Mayer's union with real estate investment manager Zach Bogue will take place as part of a wedding stretching from Dec. 11 - 13 at the San Francisco Four Seasons, we're told. Mayer and Bogue bring out the competitive overachievers in one another, and the event sounds like an extension of their mutual mania. Even the invitation came wrapped in a heavy red velvet box, said a tipster.

The lengthy wedding should only further Mayer's reputation for aggressive well-roundedness: She was on both the debate team and pom-pom squad in high school, and today her master's degree in computer science makes a geeky contrast to the Oscar de la Renta clothes and fashion spreads in Vogue and Glamour. In keeping with the theme, we'd expect her fairytale weddings to have some geeky twists (laser tag, anyone?). If you have any further details — or better yet, a picture — we'd love to hear from you.

UPDATE: Added location of the Four Seasons.

UPDATE: We failed to mention that Mayer lives at the SF Four Seasons, in a penthouse, as we've reported previously. So maybe she's having the wedding at home.

(Pic by JD Lasica)

Business Insider has the full, 29-picture photo tour. Google has been outfitting its various offices like this for a while, but it's always an eye-openingly retro experience to actually see the office trappings of the hugely profitable company. Below, find our five favorites, the ones that really take us back to the days of Webvan and Pets.com. We mock, of course, because we're insanely jealous.

The reception area is straightforward enough...

Google takes a systematic approach to free snacks. A less successful dot-com would just have pre-wrapped candy and open/stale cereal boxes and so forth.

"We've hired a substitute short-order cook named David Chang. Apologies in advance if he screws up your lunch."

Of course there are razor scooters.

The requisite exposed brick. Plus a can of of kerosene in case you should ever feel disgruntled. Don't be evil!

When someone supposedly dies on Twitter, there are nothing but questions that aren't "Is this person actually dead?" Because who gives a shit if they're actually dead. There are issues here:

Do people actually trust Twitter?
Who do they trust?
Why? It's just someone with a Twitter.

But they do! And sometimes, that information is valid, and all it takes is one Tweet for Twitter to be the needle in a haystack screaming to be found. But Twitter, like the people who use it, is weird.

Which would explain part of the answer to the question, What do Kanye West, Lil' Wayne, Rick Astley, Britney Spears, Harrison Ford, Jeff Goldblum, Miley Cyrus have in common with Morrissey? They've all been "killed" by Twitter. But not the other questions they present:

Who starts the _____ is dead rumors? Anyone and everyone! It can be some high school junior, or, as is this case, the New York Times The Moment blog, trying to crowdsource information. If you suggest someone who isn't dead may be dead, you've started a ____ Is Dead meme.

Why did they start the _____ Is Dead memes? For all kinds of reasons! Said high school junior who, bored and stoned in his US Government Honors class, decides that John Bolton, who has a funny mustache, is dead. He can then raise his hand and start a discussion about John Bolton being dead! Or maybe someone hears something and decides that they need to know more, because they actually care about this person's impact in their lives (as is, possibly, the case with Moz and The Moment). But mostly, the impulse to declare someone dead who isn't has to come from a place of mischief. Having to explain that you're not dead, you're just waiting to be seated at Pastis, could be a serious inconvenience for you and your publicist. Or if you're not a publicist or don't have one, a "normal" person who has to go out of their way to call their parents and explain that the stress they just went through was for naught.

What would be considered a "successful" ______ is dead meme?

A+: Getting a mainstream media outlet to report on the death, or rumors of the death. Newspapers, newspaper's websites, breaking news websites or Twitter accounts (like Drudge or BNO), CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, etc. If you can get someone to say something on the air about someone who's dead that isn't dead, without it being a denial, you've done an awesome job.

B+ to B: A personal denial. Get someone to admit that they're not dead through someone who isn't their publicist, either because their publicist's credibility was called into question, or because they weren't picking up the phone when they should've.

B-: A publicist denial. Fucking up a publicist's day isn't nearly as mischievous as fucking up Miley Cyrus' day, but still equally satisfying.

C+ to C-: High-profile news-denial. If a news outlet has to report and quell the rumor, at least you got it out there to the right people.

D+ to D: High-profile gossip denial. These people sort out death rumors professionally, and if yours is smart or obscure enough to make their job tough, decent, but otherwise, you're throwing them something slow and down the middle.

D- Subversive gossip and or news crowdsourcinng for an answer (see above, also, here), but add one grade notch for every 50,000 viewers they get a day.

F: You get re-tweeted a few times. That's it.

So, how do you do it correctly?

1. Pick your target correctly. Find an obscure figure who isn't exactly "popular" amongst Twitter's celebrities. Make sure they're not on Twitter, or Twittering when you put the rumor out there. This would be an example of a "Twitter Death Meme Fail":

They can't Twitter their reaction, and they can't have people with them who could Twitter a denial. A really great pick is someone who you didn't even know was still alive. Marian Seldes would be decent, so would Kathleen Turner, because then, you can get a bunch of insane Broadway gays to start freaking out and asking questions. Which brings us to the second step:

2. Find someone to help corroborate your story. Make sure to find someone with decent cred and mix of followers with mixed interests.

