2010 has been a big year for Hilary Duff. First she got engaged, and now she’s working with the folks at Simon & Schuster on a Young Adult series. The first novel, Elixir, will center on photojournalist Clea Raymond’s many adventures and is due out in October. It got us thinking: What if other teen celebrities suddenly decided to pick up the pen? What would a Justin Bieber novel even be about? After the jump find the descriptions for our fictional best-seller list, which read a lot like you might expect if you follow these moppets in the tabloids.
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1. The mighty Weinsteins will scale back the number of theaters showing Rob Marshall‘s songtastic remake Nine after poor box office performance its opening weekend. [via ArtsBeat] UPDATE: Oops, that is not so, according to NYMag’s Vulture, contradicting Reuters’ original report. Carry on, musical theater buffs!
2. MSNBC ranks architecture as the professional field hit hardest by the 2009 recession, with a whopping 18% reduction in the number of employed architects. [via Culture Monster]
3. A new exhibition shows off Stalin‘s saucy side, with the Soviet dictator’s nude sketches of Russian figures like Marxist theorist Georgy Plekhanov. [via The Daily Beast]
4. If 30 Rock’s Judah Friedlander had to write his life story in six words, it would go like this: “100 percent American. Made in China.” Yeah, slow news day. [via New York Post]
5. Breakup rumors plague teen pop idols the Jonas Brothers, now that one is married and another is the hottest. There’s a Justin Timberlake reference in there somewhere. [via Pop Eater]
Bonus link: MOG gets in on the listicle action with its roundup of the ten most disappointing albums of the decade.
Today at Flavorpill, we were so patriotic that we decided to read about how much White House staffers get paid, until that is, we read that Reggie Love makes over $100k, and come on, all he does is freaking play basketball with Obama! Then we read a mixed review of the new Yankee stadium’s design. We listened to Quincy Jones say all sorts of crazy things about his protege, Michael Jackson. We OMG’ed at the news of the first Jonas brother engagement before becoming implicated in a lively debate among the interns about how much the JoBros suck (It was three to one in favor of “a lot”). We wondered how New York City’s discontinuation of film and television tax breaks would affect our dear sweet Ugly Betty. We thought this Katy Perry doll was freaky, but whatever, we’re not gonna let it ruin our long weekend. May the 4th be with you all.
1. Tony-award winning Broadway mainstay Ragtime is set to return next November. [via Variety]
2. To the dismay of 15-year-old girls everywhere, Kevin Jonas is officially engaged. [via MTV]
3. The former head of the Dutch the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, is being hunted by police after siphoning and absconding with more than €15.5m of the organization’s assets.[via The Arts Newspaper]
4. Vibe magazine may not go away after all, at least not if Quincy Jones has anything to say about it. [via CNN]
5. Academy Award-winning actor Karl Malden passed away yesterday. His credits included cinema classics like A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. [via LA Times]
These days, loving fashion is as much a requisite of celebrity culture as lending your face to a charity, or dodging claims of plastic surgery. Whilst we applaud a well-dressed star, we get somewhat irate when some of them take it too far, believing that their acquiescence to the clutches of a stylist translates as raw artistic talent in the fashion business. What’s worse, many design houses are willing to not only put up with this charade but endorse it, believing that a collaboration with Mischa Barton/Jessica Simpson/Miley Cyrus (who all have careers that, to outsiders like us, have nothing to do with fashion) will attract highly-desired publicity or a new demographic to a brand. To that end, we decided to bring you the best and the worst fashion/celebrity collaborations of recent years. BE WARNED: some of it ain’t pretty…
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Week Two. First the captain sped ahead without any sense of steering. Then when the pirates approached, he refused to turn around. When they tried to talk, he said he’d rather let them ransack. When they threw a life raft, he sucked out all the air. Now, wallowing in shark-infested waters, there’s nothing left to do but watch the dumbass drown. Very, very slowly.
For those keeping score at home, find out what went down this week after the jump.
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Google released its annual Zeitgeist report this week, giving the world a chance to view 2008 through the lens of our search habits. Data geeks that they are, they’ve formatted their version of a year-end report not as an easy to read (read: easy to ignore) list, but rather as a collection of numbers, charts, regional segmentations and other showy stuff that we don’t know how to do in Excel.
While we know that the point of the Zeitgeist is to help us understand the state of the Internet world — and be extension, society at large — our first reaction to it was a resounding “Huh? What does this all mean? What’s a ‘nasza klasa’? Where are we? We’re scared.” After the jump, we try our best to sort it all out for you.
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