Angelina Jolie. (Photo credit: Patrick McMullan).

Mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, in an attempt to "try to soften her often rough-edged political image," according to The New York Times, called up and gave The Grey Lady a big scoop: as a young woman, she struggled with bulimia and alcoholism.

But despite Ms. Quinn's best efforts to win the news cycle, she couldn't have known that she was up against Angelina Jolie, who unveiled big news of her own in an Op-Ed, that also ran in today's Times, discussing her decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy. Ms. Jolie wrote that she possesses a gene, BRCA1, that puts her at a high risk for ovarian and breast cancer.

Both women gave a similar reason for going public with their struggles.

Ms. Quinn said she decided to discuss her challenges in the hopes that others will benefit, though the Times also noted her efforts to "build a campaign that draws heavily on her personal appeal to women."

“Until you stop hiding things, you’re hiding things, and hiding things is not healthy,” Ms. Quinn told the Times. “I just want people to know you can get through stuff."

Ms. Jolie wrote that she hoped her story would help other women facing similar medical decisions.

"On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work," Ms. Jolie wrote. "But I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience."

The superstar actress's revelations blazed across Facebook, Twitter, the tabloids and the Times' own most-read lists.

Seems that news cycles, like political races, are unpredictable.

Meryl Streep, Oscar presenter (Getty Images)

The Academy has released an incomplete list of this weekend's Oscar presenters. Based on past experience, what categories shall they present. Here are our best guesses!

Christian Bale will present Best Supporting Actress; Melissa Leo will present Best Supporting Actor; Colin Firth will present Best Actress; Natalie Portman will present Best Actor. This gender-swapping return of last year's winners is a predictable tradition; the only thing surprising about it is that Melissa Leo won an Oscar one year ago instead of eight, which is how long ago it feels.

Halle Berry will present Best Documentary Feature and Short. This seems like her level of fame right now.

The cast of Bridesmaids will present Best Costume Design. Because women can make jokes about dresses!

Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone will present Best Sound Editing and Mixing. Only two charming young(ish, in Mr. Cooper's case) stars can get us excited about two seemingly indistinguishable categories.

Tom Cruise will present Best Picture. Doesn't it seem sort of weird that he never has? And doesn't it seem as though he's been fully rehabilitated?

Penélope Cruz will present Best Cinematography. Sure!

Cameron Diaz will present Best Art Direction. This is the sort of early-in-the-ceremony category for which it's perfect to have on hand an early-2000s star whose rep couldn't arrange something later in the ceremony.

Michael Douglas will present Best Director. He's already presented Best Picture twice but he's still a pretty prestigious guy. Practice saying "Hazanavicius," Gekko!

Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis will present Best Visual Effects. And do some sort of Rise of the Planet of the Apes-themed skit in the process.

Tina Fey will present Best Makeup. And tell a joke about how much makeup it takes to keep her from looking like either a wrinkled old man or an acne-scarred teenager in the process.

Tom Hanks will present the "In Memoriam" montage. He can't present Best Picture because one of his own films is nominated (the Academy's actually done this before when Jack Nicholson presented the prize to The Departed, but let's hope they learned from how gauche that looked) and his presenting Best Director would only call attention to the fact that he directed Larry Crowne last year. The only other thing someone with all Mr. Hanks's gravitas can do is present this segment.

Angelina Jolie will present Best Foreign Language Film. What a wonderful way for her to seem benevolent in defeat after not having been nominated for her own foreign film (which was not eligible in this category).

Jennifer Lopez will present Best Original Song. A theoretical actress and theoretical singer, Jennifer Lopez is the perfect simulacrum of a presenter of a music category at the Oscars.

Meryl Streep will present Best Adapted and Best Original Screenplay. "For actors [giggle, stern look over glasses], it all begins with a script," the star of The Iron Lady will inaccurately say.

Tina Brown

As Secretary of State during the Clinton administration, Secretary Albright directed US policy in the Bosnian War. Ms. Jolie recently made her directorial debut with a film about the Bosnian War, In the Land of Blood and Honey.

Later, a panel about machismo in Central America between Sylvia Gereda, a Guatamalan journalist and Rosi Orozco will be hosted by actor Gael Garcia Bernal.

Green Party presidential hopeful Rosanne Barr will speak about television and cultural norms. In our opinion, she needs no moderation.

And what's with dragging Dick Van Dyke and Patrick Duffy out to parade around memories of their former careers? That just seems mean.

Hilary Swank, at a Santa Monica Cirque Du Soleil performance (Getty Images)

A selection of celebrities who have recently attended Cirque Du Soleil and been summarily featured in press on People or Us Weekly's web sites or PerezHilton.com, placed in ascending order of desperation for publicity:

• Christian Bale
• Halle Berry and Olivier Martinez
• Tim Tebow
• Pitbull
• Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Maddox Jolie-Pitt et al.
• Kylie Minogue
• "Pregnant Beyonce and hubby Jay-Z"
• Kristin Cavallari and Jay Cutler
• Perez Hilton

Charlize Theron (Getty Images)

Newsweek's current issue features its annual pre-nominations "Oscar roundtable"--and either it'll look dated when nominations are announced tomorrow, or we need to adjust our predictions! The panelists are likely nominees George Clooney and Viola Davis (the working-it pair both recently appeared together on an Entertainment Weekly cover, too), as well as Christopher Plummer, Tilda Swinton, Michael Fassbender, and Charlize Theron.

