MEDIA
• General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt said he’d postpone any decision on selling NBC until after the 2008 Olympics. Let’s just hope 30 Rock and Friday Night Lights last that long. [FT]
• Doris Lessing beat out Philip Roth, who was rumored as a top candidate, for this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. It probably helps that Lessing’s most recent novel doesn’t involve an old geezer fucking a “luckless goy chick” in the face. [NYT, Hitchens/Atlantic]
• FSG dominated this year’s National Book Award finalists, with five out of ten in fiction and nonfiction coming from the tweedy publisher’s lists. [NYT]
FINANCE
• Just how bad was early August on the Street? Morgan Stanley just admitted their quant traders lost $390 million in a single day. [Bloomberg]
• The credit crunch may have slowed, but subprime fallout continues. UBS canned two senior executives, David Martin and James Stehli, after admitting a $3.4 billion loss. [NYP]
• Chrysler workers weren’t the only ones walking out on Cerberus. Managing director Kurt Larsen quit the firm to join Ken Moelis’s new crack team of private-equity veterans. [Deal Journal/WSJ]
LAW
• The fake lawyer who talked his way into a job at Anderson, Kill & Olick pleaded guilty to grand larceny for the salary he “stole” working 80-hour weeks without a little piece of paper from the New York Bar. [Connecticut Law Tribune]
• Chief Justice John Roberts told Time that he makes sure to reread “The Vanity of Human Wishes” every year. Guess whose son won’t be getting a pony come Christmas! [Law Blog/WSJ]
• Why is George Clooney always looking so angry in Michael Clayton? Probably because he’s a long-term senior associate, the equivalent of lawyering purgatory. [NYO]
FASHION
• Can the Agyness juggernaut be stopped? The model is in talks with Topshop to do her own line. [British Vogue]
• Fetishists rejoice: Bondage shoes are back. [NYT]
• Karl Lagerfeld, the Sultan of Slim himself, sent home models that were too skinny before his show this season. [Fashionista]