You need someone to breathe on the burning embers to get a flame, right?

3. Stay silent. Don't say anything else, especially when people ask you where you heard that. Tip off a few gossip blogs, or blogs that are in the periphery of gossip and/or news blogs.

4. Wait. Teach a man to fish, he'll be set for life. But teach a man to fish without telling him that screaming "BE CAUGHT, YOU FUCKING FISH" won't help, and he's screwed. Stay calm. Wait for this thing to erupt. Once you've put it out there, unless you have multiple accounts with lots of followers to help corroborate your own story, all you can do is see what happens. You've set a line out there, enjoy the natural course it's going to take. Maybe go for a walk, work out, play with your dog. Enjoy the time you have before you get back to your computer to find out from P-Nasty himself that one of the Baldwin brothers had an aneurysm while grilling tandoori chicken skewers.

5. Celebrate correctly. Twitter provides for all. Once you've successfully "killed" someone via Twitter, you should respect and honor their not-dead-ness with a seance. A Twitter seance. Or, a Tweance.

And there you go! How to kill someone with Twitter, correctly. Now, go out there, and get your death fetish on. And please report back to us with your best results.

Oh, and by the way: Morrissey isn't dead. We think. Nice work.

Mayer was employee number 20 and retains immense power within the Googleplex. But, as much as she likes to insinuate her vital early contributions to hits like GMail and AdSense, the VP for "search product and user experience" isn't quite the very bedrock of Google's success, as Glamour seems to imply in naming Mayer one of its "Women of the Year:"

We google about 7 billion times a month. And each time, it's like a trip into Marissa Mayer's mind. That sunny logo, blessedly spare interface and perfect list of links you get in response to a query are all pure Mayer.

Google's minimalist design and "perfect" search utility are "pure Mayer?" Google co-founder and Mayer ex Larry Page would take issue with that; he invented the algorithm at the heart of Google while a Stanford University PhD student. Co-founder Sergey Brin, part of the same PhD program, also contributed to the system. Google also had what was, by the standards of the day, a spartan homepage going well before Mayer joined in 1999, complete with a "sunny" if slightly fatter logo.

So while Mayer should continue to enjoy tonight's Glamour awards ceremony, relish her pretty pictures in the magazine (above) and stand proud of her accomplishments at Google, there's no need to give the competitive overachiever credit for every last innovation at the company.

(Top pic: Glamour)

Mayer discussing her award on Today this morning:

British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

Here's a rundown of some of the more promising names in child-labor media. Some of the names will probably look familiar to you, since these kids are famous. Far more famous than most media hacks. In other words, they're coming for your job, loudly.

The Dating Advice Kid

Name: Alec Greven

Age: 10

Summary: His dating-advice book How To Talk To Girls is supposed to become a movie; he now reportedly plans How To Talk To Moms, How To Talk To Dads, How To Talk To Santa and How To Talk To Grandparents. Original publisher HarperCollins is presumably working with him on all of the followups.

More: Here's video of young Alec.

British Blog Boy Wonder

Name: Scott Campbell

Age: 14

Summary: Started British news website, contributes to BBC and various newspapers

More: Campbell is CEO of Net News Daily; with co-founder and editor-in-chief Nathan Adam, he claims 100,000 unique visitors per month, and has scored freelance gigs with the BBC (left) and writes a regular column for the newspaper First News. Asked earlier this year in a Guardian profile how the economic downturn was affecting his business, he said, "I'm 13, so therefore don't have a lot to lose in the financial crisis."

The Lil' Food Critic

Name: David Fishman

Age: 12

Summary: Aspiring food critic profiled in the New York Times; his Upper West Side New York tablehopping has been optioned by Lorne Michaels for a movie.

More: "As I left, I knew that soon enough this would be one of the most ‘hip' places in the city."

(Image via Rachel Ray)

The Pint-Sized Political Pundit

Name: Jonathan Krohn

Age: 13

Summary: Talk-radio regular and self-published author became a smash hit when he spoke at the CPAC right-wing convention.

More: The home-schooled youth practiced public speaking at Christian Youth Theater plays and calling in to Bill Bennett's radio show. Has appeared on CBS News and Today. His endorsement was sought by a Georgia gubernatorial candidate.

Barack Obama's Journalist 'Homeboy'

Name: Damon Weaver

Age: 11

Summary: A successful quest to interview President Barack Obama made him the talk of cable news.

More: After ending an earlier interview with vice presidential contender Joe Biden with, "Senator Biden is now my homeboy," got permission from Obama to also be the president's "homeboy." Has completed such other White House Press Corps rites of passage as attending the inauguration on a media pass and dissing an MSNBC talking head.

The Teenaged Tech Titan

Name: Daniel Brusilovsky

Age: 16

Summary: Founder and CEO, TeensInTech.com; product evangelist for video-casting service Qik; writer for TechCruch; has 120,000 followers on his "Verified" Twitter account.

