"In one of the most dramatic two days in Wall Street's history, Merrill Lynch agreed to sell itself to Bank of America for roughly $50 billion to avert a deepening financial crisis, while another prominent securities firm, Lehman Brothers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection."

That was yesterday. Also, yesterday, Slate — the website where everything that is up is down, and everything that is right is wrong — launched The Big Money, its financial website that cares less about whether the Dow Jones is posting gains and more about taking conventional fiscal wisdom and arguing against it.

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Don't call Domino a shelter title. That's the message editor Deborah Needleman tried passing off in January, claiming "We were never a straight shelter title."

Except where would today's New York article about Deborah's Tribeca loft – which she shares with Slate chief Jacob Weisberg – be without that newspeg? The loft that she claims was built by Domino – its design being "sort of a Domino project" – with its "paint-it-all-white thing" and "nothing’s too precious" attitude?

Probably nowhere. So let's forget she ever brought it up.

• E&P editor Joe Strupp lambasted for championing the Internet when, like, nobody understands it.

• NYT wading in the best job applicant pool: The New York Observer. Rebecca Dana is said to be departing Jared Kushner's camp for a seat alongside Bill Carter.

• Those redacted Iran documents are now all yours. Gee, whiz, NYT!

• Deborah Needleman, Jacob Weisberg, Malcolm Gladwell and Kim France all have nobody but each other this holiday.

• Google News alerts get the LAT into trouble.

• Joe Zee joins Ariel Foxman in finally landing a new job post-shopping mag fall out.

• Tina Fey to make bad 30 Rock jokes at Writers Guild Awards.

• LAT ain't giving Hispanics enough lovin'.

When Bonnie Fuller told us last night that she polygraphs some of her sources for Star to ensure they're telling the truth, we nearly shit ourselves. And so did at least a dozen other media reporter types in the audience who we talked to at last night's Reuters panel "Public Figures, Private Lives." (That was after the audible gasp from the audience.)

Polygraphing sources? Does American Media Inc. even have the budget for that? (And if they do, doesn't David Pecker pad his own pockets with it?) We've heard murmurs about this before, but we've also heard murmurs about Mel Gibson not hating Jews. Do the tabloids operate on a Hollywood-level of mysticism we don't know about?

Apparently so. We touched base with a number of chief editors at the celebrity rags and, it turns out, polygraphing sources is not entirely uncommon. National Enquirer editor David Perel tells us: "We have polygraphed sources in the past and in fact made mention of it in the article we published, showing the result. Some sources do sign contracts, in particular when we are buying something exclusive, such as photographs." (The Enquirer, it's worth noting, is also a AMI title.)

That's "sign contracts," as in paperwork binding sources to their story and agreeing to testify in court should the magazine come under legal assault (read: accusations of libel). Fuller also said that's regular practice at Star.

But the meat (pun intended) of last night's panel – with Fuller flanked by Slate's Jacob Weisberg, Reuters' Paul Holmes, First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, former RIAA prez and media/GLBT issues consultant Hilary Rosen, and Splash News chief Gary Morgan – was devoted to the gays. Mark Foley this, House pages that. But what about Lance Bass and Reichen Lehmkuhl, yo? Forget closeted Congressman. How does Fuller handle covering gay celebs who aren't out?

Well, she doesn't. As most panel members agreed, sexual orientation remains a part of someone's private life, off limits to even tabloid scrawl. So yes, two gay (but not out) celebrities sleeping with each other will be kept under wraps, while two straight celebs are fair game. And besides, Fuller claims Star didn't even know about Lance and Reichen until the former *Nsync-er came out in People — which is less a debate over outing gay celebs than it is for finding new reporters. Seriously. There were photos of those two. Everywhere.

Update: While some editors didn't have much to say on the record, we did just hear from In Touch executive editor Dan Wakeford, who says: "We’ve never polygraphed a source in our four years of existence. Polygraphs are not accepted as court evidence. We make our stories accurate by avoiding single sourced stories and investigating them thoroughly." So booyah.

You know you're so in need of a crazy e-mail fix. Ian Spiegleman's been laying low since the Toby Young incident and despite his random crazy letter, nobody really cares who Pranay Gupte is.

Nobody really gives a crap who N.P. Thompson is, either, mostly because he's from Seattle. But, since this little not-so-friendly letter comes from the quite disgruntled writer, who was rejected as a Slate contributor, we thought we would share.

His electronic letter was sent to Slate editors Jacob Weisberg, Bryan Curtis and Meghan O'Rourke arrived last night. And is completely ridiculous. He dives right in, attacking current Slate writers, calling Nathan Lee a "dyspeptic hipster" and O'Rourke a Brooklyn snob.

"What we have at Slate are editors hell-bent on preserving the shittiest, shallowest aspects of the status quo by slamming a door on anyone capable of upstaging their friends and neighbors, or their lovers."

Well, we guess if you can't get published at Slate, your creative outlets have to be carved out somehow. The full crazy, beautiful rants, after the jump.

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