One night last week, Houston rapper/viral phenomenon Riff Raff was sitting in my living room in Brooklyn, eating a bag of Wise BBQ potato chips. The day before, he'd flown to Daytona Beach, Fla., to shoot a music video with 19-year-old viral rap ingénue Kitty Pryde, and now he was in New York to do photo shoots and interviews for two major rap magazines. He was scheduled to play The Bamboozle festival in New Jersey the following day. He sat on the couch next to the two attractive women that he'd brought with him—"my girl and her friend," he explained—and while his girl's friend rolled a small joint, Riff Raff and I played NBA Street Vol. 2 on my PlayStation 2.

This Sunday, Newark Mayor Cory Booker went on NBC's Meet the Press, home of David Gregory's meatball pitch to right-handed batters, and called Barack Obama's attacks on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital record "nauseating."

EXT. NETHERMEAD MEADOW AT PROSPECT PARK, INSIDE THE GREAT GOOGAMOOGA FESTIVAL — 3:00 p.m.

At about 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday night, while standing in the Roosevelt Rotunda at the American Museum of Natural History on 81st Street and Central Park West, my friend Sam and I stuff an eighth of psychedelic mushrooms into egg rolls and eat them. It is time for the 2012 Clio Awards, the advertising world's version of the Oscars.

Yesterday morning, the New York Times reported on a super-PAC plan submitted to Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs. Entitled, "The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good," it proposed a $10 million series of ads tying Obama to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. By early afternoon, Ricketts had abandoned the plan outright.

The Washington Post reports that Chuck Brown, the so-called "godfather of go-go," died today in Baltimore. He was 75 and had been hospitalized for pneumonia earlier this month.

Two years ago today, Salon's Twitter account pressed send on a single, everlasting tweet:

Ah, Florida, cradle of justice. One day, when they document the great codifiers of the law, the names will ring out: Hammurabi, Solon, Justinian, Blackstone, Napoleon, Tallahassee. Last Friday, the state that's hosted the politically ugly Trayvon Martin reality show handed down a 20-year sentence against Marissa Alexander.

Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator is the picture of an equal-opportunity offender, but don't expect it to be taken as such. Racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-American sentiment, anti-Arab sentiment, anti-celebrity sentiment — they're all key to the film's ruthless humor, but there is one breed of jokes that may affect delicate sensibilities above all the others: the rape joke.

A few weeks ago, I created a profile and logged onto VKontakte, the most popular Russian-language social network. I entered some personal information, uploaded an especially flattering picture of myself, then used the search function to find all single women between 25 and 35 in Ukraine who were online at the moment — around 7:30 p.m. Ukraine time. There were more than 10,000 available, all sorted by a rating system which seemed to be directly proportional to the amount of pictures a woman had posted of herself in a string bikini, and how good she looked in said bikini.

There are a slew of young, talented rappers coming out of New York these days, but none of them sound very "New York." The A$AP crew of Harlem, which recently toured with Toronto's Drake and Compton's Kendrick Lamar, have a "placeless and universal" sound that seems more influenced by Houston's chopped and screwed beats than DJ Premier's horns; Azealia Banks has a distinct enough flow, but her tracks are more electronic than anything practiced by New York's hip hop gatekeepers. And out of Brooklyn, Kilo Kish has outsourced beats for her casual, monotone rhymes to The Internet, Syd the Kid's spaced-out L.A. duo.

For four years, my mother had a crippling fear of death. It started during her first bout with breast cancer. While recovering from her mastectomy, she insisted on driving my father to and from work, so that if he died in a car accident she'd be there to say good-bye. Nobody in our family was allowed to drive in bad weather, lest the vehicles hydroplane and we die. Christmas traditions were banned; anything that reminded my mother of the passing of time reminded her of death. She objected to my teen sleeping habits: "Just lying there all morning, like you are dead. How do I know you are not dead?" Chastised for her morbidity, my mother would snap, "You don't understand."

Yesterday the Washington Post reported that, when he attended prep school, Mitt Romney mocked and assaulted students suspected of being gay. Call me a cynic, but I expect more from America's future sociopaths. When stories come out about non-consensual masturbation or the younger, feminine boys being expected to "do mouth stuff" on the seniors ("But no queer business or nothin'!") then it's a prep school scandal.

Last night, Politico published a breakdown of how ABC's Robin Roberts scored the President Obama gay marriage interview yesterday and, through several producers and media analysts, offered up these non-media-related credentials: Black. Christian. 50-year-old. Sports fan. Female.

Last week, after learning that Adam "MCA" Yauch of the Beastie Boys had died at 47, Gawker asked sometimes Deadspin contributor Peter Nash—also known as Prime Minister Pete Nice of 3rd Bass—to share his thoughts about MCA's legacy and being a white MC during the golden age of New York hip hop. He obliged.

Even for conservatives, the Mitt Romney campaign provides a meeting point between high finance and low expectations. Now that the GOP nomination is all but officially wrapped up, Mitt is free to shake the Etch-a-Sketch, tack to the center and betray the perfectly reasonable people who wear felt hats, stockings and breeches to point out the villainy of, say, Head Start.

It was down to four on last night's season two finale of The Voice: Team Christina's mom-popper Chris Mann, Team Cee-Lo's Juliet Simms, Team Blake's soul crooner Jermaine Paul, and Team Adam's wind-up dancing troubadour Tony Lucca. One won. It was...

Back in summer 2009, the Beastie Boys were forced to pull out of their scheduled headlining performance at the All Points West music festival in Jersey City, N.J. Yauch had just announced that he'd been diagnosed with cancer, and the group was forced to cancel a lot of shows as he sought treatment.

It's about as easy to lose track of Mitt Romney's political gaffes as it is to lose track of the number of drinks you've had during a beer pong tournament. Their pace is relentless, both are sort of shamefully satisfying, and ultimately they make your head hurt.

Chief Keef, the 16-year-old unsigned rapper from Chicago, is still on house arrest at his Grandma's, but now he has a Kanye West remix to his name, because technology has had something of an effect on musical collaborations. Instead of recording in the studio together, Kanye sent some producers from his new label, G.O.O.D. music, to Keef's home in Chicago, where they set up a laptop and a microphone. Keef typed out a verse onto his iPhone on the spot, then yelled into a microphone for a few minutes, and this banger of a street remix was born.