More: He's an adviser to at least two companies; his parents used to shuttle him to and from tech conferences; says you should be persistent to reach your goals. More here.

(Pic by Randy Stewart)

Lose yourself in art, rich tech people; the proceeds go to charity. Kataoka, an entrepreneur and Julia Allison-grade protocelebrity, has announced her participation in a charity auction. The prize? "Sit back, relax & ... Leave your mark on a conceptual work of art by prominent artist Drue Kataoka... on a private jet across the Bay." That certainly sounds immersive. And if there's any time left over after the art session, you can ask Kataoka about fashion, and her recent conversation with designer Yigal Azrouel for her site Culture Lick (see video below, which opens with Kataoka's trademark ice cream lick.)

Hopefully Kataoka will bring her camera onto the plane, as well. Can't wait for the footage!

You might know Google owns YouTube, GMail, GChat, Google News, Google Docs and Google Reader, but the full privacy impact probably hasn't hit you until you look at the information from all those services condensed into one place, on this dashboard thing. Oh look, it's the last person you chatted with, the last person you emailed, the last video you watched, the last news search you ran, the last Google search, the last image search, the last video search, the last document you authored and maybe what you're buying your wife for Christmas.

Here are some of my recent searches, for example, and keep in mind this is just one small part of the dashboard, which in turn is one small part of what Google knows:

Insane. And yet, nothing I didn't know about, on some logical unemotional level. There's a Google video explaining everything above, and you can find your dossier here, but be warned: looking at it could change your life.

Here's the rest of mine, not including my main Google Apps email and Docs accounts, and heavily redacted (sorry) (click to enlarge):

Google and its Dutch map provider told the UK Telegraph they have no idea how the fake town got onto Google Maps. "There are occasional errors," a Google spokesman told the paper. But the paper points out cartographers often insert fake minor features like "trap streets" to catch people copying their work. If Google and its partner don't know anything about the town, that leaves a possibility the Telegraph was too polite to bring up: Perhaps the data in Google's maps was, itself, purloined from an offline source.

Time to start asking this Dutch company some tough questions, Google. Either that, or you can risk that some aggrieved British mapmaker might see the coverage of "Argleton" and starting asking the tough questions for you.

(Top pic: Adam Burt)

Fellow Yelpers were initially skeptical about Sean C.'s claims in this Yelp comment thread until he produced apparently authentic screenshots of the owner's angry private Yelp messages to him, and until a Yelp admin weighed in to say "we're here to help Sean out in any way we can... there's no telling how this person may have unearthed Sean's place of residence, but rest assured, that information was in no way.... provided by Yelp."

Sean C. never bought anything in the store in question and has an unlisted address which he never provided to Yelp, so he's truly baffled how the owner tracked him down. But track him down she most certainly did, the reviewer said in a series of posts:

Tonight I get a knock at my front door - I open it and a woman tries to force her way in... it seriously took all my strength to get her out.... and I had to wrestle with her on my front steps... was trying to pin her down incase she had a weapon.



Finally I was able to shut the door and call 911 - the police showed up and took her away. Turns out it was the business owner! ... They took her to jail and will try to put a 72 hour psychiatric hold but they said it's up to the doctor that examines her...

Now Sean C. is trying to get a restraining order, which he said the police offered to serve while the woman is still in jail. (UPDATE: The store owner denies most of his account. See bottom of this post.)

You can find Sean C.'s original, two-star review followed by the owner's alleged private messages below, caling the reviewer a "pussy boy" and a "coward." There are surely loads of other business owners who have been sorely tempted to try and do likewise, though good sense, respect for the law and the tendency of Yelp reviewers to be anonymous and thus un-find-able tend to dissuade them.

Key to the entire Yelp enterprise is how it enables a passive-aggressive approach to customer feedback: You say anonymously — but in public, online — what you couldn't bring yourself to say directly (and perhaps more politely) to the staff when you were in the actual place of business. This provides consumers with tremendous new powers — and business owners with a frustrating new set of headaches. Maddeningly frustrating, it would seem.

UPDATE: The store owner says it was Sean C. who attacked, that she never forced open his door and that she came to his house to apologize. More here.

(Top pic: by Steve Rhodes)

It was an odd pairing, the shameless blog-and-video fameball, with a contributor to the famed Eggers line of elaborately precious and self-consciously-old-fashioned written products. But then, judging from the Twitter account Allison, 28, set up for young Eggers, 26ish, there were mutual benefits to the relationship. Toph, reportedly developing a feature film, was determined to make Allison school him in the tricky art of internet self promotion:

Allison, meanwhile, got the high drama of a tantalizingly secret relationship with the mysterious "TK" to write up for her various revenue-generating "lifecasting" endeavors.

More surprising than the pairing was how it ended: At Allison's behest. We hear that Toph had an ex-girlfriend who wasn't ex- enough. With the breakup and its slow leak into public view, Allison is feeling "teary" and old and "the world would be a much better place if we were all more honest."

