A little rebranding is certainly in order.  Otherwise, I’m liable to think that PETA wants to save the animals, but encourage sex with children.  Jolly good, then.

PETA’s campaigns have always seemed slightly counterintuitive.  [via]

He was everywhere yesterday talking about all sorts of topics.  Here he is with  Meet the Press’s David Gregory. Watching this video is somewhat painful and just another reminder why everybody hates the press more than lawyers and child molesters.

Obama will also become the first sitting President to appear on David Letterman’s show, so he’s got that going for him tonight.

Possibly continuing a trend from just about every major news organization, ESPN rolled out ESPN Boston today.  There are no other cities to date, but it would seem like Boston or New York would be the logical places to roll this out. 

Of course, they have Bill Simmons participating, but also Peter Gammons makes an appearance and they’ve managed to poach Mike Reiss from The Boston Globe to be their new Patriots writer/blogger. 

It’s an interesting experience from ESPN and if any sports media company has the cache and wherewithall to put local sports sections out of business, they would be it.

On Friday we noted that GQ decided to bury a story about Vladimir Putin’s rise to power by not publishing his article in Russian and by not promoting the magazine article. 

In a classic double-middle-finger salute, Gawker Media has decided to publish the piece with a Russian translation for the world to read.  Or at least Russia. 

Simon Owens, of Bloggasm, sat down with Nick Denton, ruler of the Gawker Media Empire, to find out why. 

Why did he think Conde Nast was going to such great lengths to bury the story?

“I assume concern for the commercial prospects of their Russian titles,” he said. “And remember that the punishment of disobedient journalists can go beyond the impromptu tax audit. Paul Klebnikov of Forbes was killed.”

Gawker has never been one to back down when republishing controversial documents. When the Church of Scientology tried to get the media company to take down leaked video of Tom Cruise’s evangelizing several months ago, the media company refused.

“I’ve always thought that a site like Gawker — though we try to seek out corruption and hypocrisy in New York — would serve a clearer public purpose in Moscow, Beijing or Riyadh,” Denton said.

If you want to read the piece in English, you still have to buy the magazine.

If you check out the September issue of GQ you’ll see on the cover a picture of Michael Jackson, a nod to tennis star Andy Roddick’s wife and a ranking of obnoxious colleges and top drinking cities.  But, what you won’t see is any mention of Scott Anderson’s digging into a 1999 bombing in Russia. 

Anderson, 50, is an accomplished journalist and the reason the piece is being buried has much to do with the nature of “Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power.” 

The piece “challenges the official line on a series of bombings that killed hundreds of people in 1999 in Russia. It profiles a former KGB agent who spoke in great detail and on the record, at no small risk to himself.”  And yet, GQ’s parent company, Conde Nast, has decided to make the piece go away. You can’t even find it on the internet and you can be sure that no Russians will see it either because Conde Nast is bowing to fear from retrobution from Putin’s government. 

“If you’re worried about repercussions and you bow to them, you’re basically surrendering to the other side,” Anderson says.

David Grann’s “Trial By Fire” in the current New Yorker is long, 17-pages long to be exact, and on the despressing side. But it’s everything great journalism/feature writing should be. The story of an innocent man who was put to death in Texas is a must read.  Print it out, take it to the bathroom, put it on the nightstand. 

By now, both investigators had a clear vision of what had happened. Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children’s room, even under their beds, then poured some more along the adjoining hallway and out the front door, creating a “fire barrier” that prevented anyone from escaping; similarly, a prosecutor later suggested, the refrigerator in the kitchen had been moved to block the back-door exit. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap.

The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The lab’s chemist reported that one of the samples contained evidence of “mineral spirits,” a substance that is often found in charcoal-lighter fluid. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door.

The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham—the only person, besides the victims, known to have been in the house at the time of the blaze—became the prime suspect.

I’ve often wondered what it would take to disappear completely, to walk away from one life and start another.  This fascination probably began sometime around my youth when I watched Julia Roberts do so in Sleeping With the Enemy.  Except in my fantasy, I never fell in love with a plumber who happens to sport a mullet. 

This month’s Wired has a story about one man who did vanish, Matthew Alan Sheppard. 

So on a Friday two weeks later, Sheppard drove with his wife, Monica, their daughter, and his mother-in-law to a rented cabin in the foothills of the Ozarks on the picturesque Little Red River, an hour from Searcy. He called it a much-needed last-minute getaway for the family, and for most of the weekend, it was.

