“Wherever there is number, there is beauty,” wrote the Byzantine philospher Proclus Diadochus in the 5th century, unaware how very wrong he was. According to the average plane-riding American, mathematics is now nothing but the Satanical scripture of olive-skinned terrorists.

In October 2011, I was rounding out a year and a half of service in a Whole Foods bakery when I finally stopped to read the text that was on the side of our pie boxes. This was a revelatory moment in my relationship with the company, which wants its employees not just to drink but to steep in their organic non-GMO Kool-Aid. The box stated:

Howard University students raised a Pan-African flag on the campus flagpole last week, prompting the school's president to issue a statement saying, "While I openly support freedom of expression on our campus, I do not support unauthorized use of University property or official platforms to transmit these expressions of thought and ideas." Uh... huh.

It's "a good thing" Aurora movie-theater mass-killer James Holmes "had a 100-round magazine," says a Republican Colorado state senator. "If he had four, five, six 15-round magazines, there's no telling how much damage he could have done until a good guy with a gun showed up."

Mohamed El-Erian recently announced he's leaving as CEO of the bond firm PIMCO. Not to worry, investors: the company says "we are a better team at this moment than we were before." Soooo... why was El-Erian getting paid $100 million a year, then?

In a feat of either unbending loyalty or quiet ratfucking, today's New York Post allowed doomed Republican mayoral nominee Joe Lhota to comment on the recent acts of lurid violence on the West Side:

Lil rapper Lil Wayne is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against Quincy Jones III, documentary filmmaker and son of the more popular Quincy Jones.

The most confusing thing about this clip from The 700 Club, wherein Pat Robertson explains that married liberal women have abortions in order to put themselves on "a level playing field" with childless lesbians, is that he seems to think lesbians can't have children. Whatever you do, Pat, do not watch The Kids Are Alright. [via Little Green Footballs]

Remember how Bill O'Reilly used tidal phenomena to definitively establish the existence of God? And how you laughed at him because the moon, and not God, actually does that? He's got a question for you: How'd the moon get there?

Tabloid sexpot Andrea Peyser has never been accused of being honest, or a deep thinker. But her column today squeezes so much anti-gay, xenophobic rhetoric into so little logic that we feel we must comment upon her arguments.

Are college kids in San Diego particularly racist, or just, perhaps, particularly dumb? Monday, a "KKK-style hood" was found "atop a Dr. Seuss statue" on campus, naturally. Allow us to briefly recap sunny UCSD's recent reign of racial hullabaloo:

The Copenhagen summit has brought the global warming debate to a head, and the skeptics have the upper hand because Al Gore made a math error, scientists wrote mean e-mails, icebergs won't destroy Australia, and it's snowing in Copenhagen.

This "The Internet" thing is nice, but we often think: What it really needs is a self-proclaimed arbiter of its cultural relevance to undertake the preposterously impossible ambitious task of explaining the entire internet. In a book. Hello, Virginia Heffernan!

You have to admit, anti-abortionists have a canny grasp of the "news cycle." What if that baby you decided to abort grew up to be... Barack Obama? Then he'd be pro-choice. But whatever. Advertisement!

Vivacious redhead Paige Davis has agreed to return as host of a new HD version of the once-geisty TLC home-swap design show Trading Spaces. What does this all mean? Well, for one thing, that the Broadway dreams of one Paige Davis, who's played Roxie in the stage version of Chicago —she's a thespian on the level of Lisa Rinna and Ashlee Simpson!— are dashed. Tail between legs, she slinks back...but wait! Perhaps Paige Davis is merely the Terry Malloy of the troubled labor times! She does kinda look like a young Brando.