“[I] went and tried to talk to Sarah Palin, and instead she talked to Greta. … But maybe she’ll talk to me now that she has a book deal,” Oprah Winfrey, last December. That was an Andrew Sullivan quote of the day. I’m guessing Palin on Oprah is old news to TMV readers by now. A tit-for-tat; Palin’s book is out the day after her eagerly awaited Nov 16 appearance on the show. Which just happens to fall plumb in the middle of the November sweeps. Pop Watch has five...

On the same day. And just hours ago: Back-to-back deals on Wednesday to make the company’s steady stream of posts available to Microsoft and Google’s search engines may point to a potential new source of cash. How large, however, is not known. The terms of the deals were not disclosed and Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive, said in an interview that revenue was “not the focus of the deals.” Microsoft said it did not plan to put ads on its Twitter search service for now, and Google...

The brand-new King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, KAUST, received its founding endowment of $10 billion from the King himself. That makes it among the wealthiest handful of universities on the globe, in the company of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton. As Stanford is to Silicon Valley, Saudi Arabia hopes KAUST will spur a new Arabian “knowledge economy.” It’s a controlled experiment that they hope will mean a major shift in the world’s academic gravitational field: In...

The New Yorker staff writer was asked in a Time Q&A, “If you were U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan — who has about $5 billion in discretionary funding and a mandate to fix our schools — what would you do?” There’s precious little experimentation in education. Instead there seems to be a desire for greater regimentation, which I think is nonsense. I think we need to try 100 different things. If I were Arne Duncan, I’d think of myself as a venture capitalist,...

At my moving away party, when I left NYC after 28 years to come live in Middle Georgia, my partner and I did a rousing rendition of the “Green Acres” theme song. (I sang Eva/Lisa’s part.) Now it’s my ringtone. Vic Mizzy, the man who wrote it — he also wrote the ‘Addams Family’ theme song — died Saturday at his home in Bel-Air. The LATimes: For his theme song, Mizzy played a harpsichord, which gives the theme its unique flavor. And because the production...

Impressive: According to the Wall Street Journal, the company’s fourth-quarter profit jumped 47 percent “as consumers continued to snap up its iPhones and Macintosh computers.” Surprisingly resilient demand for its laptops and smart phones have carried Apple though the recession. This past quarter, Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones and 3.1 million Macintosh computers. Apple’s CFO called sales of Macintoshes “phenomenal,” and the quarter, Apple’s “most profitable ever.”...

This morning AP reported that the Obama administration will not seek to arrest medical marijuana users and suppliers as long as they conform to state laws. The NYTimes points to the three-page memo spelling out the policy, but I’m thinking Reason’s Jacob Sullum still believes there’s good reason for legit distributors to worry: [T]he Drug Enforcement Administration can still participate in raids on medical marijuana dispensaries that local officials consider illegal. In Los Angeles...

When I posted kiss the iPhone goodbye I assumed that the rumors of a Verizon iPhone were just that. Rumors. And false. It looks like I may have been mistaken in my assumptions. FoneFrenzy: My sources have confirmed that Apple and Verizon have been testing a CDMA iPhone on Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Yes, you read that correctly, Verizon and Apple have been testing the first 4G phone on Verizon’s 4G network. The tests have been taking place for the last couple of months but with no confirmation...

I don’t know bupkis about physics but they say that if you create a wheel that contains another rapidly spinning wheel, the gyro effect will keep the wheel upright. That’s the idea behind Gyrobike. Ars Technica spoke with CEO Daniella Reichstetter: “Our challenge was not only to develop a front bike wheel with a disk that could do this, but also to find a way to get the disk to spin fast enough to create enough force (gyroscopic precession) that would help stabilize the bike at...

This morning I posted about a soldier from my town who was killed in Afghanistan. I did not know him, though in my few years living here in small-town Georgia, I have met more soldier boys than in the decades I lived in NYC. The post included only the facts and only three people commented. But those three comments spanned the gamut of opinion, from honoring the dead to criticizing the president, to criticizing our presence there. I don’t know what I think we should do in Afghanistan. I wouldn’t...

Fred Wilson calls it “a real competitor to the iPhone” and says he loves the ad (above). The new site DroidDoes.com is a direct attack against the iPhone: Verizon isn’t pulling any punches: it calls out basically every major weakness on the iPhone, from its inability to run background applications to the App Store’s walled garden. The site kicks off with a stream of things that the iPhone can’t do, mimicking the black text-on-white background commonly seen in Apple ads but replacing...

Weekend Edition from my town this morning: In Milledgeville, Ga., hundreds turned out to pay their respects to a small-town hero with a larger-than-life personality. Following two tours of duty in Iraq, Staff Sgt. Alex French IV, a member of Georgia’s 48th Brigade, was killed in a suicide bomb attack Sept. 30 in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. Local coverage from The Macon Telegraph and Union Recorder. Ten other soldiers died in Iraq and Afghanistan that week: Army SGT Titus R Reynolds,...

