"Twitter has already changed the way news breaks and provided journalists new ways to connect with their readers," the description said. Not untrue! Especially considering that a recent hack into the Associated Press' Twitter account caused the stock market to tumble; now's probably a good time as any for Twitter to develop a liaison who can calm frantic journalists frothing at the mouth for two-factor authentication.

But what skills would the right candidate have?

"You will be responsible for devising and executing the strategies that make Twitter indispensable to newsrooms and journalists, as well as an essential part of the operations and strategy of news organizations and TV news networks," the post continues. "You should have a strong vision for the broad potential of Twitter and news, while also being able to rigorously manage and scale the news team’s daily impact."

The successful candidate, no doubt with visions of Tweetdeck dancing in their eyes and an iPhone glued to their palm, will represent Twitter to the "News industry," manage the social network's partnerships with newsrooms and journalists, and represent Twitter at industry events.

And good news! It looks like they are looking for someone with newsroom experience.

"You must have deep experience leading teams in reporting, editing or managing journalists, as well as a strong record of executing strategic partnerships," the post says. The future of news can be a glorious place, as long as you stick to 140 characters or less.

Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

It’s not every weekend that Kerri Gristina, a schoolteacher living in the Bronx, manages to round up her three daughters and load them into the car for a Manhattan outing. When she does, she’ll take them to a Broadway play, to a museum or just to frolic around Central Park. But no matter what else they do that day, the busy mom always manages to carve out some time for one special stop along the way.

“They have natural options, organic options,” Ms. Gristina, who writes a blog called Raising Three Savvy Ladies, told The New York Observer of her favorite place to buy beauty products in NYC. “It’s like a designer store. Maybe it costs more, but having more variety is worth it.”

No, it’s not the Laura Mercier or Bobbi Brown counter at Bergdorf’s. Ms. Gristina’s guilty primping pleasure is Duane Reade.

Seriously.

“I can’t always go to a Sephora with three kids,” she said, praising the chain store’s LOOK Boutiques, where quickie makeovers are provided for free by professionals. “At Duane Reade, I can still get a mom moment—a me-time moment.”

And Ms. Gristina isn’t the only one singing hymns at the altar of the mega-chain. “I have been in NYC less than a month and they recognize me when I go there. It’s like Cheers. It’s awesome,” reads one recent Yelp review. “A girl I dated once called Duane Reade her secret lover for all that he provided for her,” another enthusiast wrote about the franchise’s 42nd Street location. “At first a joke, I started to get jealous after a while.”

“They really are like a literal urban oasis,” said Mary Elizabeth Williams, a culture writer at Salon who has spent the past two years battling stage IV melanoma. “They have this neutral quality of an airport lounge,” she told The Observer. “When you’re in a real crisis moment of your life, the mundane becomes the most important.”

Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

But Duane Reade has done more than just master the mundane. This is a drugstore whose flagships offer everything from sushi and fro-yo stations to juice bars and in-store nail and hair salons. If you need assistance, you can ask a hologram floor greeter. Or you can help yourself at the digital makeup counter, where, via a computerized snapshot of your face, you can see what new products would look like without ever having to use a tester.

The 40 Wall Street location in particular, which opened in 2011, resembles a futuristic shopping mall or an underground Japanese city more than a place to pick up prescriptions. The reaction to a chain store opening in a landmark location could have gone either way, but this ribbon-cutting proved an unmitigated success: customers loved it, the store won a prestigious design award, and the critics were raving. The New Yorker and Women’s Wear Daily both gave the store high marks, but really, the litmus test was the fact that such publications wrote about the opening of a franchise drug store in the first place.

The party thrown for the opening of the 40 Wall Street flagship—attended by bloggers, journalists (The Observer included), design students and busy attorneys alike—wasn’t just a game-changer. It was a mood-changer.

Duane Reade's juice bar. (Shao-yu Lin.)

