FINANCE
• Aleksey Vayner, everyone’s favorite bizarre self-promoting video maker, is back with a new Website and perhaps a book! Impossible may be nothing after all. [Gawker]
• Goldman Sachs set new records with their $20.2 billion bonus pool, including $67.9 million for Lloyd Blankfein, but rumor has it the bank decided to stiff their back-office employees. [NYP]
• Blankfein’s salary still pales in comparison to hedge-fund kings like John Paulson and Paolo Pellegrini, who raked in more than $1 billion each in 2007 betting against the housing market. [NYT]
MEDIA
• Bill O’Reilly got in a shoving match with an Obama aide in New Hampshire until the Secret Service stepped in to restrain him. Obama still took a moment to chat with the right-winger, and apparently even said he’d go on O’Reilly’s show. Talk about fair and balanced! [Slate]
• The Writers Guild moved a step closer to signing special deals with small production companies like United Artists, the Weinstein Company, and Lionsgate. But the guild still refuses to sanction a broadcast of the Golden Globes, and since NBC has exclusive rights to the show, it’s unclear whether the Foreign Press’ annual drunken extravaganza will even happen. [NYT, Deadline Hollywood Daily]
• Gawker’s much-lauded commenters (a large source of hits for the site) defected for a day. [Felix Salmon]
LAW
• Does sexiness matter in the law? Duh. A new study shows that hot lawyers tend to take home more cash — not to mention other plunder — than their less attractive classmates. [Law Blog/WSJ]
• Lawyers and doctors, not as cool as they used to be? Or were they never, um, actually cool? [NYT]
• One judge comes up with an easy explanation for the recent epidemic of bench-sitters dozing off in court: Lawyers, and lawsuits, are boring. [Law Blog/WSJ]
FASHION
• Kate Moss doubled her income last year. She also ditched Pete. We’re just sayin’… [British Vogue]
• Rachel Zoe will star in her own reality-TV show. In unrelated news, Bravo execs got a low, low interest rate on the mortgage they took out on their own souls. [FWD]
• BCBG is merging its BCBG Girls and To the Max lines into one called BCBGeneration. [WWD]
