There aren’t many trustworthy faces left on television, and it looks like there is now one less.

One of the few newsmen on TV who managed to be trustworthy, genuinely informative and a true Washington insider, Russert handled himself with style and class through a number of trying situations, most recently the Judith Miller scandal. A consummate professional, he projected dignity and calm even when his surroundings suggested the opposite.

A more thorough obit can be found here.

Being a famous musician must be great. Your work is intensely personal and fulfilling, you’re surrounded by adoring women, and you get to do pretty much whatever you want all day, every day, for as long as you want. In other words, it’s the complete opposite of being a magazine intern.

Which makes Ryan Adams’ most recent career move particularly puzzling.

The folksy troubadour—and self-proclaimed Huey Lewis of alt-country—has taken up an intern post at BlackBook in what is presumably either a tribute to Sean Avery or part of an extended research process for his upcoming concept album about the downtrodden media underclass. (We’re hoping it’s the second one.) Either way, we don’t see him going the distance.

On the bright side, we guess this means they don’t drug test?

Two States: If you needed a map of all 50 state mottos, here you go. A lot of them are really strange. [Cartophilia]

Clapped in Irons: Kempt favorite Scott Schuman ponders the ideal ironing technique. [The Sartorialist]

Going Mad: The threat of Mad Men without show creator Matthew Weiner is apparently real. Zombie Mad Men? Get worried. [Vulture]

Hair of the Dog: An annotated history of the mustache trend piece. [Gawker]

The decline of the celebrity interview has been fairly well-documented, but just when you think the whole enterprise is too hopelessly compromised to convey an honest human moment, Esquire comes along and drops something like this.

The piece is the Christopher Walken edition of their ongoing “What I’ve Learned” series, and it might be the best thing ever to grace their pages. (That’s right, we’re looking at you, Talese.) Walken’s screwball banality cuts right through all the false modesty, PR calculation and good-natured cant that usually makes this kind of writing such a minefield. Ponder this gem, for instance:

Sometimes I look at this watch and I think, There’s some guy that puts these little screws in there? There is something about it.

Or better yet:

I used to love Danish. My father used to make a Boston cream pie. You never see that anymore. Very good.

Truer words were never spoken.

In the wake of the Iranian Election turmoil, YouTube and Twitter have gotten a lot of press as something more than idle entertainments. And while Twitter hasn’t changed up their game plan too much, YouTube is getting a little full of itself.

In order to assist the new generation of webcam-equipped witnesses, YouTube has launched The Reporters’ Center, a feed devoted to guiding and publishing the work of aspiring citizen journalists. They’ve got brief tutorials from Bob Woodward, Nicholas Kristof and (for some reason) Arianna Huffington on getting to the bottom of the story, but we’re not sure if the world is quite ready for the stories that they’re about to get. It’s one thing to publicize raw feeds from an event everyone already agrees is important, but it’s quite another to sift through a few thousand clips looking for something that approaches newsworthiness.

Either way, we’re guessing the cat-in-fan story is about to get a lot more play.