Last night Obama joined Instagram, the hip iphone photo app that lets you use artsy filters to make your photos look crappy and old, in a romantic way. Obama's really making a bid for the 18-30 "spends too much time on the internet" demo.

Michele Bachmann, the magical flightless wish bird willed into existence by thousands of liberal bloggers, is no more. After a sixth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, Bachmann announced on Wednesday that she would be suspending her campaign and returning to her homeland, Quadling Country in Oz.

This A-lister is using this bisexual up-and-comer as his latest beard. This rapper insisted he be Photoshopped to looking younger, this actor is back on the sauce, this former sitcom star is a reclusive germophobe, and this former sitcom star is sleeping with her fans. Wow, former sitcom stars sounds really, um, interesting.

After apprehending the New Yorker who constructed Molotov cocktails out of Starbucks Frappucino bottles and used them to attack Hindu and Muslim places of worship, a bodega, and a priate residence yesterday, the NYPD extracted a confession from the Frap-otov bomber. He's not a huge bigot, just a minor one with a really strong sense of vengeance, the New York Post reports:

Time-traveling Slate essayist Katie Roiphe is back from 2005 with another crazy article about "the information superhighway." This one—a real scorcher!—is about how she will never get off the internet, ever, no matter how many of her friends beg her.

On tonight's Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert paid homage to the late great Paul the Octopus and introduced his own invertebrate prognosticator, an incredible snail by the name of Megyn Shelly. Amazingly, she was right on the money: she chose no one.

Tonight's Daily Show can't comment on the Iowa caucuses on account of having been taped earlier today but that didn't stop Jon Stewart from breaking out his "White Man's Sampler" box of chocolates and breaking down the candidates. The plain one is Romney of course, the one filled with nuts is Bachmann and the one with the terrible cherry concoction inside is, naturally, Santorum.

Well here we are, first voting night of the presidential season, and CNN is already completely insane, playing with ludicrous pastel penis holograms while Wolf Blitzer meanders around looking for some anxious correspondent to appear on a garish outer space screen and say nothing. Only in Iowa!...?? Let's get this over with.

Illicit photography is way up in Japan, and police blame smartphone silencers - apps that hush up the sound of taking a picture. Maybe this spy technology will be America's next big cultural import from Asia. God knows we have enough pervs.

Notorious class sleeper, D student, failed Oscar host, art enthusiast, multiple PhD candidate, and sometimes actor James Franco is going to ruin literature once again. He sold a novel! To Amazon! About actors! My eyes are getting a workout from all this rolling.

The Gawker Political Desk will be covering the returns from Iowa tonight starting around 7:30 or 8. (Bad things happen if you start watching CNN's 80-person floppy muppet panel too early.) Pray to Allah for a Romney third-place finish!

The past few weeks have seen an impressive burst of political activism from nerd hive Reddit. Now they're talking about "destroying" senators. Oh jesus, this does not bode well.

1988 Iowa caucus runner-up Pat Robertson — that's still funny, isn't it? — is getting disturbingly cocky in his regular secret magical chit-chats with The Almighty these days.

Forthcoming Linda Lovelace biopic Lovelace has the most strangely star-studded cast since Bobby: In addition to blue-eyed blonde Amanda Seyfried in the title role as the brown-eyed brunette porn star, Demi Moore will portray Gloria Steinem and James Franco is rumored to be closing in on a cameo as Hugh Hefner.

If there's one thing everyone knows about Mountain Dew, the soda specifically designed to gross out your mom when you make her buy it for sleepovers, it's that it's extreme. How extreme? So extreme it will turn a mouse into jelly!

Technically, I'm on quasi-vacation this week but I do feel like I should address the editorial shift that will take place once I officially begin January 9th. Maybe it will be drastic, maybe it won't be. The only thing I know for sure is that in order to guarantee job security at this site I must avoid increasing traffic too much, since both former editors Gabriel Snyder and Remy Stern did that and were swiftly let go. Let's lay out the list of iterations for Gawker I've been told to think about creating, just to give a glimpse at what soon may come.

Check out this French trailer for the new thriller Upside Down. I don't quite get how this high concept works. Apparently there is a world with two sets of gravity and those who are right side up can't fall in love with those upside down. Unless you're Kirsten Dunst, of course.

Hello, Upper Middle Class! I see you there, at your professional job, with your graduate degree and your above-average salary and your subtle gradations of taste. I bet you thought 2012 was going to be your year! Sorry, bud: both Starbucks and the Times are raising their prices.

Hundreds of bloggers were bribed to write posts promoting Google Chrome in recent weeks. The scandal is only worsened by Google's excuse: The whole scheme was dreamed up by the company it hired to help make things popular on the web.

Yes, Omar Little was booked on possession of a handgun in Baltimore this weekend. No, silly, it's not Omar Little the awesome gay vigilante who terrorized the drug dealers of Charm City that we all rooted for on The Wire, this was a real Omar Little. Turns out, he also favors a life of crime.