Then, in the fading Sunday afternoon light, with his daughter and mother-in-law occupied in the cabin, Sheppard walked down to the dock with Monica and their black lab, Fluke. When Monica looked away, Sheppard helped the dog — always eager for a swim, just as he’d counted on — off the platform and into the Little Red River’s notoriously deadly current. His wife looked back just in time to see Sheppard heave his own 300-pound frame into the river after their beloved lab.

Thrashing in the 39-degree water, Sheppard managed to hand the leash up to Monica, who hauled the dog to safety. But he struggled to swim back to the dock. Flailing desperately, he gasped that he was having trouble breathing. A moment later, as the current pulled him downstream, his head dipped below the surface and didn’t reappear.

A frantic 911 call from Monica minutes later launched a search-and-rescue operation involving more than 60 people. Dive teams scoured the river, and a plane scanned the area from overhead. The next morning, Sheppard’s shell-shocked coworkers brought their own boats up to help with the search. They found his fluorescent orange Eaton cap in shallow water not far downstream. But when 24 hours passed without another sign, the authorities abandoned — publicly, at least — any hope of finding him alive.

And in a twist of gonzo journalism, the author of the piece, Evan Ratliff, vanished himself on August 15.  Clues to his whereabouts will be posted to @nxthompson.  If you find him, you could win $5,000.

I first got a whiff of the new Malcolm Gladwell essay when he engaged in a three part (part one, part two, part three) email exchange with Bill Simmons from ESPN.  Gladwell looks at underdogs and innovation in sports and why the two don’t necessary follow each other, even though they probably should.

Both exchanges are worth reading, if for nothing else than they’re sports food for thought.  The most memorable aspect is Gladwell’s thoughts on sports drafts and his suggestion that there shouldn’t be a draft, but rather college players should go on job interviews with their respective teams.

That suggestion alone, is worth wading through 20,000 words or so.

I better start adding some of these peeps.  Wired has a list of the 100 geeks you should be following on Twitter.  You know, if you have a Twitter account, and you’re into following geeks.  Otherwise this information is absolutely useless to you.

It’s like Fuck My Life, but instead of all the hopeless anger, My Life is Average confronts the world with a healthy dose of existential ennui.

Can’t wait for the My Life is Awesome companion site.

MSNBC personality Carlos Watson has launched his new online endeavor, The Stimulist, today.  And it’s a pretty decent effort. 

I wonder about it’s viability as a longterm alternative to both Gawker and The Huffington Post, especially since it’s based around an optimistic tone and its insistence on posting only six stories a day. 

It’s a ballsy business decision, going against the status quo and for that he should be commended.  Especially considering that 90% of content driven sites make their money by artificially inflating pageviews with truncated front page posts, publishing 30 posts a day — when only 10 – 15 are post-worthy — relying on spurious rumors, tipsters and press releases to do their work. 

It’s certainly worth keeping an eye on because its voice and mission are so different.  There’s plenty of intelligent snacking to do.  One article that caught my eye was on voluntourism, where people vacation and volunteer at the same time. 

Voluntourism. Sure, the ideal “vacation” for half of American tourists would be to indulge themselves at a spa, but you’re no ordinary American tourist. “Volontourists” devote anywhere from a single afternoon to their entire trips doing charitable work.  Although the typical set-up is a sort of mini-Peace Corps (i.e. building schools and digging ditches), there seems to be something in it for everyone — from reef cleaning for scuba divers in Aruba to meat donations for hunters in Alabama. Companies like Global Imprints (full disclosure: Carlos’ sister’s company) let you put your professional skills (i.e. legal, medical, engineering) to work while you’re working on your tan. So if you’re, say, a delayed-start lawyer who wants to do a little good-will lawyering, now you can.

Have you seen the new Times Wire? It’s like a NYT Twitter/RSS/blog/aggregation feed all wrapped up into one constantly updating package. In reverse-chronological order! 

It’s a customizable fountain of information, a much better way to consume news than their other endeavor. 

It’s still curious that the New York Times is one of the few old school newspaper companies that actually seems interested and invested in the manner they deliver news through technology.

Twitter has taken a necessary evolutionary step in regards to its search function, by turning its search results into a real-time news and opinion aggregator. 

Rather than be a list of updates related to the topic you’re searching, now it’s going to be a real-time data source. 

For example: If you want to learn about swine flu, you’d search Twitter and turn up not only a list of opinions, facts, and news that people are Tweeting, but also information from the sites they linked to in their tweets–in this case it may well be other news sources, medical reference texts and so on. Similarly if someone tweeted a link to their blog post, you’d find data from that post appear in Twitter’s search results also.

This seems almost inevitable if you’ve ever used Twitter as a source of news information.