Very excited to be joining @peretti, @scottlamb,@mattstopera & to hire some great reporters to build the first true social news organization

— Ben Smith (@benpolitico) December 12, 2011

If two's a trend, then holy cow. Ben Smith is leaving Politico for Buzzfeed and Don Van Natta is leaving the Times for ESPN (after 16 years!). (Bonus: from just the other day, here is a Ben Smith blog post about Don Van Natta.) This means a thing, and it's different from recent hires like "Tina Brown offering people oodles of money" or "Bloomberg View offering people oodles of money," but I can't [...]

"Most people aren't accustomed to seeing mood lighting. If you're in a bad mood, the lights will go red, and they'll go blue if you're in a good mood… There's some kind of sensor, like I guess a mood-ring sensor thing. I really don't know, I still can't figure out how it works, but it's amazing. They're all done in fiber optics. When they're off, you can't tell they're in the house." -Guess what Vanilla Ice is up to? Right! He's renovating houses for resale. He decorates in earth-tones to "keep it neutral, warm and welcoming," and, apparently, installs magical emotional detectors.

"We kind of liked the idea of living off the back of American stupidity, so we hooked up with a Sakawa gang"! The email fraud industry may or may not die out in the wake of Ghana's oil discoveries, but it's definitely fascinating.

There's a lot of ways to make money as a former politician! You could consult on "security services" like Rudy Giuliani. You could write a memoir, like everyone. You could retrieve coins from the flopping intestines of flayed dusky prisoners, like Dick Cheney. Or you could become a slightly slatternly spokesbot for penny-stock startups, like George Pataki-who has now lent his name and visage to two concerns, one of which went big-time belly-up last month.

Over the last two years, there has been a covert study of the lives of gay men in an unnamed country in the "Middle East."