Last week, mustache-stroking corporatist sloganeer Thomas Friedman used his immensely valuable column space in the New York Times to write a love letter to a company run by his daughter's college roommate. Could Thomas Friedman possibly top that for sheer laziness and nepotistic indulgence? But of course.
Besides forcing young college graduates into a decades-long penurious existence as veritable indentured servants to institutions of higher learning, there's another downside to our nation's $1 trillion student debt: it's stopping young people from starting business. Businesses! The lifeblood of Republicanism!
What is Marine Corps boot camp really like? According to an email that a current recruit sent to a bunch of his friends, it's a lot of being called a "faggot" by your drill instructors. And, if you happen to be brown-skinned, a lot of being called "terrorist." Not to mention "beast mode" workouts.
Last week, top editors at the Village Voice resigned in protest when they learned that management wanted them to lay off several members of their already-decimated staff. This morning, those layoffs came down. They're not pretty.
The people of Boston are currently holed up in their homes as authorities canvas the area for a suspect considered "armed and extremely dangerous." Meanwhile, Martha Stewart is working frantically to protect her grandchildren from an even more sinister enemy: flowers.
Like something out of an American Pie movie — and about as funny — actor Eddie Kaye Thomas, best remembered as Paul "Shit Break" Finch from the long-running film franchise, had to call a SWAT team on a knife-wielding female houseguest whom he had met just 24 hours earlier at a diner and brought back to his Hollywood Hills home.
The most common refrain you hear in the wake of tragedies like Monday's Boston Marathon bombing is also the one that sounds most like a redneck bumper sticker: "Don't be scared." In an interview with the Washington Post yesterday, author and security expert Bruce Schneier said the appropriate response to terrorist violence is to face it fearlessly: "If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they lose, no matter how much carnage they commit."
On the heels of Connecticut's post-Newtown push to restrict assault weapons, a Texas tea party congressman has plans to send form letters to Yankee gunmakers, goading them to move their operations to the Lone Star State.
With fine art, gambling, gangsters, Hollywood stars, the Olympics, bribery, FBI agents and more, this story has something for everyone. On Tuesday afternoon, FBI agents raided the Helly Nahmad Gallery in Manhattan, charging its owner, Hillel Nahmad, with being involved with an international gambling and money laundering ring.
Chris Heath warns you up high in his GQ cover story on Robert Downey Jr., that: "Conversations with Robert Downey Jr. are rarely linear, and sometimes it takes a moment to realize how one thing might relate to the next." Yes, this seems to be the perfect way to set up the inscrutable parallel the actor draws to overly emotional acting and bestiality porn (not that he's watched it, he's just seen it being sold in Amsterdam...). Here is the powerful exchange:
Miracles happen everywhere, if you only know where to look. Sometimes you have to look in diarrhea.
What do you do with your instantly publishing short-form social-media account when something big has happened but you don't know exactly what? Correct answer: nothing. But in the absence of reliable information yesterday, reflexive Twitter users filled the time by emptying out the preexisting contents of their heads.
BuzzFeed, your go-to source for lists of animals, snuff videos, and racial superiority propaganda, has posted a fascinating new political story about the persistent personal rumors dogging Sen. Marco Rubio. Well, "about" might not be the right word. The story, by McKay Coppins, is premised on the existence of the rumors, and clearly relies on reporting and interviews during which the rumors were discussed. The only thing missing is the rumors themselves, because, Hey, BuzzFeed doesn't traffic in rumors!
Remember that children's book "Go the Fuck to Sleep" that came out a couple years ago? Samuel L. Jackson did a reading of it and Werner Herzog did a reading of it and it was so hot that it literally burned down all the bookshelves and Borders had to declare bankruptcy the company could not afford to rebuild its stores from the smoldering ashes wrought by this instant classic?
In an effort to further flesh out his mysterious list of 99 problems, Jay-Z has released a track called "Open Letter" that addresses a couple of his more recent predicaments.
Nick Denton, who owns Gawker Media, sent out the following memo today:
