Look out, Wyoming: Liz Cheney has posted bond and is a free woman.

TV reporter and book author Brian Stelter isn’t supposed to write about cable news, given his recent try-out as the new host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, where Howard Kurtz policed the media (well, tried to) before signing with Fox News. But on Monday the Times published Stelter’s report on the cable news upstart Al Jazeera America, citing its executives’ plan to usurp established channels (such as Stelter’s potential employer). And today Stelter reported on Al Jazeera’s litigation against AT&T for dropping the network. Has a would-be media cop lost track of his own conflicted interests?

And here is why:

Nirvana, the "alternative" rockers who recently reunited to shoot a very special homecoming video message for Virginia Tech's "Hoagies," first signed to Sub Pop Records in 1989. Fortunately, the Pacific Northwest label has kept the original paperwork around all these years and published that initial contract to Tumblr yesterday, which we've reposted below:

Last week, Katy Perry and Lady Gaga released the first singles of their respective upcoming albums, Prism and (my fingers groan a little bit louder with old age every time I type this) ARTPOP. The ensuing battle to the top of the charts was like a taste test between a Saltine and a Saltine piled with sprinkles, truffle oil, caviar, gold flakes, Madonna's post-True Blue eyebrow pluckings, and lead paint chips from the walls of Andy Warhol's Factory. Both songs are meta-noise — Perry's reggae-lite "Roar" is about working up the nerve to cause a ruckus ("I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me ROAR"), while Gaga's aggressively ugly "Applause" is about having the nerve to declare how life-affirming ruckus directed at you can be ("I live for the applause, applause, applause"). If you play "Roar" and "Applause" simultaneously on stereos facing each other, the songs solve each other while opening up a black hole of infinite vacuousness.

North Korea's official news agency reports today that "table-tennis shoes made by daily necessaries workteams are very popular among the users." Oddly, they don't report anything about forcing citizens in prison camps to kill their own children.

It's hard to imagine anything that someone like Dr. Phil could say that would still shock some people, but apparently there is.

Washington, D.C. interns — in particular, congressional interns — tend to be embryonic versions of the monsters they serve: rich, white, and drunk on even the tiniest modicum of actual power. How do they get that way? In part by carefully attending to the advice contained in the “2013 Intern Manual” distributed to the unpaid peons of House Speaker John Boehner, the 12-term Republican who superintends the lower chamber’s extreme right wing. Left behind at a recent D.C. house party by a sauced Hill staffer, the manual shows how even the lowest employees lubricate the capital’s gilded political machine.

As bloody political turmoil continues to rain down violence and chaos in Egypt, things are pretty crazy in the Western Hemisphere, too, where everyone wants a cronut. Some people are so desperate to put a cronut in their mouths and chew it and swallow it, they're even buying off-brand: a croissant dusted with cinnamon sugar—that's a cronut; a Pillsbury popover drizzed with simple syrup—that's a cronut; a Big Mac container that says "CRONUT" in marker with water sprinkled over it—that's a cronut. Now Canadian news outlets are reporting that at least 12 people suffered stomach pain, vomiting, and diarrhea after consuming so-called "cronut burgers" at the Canadian National Exhibition, an annual fair in Toronto.

It's a familiar story: Person loses phone, phone gets found, finder uses phone to post an Instagram of themselves using the phone, Instagram helps person retrieve their phone.

A playground, somewhere over the rainbow (East Village, NYC)

Thanks to some misguided moral philosophy and some excellent lobbying work, it is now almost impossible to discharge your student loans in bankruptcy. They haunt you forever, like the souls of those you've killed. As our national student loan debt balloons further into crisis territory, it become ever clearer that we need to change that rule.

The decomposing corpse of a bizarre creature that recently washed ashore in Spain has local wondering what the hell it could be: A sea monster? A dragon? Falkor from The Neverending Story?

For reasons that remain upsettingly unclear, photojournalist Ben Garvin of the St. Paul Pioneer Press was compelled to shave off his majestic facial hair.

The New York Times today alerted its readers to the urgent political news that Bill de Blasio, the current maybe co-front-runner for the Democratic mayoral nomination, identifies as a fan of the Boston Red Sox. According to the paper, tradition appears to require that the city's chief executive be a fan of the Yankees. Javier C. Hernandez writes:

Reporter James Kirchick was supposed to be on Kremlin-funded English-language news channel Russia Today to talk about Bradley Manning. Instead, he decided to talk about Russia's terrifying new anti-gay laws—and got kicked off the program. They then refused to cover his car service home:

"My mom dancing down the isle (sic) doin what she wants having fun and being her," is how Kendra Garber of Pekin, Illinois, described this YouTube video, which was shot on her mother's wedding day.

"I vaguely hoped that one day, someone would say something. I just didn't want that person to be me. That bar was too high for my moral courage to clear." A former soldier's brutally frank reflections on Bradley Manning and the pathology of conscience.

Just as "high school" was invented as a way to keep teenagers off the streets most of the year, "summer jobs" were invented as a way to keep them off the streets for the remainder of the year. But even five years after the Great Recession struck, summer jobs are as scarce as [reference to some teen-specific buzzword here]. Can someone hire these fucking kids, please?

Videos and photographs of what Syrian rebels say was a horrific chemical-gas attack on a Damascus suburb by the forces of Bashar al-Assad are beginning to emerge. Warning: These are very graphic.