Today the Daily Beast published a story titled “Is a Serial-Killer Gang Murdering Young Men Across the U.S.?” Boldly defying Betteridge’s Law, the report—written by crime reporter Nicole Weisensee Egan, who covered the Bill Cosby trial for the Beast—suggests that the answer to the question posed in the headline may…

When it’s winter and cold outside and, say, your office is an uninsulated block of freezing concrete, you and your colleagues might spend a lot of time haggling over space heaters, thinking about warmth. There are many different warmths; here they are, ranked from best to worst.

So, yesterday, hilariously inept* conservative politics flack and weird cable news creature Liz Mair did, and later deleted, a very bad tweet:

Louisville Metro Police Officer Deidre Mengedoht was killed during a traffic stop right before Christmas, when her cruiser was rammed by a truck driver, who was later charged with murder and operating a vehicle under the influence. On a Dec. 29 broadcast, WPSD’s Brianna Clark reported on her funeral and ended up…

I am told this spectacular light show over New York City tonight was caused by a transformer explosion at a power station in Queens, and not by a massive meteor burning up in the atmosphere, nor by slimy space aliens parking their city-sized mothership over the city and preparing the invasion. One thing we can all…

I’m a sucker for any show about a bunch of flawed misfits working together for some common goal—Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Community, Veep, you name it. And no show in 2018 stuck together a more lovable, broken, inspiring group than NBC’s The Good Place, a half-hour comedy/sci-fi/philosophy lesson that’s only getting…

King Princess has exactly six real songs out and every single one of them is good as hell. “1950” is a perfect pop song that you better like or else you’re the cops, and it’s not even the best song on her debut EP. Friendship ended with Lorde; now King Princess is new best friend. - Patrick Redford

Let’s get this out of the way up top: Yes, I agree, you wouldn’t think a cultural history of Oklahoma City would make for a compelling book. (I’ve had this conversation a lot this year.) But Sam Anderson’s Boom Town is the most engrossing piece of writing I’ve read all year. The book weaves together the story of the…

Christmas feels incomplete without at least four-to-six partial viewings of A Christmas Story, Bob Clark’s 1983 movie based on Jean Shepherd’s semi-autobiographical stories. By now, if you have a heart, you’ve seen each segment and running subplot dozens of times. But which are the best? And which are the less-best…

If you are anything like me, many times you have been riding the subway and have had the thought, “What is wrong with this dang subway is that it is not exponentially more expensive and slower than this.” Many times you have seethed, through clenched teeth, “Goddammit, it just churns my guts that this subway does not…

If you haven’t heard, white-supremacist whisperer Olivia Nuzzi and guy who was fired from the New Yorker after a sexual misconduct investigation Ryan Lizza are a couple. Congrats to the sex-havers. While I’d usually try to avoid thinking about a woman my age being with a guy who is old enough to be her father, it was…

On Tuesday, conservative rag The Federalist—a website perhaps best known for its endorsement of statutory rape and its former use of a “Black Crime” tag—published an opinion blog by a gay guy named Chad Felix Greene titled “The Stigma Against My Conservative Politics Is Worse Than The Stigma Of Being Gay.”

Probably nothing anyone does at this point stands more than a remote chance of averting any but the very most extreme, apocalyptic tolls humanity’s trashing of the planet could inflict on the global ecosystem and human society within the next few decades. The time when people could have addressed this already-ongoing…

I purchased my last iPhone in the summer of 2016 and I’m still using it. But this blog is not a boast about how I am resisting consumerism and striking a blow against Apple’s dedication to planned obsolescence. I’m not bragging about how I haven’t (yet) dropped my phone in the toilet. The purchase date of my iPhone is…

Before we begin: Yes, those appear to be two actual human workers on a cherry picker getting clocked by this falling clock face at Purdue University, but according to the clock contractors, nobody was injured. So please enjoy this mini-disaster with the sound cranked loud and your conscience clear:

What you’re looking at here is a cow named Knickers, a Holstein Friesian that lives on a farm in Western Australia with a bunch of other regulation-size cows that honestly look laughably small—like a child’s toys, like a dull child’s stupid playthings—in comparison. This is because Knickers, per Perth Now, is nearly…

1. Your soul is an appalling dump heap, overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled-up knots.

It never takes much. Tubbs started when some power lines blew over. All it took for Carr to roar to life was a flat tire. Thomas was born of a utility malfunction. Camp was probably the same. Their beginnings almost don’t matter, since the story of each of those historic wildfires, and all the fires raging right now,…

This piece is part of a recurring series that aims to be a complete guide to the laws of war. You can read previous entries here.

President Donald Trump often stands near a helicopter on the White House’s South Lawn while reporters shout questions at him. Certain elements of this ritual are the same every time. The wheedling honk of Trump’s voice and the uneasy tilt of his standing-on-a-hoverboard-for-the-first-time posture are constants, as is…