Two-year-old Taylor tales. (CBS)

If anyone missed Lesley Stahl's segment this weekend on 60 Minutes (though come on, how unlikely is that?), you might not have noticed that her profile of Taylor Swift, "A Young Singer's Meteoric Rise," was actually just a re-aired interview from 2011.

Which is fine--Ms. Stahl tells the audience that "we first met Taylor Swift in 2011, during her Speak Now tour," and on the 60 Minutes website, they disclose "The following is a script of "Taylor Swift" which originally aired on Nov. 20, 2011 and was rebroadcast on May 19, 2013"--except that it says something about Taylor Swift's "meteoric rise" that most people would have no idea that this interview was two years old. Or that on Twitter, 60 Minutes gave no clue that this would be a rebroadcast episode.

Nor did her fans seem to notice, with the exception of a few eagle-eyed viewers. (Despite the fact that in the segment she refers to herself as 21-years-old.)

The segment seems to have been re-aired in conjunction with CBS' ACM Presents: Tim McGraw's Superstar Summer Night, which featured Ms. Swift. But Sunday was also the night of the Billboard Awards, where Ms. Swift performed and took home eight statuettes.

Sunday's 60 Minute segment:

Part Two, from November, 2011:

Why did 60 Minutes only choose to air half of the interview? Probably because the second half addresses issues that would have hilariously dated the segment--Ms. Swift refusing to comment on Kanye, or saying that she "okay being alone," and "doesn't want to be one of those people who need to have a boyfriend all of the time."

Even so, hearing Ms. Swift talk about what "thin skin" she has, and how she hates reading anything negative about herself is heartbreakingly prescient: It makes us wonder if 2013 has either toughened up, or has somehow managed to avoid reading 90 percent of the Internet on a given day.

Mike Wallace, long considered one of the most fearsome interviewers in broadcast news, has died. He was 93.  A spokesman for CBS told the Associated Press that Mr. Wallace died Saturday night.

Mr. Wallace went into a kind of semi-retirement from regular appearances on 60 Minutes in 2006 but kept a promise made upon announcing his slowdown to do occasional new reports, profiling Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2007 as well as "suicide doctor" Jack Kevorkian.

Over the course of his 6 decades as a newsman Mike Wallace frequently went toe-to-toe with the famous and powerful in interviews legendary for their confrontational and emotional nature. As the A.P. reports in his obituary, Mr. Wallace once managed to break through Barbra Streisand's intensely controlled public persona:

In the early 1990s, Wallace reduced Barbra Streisand to tears as he scolded her for being "totally self-absorbed" when she was young and mocked her decades of psychoanalysis. "What is it she is trying to find out that takes 20 years?" Wallace said he wondered.

"I'm a slow learner," Streisand told him.

Mike Wallace was also one of the pioneers of the ambush interview, in which a news crew unexpectedly confronts a subject. He also disavowed this approach in later years, stating that it was a dramatic approach but ultimately not particularly informative.

Mr. Wallace leaves behind his fourth wife, Mary Yates Wallace, his son, Fox news stalwart Chris Wallace, stepdaughter Pauline Dora and a stepson, Eames Yates.

Mike Wallace's inimitable style has few imitators today. Aggressive, skeptical, challenging, wickedly well-prepared, he eschewed chummy, softball interviews designed solely to maintain journalistic "access" in favor of tearing his way through to whatever might be the truth. He wasn't the only journalist long-lived enough to have reported from hazy studios, cigarette in hand then later in videos broadcast over the Internet, but he was easily among the most feared and memorable.

Elliott Kalan: America’s next Andy Rooney?

Elliott Kalan likes to complain about things. The Daily Show writer can go on forever (or at least one whole minute) on his irritation with gum, fancy pork-pie hat stores in your neighborhood, pre-made sandwiches, and generic movie titles.

So now that Andy Rooney has officially stepped down from his role as "old cranky guy" on 60 Minutes, Mr. Kalan would like to humbly submit his application for the job of professional complainer.

Hey, if it doesn't work out with 60 Minutes, maybe Mr. Kalan could team up with Larry David on some new project about whining.

