You know the story: coddled (post-)college kid comes to the big city, buckles under pressure, cue tears. Today's tale is from a "twenty-something former film student, frequent subway-crier and headboard enthusiast," who called a late-night locksmith when she couldn't get into her apartment. When the work was done, the guy asked for $613, which she rightly called "exorbitant," enough so to call the cops, who showed up and subsequently bullied her into paying. ("Pay the man now or you're under arrest.") Consumerist relayed the story, adding some dry tips like, "Agree on an estimate before they start services." The Awl, meanwhile, advised all "NYC Young People: You Never, Ever Call an Emergency Locksmith." As one of those young people -- one who has been ripped off! -- I just want us all to be a little bit tougher.

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​VICTORY! for a New York City newspaper, while the rest are going down, down, in an earlier round. A new, familiar byline at New York's Vulture, and a new, familiar byline at AgencySpy. The iPad is still just The iPad, but Twitter is definitely still Twitter. Howard Kurtz at The Daily Beast is still Howard Kurtz. Let's all hack the New Yorker! Press Clips, Day 15, Late and Mostly Scandal-Free Edition, right here. More »

New York media outlets are like high-schoolers in a crowded lunchroom -- a circle of nerds, a coterie of posers, cool kids, laid-back social floaters, and, of course, the junkies. Every so often, stories significant enough to report but light enough for playful interpretation truly reveal media outlet personalities. This week, to our delight, such a story descended the ranks and disseminated like gossip in this hypothetical cafeteria: Construction workers found an 18th-century ship at the World Trade Center site, to the vast enchantment of archaeologists (and even more so, the New York Times). With that, here's the shipwreck media personality litmus test.

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In the latest issue of Time magazine, comedic writer Joel Stein does a profoundly unfunny bit about how families from India have descended upon the New Jersey town where he grew up. "The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas," he writes. It is more than a little xenophobic! He has since apologized, but not before Kal "Kumar, Not Harold" Penn shot back a response on the Huffington Post. But more importantly, what's up with committing editorial hate crimes against Indian people lately? We already went through this!

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