If ever there was a store in need of a makeover, it was Duane Reade. The problems the franchise faced—both before and after it was acquired by Walgreens in 2010 from Oak Hill Capital Partners—have been well documented. Former CEO Anthony Cuti and CFO William Tenant were sentenced to three years in prison for fraudulently misrepresenting the companies finances. The pharmacies were ranked dead last in customer satisfaction, according to J.D. Power and Associates, and the stores frequently received low health grades. (Duane Reade was once forced to pay $200,000 out in civil court for peddling drugs and products past their expiration date.)

The blog I Hate Duane Reade, founded in 2007, served as a mouthpiece for customers and employees who had complaints about the mega-chain—and they had many. The combination of photos of the understocked, overcrowded stores and relatable tales of misery made the site a viral hit, garnering mentions in The New York Times, Gawker, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. It was the quintessence of what was wrong under the old regime.

The most damning bit of criticism came from Martha Plimpton in a 2007 New York magazine interview. Asked what she hated most about the city, she replied: “The dead-eyed pharmacy people at Duane Reade ... It’s always a journey into the heart of darkness.”

The founder of IHDR (who wished to remain anonymous) told The Observer that the idea came while sitting with friends and comparing horror stories about the drugstore. “[We] realized that we all had the same issues. We wondered if everyone else felt the same way. Turns out they did.”

Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

The Walgreens buyout had an immediate effect, curbing the criticism. IHDR published its penultimate post in February 2010. And four months after the purchase, Walgreens boasted in a quarterly meeting that sales were up, with Duane Reade contributing 2.8 percent to the total increase.

Still, altering the essence-du-Duane took more than a quick-fix change of ownership. It’s been a long road back to Gotham’s good graces for the store that boasts the most sales per square foot in the industry.
While still under the aegis of Oak Hill Capital Partners, Duane Reade began its facelift, courtesy of the strategic branding firm CBX. The mission: redesign its stores and rehabilitate its personal brand. No easy task.

(Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

Joe Bona, president of the retail division at CBX, worked closely on the in-store redesigns and in-house brands. “People need to still walk in and recognize that it’s a Duane Reade,” he said of the new and improved stores. In other words, it was all about atmosphere. Or as the franchise’s revamped slogan put it, “New York Living Made Easy.”

“One of things we know through research,” Mr. Bona said, “is that when you create a wider aisle, [customers] feel less pressured and they tend to linger a bit longer.”

And relaxation is a key theme at the new Duane Reade: a luxury that hints at the store’s new upscale aspirations. After all, as any New Yorker knows, time equals money. So if you have time to meander and browse instead of rushing to the express lane, you must have minutes—and therefore cash—to burn.

When Ms. Williams ducks into her favorite Duane Reade location, right next to Sloan-Kettering, where she receives cancer treatment, for example, she is always amazed to see how many customers just seem to be loitering. “At least 50 percent of the people are just hanging out,” she marveled.

“I guess that’s what’s in it for me too,” she added. “I need to regroup.”

Ms. Williams’s reaction to Duane Reade is no accident: through wider aisles and warmer fluorescent lighting, landscape windows and perfumeries, Duane Reade represents the latest triumph of psychographics, a research field specifically tailored to the psychological states of customers in retail environments.

The nail bar. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

Dr. Archana Kumar, an assistant professor in the department of marketing at Montclair State University, might be described as a psychographicist. In a phone call with The Observer, she broke down this almost-subliminal messaging.

“Blue, green and violet are calming colors,” she said, explaining that to create a “calming effect,” a store like Duane Reade would have to change its color palette from “agitating” colors, like red, to warmer ones that are “associated with feelings of peacefulness and happiness.”

Is it any coincidence that Dr. Kumar’s calming colors are the exact three that Duane Reade happened to choose for its redesign? Probably not.

Other subtle changes have been effective as well. By designing and promoting the Duane Reade food-and-beverage brand DR Delish as a more expensive alternative to its other off-label brand, Cityscape, for example, CBX was able to convince customers that the store’s self-made tiers correspond to product quality. It sacrificed one label to the hordes of coupon-clippers so that DR Delish might fare better against the big-name brands.