How good is Newsweek at choosing panelists who will be Oscar-nominated? Some years are great--last year's panel featured six eventual nominees and both the Best Actor and Best Actress--and others less predictive. In the past ten Oscar panels (discounting the two panels speaking to five directors apiece, of whose number eight ended up nominated), 48 actors have been interviewed about their Oscar hopeful performances, with eight missing the mark. These "losers" include Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Naomi Watts, so their inclusion isn't exactly surprising.

The rate of an Oscar roundtabler getting an Oscar nomination, 40 of 48, is exactly a 5/6 probability--so one of the current panelists (sorry, Charlize! We really loved Young Adult) will probably have talked about the Oscars a bit presumptively.

Standing in our way is a nefarious array of mobile devices and operating systems. Angelina might play well on the iPhone, but not an Android. She might appear in all her HD glory on a on a Motorola, but not a Samsung. 

NYC startup Thwapr won't stand for this injustice. Text "angelina" to 757575 if you don't believe us. See, wasn't that better?

The rise of the smartphone has led to an explosion in mobile video consumption as users stream web clips, TV, films and live sports, all from the palms of their hands. 

But making sure that video looks good across all these devices can be a nightmare.

"We want to make it simple for companies to share video to mobile without having to worry about the make or model," says Thwapr CTO Eric Hoffert. "Right now, that means figuring out a way to ensure high quality video for more than 300 different devices." 

Thwapr was founded in 2007 and worked in stealth to develop it technology, raising $5 million to date from angel investors, before launching earlier this year.

Hoffert, one of the brains behind Apple's original QuickTime software, helped create Thwapr's proprietary technology, which formats streaming video in real time, adjusting for hardware, operating system, even available bandwidth.

The small NYC startup announced two major partnerships this week. One was with the NFL's Miami Dolphins, who use Thwapr to ensure their hundreds of thousands of fans, streaming exclusive video from the team on hundreds of different devices, all get the same great experience.  

It's not just big companies that can put Thwapr to good use. The company has developed a simple "Share To Phone" button that can be added to any web site. Click the button, type in the mobile numbers of friends and family, and Thwapr automatically delivers video to their phone from the cloud in real time.

Yesterday Thwapr announced that WatchMojo, one of the biggest video networks in the country, had choosen its Share to Phone technology for its mobile efforts.

"With Thwapr, WatchMojo is able to extend its video distribution reach to mobile, ensuring access by a broad audience with hundreds of millions of compatible devices. Thwapr's Share to Phone platform was simple to integrate. We kept our existing video player and video files, adding only a few lines of HTML," said Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, CEO of WatchMojo Inc.

The market for mobile video, which has more than doubled since 2008, is expected to grow five-fold by 2014 to more than $16 billion. Thwapr is well positioned to profit from that growth, and the increasing fragmentation of the mobile phone market.

You can text "angelina", "terminator" or "motocross" to 757575 to try Thwapr on your phone. We recommend angelina.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper

Book burning is antithetical to American ideals. People have a constitutional right to burn a Koran if they want to, but doing so is insensitive and an unnecessary provocation - much like building a mosque at Ground Zero.

"I would hope," continues Palin, "that Pastor Terry Jones and his supporters will consider the ramifications of their planned book-burning event." Palin did not offer any necessary provocations the Pastor might choose instead, but she did end her statement by name-checking the Park51 Project, the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque":

We don't need to agree with each other on theological matters, but tolerating each other without unnecessarily provoking strife is how we ensure a civil society. In this as in all things, we should remember the Golden Rule. Isn't that what the Ground Zero mosque debate has been about?

But wait! Palin's not the only civic-minded public figure chiming in on the controversy--People reports that Angelina Jolie has weighed in from Pakistan, where she is currently healing the sick and bringing comfort to the poor: "I have hardly the words," Jolie said to reporters in Islamabad, to grasp "that somebody would do that to somebody's religious book."

That's it. We're done; eBay-happy Pastor Jones will surely fold up his hate tent and meekly pull his flock back into his tin-roofed sanctuary to pray for forgiveness now. If Palin is in moose-hunting mood and Jolie chooses to channel her super-spy character from Salt, he could be in a heap of trouble.

"In the age of the Internet, the unauthorized biography has been increasingly scooped by instant, endless online gossip," reports the AP. Our love of celebrities remains steadfast, but sales figures aren't what they used to be.

For example, Andrew Morton's book on Angelina Jolie must compete with the wealth of Jolie scholarship available free online. "An entire tabloid gossip industry has selflessly devoted itself to chronicling such episodes," noted Janet Maslin in her review. "That limits Mr. Morton's capacity for adding to the chatter."

It is the end of a proud tradition:

The unauthorized celebrity book was defined and mastered by Kitty Kelley, who in the 1980s and 1990s had million sellers in hardcover alone with biographies of Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan. Her latest, "Oprah," was a hit by most standards, but not for Kelley, who herself has said that the Internet endangers her kind of book. "Oprah" has sold just 115,000 copies so far, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks around 70-75 percent of sales.

"The sales of `Oprah' were well below our expectations," Bostelman said, adding that the book was still a best seller.

Beyond Kelley, there is a core of writers taking on familiar celebrities, including C. David Heymann (the Kennedys) and Edward Klein (Katie Couric, Hillary Clinton). But the market is so tough now that not even the death of Michael Jackson could expand it.

Fortunately, the AP reassures us, celebrity memoirs still seem to be doing OK.