Is New York a city in decline? DNAinfo reports that last week, an unnamed thief stole $113.80 in Häagen-Dazs ice cream from a Times Square Duane Reade. The news comes after reports of 10 other large-scale Häagen-Dazs thefts over the last four months. Forget about subway slashings—the ice cream thief’s spree is what New Yorkers should really be afraid of.

Have you heard that some of the contestants on this season of The Bachelor have chosen to wear shoes designed by Kristin Cavallari?

Now that there’s an alleged recording of comments Donald Trump made about his immigration policy, off-the-record, to the New York Times, perennial runners-up Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are campaigning on it, and hard.

Early yesterday morning, Donald Trump decided to retweet a Benito Mussolini quote originally posted by Twitter bot that Gawker had made several months ago, expressly for the purpose of goading Trump into retweeting a Benito Mussolini quote. In sending out that one little tweet, Donald Trump proved the point we had in mind when we created that bot: to show that Trump’s rhetoric is often indistinguishable from that of history’s most vainglorious and authoritarian fascist dictators—Benito Mussolini, specifically.

When someone like Bernie Sanders rails against a “rigged” economy that is fueling inequality, some believe that he is espousing a radical view. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the White House knows the economy is rigged.

Donald Trump and Chris Christie were friends before each began running for president, and they’re certainly friends now that Christie is campaigning on Trump’s behalf as his first major establishment endorsement. But in the months between those periods—when Trump appeared to be little more than a nuisance to party favorites like Christie, before eventually overtaking them all—the two sniped at each other with fervor.

A New York appeals court held last week that Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s school-age children don’t want to live with him anymore, and should live exclusively with their mother, O’Reilly’s ex-wife Maureen McPhilmy.

BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith has an inside baseball report about a January 5 meeting between Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and the editorial board of The New York Times. According to Smith, many Times employees believe Trump conveyed to the paper—during a portion of the meeting deemed off-the-record —that his extreme policy positions on immigration are more flexible than he’s publicly admitted. Still, the Times refuses to release a transcript of the meeting, or even discuss Trump’s off-the-record comments:

Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who has been imprisoned in North Korea since the beginning of 2016, was presented before assembled press in Pyongyang today to deliver what appeared to be a hopelessly coerced confession, in which he admitted he attempted to steal property from a staff lounge at the hotel where he was staying. After, Warmbier broke down in tears and begged for his release back to the United States.

The latest act of violence at a Donald Trump rally, from today’s event in Radford, VA. It’s unclear if the guard above is indeed part of Trump’s Secret Service detail, or a private security agent.

The New York Times today has a good recap of the situation in Hoosick Falls, New York, a small city outside Albany that has been contending with its own Flint-style water crisis. Hoosick Falls’ water was recently found to have elevated levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, a likely carcinogen.

Something strange is happening to the Supreme Court, which just lost Antonin Scalia to an untimely secret society hunting trip heart failure and now has to contend with Clarence Thomas using his voice to ask actual questions during oral arguments.

While on the Supreme Court, Justice Antonin Scalia, who died this month at 79, worked to make society less just for black Americans, railing against affirmative action and seeking to undermine the Voting Rights Act. His admirers would attribute this not to rank bigotry, but to his textualist legal philosophy. According to some of the dead justice’s former law students, though, a younger Scalia also went out of his way to undermine young legal scholars, simply because they were black.

Ben Carson finally explained what’s keeping him in the presidential race: It’s money.

If you study this list of the 22 best coffee shops in NYC very closely—mapping out which neighborhoods have the highest concentrations of quality espresso, determining which brewing and roasting trends are on the rise—you will have wasted quite a bit of time.

During his acceptance speech for Best Original Song (“Writing’s on the Wall” from Spectre), British singer Sam Smith thrust himself in the identity politics game by labeling the moment as a potential milestone. He said:

Joe Scarborough—former Republican Congressman, current co-host of Morning Joe, and erratic political columnist—has a complicated relationship with Donald Trump, who lifts the ratings of his morning MSNBC show but is also a bigot and maybe an actual fascist. Trump has even called Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski “supporters” and “believers” in his campaign—an understandable statement, given the free publicity Morning Joe has offered the Republican frontrunner. But now Scarborough, writing in The Washington Post, seems to have suddenly soured on Trump...over Trump’s predictable refusal to disavow David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan:

Donald Trump is blaming a “bad earpiece” for pretending he’d never heard of vocal Trump supporter and former KKK grand wizard David Duke during an interview with CNN Sunday.

In 2013's beloved animated feature, Barbie & Her Sisters in A Pony Tale, Barbie (and her sisters) find themselves going up against malicious riding master Philippe Cheynet in an effort to win the Big Horse Tournament. Philippe, of course, ultimately loses, but even more devastating for the villain: He looks uncannily like presidential candidate and noted lizard person Ted Cruz.

During the furious stock market boom of the past several years, the only apartments you could find anywhere were exclusively glass-walled luxury penthouses, priced at $85 million. It seems, however, that we may be waking up from our cash-induced fancy apartment haze at last.