60 Minutes sought to explain Gaga, pre-Grammys, to an older generation with the interview, a mission that was only mildly successful: depending on how much you know of her by now, the Lady's routine of sub-Warholian insight and scanty clothes was either a retread or tremendously off-putting. On 60 Minutes's website, producer John Hamlin says Gaga's appearance was "not a no-brainer" for the producers--it seemed almost as though they weren't sure how to handle the star. While she gave generously of her time, as Hamlin indicates, that time was not marked by any opening-up: she shows Anderson Cooper her favorite taco place, for instance. (Is this mock-revelation what we can expect from Anderson's new syndicated chat show?) Unlike stars who bubble over with emotion they simply must share, Gaga played the CBS cameras beautifully, revealing nothing besides her desire for more fame, while having a venue to get just that (the interview cut away to past live performances, keeping the spotlight off whoever the "real" Gaga may be). Eventually, this may get boring--as we enter our third Gaga-album promo cycle, will she get many more TV invites without a new topic besides her own celebrity?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipk1tQYKlf0

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The first time, back in 2008,  Zuck seemed every bit the akward nerd, stumbling on questions. Last night he came across as a confident business leader, while his Harvard nemeses, the Winklevoss Twins, seemed like creeps.

Further evidence of Zuck's growing business savvy: He used last night to launch Facebook's new look for the profile page, choosing a forum sure to put older users at ease.

The new profile places heavy emphasis on photos, which have emerged as Facebook's killer app.

Right now, users' profile pages feature one photo, and then a wealth of text about all their interests.

The new profile puts the basic text up top -- name, age, job, relationship status, birthplace. Below that is a running stream of photos featuring the user and his or her "favorite friends."

That means instead of one photo for each profile, users will now display five or six. With photos taken from friends' accounts, Facebook will also automatically target and zoom in on users' faces (yikes!).

Overall, the new Facebook is decidely more visual and less literate. Even interests like music, movies and books are going to be represented by images, not words.

Humans are hard-wired to respond to faces, and Zuckerberg, who ironically is often depicted in the media with a mild case of Asperger's, is refocusing his site to capitalize on that inherent tendency.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

"I went through some stuff," said Mr. O'Brien. "And I got very depressed at times. It was like a marriage breaking up suddenly, violently, quickly. And I was just trying to figure out what happened."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFMtQ5UKz-I&feature=related

Today, CBS News released a few tidbits from Mr. O'Brien's interview with Steve Kroft.

At one point, Mr. O'Brien tells Mr. Kroft that (surprise, surprise) he would have handled the whole Tonight Show clusterfuck much differently than Mr. Leno: 

He went and took that show back and I think in a similar situation, if roles had been reversed, I know--I know me, I wouldn't have done that...If I had surrendered The Tonight Show and handed it over to somebody publicly and wished them well-- and then…six months later.  But that's me, you know.  Everyone's got their own, you know, way of doing things.

In his nice New Orleans drawl, Mr. Lewis said that this banker lost Morgan Stanley about $9 billion. “More than any single trader has ever lost in the history of Wall Street. And no one knows his name.”

They do now. Thanks mostly to that interview and Mr. Lewis’ The Big Short, a kind of recession-era sequel to his Wall Street classic Liar’s Poker, Howie Hubler has become an unwitting icon of the financial crisis. Even though he made a shrewd bet against subprime loans, he offset it by gambling hugely on slightly better mortgages that turned out to be extraordinarily worthless. Nevertheless, he left the bank with several million dollars, the book says, retiring to New Jersey with an unlisted telephone number.

A Wall Street villain’s story line, just like a comic-book bad guy’s, has distinct scenes. There’s the early decency, the sour turn, the grand act, the escape and then the disappearance. But what sometimes comes afterward, a quiet return, can be the most dramatic of all.

“I ONLY KNOW HIM as a good person. And I’m sure he’ll come out on top, basically, because of who he is. But it’s hard to analyze his world,” said the banker’s father, a New Jersey real estate broker named Howard Hubler Jr. His son is technically Howard Hubler III. “The other guy was the toughest of the three. He died at 97, and I never got a word in.”

The Wall Street son is tough, too. A former Montclair State College football player, he’s described in The Big Short as “loud and headstrong and bullying,” the type to react to any intellectual criticism of his trades by telling the critic to get the hell out of his face.

But what’s a personality quirk when you’re a top Morgan Stanley bond trader? He was good at what he did, and he was smart. By the end of 2004, he was skeptical of the subprime mortgage business, and craved new ways to bet against it. He found Morgan Stanley customers willing to sell him credit default swaps on pools of subprime mortgage loans, which, though there are many poetic ways of putting this, was like taking out an awesome insurance policy on a house you’ve built in quicksand.