Hard to imagine this fairy tale romance went awry, given how sweetly it started:

Awwwwww.

(Top pics: NonSociety, Facebook)

Arianna Huffington has allowed her editors to run ultra-close ups of the aging body of Vogue's Anna Wintour ("what does she really look like?") and now actresses Lindsay Lohan ("unedited" and splotchy) and Elizabeth Hurley (a bit sweaty). It's a case of her unprofitable company's need for monetizable, non-political Web traffic (read: cheap celebrity clicks) running headlong into Huffington's need to suck up to celebs, who write for her site and come to her parties and help her seem very glamorous.

We won't lecture Huffington on her company's too-often-shoddy attempts to make money in the online publishing racket. At least, not in this post. But we will keep her honest: If Huffington is going to run unedited pictures of others, it's only fair there should be some unedited pictures of her out there.

Click any of the images below to pop-up large, hi-res versions. (Warning, this may slow down your web browser and ruin your lunch.) We've played by HuffPo rules: Posed, red carpet pictures with no editing. We've also excerpted a highlight, as Huffington did with Wintour.

UPDATE: Jessica Wakeman at The Frisky notes that the first chapter of Huffington's book On Becoming Fearless is about positive body image. Plastering someone's picture on HuffPo is certainly one way to nudge that person toward becoming "fearless."

Last Monday, Wired laid off at least six staff, including longtime editor Ted Greenwald, New York editor Mark Horowitz and, we heard, West Coast ad director Moira McDonald, whose tenure dated to the days when founders Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe owned the magazine more than ten years ago.

Where was Anderson that day? Delivering a no doubt gainful lecture for Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley. A spokesperson tells us Anderson was in the office "all morning," when the firings occurred, before heading off to HP. But Anderson's absence for so much of such a sensitive day at Wired is great ammunition for his critics at Condé Nast, who have long said Anderson's too distracted by his approximately 50 annual lecture gigs, some in far-flung locales like Norway.

It's one thing for Anderson to delegate editorial tasks to lieutenants like executive editor Thomas Goetz or his predecessor Bob Cohn, who jumped to The Atlantic, in plusher times. But with advertising down 50 percent through May, Anderson should — arguably! — be a fixture on the front lines at Wired. Instead he's tweeting his two-week book tour schedule, which reads as follows: "SF, Munich, Naples, Capri, NYC, Toronto, Chicago, Copenhagen, Billund, Manchester, Orlando. Sigh..."

"Sigh" indeed, Chris. But at least all that time away from home and office will help bolster your independent revenue stream. Bet your ex editors wish they had created one of those! When they weren't picking up the slack for absent co-workers, that is.

UPDATE: Anderson tweets he left the office on firing day because he was on a "sales call" for Wired at HP. More sales calls are a good thing — on different days. (We had told a Wired spokesperson we'd heard Anderson was at a "speaking gig" that day and were told, "he was in the office all morning until then.")

(Pic: Anderson, by Dan Taylor)

In response to a question about "what keeps you up at night" at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Brin talked about what "keeps me excited at night." Oh, Sergey, you naughty boy. "Primarily hardware." Heh, do tell! "A processor with eight cores... two terabyte hard drive... micro SD cards."

Sigh. A computer geek at all hours, then. Not knowing about batting averages is one thing, even if Brin did immigrate from Russia at the young age of six. But laying awake at night, thinking about computer chips and Moore's Law? That's hard core nerdery, right there. And if that's what it takes to achieve a multi-billion-dollar personal net worth and the creation of a hugely powerful tech company, we know plenty of people who would give up their normalcy in a heartbeat.

Above, find a compilation of geeky-freaky Brin moments, culled from conference footage and this interview his wife gave, in which she mentions that coffee helps prevent Parkinson's, which Brin is genetically at risk for. It's especially palatable with cream and sugar, Sergey.

Citing a quote from Sorkin himself, The Playlist reports the cast includes Armie Hammer from Gossip Girl; model Dakota Johnson (who is Griffith's daughter); Max Minghella of Agora; and male model Josh Pence. This goes beyond lead actors Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield, who were already confirmed.

A quick look at the cast members, with some thoughts on who some of the new people might be portraying (all pics by Getty Images unless otherwise credited):

UPDATE: We've updated the entires for Hammer, Song and Pence. UPDATE: And Mara.

esse Eisenberg plays founder Mark Zuckerberg. He's got the curly hair and geeky look down well enough.

Justin Timberlake plays early Facebook adviser and Napster co-founder Sean Parker. (Insert Parker photo by Andrew Mager on Flickr.)

Andrew Garfield plays spurned co-founder Eduardo Saverin.

Brenda Song, of the Disney Channel, would appear to be a shoo-in to play Zuckerberg's girlfriend Priscilla Chan. UPDATE: One tipster tells us Chan does not appear in the script but that Saverin is supposed to have an Asian girlfriend, so perhaps Song is taking on that role.

