When you have children of your own, you realize for the first time what your own parents went through, things you couldn't possibly have understood when you were a child—and really are better off not having understood, because the knowledge would have been debilitating. There's the abyssal terror at having brought a fragile, trusting life into a world of hurtfulness and destruction, for instance. Not far behind that is the problem of packing lunch.

Are you desperate for the perfect book? Having trouble choosing between the Tao Te Ching or Who Moved My Cheese? Can't figure out whether Siddartha or Lipstick Jungle will be better suited for your emotional development? There is hope. For a small fee! Of $30/hour.

"Jonathan Franzen: what's wrong with the modern world" is in many ways the perfect headline for this column.

Long after the floods or the fires have reduced our cities to rubble, long after the plague or the asteroid strike or the famine has killed off the human species, long after even our sun has boiled the seas dry and, in its own death throes, engulfed and annihilated every dust mote of this world we like to think of as our safe and stable home, a three-quarter-ton assemblage of metal will be sailing through empty interstellar space—on its way to nowhere, effectively from nowhere. A year ago, Voyager 1 crossed out of our solar system. It took us till now, painstakingly deciphering its available signals, to figure out that it had done so. Voyager 1 will continue communicating with us until perhaps 2025, when it is expected to run out of power and fly on in silence, all on its own, while you and everyone you know die and are forgotten. It will be carrying an analog audio disc containing, among other recordings, "Dark Was the Night" by Blind Willie Johnson.

Are you aware that the UN has declared 2013 to be "The Year of Quinoa?" How are you participating in the global quinoa uprising?

Two out of every three "catastrophic injuries" of female athletes are caused by cheerleading.

It's being called "the most beautiful, haunting infomercial you'll ever see."

You know that scene from The Simpsons where Bart and Lisa ride through one of those carnival haunted-house rides and it turns out to be really busted? It’s lacking anything scary. Or anything at all for that matter. A scream greets them; they hear they squeal of a tape rewinding; and the scream repeats. A coffin opens to reveal only a spring, as a canned “I vahnt your blood” sounds. A skeleton drops from the ceiling accompanied by the sound of a donkey braying. Lisa side-eyes Bart and says, “That was just confusing.” James Wan’s Insidious Chapter 2 is the cinematic equivalent of that ride, the Screamatorium of Dr. Frightmarestein. It's not very scary. It's just confusing.

Cat Marnell is a writer whose persona is tightly wound up with her acknowledged drug use. Last March, the book proposal for her tentatively titled memoir How to Murder Your Life, a Basketball Diaries meets The Devil Meets Prada sketch, sold to Simon & Schuster for $500,000. Earlier this week, we received a concerned tip with the subject header: "Cat Marnell almost died the other night."

Yale University, America's sex palace, has issued a memo that attempts to clarify what constitutes "consensual" and "nonconsensual" sex. Immature readers may find this memo's hypothetical scenarios "hilarious," or even "ROFLMAO." Allow us to make things more clear.

The Women in the World Foundation, former Daily Beast editor Tina Brown’s very own charity, is nominally devoted to “driving solutions that advance women and girls.” According to its sole IRS filing, the New York Post points out, Women in the World spent the plurality of funds raised in 2011, totaling more than a million dollars, on throwing lavish gatherings for its director and her connected friends. That’s one kind of solution!

A disappointed customer who decided to inform the world of his negative experience at a Philadelphia health spa took his review to Yelp, where he gave the business two stars and a "meh."

Thursday morning, the bodies of four young people were found inside a car near a former mountain resort in rural Tennessee. The victims had been shot to death, and authorities believe all four were deliberately targeted.

British singer and living embodiment of ennui Morrissey has reportedly yanked his upcoming book just a week before it'd been scheduled to hit shelves, and nobody really knows why. Well, I wonder.

This video is over a year old, but for some reason it started making the rounds again yesterday which is absolutely fine because it is amazing and should be watched many times a day forever.

A wealthy Australian tourist was sent hurtling face first onto the ground outside her hotel yesterday, after a cyclist crashed into her while illegally riding his bike on the sidewalk.

Alert! Lame duck New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has decided not to endorse a candidate in the 2013 mayoral race.

In honor of Friday the 13th, YouTube's most "daring" pranksters (read: foolhardy) have teamed up for what is possibly their most ill-conceived prank to date (and that's saying something).

In a new poll, the vast majority of Americans say that in the five years since the recession, the government has "done not much or nothing at all to help poor people [and] middle-class people." Guess what? They're right!