"This is a never-ending race," says the CEO of a high-speed trading firm that's built a network of lasers to trade stocks several nanoseconds faster. This is the single stupidest use of human ingenuity happening in the world today.

A stolen truck collided with a New York City bus early Wednesday morning, sending both vehicles crashing onto a Greenwich Village sidewalk and into a building. One person—reportedly the bus driver—was killed and at least four others were injured.

For the first time, an Alpine skiing event at the Olympics has ended in a tie. On Wednesday, Dominique Gisin of Switzerland and Tina Maze of Slovenia both made it through Sochi's women's downhill course in exactly 1 minute and 41.57 seconds. Adding to the historic moment: Maze is the first Slovenian to win a gold medal at a winter Olympics.

Eighty-three-year-old billionaire George Soros had to literally hide behind his lawyers after his soap opera actress ex-girlfriend started hitting him during a deposition today, knocking his hearing device off his head in the process.

Two nations came together today during the men's cross-country semifinals when a Canadian coach came to the rescue of a Russian skier struggling to finish after he crashed and broke his ski.

NBC's Tom Brokaw announced tonight that he's been secretly battling multiple myeloma, a cancer that affects bone marrow, since his diagnosis last August.

This week Michael Skakel, a Kennedy cousin on trial for murdering his neighbor, convinced a judge to relocate his court-ordered GPS ankle bracelet because the bulky tracking device wouldn't fit inside his ski boots.

A 21-year-old California woman who killed six people this weekend drunkenly speeding the wrong way down an LA highway had only recently cleared her license of restrictions from a string of traffic violations, beginning with a DUI conviction she picked up when she was only 16 years old.

This week's New Yorker contains an essay, currently available in the print edition only, by Roger Angell, about what his life is like at the age of 93. It is full of well-wrought observations about loss and mortality and sex and the abundance of existence but it also keeps an eye on the contemporary, as in this passage:

[Fans touch wax figures of One Direction members Louis Tomlinson, center, and Liam Payne, second from right, during an unveiling ceremony at Madame Tussauds in Tokyo on Tuesday. Image via Koji Sasahara/AP.]

Many people do not go to the mall any more. But some people still go to the mall. And most people at least used to go to the mall. What is the number one store that draws you—or drew you—to the mall? Think. This is important.

Well, at least Miley is no longer the most embarrassing member of the Cyrus family (for now). Witness her dad Billy Ray's collaboration with Dionne Warwick's hip-hop rappin' son (says Complex) Buck 22, "Achy Breaky 2." Buck's first verse speaks of a chance meeting with Cyrus and concludes that this song happened because "I'd rather be lucky than good." Is that self-aware trolling I detect?

Oilmen have quietly obtained government permission to drill the holy shit out of the habitat of the endangered Florida panther. There are an estimated 100 to 160 panthers left in America. But there are something like 150,000 Hummer H2s, so, you know, sorry, big cats!

James Taranto is what we in the journalism business, ensconced as we are in our industry lingo, call a "fucking moron." Yet, by virtue of his position as a tastemaker on the Wall Street Journal's op-ed pages, it's worth asking how he spelunked today into his latest, lowest muddy crevice of misogyny.

Pictured above are the scribblings of Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly, who used them during his (boring) pre-Super Bowl sit-down with President Obama last Sunday, and is now auctioning them off on his personal website for charity.

These clips come from last night's HBO documentary Questioning Darwin. Says the first interviewee you'll see above, Pastor Peter LaRuffa, "If somewhere within the Bible, I were to find a passage that said 2 + 2 = 5, I wouldn't question what I'm reading in the Bible. I would believe it, accept it as true, and then do my best to work it out and understand it."

The governor of Washington has suspended the death penalty in his state, citing "too many flaws in this system."

It's election day at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill! Who's your pick for student body president? You have a 25 percent chance of being represented by Emilio Vicente, a homosexual from Guatemala who clambered into America through a barbed-wire fence when he was six.

There are three ingredients needed to make a perfect obituary: a peculiar life, an anticipated death (hence: ample time to write the thing), and at least one story about tap dancing. So you knew going in that the New York Times obituary of Shirley Temple Black, who many people were sad to learn had died Monday night (but also, briefly, happy and surprised to learn had been alive up to that point), was going to be sensational.