Whomever model Josh Pence is playing, he's definitely not part of the Silicon Valley tech scene. How about the Winklevoss twins, two Olympic rowers from Harvard who accused Zuckerberg of stealing their idea for Facebook? UPDATE: That part is being played by Armie Hammer (see here). Perhaps Pence could be another Harvard kid?That would seem to work. Pic via Nous Model Management.

Dakota Johnson looks like the kind of girl you'd hope to meet during a night on the town in San Francisco. And Zuckerberg did escort that Victoria's Secret model away from a party there — at least according to author Ben Mezrich.

<pRooney Mara (The Winning Season) looks so downright nice. Zuckerberg's geek girl friend at Harvard, maybe? UPDATE: A tipster suggested Zuckerberg's sister Randi. Good call.Send us your guess.

Max Minghella — no idea who he might play. Thoughts?

Armie Hammer from Gossip Girl. UPDATE: He is playing the Winklevoss twins, Olympic rowers who sued Zuckerberg for stealing their idea for Facebook, according to a tweet from director Richard Kelly. Pic via

Certain, that is, if you judge from recent history. Here's a roundup of tech chauvinism flare-ups from just the last couple of months:

• "Booth babes" were explicitly discouraged at the TechCrunch 50; some people still hired the attractive spokesgirls.
  
• On stage at the same event, Penn Jilette promoted his iPhone magic app by explaining how it helped a stripper increase her tips. Oy, said Twitter
  
• When the fit, female co-founder of the startup TotalTrainer gave a presentation at VentureBeat's Demo conference, some male geeks in the audience got snarky about her body on Twitter, provoking a backlash against their "sexist tweets."
  
• Attendees at TechCrunch had to be warned not to mock the accents of speakers from foreign countries, according to co-organizer Jason Calacanis.

What's more, the girls who danced on stage at this year's Yahoo Hack Day were merely a sequel to the gyrating women who appeared on stage last year, notes Kara Swisher at All Things D. That's despite the fact that an all-woman team won the top prize at Yahoo's first Hack Day, in 2006, and that Yahoo has a tough-as-nails female CEO.

Chalk it up as evidence that, whether a woman calls the shots or not, the tech world remains heavily male dominated. It goes beyond that, though: Human relationships, across the gender divide or not, get severely twisted in Silicon Valley's intense startup culture, where they're all too often pushed aside to make way for technical achievements (think marathon coding sessions) or business success. The Hack Day incident is as much about interpersonal awkwardness as sexism (does this guy look like he's enjoying himself?).

Images from this year's event are below, via simonwillison.net and CocaChou on Flickr. It's a well-stocked gallery, purely so you can fully appreciate how, uh, deplorable this whole scene was.

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

Granted, Shannon Jackson, the accused, was under court order not to communicate with the woman she poked (see attached clip). But couldn't said woman have turned off poking? Or blocked pokes from Jackson? Maybe her profile was sort of asking for it? In addition to, uh, literally asking for it? Government paid lawyers should definitely fight about these crucial issues, at length, in court.

High school was bad enough when I was a teenager. But reading Wiseman's new book—which expands on the original by discussing technology and why "Mean Girl" culture has filtered down to younger girls—I realized how much trickier being a teenager is today. When I was in high school, if I got in a fight with someone, maybe we'd exchange a couple of bitchy notes. There would definitely be some behind-the-back gossip. But I never had to worry that someone was going to set up a fake Facebook account in my name or trash me on MySpace or unearth naked photos of me on their cell phone.

Still, there are some things that seem to be universal. There will always be Queen Bees, the Regina Georges of the world, who are, as Wiseman so excellently puts it, "a combination of the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland and Barbie." For adult women, learning how to navigate the Queen Bee isn't just an exercise in nostalgia; unfortunately, many adult relationships still seem to hew all too closely to the lines drawn in high school (or earlier).

On her website, Wiseman answers questions from teenagers and parents every day. But she's agreed to answer questions from Jezebel readers who might need advice about how to deal with the bully at work, or the friend who's mad at them but won't say why. Leave your questions in the comments or email them to Doree if you want to stay anonymous. We'll publish her answers in a separate post next week.

Why did you feel like you needed to write a new edition of Queen Bees and Wannabees?
As soon as I'm done with something I always think of things I forgot to put in. I've done that already with the new book. But definitely, about two years ago, I realized that the only thing in the book about technology was email. That is just not acceptable. I started feeling guilty that girls and moms and dads were reading it, and I do feel a very strong sense of obligation to these people. I'm constantly trying to take the things that I see and put them forward and think, what can we do about it. Specifically the things I wanted to change the most about were about technology and some of the more leading questions that I get—people always say, everything that's happening is happening so much younger. I wanted to answer that question.

How do you answer that question?
Okay, yes, girls at younger ages are acting more "teenage-like" and exhibiting mean girl behavior. But it's because we're not teaching our kids to be more mature, we're teaching them to be older. Older meaning getting to sort of typical adolescent behavior earlier, like dressing as teenagers, having them listen to teen music, laughing when they're "precocious," going with moms to get a manicure and pedicure, when they go to dance recitals dressed in hip-hop outfits. All these things we think are "cute."

