"I don't know where that came from," TA President Lawrence Reuter said yesterday. "We haven't studied that and we don't have the car equipment to do it if we wanted."

Co-founder of Wired and the Industry Standard John Battelle's THE SEARCH: Business and Culture in the Age of Google, about the "extraordinary company that has cracked the Internet profit barrier and is now reinventing the advertising business," to Adrian Zackheim at Portfolio, for publication in 2004, by Esther Newberg at ICM (world).

Recent Harvard graduate (and Crimson columnist) and Atlantic Monthly editorial analyst Ross Douthat's memoir PRIVILEGE: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, about his Harvard experience--e.g. academic life, "punching," student tensions following 9/11 and the economic recession--as well as examining the elite culture of higher education that pays lip service to earnest ideals like diversity and public service and tolerance but in point of fact indoctrinates its students in a religion of success, to Will Schwalbe and Ben Loehnen at Hyperion, for six figures, by Rafe Sagalyn.

Executives at G.M. say they threw their resources behind XM rather than Sirius largely because XM had agreed to buy satellites and related ground technology from G.M.'s Hughes aerospace and electronics subsidiaries and to work with Hughes's DirecTV satellite television unit. XM and DirecTV officials say it is too soon to tell whether the News Corporation's plan to buy control of DirecTV's parent, Hughes Electronics, will affect their relationship, which includes a joint marketing agreement and Hughes's 7 percent stake in XM. XM already broadcasts the News Corporation's Fox News and Fox Sports channels.

Jovan is no longer Jovan. Now he's J. Hutton Pulitzer. Does Mr. Pulitzer have anything to do with the recently announced Pulitzer Prizes? No. What does Mr. Pulitzer do? Not sure. Read his Web site www.jhuttonpulitzer.com) and see if you can figure it out. When D magazine tried to find out, mean ol' JHP just swore at the mag.

Buzz, however, is confident that there are two things we know for sure about JHP. First, we know that he's selling his crystals. What crystals, you ask? The ones that make up the Pulitzer Collection (www.pulitzercollection.com)--a.k.a., a coupla hunks of mineral that used to adorn his offices at Digital Convergence Corp., the company that brought you the CueCat and helped send its primary investor, The Dallas Morning News, into a PR nightmare.

An annual rider who uses only the 30-Day Unlimited MetroCard will spend $851.90 per year. A rider who makes exactly 40 rides per month—and no more—will spend $799.48 a year if he uses nothing but the $10 and $20 discounted cards. That’s $51.72 saved throughout the year: a phone bill, school supplies, part of a wedding plan. However, just three more rides a month, to 43, would make the 30-Day Unlimited Card the better value. The cost of the $10 and $20 discount cards would increase to $869, making them more expensive at the end of the year by $19.10.

After arriving in Kuwait, Yago even explained his surroundings using MTV lingo.

"Kuwait City is dominated by its sheik, Jaber Al-Sabah, whose royal palace makes Puffy's crib in the Hamptons look like my dilapidated Lower East Side apartment."

"rice to riches"... 105 hits
"basso est restaurant nyc"... 3 hits
"rice to riches nyc"... 3 hits
"rice to riches spring"... 3 hits

My take on Eggers is that he's an interesting and occasionally inspired writer, but his unacknowledged significance is that he's one of the most important graphic designers of his generation. In fact, although his aesthetic is fairly reactionary and at times unbearably twee, he has a rare talent for the arcane art of typesetting and publication design.

The look of the Believer, with its sophisticated attempt to professionalize the shaggy, Bay Area broadsheets of the '60s and '70s, confirms my suspicion that Eggers' goal is not to become postmodernism's answer to Bennett Cerf, but to function as an update on the 18th century "gentleman printer" -- a contemporary Ben Franklin. (Eggers, however, wants to be Franklin minus the political and scientific enthusiasms, which distracted the founding father from the altogether more fascinating business of printing.)