In the second of The Intercept's three-part interview with Jay Wilds, the star witness in Baltimore County's case against Adnan Syed recounts his meeting with Serial host Sarah Koenig at his home in California.

Comcast, your back-to-back Worst Company in America champion, responded to a series of particularly egregious customer service screwups by putting a VP in charge of making the company's phone support a little less like the wrong side of the Acheron. It isn't working.

Thomas Keller's French Laundry restaurant suffered a Christmas day wine robbery—certainly, the worst kind of robbery either a three-star Michelin rated restaurant or any old wine fan could suffer.

Since its publication this fall, Lena Dunham’s bestselling essay collection, Not That Kind of Girl, has inspired her fans and offered a different kind of inspiration to her foes. The right-wing press, in particular, has taken Dunham’s discursive set of autobiographical writings as a tip sheet to potential scandals and crimes involving the author—who is, as a paragon of metropolitan lefty pop culture, clearly a degenerate.

The Venezuelan government is denying reports of an ice cream crisis. Coromoto, which serves over 850 flavors, claimed it was closing due to the country's shortage of milk. Venezuela's scarcity index was 29% in March, but officials say Coromoto is "serving more and more tourists and residents" than ever. If you say so.

This afternoon, an exterior wall at Chicago's Morton Salt plant collapsed, sending an enormous mound of Morton Salt into a parking lot outside. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, no injuries were reported. More photos are below.

A two-year-old boy accidentally killed a woman, reported to be his mother, this morning at an Idaho Walmart. Police say the boy fatally shot the woman after grabbing a handgun from her purse.

The opinion department of the New York Times is very frightened by recent techno-geopolitical developments, and it wants you to be frightened too. The (alleged) North Korean aggression against Sony Pictures, an editorial explains today, is a wake-up call to a slumbering and inadequately technology-defended nation:

This morning, Rob Thomas accidentally removed a chunk of his left hand's middle finger while preparing breakfast. Jose Canseco accidentally removed a chunk of same with a handgun in October, and shortly after Thomas' mishap, the legendary ballplayer took to Twitter to commiserate.

While cleaning out his bookshelves last night, my boyfriend stumbled across his Ann Arbor Community High School yearbook. He opened to page 35. "Do you recognize anyone?" he asked. I didn't, even though he was on page 35 (he looks very different now!). He pointed to the high school's most famous graduate, a non-descript looking teen named Andrew Wilkes-Krier, who would go on to become the very descript professional partier and "multi-instrumentalist" Andrew WK. Another wallflower blossomed.

The year of 2014 began with a bang: a man on Reddit who had posted photos of his two penises sat in on the site for an AMA session on January 1st. Answering the question, "Do you have a favorite?" the man with two dicks replied, "Yes. The right one. The left one has a grudge against me for it too. lol" With that affirmative moment in penile favoritism, the year of the booty had found its companion in dicks, and the 365 days ahead were long and hard.

The last few days of the year are a great time for everyone to reflect—especially Teresa Giudice, who's heading to prison in a week for bankruptcy, mail, and wire fraud. After all her literal and figurative trials this year, Teresa is committed to improving herself in 2015. Her first step? She'll "stop eating bad carbs."

At the urging of a "friend," this presumably inebriated definitely idiot attempted to scale the half-bicycle mounted 12 feet up—for decorative purposes only, it should be emphasized—on the façade of RV&E Bikes in Canandaigua, New York. You already know what happened next.

According to reports in the New York Post and New York Daily News, the NYPD has basically stopped doing its job since the murder of two officers earlier this month. Arrests, the Post reports, were down 66% in the week following the deaths of officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, compared to the same period in 2013.

As the outrage winds have swirled around the NYPD's decision to turn their backs to Bill De Blasio at the funeral of murdered officer Rafael Ramos, some in the police force's corner have been compelled to bend in the other direction. This weekend, both NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton and semi-professional police state spokesperson Rudy Giulinai distanced themselves from the police protest, with Bratton calling the demonstration "inappropriate." They are right, but for the wrong reasons.

Depending on where and how you were looking, it was a terrific year for gay pop culture... or a rotten one. While representations of gay folk in media have never been more varied, they still aren't varied enough. They are still overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly affluent, overwhelmingly male*. Below are some quick summaries of the conclusions that I've drawn from some of the gay-oriented pop culture I consumed this year. When thinking about this post and why these representations matter at all, I used these words from bell hooks's intro to Black Looks as my guide: "It is only as we collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen."

If you're feeling inspired by the recent Xbox Live and PSN outages that spoiled Christmas for a large swath of the planet, you can now attempt a copycat attack—if you can afford it.

When Uniontown, Pa., police arrived at the scene of a pizza shop robbery, their primary suspect denied he was at fault. Eric Frey said someone else forced him at gunpoint to write a stickup note on a piece of toilet paper—"I have a gun. Give me $300."—and hand it to the cashier at Michael Maria's Pizza.

Pray for her.

The city of New York received 70,000 applications for 38 units of affordable housing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The city's affordable housing plan is a, uh, work in progress.