BlackBook

It’s a rite of passage for president and poseur alike: an extended AMA (Ask Me Anything) session over on the landfill of pop culture called Reddit, perhaps more commonly known as the place BuzzFeed steals all its crappiest ideas from. Twitter genius Bret Easton Ellis touches down this afternoon at 3 p.m. EST, according to the author himself. Below, some ideas about what to ask him.

Since Tuesday, actress Amanda Bynes has been tweeting her own topless photo album from her bathroom to her 850,000+ followers, an assortment of The Amanda Show fans and OK! Magazine subscribers. Though she poses topless in the photos - clutching her enhanced breasts, smooching for the camera, and wearing tattered stockings – of most interest is the very shiny gold watch she wears in every photo. Oreo-sized, gold-linked, and of a first-place trophy-colored variety, the watch is a sight to see, and nearly distracts from the fact that Amanda Bynes is nearly naked and sitting on a bathroom sink. 

From his Oscar-winning, beloved, and acclaimed narrative features such as Traffic, Sex, Lies, and Video Tape, The Limey, Che, Side Effects, Magic Mike, Erin Brockovich, etc. to his documentary works like Gray's Anatomy and And Everything's Going Fine, there's no denying Steven Soderbergh is as genius as he is prolific. But when you look back on his body of work, it's hard to imagine that his 36 directorial features stemmed from the same bizarre and vast mind. And if there's one pocket of that mysterious brain I'd always wished he'd return to, it's wherever he stored the magic from his 1996 comedy Schizopolis.

On the Colbert Report last night, Stephen Colbert held a Q&A with President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative University, which was, of course, interesting and wonderful all-around. But in speaking to the topic of social media, Colbert brought up that Clinton's online presence isn't as well-rounded as it could be. He admitted that he does intact "Facebook" but when comes to Twitter, he's "insecure—what if you tweet and nobody tweets back? There's nothing worse than a friendless tweeter." Yes, thank you Bill, glad to know you share in the collective fear of tweeting into the abyss as well.

RIP, Margaret Thatcher, I guess. With the recent deaths of film critic Roger Ebert, designer Lily Pulitzer, and now Thather, this is about the damnedest Rule of Threes I've ever seen. Of course, it could be much worse, as a lot of people on Twitter are confusing the hashtag "#nowthatchersdead" to mean "now that Cher is dead." Easy mistake, I suppose, as there are a whopping thirteen people on Twitter who didn't even know who Margaret Thatcher was in the first place. Can you believe it? I suppose I should compile my "Best Tweets About the Falklands War" post soon. In other news, this is going to be a profoundly obnoxious week on the internet.
 

Oh, I love it so much when celebrities have "beef" over Twitter! Justin Bieber turned 19 years old over the weekend (cue my existential crisis about why I'm writing about teenagers), and he was very pumped to celebrate the event at London's Cirque du Soir. The next morning, however, fans were shocked to see that Bieber tweeted that his party had gone awry. "Worst birthday," he said simply, without a trace of an emoji. There were a lot of reactions, but none were better than Dr. Ruth's.

Ronan Farrow — 25-year-old wunderkind, thinking woman's pinup, sex god (OK, I made that last part up) — is adorable on his mother Mia Farrow's birthday. Adorable. 

Dick Van Dyke, who was recently honored at the SAG Awards with a lifetime achievement award, is, obviously, one of the nicest people on the planet. But he is officially the nicest person on Twitter. (Did you know that Dick Van Dyke is on Twitter? Now you do!) The actor and comedy legend has been retweeting every person to mention him in a tweet. When one person took umbrage with the multitude of retweets, Van Dyke tweeted, "Is it bad form to retweet? I get a lot of nice comments and I wanted to highlight some that stand out. I couldn't possibly answer everyone." Bless your heart, Dick Van Dyke. INSTANT-FOLLOW! 

Two years ago, actor Adam Goldberg sat around with his girlfriend brainstorming what the next new big social media thing would be. Already a man of Tumblr and Twitter (and hesitantly of Instagram), he thought he had it: “It’s sound. It’s got to be sound.”But unless you count the collective groans of boyfriends around the world when Pinterest caught fire, Goldberg was wrong. The next big thing, two years later, is video. More accurately, it’s Vine, an iOS app allowing you to capture six looping seconds with a stop-action camera, helmed by Twitter. Less than two weeks old, the app has seen a deluge of early adopters (and a lot of porn buzz), but what might be the most interesting thing about Vine is that it’s already been won.

Justin Timberlake took the stage in New Orleans at the DirecTV Super Saturday Night to perform a set of new and old songs. When introducing his hit "Cry Me a River" from his debut solo album, Timberlake casually mentioned, "Sometimes in life, you think you found the one, but then one day you find out that she is just some bitch." Very wise words. Of course, as everyone assumes that song is about his ex, Britney Spears, everyone assumed that the bitch in question was also Britney Spears. Not so, says Timberlake.