Flooding in the Midwest Tuesday shut down portions of two interstates and threatened hundreds of homes, the Associated Press reports. At least 18 people have been killed. South of St. Louis, the Mississippi river, swollen after days of torrential rain, is expected to crest at record levels later this week.

Before making their way to Mexico’s Pacific coast, where they were eventually detained, “affluenza teen” Ethan Couch and his mother threw themselves a party, officials said Tuesday. Later, as the duo drove south, police received “dozens and dozens of calls of sightings” of them or their truck.

Life is an ongoing process of intellectual growth and discovery. Here are the things I added to my personal body of knowledge in 2015.

You’re not going to find a more 2015 SEO-optimized story than this one: Two Belgian newspapers are reporting that during November’s ISIS manhunt in Brussels, eight soldiers and two policewomen coped with the tension by throwing an orgy.

Aloe vera gel. Magnesium caps. Maple syrup. Organic Chlorella. Omega-3 fish oil. Homemade coconut Kefir. Bone broth. Agave (but not any more). These are all items Kristin Cavallari has consumed to soothe what ails her. Today, she tried a new brand of snake oil: “He Shou Wu powder.”

“Think of it as The Establishment 2.0,” says the New York Times, of the “Working Team of the Itasca Project,” a group of “14 men and women who oversee some of the biggest companies, philanthropies and other institutions in Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding area,” and who meet weekly “to quietly shape the region’s economic agenda.” Or think of it another way, if you want. Like... as a cabal?

In the early 1950s, writer Patricia Highsmith had every reason to hide her pride, and quite a few to hate herself. Living under the tyranny of McCarthyism was devastating for those with same-sex attraction—if homosexuality was acknowledged in public at all, it was condemned. And yet, Highsmith transcended.

Here you will find dozens of predictions about what 2016 will bring for journalism, from “Local News Gets Smarter on Mobile” to “Distributed Platforms Will Be Your New Homepage.” The only journalism prediction worth a shit in any year is “I Hope I Keep My Job.”

Martin O’Malley: probably not the next American president. Politico reports that one (1.00) human individual person attended his campaign “event” in Iowa yesterday, and that person isn’t even onboard.

[All images via Getty except for numbers 7, 10, 25; top photo from Mobile, Ala.]

The United States incarcerates a sickening and outrageous number of people. Any idea that could mitigate this crisis is worth listening to. Here’s one.

Josh Duggar, Allison Williams’s ass, unbridled panic, Bieber dick, Lenny Kravitz dick, horny moms, and that stupid goddamn dress. These are the posts you monsters clicked on the most this year. Why not click on them again?

First, let’s toast to Netflix’s impeccable timing. It’s hard to imagine a better moment when the platform could have released Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’s series Making a Murderer. Its target audience of socially conscious liberals with the kind of disposable income that can fund a Netflix subscription and the devices to use it with is, at this point, fed up with the mishandling of power by the police (generally in the form of racism, though Murderer is entirely about whites). Capping a year when Serial and The Jinx were the talk of the internet, Murderer is as familiar and definitive as every single end of year Top 10 list attempts to be.

An official formerly in charge of regulating the waste dump that collapsed and triggered a landslide in the Chinese city of Shenzen has reportedly killed himself.

“Where have all the baby Jesuses gone?” ask New Jersey citizens, befuddled by the sudden disappearance of our lord and savior, the newborn lamb.

Mexican authorities have detained the “affluenza” teen and his mother near a Mexican beach resort town, CNN reports. U.S. Marshals and the FBI have been looking for Ethan Couch for weeks.

Donald Trump, a man who has very clearly shown that authority is not becoming of him, was just given one doozy of a responsibility.

A Puerto Rico policeman, Guarionex Candelario Rivera, is in custody after fatally shooting two superior officers and a colleague on Monday. A police spokeswoman told the Associated Press that Rivera took the three police officers hostage before killing them in an office at the station in Ponce.