be? You roll out of bed, turn on your computer, scan the headlines, think up some clever analysis while brushing your teeth, type it onto your site and you're off.

But as I discovered, blogging is no longer for amateurs or the faint of heart. Blogging -- if it's done well -- has evolved into an all-consuming art.

I wasn't the only newcomer to blogging last week. On the ballyhooed Huffington Post, Gary Hart, Walter Cronkite and David Mamet dipped their toes in the blogosphere as well.

I don't know how they'll fare, but I doubt that celebrity will attract readers for long. To succeed in blogging you need to understand it's a craft, with its own tricks of the trade. You need a thick skin. And you must put your life on hold to feed an electronic black hole.

What else did I learn by sitting in for Dan Drezner? That I'm not cut out for blogging.