Diane Lane Brolin filed papers to divorce from Josh Brolin and will return to her maiden name, thank you very much. The couple certainly shared ostensibly happy times on the red carpet, but doesn't she look like she's gonna cry a little bit in this photo?

"Till death do us part" was clearly absent from the vows of one upstate New York man who passed away while riding in a limo on the way to his wife's funeral.

Did you know that the federal government is on track to enact massive, across-the-board spending cuts one week from today—cuts that that could affect important government services, cost hundreds of thousands of people their jobs and greatly slow the growth of the economy? No? You didn't? It's okay: it's an incredibly boring story. But don't worry! We're going to make it interesting, the only way we know how: by putting it in the mouths of attractive famous people. Here now: Ryan Gosling and Kate Upton explain the sequester.

"Let the darn thing go, will ya?" said Sally Field said during the manic 20/20 special Mad About the Oscars with Katie Couric. Field was referring to her frequently quoted speech from the 1985 Academy Awards ceremony (where she won her second Oscar for Places in the Heart), and the way it has reverberated through pop culture in the 28 years since she uttered it.

The largest California outbreak of tuberculosis in a decade is happening in Los Angeles right now, and the Centers for Disease Control has finally dispatched a team of scientists to help LA-area authorities try to control it. The locus of the outbreak, which involves a strain of TB unique to LA, is the city's notorious Skid Row, the small constellation of streets in downtown where Southern California's most downtrodden citizens—homeless people, prostitutes, heroin addicts, combinations of all three—congregate in such close quarters that a disease outbreak was probably inevitable. Since 2007, 11 people have died of TB in LA County, according to the LA Times. In the latest outbreak, 60 of the 78 cases reported to authorities were homeless people living on or near Skid Row.

Earlier this week, Gawker posted a job listing seeking applicants for a reporter position. Among the responses was this letter from Hjalmar Sveinbjőrnsson and Alex, two under-employed Swedish roommates. We have reproduced the letter without correcting grammar or punctuation; the images shown above were attached. Gawker's response follows.

Hell hath no fury like a Scottish optician scorned.

A temporary payroll tax cut was allowed to expire recently, meaning that payroll taxes are now removing an extra 2% from everyone's paychecks. Every corporation in the business of selling things to non-rich Americans is freaking out, because they expect their customers to cut back on spending now. The working class has just seen its take-home pay reduced by 2%; working class people will now have 2% less to spend on food, and clothes, and toilet paper, and everything else. It may be true that letting the payroll tax rise was foolish in the short term. It is definitely true that payroll taxes in general are, as constructed, a bad idea.

Over the last hundred or so years, the FBI has developed a reputation for being kind of a serious place to work. Judging from a series of newly-leaked disciplinary memos though, many of its employees are no better behaved than those of your average drug cartel.

#SlatePitches for kids.

Officers in New Jersey who brought a driver into police headquarters over outstanding traffic warrants discovered something even more outstanding when they searched his cavities: 100 bags of heroin "concealed in his anus."

"Jellicoe that shit." Richard Lawson on a hilarious twitter rant against Time Warner Cable. They're just the worst ever.

Like many things of great consequence, it all started with "Ice Ice Baby." Adalia Rose Williams, at the age of five years, made a video of herself dancing to the Vanilla Ice hit, and the dancing videos were ultimately responsible for what followed: the hundreds of letters, the thousands of emails, the 5.8 million Facebook fans. The unauthorized redneck-rap tribute song selling on iTunes. The obscene put-downs. The death threats.

Two eighth grade classes at Roseland public school in Windsor were made the butt of an extremely cruel and unusual prank orchestrated by a pair of evil teachers that involved tricking the students into thinking they were going on a field trip to Walt Disney World in Florida.

The results of a huge, seven-year study in rural South Africa are in, and god damn: by giving antiretroviral drugs daily to 100,000 people in Kwazulu-Natal, researchers were able to raise the entire region's life expectancy by more than a decade. From the LA Times:

Meat! Think it's just about dead animal flesh, hacked and ground and processed with ever less "natural" flavors and preservatives? Well, I guess you know everything, don't you? No you don't. There are still more secrets to be revealed, about America's obsession with nasty meat.

After just 20 minutes of public comments, North Carolina's House Rules Committee voted to reject a bill that would have legalized the possession and use of medical marijuana in the state.

In a bizarrely lengthy ruling—the reading of which took nearly two hours, most of which was devoted to summary of the evidence and of South African law—Magistrate Desmond Nair granted bail to paralympic medalist Oscar Pistorius, who has been charged with premeditated murder in the shooting death of his girlfriend, law student and model Reeva Steenkamp.

If you've been anywhere near the Internet for the past five years or so, you've no doubt come across the so-called "world's worst portrait tattoo."

What's the worst thing about chief New York Times pop sociologist David Brooks' new column, which is titled "The D.C. Dubstep" in a vague approximation of cleverness? Is it the insipid central metaphor, by which Brooks has each party doing "dance moves" in advance of the coming sequester and its accompanying deep budget cuts? Is it the names of those dance moves, names so embarrassing my hands are actively attempting to prevent me from typing them out? (For the record: the Democrats are doing the "P.C. Shimmy"—P.C. as in "permanent campaign"—the Republicans, the "Suicide Stage Dive.") Is it his misguided, near-religious belief that Both Parties Are At Fault? Or is it this sentence: "The president hasn't actually come up with a proposal to avert sequestration, let alone one that is politically plausible." David. He has. It's right here. It's a banger, I promise. [NYT]