Your uncle has been posting on Facebook about "Benghazi" or whatever for months now, and you have no clue what the fuck he's talking about because, really, you don't have time for this shit. It's OK. We do. Here's your guide.

What comes next after unpaid microcontent? Try 4,700 words about foreskins, at about $3 a word. That, according to a source, is what Sloane Crosley supplied to a new project called Medium, from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. Williams won’t pay you for a Tweet but, for now at least, he might pay you depending on who…

Who is your favorite Twitterer? Time magazine has assembled a list of the 140 very most important and entertaining users of the short-form social-media service.

Sky News correspondent Mark Stone was detained by Chinese police in Beijing this morning while in the middle of a live segment on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Most of the episode—include the moment they were detained, and Stone's conversations with one officer in the midst of their detention—was…

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, now to be known forever as Pope Francis, sounds likeable enough, to people who are disposed to like high-ranking men of the cloth. The 76-year-old Argentine is reportedly marked by a devotion to the poor and a cultivated humility—he doesn't like limos or fancy palaces, you see, favoring…

Peripatetic poet-reporter Charlie LeDuff, author of Detroit: An American Autopsy, was arrested and* charged with aggravated assault after allegedly biting a security guard's finger this weekend, the Detroit Free Press reported. The incident happened at a St. Patrick's Day parade.

Jon Lee Anderson, a writer for a weekly magazine called the New Yorker, got angry on Twitter today. A reader with the Twitter name of Mitch Lake (@mlake9) had tweeted at Anderson (@jonleeanderson) to dispute a claim of fact in Anderson's online story about the death of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. Anderson had…

This is the story of star-crossed lovers. This is the story of a newspaperman's last days. This is the story of A COUPLE OF BOOBS.

They call it "the nasty effect."

New York Times columnist and culture scholar David Brooks had some thoughts this week about the difference between hardworking Chinese students and lazy American students. The Chinese, he wrote, see education as a moral enterprise, built around the cultivation of discipline and other internal virtues, while Westerners…

A couple of times a week I walk by the Yale Drama School. It's a strange experience because my dream through college was to go there and become a playwright, a cross between Clifford Odets and George S. Kaufman. When the socialist revolution came I wanted to be the one writing snappy one-liners to support it. Then I…

Dov Hikind is the asshole New York assemblyman representing District 48, a swath of concrete in Brooklyn that includes Midwood and Borough Park, a famous Orthodox Jewish enclave in the borough's southwest quadrant. Hikind is an Orthodox Jew himself. To celebrate Purim this year, marking the deliverance of the Jewish…

Like many things of great consequence, it all started with "Ice Ice Baby." Adalia Rose Williams, at the age of five years, made a video of herself dancing to the Vanilla Ice hit, and the dancing videos were ultimately responsible for what followed: the hundreds of letters, the thousands of emails, the 5.8 million…

The Politico, America's worst media outlet, has a big story today about what's wrong with the White House's relationship with the political media, such as The Politico. According to Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, President Obama disdains, freezes out, and circumvents the representatives of the Fourth Estate, including…

As science predicted, the universe, in its magisterial indifference, has not bothered destroying life on Earth right now. You'd better thaw something out for dinner. Might as well go ahead and tell the people you love that you love them, though.

All the scientists are quite confident that asteroid 2012 DA14 is going to miss us when it comes by at 2:25 Eastern time. It is not all going to come burning through our atmosphere with the force of umpty many hydrogen bombs, burying whole taxa in iridium and ash, reducing human civilization to a concentrated smear of…

Having bungled one of the two central premises of their story about the Navy SEAL who is supposed to have killed Osama bin Laden, the editors of Esquire are now arguing that they were secretly right all along. Yes, Phil Bronstein's piece did say that "the Shooter," as the story calls the SEAL, gets "no health care"…

Now we've seen the art of George W. Bush, but have we really seen it? We asked arts blogger Greg Allen, of greg.org, to give the ex-president's works a close reading.