On Thursday Gawker’s Nick Denton was on a Magazine Publishers of America Magazine Innovation Summit panel titled “The Decline and Rise of Magazine Journalism.” The moderator, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, asked how Denton monitors and fact-checks the content on Gawker sites: “We don’t,” Mr. Denton replied flatly. “We aim to get the truth over time. The verification model is post-publication rather than pre-publication. Our readers correct us and we apologize and we change it....

Business Week says Germany’s building the power grid of the future. One of humanity’s boldest visions: The electricity age is imminent in six German regions: The technology of the future for smart energy management is going to be developed and tested, under the label E-Energy, in several cities. A number of projects will kick into high gear this month. Tens of thousands of homes and hundreds of companies are expected to participate in the field tests. Testing ‘virtual power stations’...

Via Romenesko: “In an attempt to conceal my mistake, I submitted false images and deleted other images,” says the artist, who has been involved in countersuits with the AP. “I take full responsibility for my actions, which were mine alone.” NYTimes: Mr. Fairey told The A.P. — and his own lawyers — that he used a shot from an event about Darfur at the National Press Club in Washington event where Mr. Obama was seated next to George Clooney. Instead, the photograph he used...

Ted Turner regrets losing his job at Time Warner, his wife, Jane Fonda, and $7 billion of his fortune. In a Bloomberg interview out yesterday he also says we’ll get out of Afghanistan: “War is obsolete…The last time someone surrendered was Japan and that was 60 years ago. The Afghans will never surrender. We will just get tired and come home. We’ve already given up on Iraq and there’s oil in Iraq, there’s no oil in Afghanistan.” Always colorfully quotable, the man who pledged...

Google stock achieved some jaw-dropping numbers yesterday, up to $552 a share with profits 27 percent above this period last year. CEO Eric Schmidt crowed, “we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future.” Today Chris Thompson brings us down to earth: [F]or all its staggering growth, Google isn’t as big as it seems. On the Fortune 500 list, the company occupies a lowly number 117. Who’s bigger than Google, you...

Just one of the heartbreaking details in this story is that it began on the boy’s 15th birthday. Terrified of going to school, his mother called and set an appointment with the safety officer. He never made it. Her tears lay bare the horror of it. I believe we all should share in that horror. We carry some blame. This kind of violence, like the recent Chicago beating death of a 16-year-old caught on cellphone video, is a side-effect of our punishing culture. Ours is the highest incarceration...

Jon Stewart’s piece on Sen. Al Franken’s first legislative amendment. Added to a defense bill passed last week, it prohibits giving defense contracts to any company that requires employees to sign a mandatory arbitration contract preventing them from taking the company to court if they’re raped by coworkers. Why was such a provision necessary? Last year a number of women came forward who were gang raped while working for various Haliburton subsidiaries but cannot take the company...

Zachary M. Seward explains Gawkers unruly new twist on traditional reader forums: Readers are now greeted with a text box as large as the blog’s logo, inviting them to share news, videos, links, and trivialities. Tagging a message with #tips on Gawker, for instance, automatically sends it to the “tips” tag page, where anyone can follow the stream of submissions and Gawker writers will keep an eye out for news to promote on the front page. Same for #mac on Gizmodo, #snapjudgment...

Their NFL sources say: Dave Checketts, chairman of the NHL’s St. Louis Blues and the point man in the Limbaugh group attempting to buy the Rams, realizes he must remove the controversial conservative radio host from his potential role as a minority member in the group in order to get approval from other NFL owners, the sources said. Apparently not unexpected: You could see this story coming like a boulder rolling down a very large hill… It was Tuesday when [N.F.L. Commissioner Roger]...

Romenesko notes that when the legendary White House reporter said it yesterday afternoon at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, the crowd gasped: “I was the interviewer and it rocked me a little,” writes Phil Bronstein [link]. “In the same conversation Ms. Thomas said ‘Nancy Reagan was a heroine in my opinion,’ expressed tender sympathy for Lyndon Johnson and great respect for Gerald Ford.” John Aravosis adds that having such criticism come from the left “does...

AP reported this morning that a second Republican, Sen. Olympia Snowe’s Maine colleague Susan Collins, has indicated that she’s open to voting for health care legislation this year. The opening lines of Collins’ statement could be read that way: “There simply is no question that our nation’s health care system requires substantial reform. The status quo of soaring health care costs, families struggling, millions uninsured, and health care provider shortages is unacceptable....

Filmed for a reported $11,000 over 7 days, Paranormal Activity broke box office records over the weekend. How? Social media: The film is about a young couple who become convinced that a demonic presence lurks in their bedroom at night, so they decide to set up a video camera to catch it. The movie…opened at the end of September with midnight screenings in just 13 small college towns. From there, it has become a Web sensation, with chatter about the movie bouncing from Twitter to Facebook,...

Sergey Brin has an OpEd in the NYTimes today on Google Books, A Library to Last Forever: There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing...