Recommended Internet consumption: If Mitt Romney was so good for Mass., why is Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) bragging about his Obama ties?

Salman Rushdie, The New Yorker, “The Disappeared: How the fatwa changed a writer’s life”—”‘You must never write history,’ he [Arthur Hibbert] said, ‘until you can hear the people speak.’ He [Rushdie] thought about that for years, and it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you shouldn’t—tell their story.” Read more.

Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times, “Hitching His Wagon to Obama’s Star: a Republican Senator”—”President Obama is appearing in yet another television commercial in the Massachusetts Senate race. This time, it was not produced by the Democratic candidate, Elizabeth Warren, but by the Republican, Senator Scott P. Brown…That approach would be unusual enough for a Democrat in a year in which many feel the need to distance themselves from the administration, but it is virtually unfathomable for a Republican. That both candidates are trying to leverage their ties to Mr. Obama underscores how popular the president is here and how unpopular his rival, Mitt Romney, is, even though he once served as the state’s governor. Mr. Obama is expected to carry Massachusetts overwhelmingly in November.” Read more.

Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker, “Restaurant Owner Creates Fake Sex Site Profile for Patron Who Posted Negative Review Online”—”An Ottawa restaurateur was found guilty yesterday of defamatory libel after she created a phony sex site profile for a patron who wrote a negative review of her restaurant. Marisol Simoes, co-owner of two dining establishments in the city’s ByWard Market district, also impersonated customer Elayna Katz in a raunchy email sent to Katz’s superiors at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. ‘I am open to anything — couples, threesomes and group sex,’ Simoes wrote in the email, which she signed in Katz’s name. ‘Am especially into transsexuals and transgenders (being one myself). I am…a tiger in the bedroom.’” Read more.

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Recommended Internet consumption: Not cool–GOP philosophy, Osama bin Laden, table-side potty training

This American Life, “The Convert”— “Craig told us he has never been to Afghanistan. But he was trying to see if these guys at the gym, who he’d never met, thought it would be cool to hang out with Osama bin Laden. They didn’t think that would be cool.” Hear more.

Jeff Zeleny and Mark Landler, The New York Times, “Clinton Delivers Impassioned Plea for Obama Second Term”—”Mr. Clinton drew sharp lines between the choices facing voters in November. He made the case in a deeply personal way, sometimes articulating the argument for Mr. Obama more forcefully than the president has done throughout his race with Mitt Romney. ‘We believe ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own,’ Mr. Clinton said.” Read more.

Neetzan Zimmerman, Gawker, “Sight of Toddlers Being Potty Trained Inside Restaurant Disgusts Patrons”—One Utah mother may have taken her parenting privileges too far when she decided to train her twin daughters on the fine art of potty-making while they were seated at a table inside a busy restaurant in Lehi. ‘I noticed that this lady was having her two – she had two twins, two little girls about 2-and-a-half years old, sitting on what I thought were booster seats,’ said Thanksgiving Point Deli patron Kimberly Decker. Doing a double-take, Decker quickly realized the girls were actually seated on two toilet-training potties.” Read more.

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Former editor at Gridskipper, Hunter Walker, goes legit, but not

In 2007-2008, Hunter Walker was an assistant editor at Gridskipper. In that capacity, he was possibly the sole editor I’ve written for who sexed up my work rather than made a few strategic deletions (I had no objections).

So what did the future hold for such a depraved blogger?

He’s now enrolled in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. And demonstrating that the conflux of old and new media is almost complete, he’s talking about it with The New York Times and blogging about it for Gawker.