But the economy’s fall took a while to begin, which was a problem for Mr. Hubler—who in April 2006 was put in charge of his own Morgan Stanley hedge fund, called the Global Proprietary Credit Group. To make up for the millions of dollars that it cost to carry his subprime bets until the bad times hit, he sold insurance on slightly better mortgages. He wagered on a disaster he clearly saw coming, and then against a worse disaster he was blind to—agreeing to insure the house next door, prettier but in the same sand. And because insuring something that’s less risky is less lucrative, he had to sell several times the amount of swaps that he himself had bought.

Before the fall, The Big Short reports, Mr. Hubler’s group felt offended when Morgan Stanley’s chief risk officer ordered tests to see what might happen to their bets if defaults caused losses of 10 percent to their subprime pool, which they thought would never happen. The coming drop was four times worse. The New York Times said his wagers cost Morgan Stanley $10 billion. Bank head John Mack called it “embarrassing for me, for our firm.”

“What happened to Howie Hubler?” Steve Kroft asked this month on 60 Minutes.

“He’s allowed to resign from Morgan Stanley and he takes with him millions of dollars in back pay,” Mr. Lewis answers. “Tens of millions of dollars in back pay.”

BUT LIFE GOES ON for fallen Wall Street executives. Lehman’s ex-CFO Erin Callan reportedly spends a lot of time at an East Hampton spinning studio; Bear Stearns’ Jimmy Cayne is said to be playing a lot of bridge; and Merrill Lynch’s Stan O’Neal sits on the board of a massive aluminum maker. Meanwhile, former top mortgage brokers like Jack Soussana have started loan modification companies that charge upfront fees to borrowers in exchange for a promise to get lenders to lower payments. “I’m not a shady person,” he told The Times last year. “We just changed the script and changed the product we were selling.”

Across the Hudson River, in an office suite in Rumson, N.J., Mr. Hubler has quietly slipped back into the mortgage business. According to marketing materials, he started a firm with former Morgan Stanley colleagues to advise mortgage lenders whose borrowers are threatening to walk away from homes that are worth less than what’s owed on them.

They’re called the Loan Value Group.

Last month, the company announced a patent-pending program that promises cash rewards to homeowners if they stay and fully pay off their mortgages. “It is no different from me putting $20,000 in a sack on a kitchen table and saying, ‘This is your money,’” Frank Pallotta, the firm’s executive vice president, and a former Morgan Stanley banker, told me this week. “I can’t talk through numbers. But we’ve signed up many. We’re live and we’re rolling.”

Mr. Hubler’s firm also includes his old proprietary trading squad’s executive director. “Default is rational for many borrowers: While they forfeit their home, they rid themselves of a mortgage liability of even greater value,” its Web site says, referring to the millions of American households who owe more on their homes than the homes are worth. One in four residences with a mortgage is currently underwater in this country.

Loan Value Group charges fees to lenders in exchange for organizing a reward that provides incentive for homeowners not to default. Because simply leaving can make financial sense, the company says, the solution is to target a borrower’s pocketbook.

Mr. Hubler would not speak for this article. “He’s pretty much adamant about not talking about this,” a spokesperson said. Neither would Richard Santulli, the company’s newly appointed chairman, who was CEO of the fractional aircraft ownership company NetJets until last August; nor the board member Michael Goodman, the former CEO of J.G. Wentworth, the lump-sum payment firm (“we understand it is hard to wait”!) that filed for bankruptcy last year.

But Mr. Pallotta, the executive vice president, was willing to speak. “People feel as though, you know, Howie was the problem and Wall Street was the problem,” he said. “And you know what? If there was a question of integrity, or trust, or the ability to bring value to a financial situation, we would not be this far.” When the firm’s rewards program was announced last month, Loan Value Group said it was already working with three hedge funds that own mortgages. “If they thought Howie was an S.O.B. or Frank was a BS artist, we wouldn’t have the traction.”

Asked about lenders they’re working with or borrowers who may stay in their underwater homes because of the promise of a reward, he said that customers want to be anonymous. “I haven’t seen tears,” he said, “but I’ve seen people say, ‘I can’t believe I got this.’”

But will struggling homeowners allow themselves to be lured into staying by a company led by former subprime mortgage bond traders? Especially one whose chief executive is being held up as an iconic and imbecilic villain in Mr. Lewis’ interviews with Charlie Rose, Maria Bartiromo, Erik Schatzker and Mr. Kroft? “We have no desire, we never did from the beginning, to sell the Loan Value Group name,” Mr. Pallotta said. “If you win the lottery, do you care if it’s Scratch and Pay or Scratch and Sniff or New Jersey Lotto? The money’s there.”

Besides, he said, “this Michael Lewis thing is very old news.”

mabelson@observer.com