In the confusion around the Boston Marathon bombing yesterday, as facts came and went, the New York Post staked out two dramatic claims: at least a dozen people were dead, and the authorities had a Saudi man in custody as a suspect.
An unnamed FBI official has told CBS News that at least one of the explosive devices detonated in Boston yesterday appears to have been improvised from a conventional pressure-cooker. Unnamed law enforcement officials don't exactly have the strongest record of credibility in the immediate aftermath of events like these, but federal authorities are well-acquainted with this type of IED.
Chris Heath warns you up high in his GQ cover story on Robert Downey Jr., that: "Conversations with Robert Downey Jr. are rarely linear, and sometimes it takes a moment to realize how one thing might relate to the next." Yes, this seems to be the perfect way to set up the inscrutable parallel the actor draws to overly emotional acting and bestiality porn (not that he's watched it, he's just seen it being sold in Amsterdam...). Here is the powerful exchange:
Thousands of Boston Marathon runners were still making their way to the finish line when the bombs went off yesterday afternoon.
A new study reveals that one of the most cited economic principles regarding GDP and debt is most likely based on a "sloppy Excel coding error." According to a 2009 book by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time It's Different, countries with a high debt to GDP ratio have slow economic growth. But three economists at the University of Massachusetts have published a critique of Reinhart and Rogoff entitled: "Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth?" They found a major and embarrassing error in the original calculations.
The National Portrait Gallery commissioned a painting of Dame Maggie Smith that makes the Dowager Countess look like a condescending mummy overlord.
Miracles happen everywhere, if you only know where to look. Sometimes you have to look in diarrhea.
What do you do with your instantly publishing short-form social-media account when something big has happened but you don't know exactly what? Correct answer: nothing. But in the absence of reliable information yesterday, reflexive Twitter users filled the time by emptying out the preexisting contents of their heads.
It's already begun: The wacko conspiracy theories about the Boston Marathon bombings are taking over the internet. (In fact, "it" began only 30 minutes after the explosions, when conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones pre-emptively declared it a "False Flag" attack.) Here's our rundown of the most popular—which is to say the dumbest—conspiracy theories and general internet horseshit.
"Anytime bombs are used to terrorize innocent civilians, it is an act of terror," President Obama clarified, citing a definition of terrorism. Now that that's cleared up, we can talk about the fact that we still know nothing about the bombing. The President went on to say:
Bringing pastry to work is the number one surefire way of making friends in the office.
Listen up, kiddies of NYC, 20 years ago, all the places you wantonly roam around without a care in the world were once filled with hostile entities such as rats the size of cats (West Village) and giant, fake vomit puddles (at the 1993 Whitney Biennial). According to some, the whole city was a war zone.
