Boomtowns don't have to be ugly. San Francisco was built during the Gold Rush, as was Sacramento and dozens of still pretty towns in the Sierra Nevada. Virginia City, home to the Comstock Lode, quickly built up neighborhoods of ornate mansions and a main street that offered everything from Oscar Wilde lectures in the opera house to exotic prostitutes from Australia and China. But since the 1960s, when America lost its ability to see or create beauty, our endless boom and bust cycle produces nothing but garbage: garbage housing, garbage retail, garbage jobs and garbage products.

Kids today with their flesh-eating drugs and their butt-chugging wine and their...incessant quoting of a Geico commercial featuring a talking camel who loves Wednesdays?

How does one of the world's richest men lose more than $30 billion in a single year? With hubris, mostly.

Yesterday, Oregon State Police released video footage of a roadside shootout between a state trooper and a motorist. The August 29 shooting left the motorist, who was traveling with his three young children, dead, and the trooper wounded.

Tom Clancy, the thriller writer who passed away on Tuesday, was, by trade, a novelist. But his biggest success—and maybe his most lasting legacy—likely comes from a different arena altogether.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the jailed Pussy Riot member who went on hunger strike late last month to protest her prison's conditions, ended the strike on Tuesday, two days after being moved to the prison hospital. She vows to strike again if she's not transferred to another prison.

Some would argue that dragging a chain gang of preschoolers through Union Square to witness "performance artist" Matthew Silver going HAM on a bass drum with the broken pink handle of a child's riding toy could be considered child abuse.

Miriam Carey, the woman killed after yesterday's violent police chase in Washington D.C., was reportedly in the grip of a belief that "Obama electronically monitored her." This fear of constant government surveillance is being described as a "delusional" belief.

[Majority Leader Eric Cantor chats on the phone while heading to a closed-door Republican strategy session. Image by J. Scott Applewhite via AP]

Celebubrated street artist Banksy is currently prowling around New York City, leaving a trail of new art on random walls. Oblivious New York City building owners are painting them over just as fast as they can.

It's unclear what exactly Sinead O'Connor was expecting to get from Miley Cyrus in return for her "motherly advice," but it seems that a five-word tweet calling her crazy was definitely not it.

The government shutdown has already caused thousands of federal workers to be furloughed. Now, a tipster tells us, a rumor is going around among Washington, DC city workers that they could be furloughed as early as Monday. If you know more, leave it in the discussion section below. (Update: The DC mayor's office denies this possibility.)

Perhaps unsatisfied with ruining Yale students’ clothing by peeing and pooping in unattended dryers, an unidentified individual spent Thursday night hanging several articles of poop-smeared clothing on a clothesline near Berkeley College, another of Yale’s residential colleges. (The original poop-related incidents took place at Saybrook College.) They don’t sing “Bright College Years” for nothing!

In the UK, it is now legal—though it was not yesterday—to sell Nestle chocolate bars in purple wrappers.

The baseball season is over—but the best part has only just begun. No, no, not the postseason. I mean Major League Baseball's legal battle with centaur-obsessed New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, who just filed a lawsuit alleging—among other things!—illicit sex and bags stuffed with money.

While the rest of the world grieves for the loss of Breaking Bad, one group of die-hard fans has taken a more literal approach to mourning the show's demise.

Last month, Kanye West reamed out Jimmy Kimmel on Twitter, bellowing, among other things, "YOU DON'T HAVE SCUM BAGS [sic] HOPPING OVER FENCES TRYING TO TAKE PICTURES OF YOUR DAUGHTER." Today, one of those snap-happy scumbags has been identified: West's lovely girlfriend, Kim Kardashian.

When Tom Corbett, the Republican Governor of Pennsylvania, appeared on Harrisburg's WHP-TV yesterday, he said his lawyer's comparison of gay marriage to “a union between 12-year-olds” was “inappropriate.” Good for him, right? Well, no, because then Corbett kept talking.

There has been a growing movement of late to push colleges and universities to get rid of all their investments in fossil fuels, in the same way they were pushed to divest from holdings in apartheid South Africa a generation ago. Harvard has answered: no thx.

Earlier this week, California passed a law designed to criminalize revenge porn. Under this immediately effective legislation, any person who privately takes a consensual photo of another person nude, but then maliciously distributes the intimate image can be punished for up to six months in jail and/or $1,000 in fines. Yesterday, Hunter Moore, a Warped Tour scene goon turned proud revenge-porn thug, posted a YouTube rant about the legislation. A summary: "You fucking retards."