Actor Andy Griffith, who starred in The Andy Griffith Show and Matlock, died this morning in North Carolina, UNC President Bill Friday — a close friend of Griffith — tells WITN-TV. He was 86.

On June 19, a YouTube user by the name of "CapitalTrigga" uploaded a video of a gang of middle school students harassing bus monitor Karen Klein. He sent links to local news stations, and school authorities, according to a Reddit thread he posted in soon after. Just a couple days later, thanks to popular posts on Reddit, the video was playing on every major TV network in America. Thousands of dollars in donations poured into an online fundraiser for Karen Klein, the video's beleagured star.

@NeedADebitCard is a single-serving Twitter account that aims to convey one very important message: "Please quit posting pictures of your debit cards, people."

Congratulations are in order for the for-profit college industry, which won a major court ruling this week—a judge ruled that the Department of Education could not penalize these fake schools just because they routinely destroyed the financial future of their graduates. Here are the outrageous DoE rules, which were struck down as "arbitrary and capricious," via the WSJ:

Back in March, Fox News host Bill O'Reilly made a promise to American Constitution Society president Caroline Fredrickson that if she were proven right, and SCOTUS upheld the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, he would replay their interview and "apologize for being an idiot."

If his tirades against the paparazzi are any indication, Alec Baldwin is a person who values his privacy. Now he'll be even more removed from unwanted attention with his decision to quit Twitter.

Today, pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline agreed to pay a $3 billion fine in a fraud settlement for illegally marketing drugs and withholding safety information. But Celebrity Rehab fans may be more interested in another aspect of the case against the company — the claim that TV personality Dr. Drew was paid $275,000 to promote the antidepressant Wellbutrin SR for uses not approved by the FDA.

Season three of Louis C.K.'s show Louie hit the air on Thursday night while riding the crest of a tremendous wave of momentum. C.K.'s profile has bubbled up in the last year with huge sales of his comedy album and his tour, which sold $4.5 million in two days. As with many things in C.K.'s world, it's not just the product but the process that's important: he sold his comedy special exclusively on his website and did the same with his tour tickets. By cutting out Ticketmaster, C.K. not only made more by directly selling his tickets for less; he also flouted tradition for the benefit of all.

The more the conversation about coming out changes, the more it stays the same: we're reduced to the fundamentally opposed sides of "celebrities have a moral imperative to come out" and "celebrities have a right to their privacy." I'm less concerned with the former — while the world would certainly be a better place if all gay people felt comfortable identifying as such, and while LGBT youth could always use more role models, there's an element of forced advocacy to suggesting gay people need to be voices for the gay community. Suddenly everything they say or do is viewed through the lens of the cause.

Cats are supposed to be great for your mental health, but a new study found a link between owning a cat and trying to kill yourself.

Every once in a while, a story comes along that offers media outlets a great deal of artistic license when selecting an image to accompany their articles. On Monday, that story was the news of a study published in Pediatrics medical journal, which found a correlation between childhood physical punishment and adult mental disorders.

The pharmaceutical company behind OxyContin is paying dozens of clinical sites to document the effects of the highly addictive painkiller on children as part of an effort to secure a Food and Drug Administration approval to label the drug for use by kids ages six and up, according to a report published by The Daily.

Frequent readers of National Review Online's The Corner might have stumbled over this odd foreign word in contributor Michael Walsh's column about Chief Justice John Roberts: Dolchstoss, which Walsh uses to refer to Roberts' ruling that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional. Literally translated, Dolchstoss means something like "dagger-thrust," but, like so many other words, this one has a particularly interesting valence. Let's take a look at Kevin Baker's 2006 Harper's article "Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth," shall we?

When we heard that Is Anyone Up founder Hunter Moore was arrested this past weekend in New York City, we thought maybe the FBI investigation into his now-defunct 'revenge porn' site had turned up something. Alas, it was only over a nightclub scuffle.

Jonathan Krohn made conservatives jowls flutter giddily when he addressed attendees of the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference at the tender age of 13.

Everyone knows that Anderson Cooper is gay. The moments after the CNN anchor officially came out of the closet this morning were like an "over-it" contest on Twitter — a chance to see who could be the least surprised by the news.

Malia Obama turns 14 this Wednesday, and Barack Obama has declared a United States federal holiday to celebrate the occasion.

Please join us for a discussion on Tenga Eggs, a promotional sex egg, as we discuss their durability, bangability, and likeness to actual human vaginas.

Scott Adams is the guy who writes Dilbert, a cartoon beloved by suicidal office workers across America. Scott Adams is also, not to brag, the smartest person in America, judging simply by the quantity of thinly-veiled self-regard which drips off of each and every post on Scott Adams' blog, especially the rapey ones. Scott Adams' genius possesses such a breadth and girth that it often crowds everything else off the internet, forcing Scott Adams himself to take on the task of pointing out just how big of a genius Scott Adams is.

So many bizarre things are for sale on the online arts-and-crafts fair Etsy that spotting them has become a business in its own right. Most of these are accidental monstrosities, but artist Brad Troemel is selling a line of purposely demented pieces, in what we feel comfortable labeling the weirdest Etsy store ever.