Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

John Tierney’s New York Times columns are filled with willfully obtuse justifications for selfish behavior, not to mention lots of cherry-picked data. But until last week his columns were fun to read online, because the photo that accompanied them was so hilarious. Here’s the photo, which must have been taken a few years ago during Tierney’s tenure as dean of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College:

The hand-stapled-to-chin pose: so sexy. It turns out that this guy also loves to pose that way, which should tell you something about Tierney.

Alas, the above picture has apparently been abandoned in favor of this perfectly normal one, which accompanied the online version of Tierney’s Times column yesterday:

Perhaps Tierney finally realized that he’s not much of a thinker after all.

In 1986, at the peak of the PMRC’s prohibitionist campaign against all pop music it judged to be insufficiently banal, Frank Zappa appeared on CNN’s Crossfire to talk about obscenity and censorship with three other panelists. One of those three other panelists was Mr. Douchebag of Liberty himself, co-host Robert Novak, who has learned a thing or two about obscenity in recent days.

Zappa is so great in this. The clip is about 20 minutes long, and the whole thing is worth watching.

Novak is actually the good cop in this exchange. The bad cop role is played with great gusto by a pharisaical right-winger—is there any other kind?—named John Lofton.

Zappa appeared on Crossfire again the following year, but that clip isn’t quite as rewarding.

Stay Free!, the fine Brooklyn-based nonprofit magazine edited by my excellent pal Carrie McLaren, has just launched a blog called Stay Free! Daily. The blog will be maintained by a stable of about half a dozen contributors. Stay Free! comes out twice a year and covers American media and culture from a lefty perspective. It’s great.

Carrie often creates satirical ads and other parodies for the back of the magazine, and I’ve appeared in two of them.

In case you’re wondering, some giant media conglomerate beat me to the domain name hearst.com, so that wasn’t a possibility.

The name of this site is derived from panopticon, a word the British utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) used for the name of an ingenious new kind of prison he spent years devising in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The word comes from the Greek words for “all” and “sight.” As Bentham conceived it, the panopticon would be a kind of ultimate surveillance machine: Prison cells would be arrayed around the inside of a huge circular space, and a hidden sentry would observe from inside a single tower in the center of the space. The sentry would be able to see all the prisoners without being seen himself; the prisoners would never know if or when they were being monitored. Thus the prisoners would have to be on their best behavior at all times. The prisoners would be forced to internalize their own subjugation, and the sentry would be rendered more or less unnecessary. Bentham tried to get a panopticon built, but he was never quite successful. His ideas eventually influenced the design of prisons such as Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built in 1829. The concepts behind the panopticon also influenced the architecture of other kinds of institutional buildings, including some hospitals, which obviously have a similar need for efficient ways to monitor large numbers of people simultaneously.

Bentham conceived of the panopticon as a benign system that would result in prisons that were more humane, but of course its implications are hugely disturbing. Today the panopticon is famous mainly because of its analysis by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who saw it as an utterly diabolical concept and a metaphor for “the oppressive use of information in a modern disciplinary society,” as David Engberg puts it on a website called The Virtual Panopticon. For Foucault, whose analysis appears in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the panopticon concept also signaled a historical shift from “punishment” that targeted the body to “discipline” that targeted the mind and soul. I’ve oversimplified things here; you can read more about these ideas and their influence on this page.

Anyway, I’m interested in all these ideas, but they aren’t going to be the focus of this site. In the 19th century the word panopticon also came to be used as the name for a kind of hands-on museum where a wide variety of objects were on display, and that’s a suitably vague description of what this site will be. I’m very interested in the media in general and magazines in particular, so there will be a lot about that sort of thing here. I’m kind of a pack rat when it comes to magazines, so I’ll regularly be sharing things from my collection, including a number of inadvertently hilarious guitar magazines from the hair-metal era. Yngwie!