What do you see on the ground, in terms of how things have changed since you wrote the first edition?
Every day I teach kids between kindergarten and college. And then the kids reach out to me all the time. Every day I get emails from kids, boys and girls. There is no part of their lives that is not connected to technology. But I don't teach on cyberbullying. I think it's complete waste of time, because it's completely integrated into everything that they do. I started out doing stuff on cyberbullying and six months into it I was like, this is ridiculous. We need to integrate it into everything that they do. All this social aggression, dominance stuff. It's exactly why they come to me about it—they say, I have a problem with this person and part of it is how I'm being attacked online.

What do you tell kids to say in that case?
I have a whole sort of system of how you deal. For example—you are hooking up with, hanging out with, however you want to call it, a guy. He used to hang out with/hook up with another girl. You're like, a junior in high school. You start going to parties where every time she sees you, she will start screaming something. It's not your name, but everybody knows it's you. She's screaming firecrotch. Or slut, or whatever. You know it's directed at you. Your boyfriend won't do anything about it. Then you find out she's completely trashing you on Facebook. So how do you handle it? I was giving a talk in Houston, for high school kids. I gave them three options. One, you say nothing and hope it goes away. Two, you talk to your boyfriend and him have to talk to her. Or you start your own Facebook war. All the kids in Houston were yelling, "Three! Three!" And I said, "That's acting like you're 12." Instead, you send one email to this person. You say exactly what you don't like. You admit you cannot control her behavior, but the drama stops here. I always give kids scripts that they can start with, but then they can put it into their own words.

How are adult women affected by Mean Girl behavior?
Some of them have never let go of their being ruled-over personas, never being able to say that they're angry with people. Women need to know how to take seriously their own feelings of conflict and of anger, and then know how to communicate that to people—because what that is is an underlying belief that someone will not take you seriously. Forget the Queen Bees—that's a minority of women. It's just that they have disproportionate power. It's this issue of not being able to express your anger because you don't take yourself seriously. Women say, I can't be the complaining bitch. They don't want to be seen as uptight. You don't know which battles to choose and so you choose none of them. It's also women knowing how to give apologies and accept apologies. If that was addressed we would have substantially less work to do.

This is the reason I prefer working with adolescents. If they're saying sort of crappy stuff to me, I know it's a rationalization of crappy behavior. I can say to them you're full of it, you think I believe that? And they're going to laugh and say, yeah, I was just trying to see how stupid you were. But that's not the way it is with adults. They get really angry with you and get really self righteous. You can't have that really honest exchange.

Is it fair to say women undermine themselves in the workplace?
I wish so much that women would take the risk to take themselves and their feelings seriously. And that means acknowledging your feelings and taking them seriously, and taking the time to think strategically through how to express that to someone. That is a way of being an authentic person of integrity. Of course this relates to relationships. This relates to intimate relationships and relationships in the workplace.

Is that why women bully other women in workplace?
When you're in a position of power and authority, it's so comfortable to you that you don't often know where or what you're doing. I just sat in a meeting with a CEO—and she texted during the entire meeting. She was acting like she was 12. She was texting during the meeting and everyone was deferring to her. It was very much like a clique. That's not the only time I've seen that. It's why I work so much with girls and boys in positions of leadership. What does leadership really mean? It doesn't mean how you perceive yourself. It's how others perceive you. It's, I get to do this and you don't. I get to dismiss people's opinions but nobody else does. It's not just women—I've certainly seen that with men. I think it's an issue of power and authority and how one uses it. And it's exactly the same if you're a 12-year-old girl or a CEO.

How do parents deal with their kids' bullying or being bullied?
I'm a parent. So I can say true stories about my own mistakes. Even to my best of intentions, I find myself doing the things that I tell people not to do. Recently, in a video chat on my website, this parent says, I'm the parent of a fourth grader, and nobody wants to be friends with my daughter. The parent says, my daughter has no friends because she's imaginative, fun and creative. I say, you love your daughter so much but I doubt that people aren't hanging out with your kid because she's imaginative, fun and creative. We define the reason they're being rejected in positive ways. My job is to say to parents, in a way they can hear, you love your child and it's so difficult to hear negative social stuff. If we can do this step by step, we can get your kid to be in a better place. It's taken me a very long time to know how to talk to parents. I bombed when the Queen Bee moms book came out. It was just a disaster. I didn't know how to present the information in a way the parents can hear.

Do Queen Bee girls have Queen Bee moms?
I get that question all the time. But there are lots of kids who have Queen Bee moms who are the opposite. And I know why people say, I know why she's this way. But nobody says that about any other role. Nobody says, oh, she's a complete wannabe or rollover. There are lots of girls who look to their mothers as anti-mentors. Like women who try really hard with plastic surgery, who look like they're 18 when they're 45. Some of their daughters are like, that's awful. It's too easy of an answer for me, though certainly there are girls like that. I guess what you need [for a Queen Bee] is a girl who has a high degree of social skills and also ruminates a lot. She holds grudges and ruminates. Then, you have her mom showing role modeling, that the path to power is based on how you look, where you come from, fitting into that box you talk about so much—and the mom saying, I'm not going to hold you accountable for crappy behavior.

