A pregnant woman I didn't know struck up a conversation with me at a party recently. We chatted amicably about the weather (bad), the Golden Globes (fine) and the food at the party (great) before the conversation turned—inevitably, it felt—towards birth (hers). She told me she was nervous but excited, that she could not stop Googling, and how glad she was to be out of the infamously uncomfortable first trimester. "I know what you mean," I said. "When I was pregnant I was so tired I could barely move." Her eyes brightened. "You've got kids?" "No."

We periodically run letters from death row inmates. Today we bring you a letter from Donnie Edward Johnson, a death row inmate in Tennessee, who was sentenced to die for the 1984 murder of his wife, Connie Johnson.

Last weekend, this year’s Super Bowl matchup was decided when the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots blew out the Indianapolis Colts. But instead of talking the Super Bowl, sports fans are obsessing over a hilarious controversy involving the Patriots deflating footballs.

"I feel very strongly about that: an alternative to the idea of women being a certain way." Janet Weiss, the drummer for Sleater-Kinney, was sitting on a leather green swivel chair three feet in front of me as she responded to a question from Broad City's Ilana Glazer about feminism. "The quiet, demure, soft-spoken sort of stereotype. The three of us get on stage and we really try to break that down and give people who feel differently than that a place to go and a place to express themselves."

Caity: Someone at a New Year's Eve party told me they felt we had hit a melancholy streak in our Best Restaurants lately.

Six years into the Obama presidency, I thought we'd finally run out of hotshot administration bros the political press could glowingly profile in exchange for future access to meaningless scooplets. I was wrong.

Every year, the president of America, Barack Saddam Hussein Obama, and other congresspeople choose a handful of Regular Joe (or Josephine, Jose, Josefina, etc) American citizens who have suffered some sort of trauma and/or are representative of an issue to take part in the Constitution's greatest mandate: that the president "shall from time to time give to Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." Cool... but have you ever heard of texting?

It's sorority rush season, ladies, and everyone you know needs to be judged on a scale of "NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" to "THE COOLEST GIRL YOU'VE EVER MET THAT WILL FOR SURE BE AN ASSET TO OUR HOUSE!" Use this Alpha Phi rush handbook a tipster sent us to help make your judgment.

The New Year, or South Philadelphia's share of it, was being assembled in a warehouse with a bright yellow Cottman Transmission sign at the entrance, right on the corner of 13th and Reed. "You don't want to get a screw in your foot," Jinks warned me. All around us were the raw materials and detritus of fun: brightly colored vinyl sheeting; racks of satin dresses, fringed costumes, and sequined suit jackets; prickly tinsel; stacks of lumber; buckets of nails, screws, and paint.

Politics is often comedy. The fact that the robotic and unloveable Mitt Romney may run for president again is funny enough. But Mitt Romney running for president on an anti-poverty platform is truly a comic masterpiece.

Earlier this week, Duke University announced that it would allow a weekly three-minute long Muslim call to prayer to be broadcast from its campus chapel tower. Now they have reversed that decision, proving that Duke University's primary values are intolerance and fear.

Antibiotic-resistant flesh-eating infection Lanny Davis published a column in the Hill yesterday deploring the media's terrible rush to judgment against NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. Because the NFL's self-commissioned investigation into the Ray Rice scandal failed to find evidence that the league had done wrong, Davis wrote, all the various outlets that had reported on the other evidence of the league's wrongdoing owed Goodell an apology.

Even Ross Douthat came out swinging yesterday in favor of the slain cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo ("The Blasphemy We Need"). Since it is difficult to find even one square inch of common ground between right and left in American politics, this ought to have come as good news. Unfortunately, Douthat's Take is yet another of the many, many exercises in facile hypocrisy we've seen since yesterday.

In the weeks since Officer Daniel Pantaleo escaped indictment for killing Eric Garner, the NYPD and organizations that support it have targeted Bill de Blasio with airborne banners, mass back-turnings, and memes about his wife's choice of legwear. It's a horrible display of police fearmongering and entitlement—but it all pales in comparison to "Welcome to Fear City," a pamphlet law enforcement unions published four decades ago to attack the mayor they hated.

Terrorism persists because terrorism works. Terrorism works because we let it.

The fifth season of Fred Armisen's hipster sketch show Portlandia premieres tonight, and if you spend enough time reading about the comedian online, you'll be left with two impressions: First, that he's funny and charming. And second, that his charm and humor mask something of a reputation. For what exactly depends on whom you ask, but here are some adjectives that have been used to describe him over the years: "womanizer," "sociopath," "traumatizing," and, from Armisen himself, "terrible."

For the bulk of his tenure, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has been dogged by rumors that he and his wife consume marijuana with some frequency. Yesterday, at a press conference in Brooklyn, he told a Daily Caller reporter that “I haven’t smoked marijuana since I was at NYU” and denied he ever smoked weed at Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor. We’ve asked about these rumors ourselves. It’s worth highlighting, however, who exactly is spreading them: The mayor’s security detail and their colleagues in the New York City Police Department.