But here’s the weird thing: sales of both DR Delish and Cityscape doubled between 2009 and 2011. People, it seemed, were ready to pledge allegiance not only to Duane Reade as a store, but to its products as well—and across all price points.

Some of Duane Reade’s newfound fans may also be attributed to the store’s vastly improved social media presence. On Ms. Gristina’s blog, she’s penned such lyrical posts about the Walgreens-owned chain that you might believe she was being paid by the company.

Duane Reade at 40 Wall Street. (Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

In fact, she attempted to become one of the store’s 10 “VIP NYC Bloggers”—a contest whose winners would receive $200 a month in store credit in exchange for blogging, tweeting and Facebooking their love for the store.

While some might read this contest as part of a cynical branding attempt by a faceless corporate entity, Duane Reade seems to be investing a huge amount of time and considerable effort to draw in digital consumers, most of whom are happy to receive the love and give it back.

Last year, the Duane Reade Twitter feed—which often promotes local events like readings at Housing Works—surpassed even its parent company’s by skyrocketing from 15,000 to 390,000-plus followers in seven months, making it the most popular drugstore on Twitter. (Pretty impressive when you consider that Duane Reade only has stores in the New York City area.)

(Photo via Shao-yu Liu.)

There have been celebrity endorsements too, like when Glee actor Cory Monteith, who is based in L.A., tweeted “Yeah, I actually started following @DuaneReade. so what? what if I need a heads up on everyday products I need.” That comment has been retweeted more than 350 times.

As silly as this all might sound, these efforts have translated into revenue: when the store put forth another Internet-based contest last year as part of its “Show Us Some Leg” campaign, sales of Duane Reade-brand hosiery jumped 40 percent.

Still, none of this Web 2.0 magic would work if people had a negative impression of the stores themselves. But the rehabilitation is working, and once again Duane Reade feels like an integral part of the city. What’s more, individual store locations have taken to embracing the character of different NYC neighborhoods.

At the Soho location (on Spring Street, another repurposed former bank), for instance, you can find obscure art and fashion magazines. The Times Square location sells a ton of “I Love New York” memorabilia. Wall Street has its shoe-shine parlor and nail salon. And in Brooklyn, as much as they fought it, hipsters have found the growler bar and walk-in beer fridge in Williamsburg a highly persuasive reason to shop at a chain.

As Ms. Williams put it, “Duane Reade provides a safeness: If you’re picking up your cancer medication while someone else is picking up tampons and there’s a guy picking up a six pack, it’s like this great big circle of life.”

And that’s something you can’t put a price on.

Great headline, great everything. (TMZ.com)

TMZ.com, your trusted source of all the news that's fit to vomit, had a hard-hitting exclusive today. "The older brother who was killed and suspected in the Boston bombings was deep into hip hop, and it appears he belonged to a fan website that touted that genre of music," read a post that was titled "Dead Bombing Suspect Heavy Into Hip Hop." The "article" then elaborated on what this relationship could mean:

What's interesting ... hip hop lyrics are notoriously violent and often degrading to women.  Tamerlan Tsarnaev has a boxing profile in which he says he doesn't take his shirt off much because he doesn't want women to get bad ideas, adding, "I'm very religious."  This statement is significantly more conservative than the hip hop genre.

Unfortunately, this brilliant extrapolation has not been lauded for its hard-hitting investigative process. Instead, a new trend on Twitter--#TMZReports-- has emerged, mocking the site's perceived racism.

Now for the fun part: Come up with your own!

Thanks to Aaron Gell for the tip.

Via Twitter

Are you guys ready to read tweets from  Rep. Steve "The most conservative Congressman in Texas! 100% lifetime NRA, GOA, NAGR, Right to Life rating. Offended? Yell at @DonnyFerguson" Stockman?

Are you??! Because fair warning, he's got himself a new bumper sticker idea, and it definitely includes some nonsensical sloganeering about abortion, babies and guns.

So...you ready for it?

What does this even mean? Or, what does this statement mean to you? Because the best reading we've come up with is: "If fetuses had guns, no mother would have a chance to even try to carry it to the first trimester--let alone abort it--before it accidentally knocked off the safety and blasted itself out of utero."

