gossip

The former frontwoman of the band Gossip discusses the body-positive community, the failures of some kinds of feminism, and pop as punk

Author of a study on relational aggression, found boys use tactics such as rumours and social exclusion to hurt others more often than their female counterparts

That a twentysomething with time and money might indulge in a bout of self-exposure is hardly a surprise

What you’re thinking

As the content of the Supreme Court’s “responsible communication” ruling propagates, I am seeing and hearing a lot of despairing wails of “Oh, TMZ will just love this!” Well, I’m sure the folks at TMZ love it when someone complains about them—usually, one guesses, in between visits to the site. In a mere matter of months TMZ has managed to replace the poor old Enquirer as the go-to synecdoche for the irresistible evils of celebrity-stalking.

Opinions should always be taken with grain of salt. Sometimes two.

Who was notably absent, where Zsuzsanna went and why Ken Dryden wasn’t impressed by Vancouver’s mayor

Brother of alleged girlfriend “confirms” affair with reality TV dad

A repentant Liberal insider, part of the Martin team that forced former deputy prime minister Sheila Copps into a bruising nomination battle with Tony Valeri, says the party recently asked Copps—who held Hamilton East for 20 years—to run again. “They’ve realized she’s the only one who can take out the NDP in Hamilton,” he says, adding that, last year, he apologized to the Liberal icon for the dust-up, when he ran into her at an Ottawa Red Lobster. Copps, he said, has declined the Liberal invite. In 2006, the NDP took all three urban Hamilton ridings.

The New York Observer has an item on the collapse of Variety, once the definitive source of Hollywood insider info. What happened was the internet, where there is no “definitive” source of anything and where having a big online presence doesn’t actually help a trade paper make money. It may be even worse for entertainment trade papers than for non-niche papers. Whereas the internet can’t compete with the New York Times for reporting, and bloggers/twitterers wind up linking to or quoting from newspaper reporting, the information that Variety or The Hollywood Reporter offer is often accessible to anyone who has an inside source or two. News about executive firings, movie projects and TV cancellations therefore winds up being “broken” all over the place. So all Variety has left is its brand name, and it’s a brand name that’s increasingly associated with boredom and, during the writers’ strike, a pro-producers slant that didn’t set well with a lot of its readership.

On John Travolta’s tragedy, Avril Lavigne, and the new 15 seconds of fame