Merle Haggard, one of the finest singers (and songwriters) in American popular music history, died today, on his 79th birthday. Here are a couple good songs.

This afternoon, Virginia State Senator D*** Black responded on Twitter to a Gwaker story about an email he recently sent to an AP English teacher about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Jessica Berg, the teacher, objected to State Senator D*** Black’s support of a (failed) bill that would require teachers to obtain parental permission to assign their students certain books. “If it’s so graphic that Gwaker can’t even print it for their adult readers,” he wrote, “then parents should have the right to know.”

Last night’s episode of Friday Night Tykes: Steel Country, Esquire Network’s reality show about elementary-school aged kids who play football, featured a gender-fluid 8-year-old from Monaca, Pennsylvania, who sometimes goes by Abby, and sometimes by Adam. The storyline, however, featured very little direct input from Abby/Adam—the discussion of the kid’s gender fluidity came almost entirely from Abby/Adam’s mother, Sarah Markusic.

This is what unions are for:

Today, a man named Al Hoffman has a column in The USA Today, the paper of record of America’s airports. At the bottom of the column, it is noted that Hoffman was once George W. Bush’s ambassador to Portugal, just so you get a feel for the type of person we’re dealing with here. Hoffman, as he writes in the column, spent the last several months fundraising for Jeb Bush’s too-big-to-fail presidential campaign, which, of course, failed spectacularly.

Paul Ryan has an aw-shucks boy-next-door appeal and talks about poor people and budgets sometimes. Therefore he is widely considered the face of compassionate conservatism. In fact he is a wacko, extremist class warrior. And not the good kind.

Hollywood actor Tim Robbins—a Trojan horse sent by the Clintons to spoil Bernie Sanders’ chances in Guam, a well-meaning, beautiful idiot, or something else entirely? Let’s review.

The Russian Communist Party is seeking to internationally copyright the red star symbol, according to the Moscow Times and the Russian-language site Lenta.ru. We commend our comrades’ noble contribution to the worldwide struggle for the dismantling of bourgeois property.

Pictured: Life’s rich tapestry, via Facebook.

When Toni Morrison’s Beloved was published, in 1987, Margaret Atwood, writing in the New York Times Book Review called it a “triumph.” She wrote of the novel, which has come to be considered one of the most important of the contemporary era, “[Morrison’s prose is] by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point.” A few weeks ago, writing in an email to an AP English teacher who is one of his constituents, Virginia State Senator Richard Black called Beloved “moral sewage.”

Though the death penalty is in serious decline in America, the same is not true worldwide: Amnesty International reports a 54% rise in executions globally in 2015, driven by increases in Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Dang.

Florida Rep. David Jolly wants to take Marco Rubio’s seat in the Senate. Unfortunately for him, he also has a long history of ties to the Church of Scientology. Which is why his campaign has been hard at work scrubbing Jolly’s Wikipedia page of any mention to the elaborate pyramid scheme of a religion, it recently confirmed to BuzzFeed News.

At around 2 a.m. on Saturday morning, a 20-year-old man ordered an Uber to drive him from Philadelphia to Herkimer, New York, a trip that would take about five hours. Would you be you surprised to learn that not all went as planned?

That odd sound you hear this morning is the groaning of a million financial con artists who are complaining that their business model—ripping people off—is being undermined by good governance. Dang.

The University of Northern New Jersey may have been a fake school established by the Department of Homeland Security, but its job placement wasn’t half bad.

At a certain point while preparing for my interview with the novelist, memoirist, and editor Edmund White, I had to ask myself: What could I possibly say about a certain segment of gay life that Edmund White hasn’t already said beautifully or unflinchingly? “What we desire is crucial to who we are,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir City Boy. “People also like to slur someone who’s very good-looking; beauties are often branded ‘sluts’ or ‘whores,’ though these words make little sense in a sexually permissive age. What, in fact, do they mean? That someone likes to have a lot of sex with a lot of people? What’s so bad about that?” he asked in the ‘Beauties’ entry in the original 1977 edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, which he edited. And then there’s this astounding paragraph from his 1980 travelogue about regional gay culture, States of Desire:

Voter identification laws are commonly understood to be just one of the more common methods by which Republican lawmakers across the country attempt to suppress voter turnout. Rarely do said lawmakers openly admit that such policies are merely tools to swing elections, but I guess Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin, was riding a liiiiiiiittle too high after Ted Cruz’s win over Donald Trump in the state’s primary last night.

Today, footage surfaced of Florida governor Rick Scott, at a Starbucks in Gainesville, getting yelled at by a customer—local woman Cara Jennings, who is none to happy with the governor.

Last week, George Mason University announced that its law school would be renamed, at the request of an anonymous donor who gave $20 million to the program, after the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia: the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University—ASS Law. (Or ASSoL.)

Approximately 15 minutes after 8:00 on Tuesday evening, screenshots of an apparent interaction between Canadian pop star Justin Bieber and Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s Instagram accounts began circulating on social media. Bieber, it seemed, had liked one of Trump’s videos.