Which would be...a...bad thing? No? So this is definitely a pro-fetal guns message? Really? Is that what this is?

Incredible. Happy Friday, everyone. Pick these up on your way out of the DMV and don't forget to buckle up, T.G.I.F.

Update (4:37): It seems the tweet was a prank written by Ryan Osborn, Senior Director, Digital Media at NBC News, not Mr. Quintano. Mr. Osborn provided some more context for the original tweet (via his own Twitter account, naturally). "Dear world and the @NewYorkObserver, I thought you all had seen poopinrules.com. That was me on @AnthonyQuintano's account," Mr. Osborn tweeted. We were, obviously, unaware of the website and the prank. But, as Mr. Osburn acknowledged in a reply on the tweet's thread, "I think @AnthonyQuintano is going to kill me. :)"

Sadly, the same adage doesn’t apply to young American men and women watching guys strip and violate a drunken female.

By now, we’ve all absorbed the main lesson of Steubenville: the dehumanization of the female is so pervasive that young people will stand by and not just watch rape, but laugh at it, video it, tweet it, post it to Facebook, and try to cover their tracks when police investigate.

What to do?

Jackson Katz has been crusading around America for 20 years trying to change the way men respond to gender-based violence. His experiment, the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), aims to train bystanders to feel enough compassion for female victims to act, whether by intervening to discourage attacks, offering aid or calling the authorities.

Mr. Katz, the first male student to minor in women’s studies at UMass Amherst in the 1980s, has made a career writing and speaking about gender violence. “In college, I saw women standing up for public safety out of fear of male violence,” he said. “I was a big football player, but I did see dysfunctional men all around me, really damaged human beings. When I saw women standing up for themselves, I related on a visceral level. As a male, I knew I was in a position to do something about this.”

While a graduate student, Mr. Katz came up with the idea of training bystanders to prevent gender violence. In 1993, with federal funding, he started a pilot MVP program in the athletic department at Northeastern University. The program targeted male college athletes, and it has since been deployed at hundreds of colleges. The goal is to use peer pressure to transform men and boys who participate in gender-based violence and humiliation into the outliers and those who speak up into the norm, instead of the other way around.

The program works by training older students, juniors and seniors, to talk to younger peers, using an “MVP Playbook” of specific behaviors and scenarios, some of which are similar to the Steubenville incident. The scenarios have sporty names, the better to penetrate the teen male cortex. There’s “the slapshot” (you see a friend of yours hitting a girlfriend) and the “illegal motion” (you see your buddy pushing a drunken girl out of a party, and she seems reluctant to leave). Students then discuss their reactions to these scenarios and examine their own behavioral options, from “It’s none of my business” to offering aid.

So far, the program has been implemented at hundreds of colleges, among pro footballers, and in the U.S. Air Force and Navy, but in very few high schools. Steubenville High was not one of them.

Where it has been tested, high school administrators report some success. Between 2008 and 2011, Sioux City, Iowa, ran the program in three large public high schools. Over the course of the program, “positive trends” occurred with regard to 13 of the 18 abusive behaviors covered in the MVP Playbook, meaning students found those behaviors more wrong and were more willing to intervene after the program than they had been before.

The Violence Against Women Act—a federal law covering a wide range of gender violence issues, from domestic violence to rape—was reauthorized this year with a new provision mandating that high schools across the country provide bystander training.

Harvard law professor Diane Rosenfeld teaches the Gender Violence Legal Policy Workshop and has been working for years to push the federal government to fund programs like MVP in schools. “It is definitely in a school’s best interest to do as much on the prevention side as possible,” she said, noting that the Steubenville event—sensational as it was—was hardly a one-off, but a growing phenomenon among students at high schools and colleges.

Group sex attacks against girls are statistically on the rise. For the last quarter-century, since numbers have been kept, sexual violence has also become more brutal, the age of perpetrators is dropping, and attacks by multiple perpetrators are up. According to U.S. Department of Justice statistics provided by University of Arizona Public health professor Mary P. Koss, the percentage of rapes involving two or more offenders went from 7 percent in 1994-1998 to 10 percent in 2005-2010.

