Andrew Sarris, the charmingly disputatious Village Voice and New York Observer film critic who helped make New York's film community in the '70s and '80s a cauldron of intrigue and joyous rhetorical sniping, died this morning after suffering a fall. He was, as the Times put it, an "intellectual duelist" whose frequent battles with rival Pauline Kael didn't stop him from inviting her to his wedding to Molly Haskell. Kael declined: "That's OK. I'll go to Molly's next wedding." (Haskell and Sarris remained married; she is his only survivor.)

You know those "clipboard guys" who purposely block your path in an effort to force you to stop and sign some useless petition to support some random cause? Really annoying, right?

This is a new series that names people who are not publicly gay, but have been shackled by rumors throughout their careers which warrant further discussion. The evidence provided has been gleaned from various Gawker sources enamored with this sort of outing process. If you have any evidence proving their gayness or their heterosexuality, please share it in the discussion system. Hooray.

While you're off trying not to injure your too-big-for-this body on a lawsuit-in-waiting slip n' slide, the Schmalzes are out back getting injured with abandon on their homemade water slide with built-in loop.

On last night's Dance Moms, 21st century carnival barker/dance instructor Abby Lee Miller had her student Maddie perform "an old routine that was undefeated, that was absolutely beautiful": Helen Keller. Seriously, she had a child gracefully flit around the stage and do an aerial over a doll while working in some wild flailing and scrambling a la Keller via Patty Duke. This is interpretive dance at its least sensory.

Alec Baldwin, a famous adult who has been famous for an estimated 44 percent of the time he's spent on this earth, is tired of the paparazzi who take photographs of him and, by extension, the "political opposition" inherent to the media that distort stories such as Alec Baldwin allegedly punching a member of the paparazzi who attempted to take a photo of him, and so Alec Baldwin hid under a blanket yesterday to avoid getting photographed by a member of the paparazzi.

Mashup necromancer Nick Bertke (AKA Pogo AKA Fagottron) is back with a lead breakfast full of Pulp Fiction goodness that's too sweet not to scarf down in a single sitting.

Drew Magary worked in advertising for ten years. SAD MEN is a series of stories from his time in the industry.

A grand jury in Texas has decided not to indict a Shiner man who made headlines last week for beating his 5-year-old daughter's molester to death with his bare hands.

Simpsons/Futurama creator Matt Groening has decided to end his long-running comic strip Life in Hell after over thirty years in print.

Yesterday we found out that Jonah Lehrer, the Gladwellesque whiz kid who's The New Yorker's newest staff writer, reused his own old writings for every goddamn blog post he's written for The New Yorker so far. A self-plagiarist, he is. Big time. What's the latest? He is an even bigger time plagiarist (self, and otherwise!) than we knew yesterday. And for it, he should probably be eased out of journalism's highest echelon.

As an American I though I'd grown jaded to bizarre pizza toppings. After all, I've seen my compatriots create such abominations as the cheeseburger crust pizza, the breakfast pizza and the Oreo pizza. So it is a testament to Swedes' twisted imagination that Swedish pizzas makes me wonder what they're putting in the Fjords up there.

You might have noticed that over the past few weeks we've been bugging you to take the 2012 Gawker Media Census. Well, try not to cry too hard, but the most exciting survey on the whole World Wide Web has come to a close. We learned all sorts of fun facts about the 3,495 Gawker fans who responded this year, like how 50% of readers now watch more movies on their computers than they do on TV. So maybe Qwikster wasn't such a terrible idea?

When Michael Nicholson parents told him to pursue his education to the fullest, they likely didn't mean for him to still be a student at 71. But the Kalamazoo native just can't seem to get enough schooling: He's currently starting his 30th degree.

The producers of Xi'an Up Close, a Chinese investigative news program, were forced to issue an apology to viewers after sending a reporter to cover the discovery of a "mystery mushroom" that was ultimately identified as a sex toy.

This is a new series that names people who are not publicly gay, but have been shackled by rumors throughout their careers which warrant further discussion. The evidence provided has been gleaned from various Gawker sources enamored with this sort of outing process. If you have any evidence proving their gayness or their heterosexuality, please share it in the discussion system. Hooray.

Last night, Lifetime premiered its Bristol Palin: Life's a Tripp, a bad, boring reality show about a bad, boring person. "Hi, I'm Bristol Palin. I'm a 21-year-old single mom from Wasilla, Alaska. My son Tripp is the love of my life," was how she introduced herself, as though that would turn us all into Andy Cohens and watch what happens. When she said that her son Tripp gives her life "purpose and direction," my balls retracted.

An aged bus monitor employed by the Greece Central School District in Rochester, New York, is moved to tears while being verbally abused by a murder of petulant school children in a blood-boiling video uploaded to YouTube by a concerned third party.

A 59-year-old woman from Bonita Springs, Florida, was arrested at Southwest Florida International Airport and charged with misdemeanor battery for allegedly groping a TSA supervisor.

A U.S. Senate subcommittee is holding hearings on the practice of solitary confinement in our nation's prisons. Here's what Anthony Graves, who spent 18 years in prison for murder before being exonerated, had to say about the practice: