1. Through no fault of host Neil Patrick Harris, we fell asleep during the Emmys, but it sounds like we didn’t miss too many surprises. [via LAT]
2. Thom Yorke collaborated with Banksy on the video for his new solo song “The Hollow Earth.” (Watch the embedded clip after the jump.) [via NME]
3. Barack Obama visits David Letterman for the first time since becoming president tonight. [via NYT]
4. Sorry boys: Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard married over the weekend. [via MTV]
5. John Grisham empathizes with Dan Brown because he doesn’t write “literature” either. [via Telegraph] Read More »

1. Ida Maria has dropped out of the “Perez Hilton Presents” tour, with Semi Precious Weapons stepping up to co-headline with Ladyhawke. Does this video hint at why? [via YouTube]
2. The Damien Hirst market is finally showing signs of recovery, with values approaching boom numbers. [via Bloomberg]
3. Warren the Ape — a “mock celeb-reality show” and Greg the Bunny spin-off — is coming to MTV next year. [via Variety]
4. While the latest round of funding values Twitter at $1 billion dollars, the website has yet to implement a profit-making business model. [via TechCrunch]
5. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol sold over one million hardcover copies across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom on Tuesday, breaking one-day records. [via Reuters]

1. ABC News reporter Terry Moran tweeted an off-the-record comment President Obama made about the Kanye West/Taylor Swift scandal. Spoiler alert: Barry’s on Team Taylor. [via Politico]
2. Rather than a game-changer, The Jay Leno Show is The Tonight Show — with many of the same Bush jokes. [via LAT]
3. Alan Ball confirms that Evan Rachel Wood will be returning for the next season of True Blood. [via EW]
4. Takashi Murakami is only 47, but he’s already worrying about his posthumous reputation and creating the self portraits to prove it. [via The Times]
5. Will Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol thrust the notorious secretive Freemasons into the national spotlight? [AP via @sarahw]

Bonus link: The World’s 10 Greatest Large Urban Parks

Today at Flavorpill, we stumbled across the strangest food blog ever. We wondered who would want to read Fahrenheit 451 in comic book form. We were fascinated by the concept of shadow jewelry. We imagined what Twitter would look like if it only consisted of 100 people. We were afraid of Big Bad Dan Brown. We were surprised by the William Golding scandal — but from all accounts the Nobel Prize-winner wasn’t a very nice man. We wondered when the Gap became American Apparel. We debated the best albums of the decade. And finally, we Googled with Bing. It made us laugh.

Today at Flavorpill, we were glad to see Marty Scorsese sticking up for LACMA’s film program — but wondered if he’s willing to back up his open letter with some cold, hard cash. We found Christina’s Aguilera’s t-shirt funny. We went behind-the-scenes of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. We were excited to see what Shepard Fairey, Kent Twitchell, and Thierry Noir come up with for their Berlin Wall-inspired project. We learned from Molly Ringwald that John Hughes was prone to grudges. We tried to come up with a funny nickname for the upcoming release date for Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. We discovered a thing or two about steampunk. We finally, we found this article — about a six-year-old boy who was only able to communicate with him family once they gave him a felt pen — totally fascinating.

1. Oy: “ MSN.com received its biggest traffic spike ever during the Jackson event, with 50% more people watching the memorial than watched Barack Obama’s inauguration.” [via THR]
2. The multiple layers of irony in Lindsay Lohan turning down a part in The Hangover is not lost on us. [via NYP]
3. Artist Damon Rich puts a visual spin on foreclosure in a new exhibit at the Queens Museum allowing visitors to “see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.” [via NYT]
4. The verdict is in on the Aaron Sorkin/Facebook movie, which is based off of based on Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal. [via Gawker]
5. The online promotion for Dan Brown’s upcoming thriller The Lost Symbol will involve a series of puzzles, codes, and maps. [via AP]

We saw greatness this week. A mom reading one of these Superman & Wonder Woman books, personalized and starring your child, out loud to her son during morning rush hour. Atlas Shrugged and House of Cards next to each other on the F train (which doesn’t even go to Wall Street). And on our way into the bagel shop the other day, we spotted “A Small Good Thing” on a page over a shoulder, and awkwardly circled around the table to see which Raymond Carver collection was in the reader’s hands — Cathedral. Much like last week’s Kindle dude, it took us a great deal of self-control not to sit down and regale him with our knowledge and love of Carver. And look at this new edition! So much prettier than the old ones, with drawings of people with vague faces and a blocky font that felt unforgivably ’80s.

More of our favorite books popping up in public after the jump. Read More »

There’s nothing juicier than a celebrity memoir. And according to this article in New Statesman, the genre is a big part of what has been keeping the UK’s publishing industry alive while everyone holds their breath for the next Dan Brown book. But here’s what I find interesting: a quick look at some of the buzziest celeb tell-alls last year in the US (Chris Ciccone’s Life With My Sister Madonna; Valerie Bertinelli’s Losing It; George Hamilton’s Don’t Mind If I Do; Tori Spelling’s sTori Telling; Kirk Cameron’s Still Growing) suggests that this kind of book doesn’t have the same clout Stateside — unless you factor in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which didn’t come out last year, but certainly became increasingly relevant. Read More »

Today at Flavorpill, we fell head over heels for this web comic. We questioned the wisdom of a dance club for nerds. It just seems like today’s version of video dating. We got the shit scared out of us by some old dude named Abe Vigoda. We looked at gnomes. We re-examined Dan Brown and the price of crazy fame. We went on a cool behind-the-scenes tour of the staging of Shrek: The Musical. We wanted to go back to college and take a class called “Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era.” We remembered that we need to catch up with our DVR’ed episodes of Better Off Ted. We laughed at this pic. We freaked out over this back tattoo. And finally, we said goodbye to Oasis. At least for the next 5 years or so.

This past week we were lucky to notice a few books new to us on the 1 train. The more we observe our fellow subway riders, the more we realize how different their tastes are. Yes, there’s a certain vampire novel that keeps appearing, but in general diversity beats out the bestsellers.

Among the more obscure choices we spotted: The Stainless Steel Rat for President. Amazon wasn’t much help with this one, but after a quick Wikipedia search, we discovered that this book is part of series of science fiction novels by Harry Harrison, written between 1961 and 1999. Its zany illustration and vintage cover are what caught our eye — it looked like it’d been salvaged from a rotting storage box or plucked from the dollar cart at a tiny used bookstore.

Read More »