Easier access to violent and dehumanizing Internet porn has coincided with the increases, and many observers believe the trends are related.

And it isn’t just teenage boys who are complicit. Among the many disturbing aspects of the Steubenville case were the attitudes of the female bystanders, and the haters who took to Twitter to threaten the victim after the verdict.

Classical feminist theory has an explanation for that. In primate populations—our simian forebears—female solidarity keeps male aggression in check, and males do not form alliances to control females. The human species is alone among mammals in the degree to which male alliances subjugate females, and feminist scholars think that anomaly pre-existed and enabled patriarchal civilization. Once prehistoric human males gained the upper hand through a combination of alliances, controlling resources and, eventually, language and ideology, females found they could do better allying with males than with each other.

Et voila, the fully evolved Steubenville girl threatening to kill the rape victim.

“The numbers are telling us something,” Mr. Katz said. “There has been a dramatic desensitization to women’s humanity and sexual agency through media representations that have become completely mainstream. It is more accessible, and the porn itself has gotten way more brutal. There is no question that the level of open misogyny and brutality in our culture has grown as well.”

High school and college leaders can be reluctant to institute gender violence training and programs because they fear that to do so will implicate them in the behavior. Penn State, for example, consistently declined to institute bystander training programs in the years prior to the Jerry Sandusky scandal. Mr. Katz repeatedly offered Penn State the choice of opting into his MVP program, and the school declined.

“It’s not just these boys in Steubenville, this is a systemic failure,” said Mr. Katz. “When you hear there were all these people standing around—that’s a failure of adults. We have known what to do for years. Why hasn’t gender violence training become completely mainstream in high schools?”

Mr. Katz is one courageous feminist and we applaud him. Women and girls—for the sake of ourselves, our sisters and our daughters—can only hope that his program will someday soon spawn thousands like him.

Artist's rendition of Leo.

This is why we really don't want animals to be part of the singularity ... how sad would it be when every time a pig with a Twitter account hashtags "bittersweet" when referring to the fact that it's going to be moving to a "farm upstate"? Really, really sad. But when it comes to our favorite mini-pig, the idea of becoming bacon is no problem, because he has a new dad!

Leo the pig rose to fame/his own social media presence (same diff) recently, thanks to efforts of his former owner, Bloomberg TV journalist Heather Hauswirth. When Ms. Hauswirth first posted her Craigslist ad in the voice of her 4-month-old "certified mini pig," who needed a nice new home and a caretaker to nuzzle with (d'waaa!), the adorable animal immediately started getting attention: on Twitter, where Leo had his own account, a Bloomberg TV segment and, most incredibly, a guest spot on Anderson Cooper Live today.

And now Leo has a new owner! Who lives on a farm! Upstate! Which is hopefully the same farm that dad took our dog Pongo to when he started getting sick.

Here's Leo's on Cooper today:

Fittingly, Leo has found a new home with Eddie Lenzo, a "two-time Emmy award winning Jib Operator," whatever that is. He has worked on The Nate Berkus Show and Good Morning America, and according to the pig's publicist, was a cameraman for the Cooper segment. (Apparently Anderson Cooper really wanted to keep Leo ... but, you know ... he's busy.)

Mr. Lenzo is also the vice president of Air Sea Land Productions, which seems to be some sort of underwater adventure film team and the producer of something called The Magic Pool. No word yet whether he is a vegetarian. But more importantly, we hope Mr. Lenzo doesn't use Leo to find the answer to the age-old question: can pigs swim?

Photo credit: The New Yorker.

BuzzFeed and The New Yorker couldn't be more different, right? Well, what if you combined them? In honor (we assume) of the news of tech editor Matt Buchanan's seemingly unlikely path from the Internet-friendly world of BuzzFeed to the prestige brand of The New Yorker, a hashtag has sprung up on Twitter to mash up the two sensibilities. Meet #BuzzFeedNewYorker.

