‘Sup, readers? So many lectures and books this week, it’s like the platonic ideal of college before college actually started all over again. And speaking of late-adolescent fixations: there’s Malcolm Gladwell and also Howard Zinn talking about his new documentary, A People’s History of Howard Zinn, a stunning expose in which we, America, find out Zinn cruelly inflected all of the world’s First Peoples with bird flu, for laughs. Ninth grade AP US History will never be the same. MORE »

• Names & Faces: Tourism officials in Tupelo, Miss., the birthplace of Elvis Presley, are hoping to get Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and President Bush to swing by Tupelo after their visit to Graceland on Friday… A new novel by Thomas Pynchon will be released in December. [WP]

• Lloyd Grove’s Lowdown: Malcolm Gladwell cheerleads for the MSM, derides bloggers as “parasites.” [NYDN]
• Rush & Molloy: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger gave an interview to the National Enquirer after the tabloid threatened to write about an alleged tryst between him and Brigitte Nielsen. [NYDN]

* It’s too bad that this NYP Tammy/Tammy NYP character — the 17-year-old Singapore schoolgirl who recorded a homemade sex video on her cell phone, which then got stolen (and the rest is history) — wasn’t a Capitol Hill or White House intern. Searches for her sex video have been straddling the top of Technorati for days. [Dream Logic; Technorati] MORE »