How do you advise people to deal with their Queen Bee daughters?
It's easy for me to get reactive. But it's my responsibility—I've chosen this as my path. I'm trying to get information to all different kinds of people. I've worked really hard to really reach out. I think they're hiding a lot. If you talk to them about being effortlessly perfect—everybody wants to be heard, including Queen Bee moms. There's a couple different variations on Queen Bee moms. They feel like they can really speak for other people. I'm speaking on behalf of all the mothers. The worst is when Queen Bee moms have gone after me—it's usually when a woman feels like she's not being taken seriously in other areas of her life. But it doesn't excuse the behavior. Really, you can see it. They don't feel taken seriously in other areas of their life.

What kind of mom are you?
The barely getting through mom. My boys are six and a half and eight and a half. I really try and aspire to be the person I write about—the loving hard-ass mom. But there are really moments when I'm so tired when I'm like, go ahead and do it. Right now, at this moment, my sister's staying with us. My sons went into her bedroom and opened her computer to try and get on computer games. So their punishment is, they're allowed to watch TV, but they have a trade-in system for good behavior, and they're not allowed to play a game on a phone. Also, I'm teaching them how to fold their own laundry. They drop it everywhere. Socks are like a calling card around the house. Now they're doing their own laundry, but it's tough. I want them to fold it, and instead they leave it in an enormous pile in their closet. It drives me crazy but I have to let it go. They are washing and drying and taking into their room, so the idea of having it in perfect stacks is ridiculous and I have to let it go.

Have you ever had to deal with a bullying situation with your own kids?
I had a really tough time with my older child. He was acting out in school and getting into trouble. I was freaked out. It was completely bad. It turns out he was being bullied really badly by five kids and I didn't see the signs. I didn't pay attention to anything I talked about. There was someone at the school who I had trained, just by happenstance. At the time I trained her my children weren't even attending that school. But she has just been a lifeline for him. Sometimes as a mother you really aren't the person who can fix the problem. Your anxiety is so high. You can't think straight. It was a pretty life changing moment for my family and for me. I was like, oh shit, I can't see the signs of my kids being bullied. There was a lot of social aggression. Boys saying they were going to beat him up at recess. It was quite similar to girl dynamics. My kids are getting in trouble all the time—it's not an infrequent experience.

Are you going to be doing any work at Millburn High School [the high school in New Jersey where the senior girls write a "slut list" of freshmen every year]?
I got an email from the head of the PTO there and I wrote her back and I haven't heard back.

What do you do about something like the Millburn High School slut list? The girls were defending it, saying that it was something that people wanted to be on. How do you teach them that it's actually not okay to make a "slut list"?
I think you talk about it very straightforwardly. You talk about the reasons why a ninth grade girl would want to be on the list. And just because you've done it forever doesn't make it right. Just because people have been treating each other like shit forever, doesn't make it right. You don't just get a pass. That's one of those tricky things about tradition. As soon as you say it's tradition you don't question it. But that should be when you do question it. When i talk to the girls about it, I'm really straight up about it. The senior girls are like, it's so pathetic, she wants to be on it. You really have to put a mirror up to the senior girls. They can be so cold and unforgiving about a position that they were in very shortly before. I do a lot of work when I work with high school kids about that dynamic. I say straight up, some girls will want to be on it desperately. Let's talk about why. There are girls who don't want to be on it. There are girls who will lie about being on it because they're so desperate for attention. I just talk really straight up with them about what's going on. I'm like, if I'm completely wrong, you think I'm insane, you need to back it up.

The principal's reaction to the list seemed, at first, to be very ambivalent—he didn't want to search for the perpetrators because he said no one would come forward and it wasn't fair to punish the whole class.
People feel like, oh, we have a policy about that stuff—but very few people know how to implement a policy in real life. They get co-opted by the system like everybody else. It takes a really gifted administrator to know how to deal with that. It takes a tremendous amount of thought in the midst of a tremendous amount of drama. It's always really disappointing. I was speaking at a conference of superintendents. I was like, look, here's the deal. You can continue to say, if it's done outside of school grounds then we have no jurisdiction. But there is no separation with technology between outside of school and school. Now, I think that administrators are going in that direction.

But what I think is more compelling in a way, is why would girls in a perfect, high achieving school want to do this. Girls haze for social power. In my experience, what I've seen with girls who do that, is those girls are not doing well. They're not excelling in other areas. You have to excel in a school like that in something. You take what you can get. Girls haze. They always haze to dominate socially. It also shows the lack of power that some girls have, if this is the only power they can get. Their capacity is limited in other areas. It sort of goes to the heart of everything we're talking about. In Chicago, girls completely beat the crap out of each other at a powder puff game. That was exactly the same thing.