Here are our nine of our favorites (in no particular order):

https://twitter.com/scottalyoung/status/296756759958286337

https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/296755753266577408

https://twitter.com/EmilyGould/status/296742568933335040

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/296738719082360832

https://twitter.com/joshspero/status/296755287942127617

https://twitter.com/SimonMaloy/status/296735471709589504

https://twitter.com/mjanssen/status/296753200713850881

https://twitter.com/brfreed/status/296752510826323968

https://twitter.com/NickyWoolf/status/296751930447908869

A Pandora's box not worth opening. (Twitter)

Poor Shirley Temple Black/person pretending to be Shirley Temple Black on Twitter (we believe nothing till an account is verified): The 84-year-old former pre-tween movie star was on Twitter less than one day before she was asked about cultural phenom Honey Boo Boo. The question, which came from Model Alliance's Coco Rocha, could be taken as an insult--why ask Shirley Temple about the TLC star unless you consider Ms. Temple's celebrity status to have been similar?--but luckily Ms. Temple was just confused. Confused enough to ask Twitter: "i have been asked what i think of 'honey boo', can someone tell me who that is." The resulting answers were, for lack of a better word, fantastic.

Mr. Allon: making hearts and algorithms throb.

Ori Allon, the charmed entrepreneur who has already sold one company to Google and another to Twitter, has been feverishly working on his third—Urban Compass. So far, Mr. Allon and founder Robert Reffkin won’t even say what Urban Compass does. But that air of mystery hasn’t slowed the company’s growth—they have raised $8 million from an impressive group of seed funders including Goldman Sachs, AmEx CEO Ken Chenault and Thrive Capital*. The start-up now has 18 employees and counting.

One of those 18 offers a clue to what Urban Compass will actually involve, and our guess is real estate. As first reported by The Real Deal, Gordon Golub, who was an Executive Vice President at Citi Habitats, left after 18 years to join Mr. Allon and Mr. Reffkin.

In an interview with The Observer, Mr. Allon said the idea for Urban Compass would be elemental. “I want to help people with their most important decisions. Anything from data collection to other services. So yes, real estate will be a part of it.”

Part of it?

“I want to help people find what they want,” said the dashing 32-year-old Israeli, who is so good looking that one commenter on The Verge wondered aloud, “Why is he even working? He should be getting paid just for being so handsome.”

Pressed to show a little more leg, Mr. Allon revealed a few more details, telling The Observer: “This is more of a real world problem that you’re trying to solve. It’s not a pure technology company. The other two”—referring to Orion, an algorithm he sold to Google in 2006 and Julpan, a social information tool he sold to Twitter in 2011—“were pure technology. Here, the operations side is very big. That’s why we have people like Gordon and Robert, who have a lot of experience.” Another co-founder, Mike Weiss, also comes from a real estate background, having worked in the real estate investment division at Goldman Sachs.

C’mon, Ori, can’t you give us a hint? “People will know very soon. We’ll have a beta version by the end of the quarter, which will be open to a limited number of people and by the summer, everyone will know what we’re doing.”

Startups are like professional sports—the world hears only about the one that becomes monetized, not the thousand that ended in heartbreak. Someone who creates two different companies that get bought by tech giants is about as rare as Bo Jackson playing pro football and baseball. And now Ori Allon is looking to become a three-sport athlete. Will he succeed? It’s tough to bet against a guy who’s done it twice, even if he won’t reveal the exact nature of the business.

But here’s something Mr. Allon will actually share. Mr. Allon isn’t trying to lure a tech giant this time, he is building something he hopes to run. “My main motivation is not to sell the company. I’m very happy with my previous companies, and I’m happy that those technologies are part of Google today and part of Twitter. But now I’m building a platform. A human network. And a lot of our success, hopefully, will come from this operation. We just want to make life easier for New Yorkers.”

*Disclosure: Thrive Capital is invested in several start-up companies. Josh Kushner, a Thrive principal, is also part-owner of Observer Media Group. Observer Media Group has no affiliation with Thrive Capital and the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Thrive Capital or its principals.