Are you a writer? Do you admire the writing of Joan Didion? Do you want to express this admiration? Here's a good way to do it: Read some Didion to yourself, and then go out and write a good essay about something, in a voice that sounds like you and reflects your era.

Heads up headphone users: This thing gets loud.

It wasn't irony so much as a stereotypical metaphor, but it was unquestionably worse than rain.

A special spirit day at Oral Roberts University took a tragicomical turn last week when a bald eagle released into the school's Christ Chapel by a professional handler crashed into a window just as students began chanting "USA! USA!"

This video was captured a few years back, but the metaphor remains as stingingly apt as ever.

Firefighters in Naples, aided by a crew from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, helped a bald eagle untangle itself from a fishing line that had left it dangling from a tree some 70 feet above ground.

When Meat Loaf announced last night that he was giving Mitt Romney his first-ever political endorsement because Barack Obama said the Cold War was over and Romney was therefore the only candidate left who was willing to stand up to the Red Menace, the jokes pretty much wrote themselves.

A video of an elephant with a smug expression flinging feces at an innocent bystander? How apropos.

On Valentine's Day, surgeons at the University of California San Diego performed the most romantic procedure possible: They installed a second heart in 36-year-old Tyson Smith's chest, so he could have "two hearts beat as one."

America's foremost authority on juvenile titillation, Katy Perry, has a hot new music video for a song called "Firework." Can you guess what shoots out of her boobs this time?

As a young man, Mark Hawthorn reported for the Times. Now he lives on the streets of Berkeley where he eats garbage and wears women's clothing. Known as the Hate Man, he asks people to tell him, "I hate you."