Gawker

Whenever two adults in New York exchange sex for money, each commits a Class B misdemeanor. So one might think it would be difficult to procure a sex worker. It takes about three minutes. The website of one local spot is your basic HTML slapdash job. It says that "they" would like to be with you very much and uses lots of exclamation points. There's a gallery of women, young and mostly blond and carelessly dressed. Most of the women look like they could be in The Bangles, a bit more on the side of Debbi Peterson than Susanna Hoffs. more »

Rupert Murdoch has done his part to ensure the ouster of Australian prime minister John Howard, who's been toiling as the sad prison-island's leader since time immemorial. In a canny feat, Murdoch sent New York Post editor Col Allan out to Scores with Kevin Rudd—he's the opposition leader down in Australia, and is now expected to win the 2007 election. "Mr Rudd admitted visiting Scores and said he had been too drunk to remember much of what had happened," says the Guardian. Then Rudd got reprimanded for manhandling strippers and got booted. For Australian men, this is like scoring the winning goal of a soccer match or shooting the biggest kangaroo or something. He will now receive nearly all of the heterosexual male vote. How can we tell it's a counterintuitive and sophisticated campaign to manage the election? The trip to Scores happened four years ago and is just being revealed now—in Murdoch's papers. Good work, Rupe!

Strip club visit hurts Australian party leader [Guardian]

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by a 24-year-old Brooklyn lad named Ben Dolnick, about his summer working at the Central Park Zoo. Dolnick's first novel, Zoology, was published last month, and it's about an 18-year-old boy from Chevy Chase, Md. (where Dolnick is from, too!) who goes to work at the Central Park Zoo. In a wee review, the New Yorker wrote that "Dolnick seems to share some of his protagonist's immaturity, but he demonstrates an engaging lightness of touch." The book seems to be—we haven't read it—a pretty slight coming-of-age novel in which the protagonist barely comes of age. (It's blurbed by Jonathan Safran Foer, but still! UPDATE: We have learned that they went to the same D.C. private school.) Dolnick's doing pretty well for himself! It probably helps that Dolnick's mom, Lynn Dolnick, is Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr.'s cousin. Also, she sits on the board of the New York Times Company. Not that the Times, which seems to get its panties in a bunch about conflicts of interest and disclosures and the like, mentioned that. But there's more of this web to untangle. more »