This morning, the Queen of Soul/Surly Auntie of Pop Culture, Aretha Franklin, was beamed via satellite into a dozen or so different local and cable morning shows in a junket to promote her upcoming Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics album (featuring her divisive cover of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep"). As a result of the satellite delay, Franklin's faulty earpiece, her lack of sleep, and her general does-not-give-a-fuck-ness, a comedy of errors ensued. Highlights are above.

Starbucks' newly liberalized dress code now reads: "Tattoos are allowed, but not on your face or throat. Treat tattoos as you treat speech — you can't swear, make hateful comments or lewd jokes in the workplace, neither can your tattoos." Piss coffee.

Two male strippers have placed themselves under voluntary quarantine on the advice of the CDC after finding out they sat less than 3 feet away from Ebola-stricken nurse Amber Vinson on her flight from Cleveland to Dallas.

Last night, Taylor Swift posted a video to YouTube in which she tries to convince the world that she's human. As someone who has had many human-to-human interactions, I remain unconvinced.

A former employee of accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers claimed Comcast got him fired from his job, and set an Oct. 14 deadline for the company to give him a full apology and a monetary settlement. He got a half-assed apology instead. So, two days after the deadline passed, he stuck to his word and filed a lawsuit.

Today in the theoretically infinite series, "Why it is expensive to be poor:" renting to own. Don't do it!

After signaling interest in appointing an "Ebola czar" to head-up the United States' response to the virus—which has been criticized as inefficient from all sides—President Obama will appoint Vice President Joe Biden's former chief of staff, Ron Klain, to the post, CNN reports.

Michael Dunn was sentenced to life in prison without parole Friday morning for killing 17-year-old Jordan Davis in November 2012. Dunn, who murdered Davis over a dispute about loud "thug music" coming from a car the teen was sitting in, issued a halfhearted non-apology to Davis' family before the sentencing.

A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health draws a conclusion that should be obvious to anyone familiar with the NYPD's stop-and-frisk tactic: If you can't leave your house and walk around outside without fear of police harassment, you're likely to have some adverse psychological effects.

A couple having sex in the ocean off the Italian coast earlier this week reportedly became stuck together—"due to suction," according to the Local—and required a trip to the emergency room to be separated.

JPMorgan Chase asking for lavish public subsidies to build its new high rise towers in Manhattan just goes to show why such subsidies should be banned, and also why JPMorgan Chase is not all that popular, in general.

"I don't know what I'm saying. My face is melting off. I didn't even answer anything, I just said a bunch of words," admitted Emma Stone on Monday night, sitting on a panel with three of her Birdman co-stars after a screening of their film, as part of the 92nd St. Y's Reel Pieces with Annette Insdorf series. Those words concluded more than a minute of rambling from Stone in response to an audience member's question about the interplay of craft, social media, and fame that Alejandro González Iñárritu's new movie about acting touches on.

Sixteen people fell 65 feet to their deaths at an outdoor pop concert in Seongnam, South Korea today after the ventilation grate they were standing on collapsed. According to the Associated Press, 11 more people are seriously injured. Concertgoers were watching 4minute, a K-pop girl group, when the grate collapsed.

The layout of Lafayette Street where it meets Prince Street was reconstructed recently, so that it now includes a short median. For human purposes, the median is engineered to separate the bicycle lane from the main flow of traffic, and to mark the beginning of the off-curb parking spaces. For the purposes of other living things, it also happens to offer a concrete-bounded patch of open dirt.

Floyd Mayweather, the world's best boxer, is apparently teaching Justin Bieber to box. A bad idea, considering how many people would like a chance to beat up Justin Bieber. Zero upside, Justin. [Pic via]

The State Department announced today that a healthcare worker who might have handled an Ebola specimen at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where Liberian citizen Thomas Eric Duncan died from virus last week, is currently on a 3,690-passenger Carnival cruise in the Caribbean.

The family of actress Misty Upham, whose body was found Thursday at the bottom of a suburban Seattle ravine, says local police wouldn't take them seriously when they first reported her missing.

Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital released a video of Dallas Ebola patient Nina Pham joking around with her doctors Thursday night, shortly before she was transported to a Maryland hospital.

Centers for Disease Control officials say the Texas nurse with Ebola may have been experiencing symptoms several days before she checked herself into a Dallas hospital.

According to the Wall Street Journal, one of Joe Biden's sons was kicked out of the Navy reserves last year after he tested positive for cocaine less than a month after joining.