If you’re the 19-year-old kid who unknowing helped select the location for the Muslim community center near Ground Zero, life is probably a bit awkward right now, what with the wall-to-wall attention your job performance has drawn. Life is probably a tad more awkward, however, for the reporter breaking the kid’s story. On the one hand, you’ve got a national controversy. On the other hand, we’re talking about a kid here. Props, then, go to NY Daily News writer Michael Daly for his handling of the awkward revelation.

So we know the Gulf is fine for swimming in, at least according to our The-President-Went-Swimming-There-ometer. However, it seems we can’t say the same for the beaches at Martha’s Vineyard. The Boston Herald reports today that, courtesy of some rather nasty bacteria in the water around the island, President Obama and his family might be better off not gong for a dip while on vacation.

Late yesterday, Facebook launched a new “geolocation” application called Facebook Places. The app, which resembles existing, smaller start up companies likes Foursquare and Gowalla, allows users to “check-in” at different locations and thereby announce their whereabouts to friends as well as connect with other Facebook users in the same location.

After ten years with the magazine, Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria will be leaving at the end of September to join Time as Editor at Large. Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel announced today that he is “thrilled that Fareed is joining us; his singular voice in explaining the world to people is a natural fit with our editorial mission at a moment when Time is more relevant and wide-reaching than it’s ever been.”

New York Times Magazine spends 10 pages examining what any 20-something-year-old could just tell you – that the wold has a scary number of possibilities, that we’re still not quite sure what life has in store for us, and that we’re more depended on our parents than we care to admit.

Today’s Abject Lesson in How Not To Improve Your Criminal Record is brought to you by Sean and Christy Quail of Enfield, CT, who dealt with reporters at their larceny trial by spraying them with insecticide.

Just in case you needed further affirmation that social networking sites are taking over the world (as opposed to Apple or whatever your conspiracy theory of choice might be), North Korea now has a Twitter account. Yes, the whole country.

This is what happens in August: Congress goes into recess, lots of Americans go on vacation and, consequently, the media has an existential crisis brought about by less political drama to cover and fewer people following the news. On the upside, though, it’s always entertaining to see what the media comes up with to fill space. NPR’s Linton Weeks, for example, contributed this August gem today in which he spent over 1,500 words analyzing President Obama’s oratorical tics.

In place of its customary three editorials, the New York Times today dedicated its entire editorial page to a single, long, blunt critique of the Obama Administration’s efforts in Afghanistan. “The State of the War” argues that the American people are fed up with the “cacophony of conflicting signals” regarding the war and are growing ever more disheartened by the “relentlessly grim” reports from the ground. President Obama, the editorial says, owes his country some answers.

Former Alaska governor and potential Republican 2012 presidential nominee Mike Huckabee joined NPR’s Tom Ashbrook for an interview yesterday in which he came out against repealing the 14th Amendment but renewed his support for non-amnesty programs like the DREAM Act.

CNN has published a short piece on the apparently time-honored political tradition of trying to defame sitting presidents with outlandish accusations. Given what some past presidents have had to put up with, the “birthers” are a comparatively tame lot.

The latest in awkward McCain-Snooki interactions came yesterday afternoon on KMLE radio in Phoenix when the Arizona Senator weighed in on Snooki’s recent arrest for disorderly conduct. Even though Snooki is unlikely to face any jail time for her drunken tirade against the cops, Sen. McCain rose to her defense.

A new study suggests that we unconsciously give away our opinions through our hand gestures. Specifically, which hand we gesture with when we speak often reveals whether we view our statements as positive or negative, a fact that plays out well for left-handed politicians on television.

Musician Trade Martin tries (and mostly fails) to to reconcile the promises of our nation’s constitution with the emotional duty of honoring the victims of a national tragedy through a really bad country song.

In a USA Today column, Rand Paul sets out to distance himself from the Libertarian label. Ironically, he winds up spending the majority of his time articulating his libertarian philosophy rather than making a case for a philosophical alternative.

NY Daily News writer and Fox News contributor Andrea Tantaros went after First Lady Michelle Obama today for running up hefty expenses on a mother-daughter vacation to Spain. Between the flight aboard Air Force Two and expensive hotel rooms on the Spanish coast, Michelle Obama’s spending spree would do Marie Antoinette proud.

In an interview this month with Details, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane offers up his two cents on Arizona’s “Papers, Please” immigration policy and the ultimate fate of Prop 8 and civil rights. In typical Seth MacFarlane form, he didn’t mince his words, and, considering recent events, his take on immigration and gay rights seems particularly interesting.

Colorado Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Meas thinks encouraging bike riding in Denver is a bad idea. In fact, he’s attacking Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s efforts to promote biking on the grounds that Hickenlooper is “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”

Two Iranian-born brothers living in Canada have remade Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)” into a protest song for young Iranians. The brothers obtained special permission from Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters, to make the remix.

Rep. Bob Inglis has served nearly 12 years in Congress, and yet, despite a 93% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, he lost his most recent primary because, as he explains it in an interview with Mother Jones, he wasn’t conservative enough to appeal to an increasingly extreme Republican base. As Mother Jones paints him, Inglis is a victim of conservative ideology gone awry.

David Klinghoffer’s recent column in the LA Times has garnered a significant amount of attention from the blogosphere and even cable news. As a staunch conservative, Klinghoffer is turning heads for critiquing the state of conservatism in today’s society, namely the degree to which radical pundits have become the face of the conservative movement. But while some are (rightly) praising his bold critique, most are overlooking the problematic meat of his argument: he refutes one form of radical conservatism by appealing to another.

Despite today’s online flurry over rumors that the iconic actor had died, GossipCop spoke with Mr. Cosby’s representative this afternoon to confirm that Mr. Cosby is, in fact, just fine.

On Wednesday, The Danger Room blogger Noah Shachtman profiled a young information services company called Recorded Future, which monitors the web in real time and, to be perfectly honest, sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi film. Recorded Future uses a collection of futuristic-sounding analytical tools like a “temporal analytics engine” and “sentiment analysis” to “find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents—both present and still-to-come.”

Nathan Love animation studios, in collaboration with NBCArtWorks, has produced quite possibly the most adorable take on the origins of NBC’s peacock logo.

Sandra Bullock is backpedaling to condemn a PSA she made as part of the Restore the Gulf campaign. The PSA, called “Be the One,” features Bullock and other celebrities asking viewers to sign a petition to Congress demanding a fully funded restoration plan for the Gulf. Turns out, though, that the campaign is sponsored by an organization called America’s Wetland Foundation, which, despite the nice sounding name, is actually a greenwashing front group for big oil companies likes Shell, American Petroleum and, you guessed it, BP.