You have a YA book coming out soon too—Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials.
I'm psyched about the YA book. I'm relieved about Queen Bees, but I'm so nervous about the YA book. I try to do my best to talk about these issues in a way that's more subtle and more graceful. But what's really cool is to look at these YA bloggers. I'm watching these young women write about this stuff and it's amazing to me to watch this. The book comes out in January. It would have been really easy to write something about a really rich kid—but I'm really hopeful that this just reflects all these issues that we're talking about. I just hope this gives people more answers.

Anything else you'd like to add?
I feel so strongly the reason why I'm successful is because of women supporting me, laughing with me, buying me a drink when I needed it, sometimes being hard on me, but working with me. For girls to not have that is just unacceptable. I want girls to have that. I want to be able to talk about the ugly stuff so we can get to the good stuff.

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and the New Realities of Girl World [Amazon]
Queen Bee Moms and Kingpin Dads: Dealing with the Parents, Teachers, Coaches and Counselors Who Can Make—or Break—Your Child's Future [Amazon]
Boys, Girls, and Other Hazardous Materials [Amazon]
Rosalind Wiseman: Creating Cultures of Dignity [Rosalind Wiseman]
A Rite of Hazing, Now Out in the Open [NYT]

Blame this altogether more sinister portrait of Decker as narcotized, philandering spy on her increasingly messy divorce, which involves a custody battle over her children. The accusations are mentioned in a September 29 letter we've obtained, sent to Decker's legal team from the San Francisco attorneys representing her husband (Click here to read the eight-page letter) .

Notice of the breakup first surfaced nearly two years ago. There didn't seem much reason to believe the parting was especially bitter. Though Decker led a series of power grabs at Yahoo, elevating herself from CFO to president and would-be CEO, her divorce generated little such noise. Divorcing couples tend to fight over money, but in April 2008 it emerged that Decker's husband Michael Dovey was not seeking alimony; he told people he was independently wealthy.

But an increasingly contentious court battle has nevertheless erupted, judging from the September 29 letter. The attorney for Dovey references hearings and letters attempting to resolve how to handle discovery, the early legal phase in which evidence is collected.

Dovey's legal team is using discovery, in part, to collect evidence concerning Decker's purported and unspecified "accusations about" her husband — including personal emails Decker may have sent referencing his conduct, "state of mind and/or mental or physical well being," according to the letter.

Some of this material may reside on old Yahoo computers, and Decker's legal team is trying to win the ability to selectively block the disclosure to Dovey's legal team of evidence as it emerges, according to the letter. Dovey's team wants much more: all potential evidence not protected by attorney-client privilege or "attorney work product protection," with particularly sensitive material handed over and protected by a confidentiality agreement.

Near the conclusion of the letter, Dovey's attorneys hint at what else they might be looking for in discovery — and what else Decker's attorneys might be trying to keep a lid on:

These sorts of allegations are relatively common in nasty divorces and custody battles and Decker, for many years a fixture of Yahoo's quarterly conference calls with stock analysts, knows how to mount a strong defense in the bright glare of the public spotlight. Still, a woman who quit Yahoo in January and just bought a waterfront home in the San Francisco Bay Area's quiet Marin County can't be happy to be caught in such a maelstrom of mudslinging. Nor, one would venture, can her former colleagues.

We've posted the full eight-page letter here.

Update: Richard Rados, who wrote the letter, declined to comment on the divorce because of "pending litigation" and added, "I don't want to contribute to ill will between" the parties involved. We left a message for Jennifer Wald, Decker's attorney, and will include any comment when/if she gets back to us.

(Top pic: Decker at an "All Hands" company meeting last year. From Yahoo Blog's Flickr account.)

Matthew Tannin may have shut down his account, but Google keeps backups, and the company provided government prosecutors with "a CD-ROM disk... of Mr. Tannin's emails from November 20, 2006 through August 12, 2007," according to the New York Times. The prosecutors are trying to prove fraud in the collapse of two hedge funds, managed in part by Tannin, and have been helped along by his personal emails, one of which reads "a wave of fear set over me that the fund couldn't be run the way that I was ‘hoping'... And that it was going to subject investors to ‘blow up risk'."

Meanwhile, online tricksters reportedly protested Google's outing of the once-anonymous "Skankblogger," Rosemary Port. Lawyers have called Google "cowardly" for not fighting harder to protect Port's anonymity in a case brought by a woman targeted by Port's anonymous blog on Google's Blogger.com.

Google takes pride in its ability to retain data; Sergey Brin has an op-ed in the New York Times today holding Google servers up as more durable than the ancient Library at Alexandria. Meanwhile, every police department and district attorney's office in the country knows they can extract valuable data from the company. Google has little motive to fight much against these authorities. Not when it could be solving sexier geek problems like indexing books or launching real-time collaboration systems — and when it could potentially be minting billions on its next tech hit.

(Image via)