A few days ago, nude photos of Snooki surfaced to little fanfare.

Season five of Mad Men ended just as it began: with a question. "When is everything going to get back to normal?" Roger asks Don in the third episode. The presumptive answer was that order, as they knew it, would never be restored—that the characters would instead have to adapt to a new normal as everything changed around them. Season five's thematic through-line was that adaptation. As each character attempted to move forward, they had to find a way to either avoid obsolescence or capitalize on the changing landscape.

Prepare yourself — the Jerry Sandusky trial has begun, and we're about to learn more and more horrifying details about a history of child sexual abuse.

In "Hang Up the Phone," the new single from Lipa Schmeltzer, who has been called "the Jewish Elvis" according to Wikipedia, the Hasidic and robotic meet.

This is Noah. Noah is drinking root beer for the first time. Naturally, Noah loves it, because root beer is delicious. But is root beer also a form of child abuse?

The appropriate response to Girls, a television show about the beleaguered staff of an under-resourced Boston hospital that turns out in the end to have been the extended fantasy of an autistic boy staring at a snow globe, is to eat someone's face off. But today is the 33rd anniversary of the release of Get the Knack, and there's only two of these things left, so here's a recap.

The Fed announced today that the average net worth of an American family dropped from more than $126,000 in 2007 to $77,300 in 2010, meaning that nearly two decades worth of wealth accumulation have been completely vaporized in the Great Big Recession Thing of Aught Eight And Ongoing. Is there any good news?

This is according to TMZ, whose paid police and EMT sources are earning every dollar this week. Those sources tell Harvey Levin's gossip hounds that once Lindsay arrived at the hospital after her Porsche rammed the 18-wheeler, she panicked and said that she wasn't behind the wheel. This is bad because Lindsay's past run-ins with police officers and drug counselors and judges all insist she be a good girl forever and ever or else she'll find herself in the clink once again.

By and large, albums these days don't get bad reviews. If you look at the music section of crit aggregator Metacritic, you'll see a strip of green, signifying "generally favorable reviews" to "universal acclaim," per the site's metric. I don't know exactly why this is, but given my experience, I'd guess that there's still a lot of placating going on — sometimes publications fear giving negative reviews because it may impede future access. Music publicists can be pretty tenacious.

As recently as last year, Bridget C. Firtle was an investment analyst at a mid-sized hedge fund. Now she's the founder of The Noble Experiment, an aptly-named Brooklyn organic rum distillery (she's got her eye on whiskey, too) that's situated far from Wall Street—in scary, scary Bushwick.

Great work, science: you've made old people live longer. You've successfully extended the most unhappy years of our lives. And the financial sector has done its part by vaporizing all of your money, by gambling. The result? There is no such thing as "inheritance" any more.

The southern Massachusetts town of Middleborough is so goddamn tired of people cursing in public that it is mulling the institution of a penalty for profanity a la Demolition Man.

From the cringe-mongering college kids who brought you "Holding The Door Open For People That Are Far Away" and "Almost Picking Up Chicks" comes the latest 'random awkward moments' prank: Holding People's Hand.

The two couples profiled on last night's episode of TLC's cultural curio spotlight My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding provided an ingenious bit of contrast. There were first cousins Annie and Josh, whose incestuous relationship is apparently permitted in their Romani culture. And then there was the lesbian couple Ana and Linda, whose love is taboo.

Georgia's Department of Transportation may be facing a serious legal challenge from members of a local Ku Klux Klan group that filed an application last month to adopt a mile's worth of Route 515 as part of the state's Adopt-A-Highway program.

Earlier this year, I wrote to every American death row inmate scheduled for execution in the near future. I asked them about their personal history, their lives in prison, and their thoughts on America and its justice system. Today we hear from Abdul Awkal—a man who was scheduled to be executed by the state of Ohio last week, before receiving a last-minute reprieve.

Is it possible to bridge the divide between two NYC subway platforms?

GMA co-host Robin Roberts announced on the show this morning that she has been diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome. Roberts explained that she will begin chemotherapy for MDS, a disease of the blood and bone marrow, today. She was diagnosed with the rare disease on the same day as the much-scrutinized Obama same-sex marriage interview.

Remember how a few years ago, 50 Cent accused Oprah Winfrey of being a white woman, just like one in her audience, after she had taken various stances against the facet of hip-hop culture that once made him such a musical force? Me neither, but she sure did and she confronted him on it long and hard in an interview that ran alongside her Paris Jackson sit-down on last night's Oprah's Next Chapter.

Illusion psychologist Richard Wiseman has spent the last two decades "exploring the backwaters of the human mind," only to discover that we're pretty easy to fool.