This weekend, as law-enforcement officers across the country devoted their resources to the manhunt and capture of the dangerous criminal Reese Witherspoon, an actual crime against humanity was being ignored: Musician Amanda Palmer was writing the worst poem ever composed in the English language, "A Poem for Dzhokhar."

Recently, Yahoo! News commissioned a couple Pulitzer Prize winners and also James Franco to write poems on the subject of Barack Obama's second inauguration. The full text of James Franco's poem is available here. You also have the option of watching him read the poem into a webcam while lying down in bed wearing a…

Famed German poet Novalis once said of poetry, "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason." Today, with a deeply personal yet universally-minded work read at President Obama's second inauguration, Cuban-born gay poet Richard Blanco attempted to apply salve to some of our nation's sorest wounds with language. Just…

Canada's National Post and the AP note a photograph, posted to link-sharing website Reddit, of failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney visiting a McDonald's sometime yesterday. "Mitt Romney loves his McDonald's and has said so on many occasions," the article reads.

Good morning, America. Do you know why this is a special time to be an American? Because this is an amazing year for peanuts!

It appears that the days of the $2.25 subway ride will soon be coming to an end, a victim of the vicissitudes of progress. As we gaze grimly into the maw of the $2.50 subway ride, let us bow our heads, and elegize:

Jonah Lehrer, the Columbia-graduate Rhodes-scholar journalist-speaker-author who lost his jobs at Wired and The New Yorker for committing a pretty hilariously wide range of journalistic sins — "self-plagiarism"! other people plagiarism! just making shit up! — may never work at a magazine again. But he will always have…

Puff of 1920's French salon smoke James Franco is in the midst of adapting two books of poetry for two different films. Stephen Dobyns' Black Dog, Red Dog will feature Olivia Wilde, Chloe Sevigny and Whoopi Goldberg, while Tar, by the great C.K. Williams, stars Mila Kunis and Jessica Chastain alongside Franco himself.…

Weird Internets is a series in which we spotlight and explore funny, bizarre, or otherwise interesting corners of the internet. Today, we examine Pentametron, a Twitter bot that writes sonnets by finding rhyming Tweets in iambic pentameter, and talk to its creator, Ranjit Bhatnagar.

There's been plenty written on Jose Canseco's bizarre and revealing Twitter account, but today's offerings are particularly rich. Canseco has been especially prolific of late, following his removal from the Mexican Baseball League. And while many of his tweets are simply angry or pleading — or informative, when it…

If you are anything like me, and I get the feeling that a lot of you are just like me, you are carefully crossing out everyday on your desk calendar as we edge slowly towards the March 23rd premiere of The Hunger Games. But waiting is a fool's game and fortunately for us, February has brought us both a second…

Energized by The New Republic's new excerpts from the racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic conspiracy newsletter published (though not specifically authored) by Ron Paul in the early 1990s? Disappointed that they're no longer being published? Unable to hire Lew Rockwell to write most of it for you? Fret not, alternate…

A visiting professor at West Virginia University has discovered a 16th-century erotic poem—written by a Catholic noblewoman to the condemned Protestant tutor of Edward VI—hidden inside an edition of works by Chaucer, leading to fevered speculation, in your head, over who will star in the movie. (Carey Mulligan, maybe?…

Washington Post style reporter Dan Zak wrote a dispatch for the section's "Night Lives" column about D.C.'s Guardian Angels.

Katie Roiphe, one of the leading sex-opinion-havers of American letters, is the upper crust version of crazy cat woman Andrea Peyser. While Andrea only broadcasts her psychologically-fraught Victorian sexual shame to tabloid readers, Katie Roiphe gets to publish hers in all the favorite news outlets of East Coast Ivy…

In your self-important Wednesday media column: Bill Keller's opinions on the internet are neverending, the New York Post gets more expensive, Salon's CEO resigns, Brian Lam moves to the ocean, and Poetry magazine successfully spends lots of money.

Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and musician, died in New York City on Friday at age 62. Best known for searing, funny spoken-word songs like "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" and "Whitey on the Moon" — tracks that would later be cited as important influences for generations of rappers — Scott-Heron also wrote two…

Sue Ann Marcum, a 52 year-old professor at American University, was found murdered in her home in the DC suburbs last year. The prime suspect in the case is Jorge Rueda Landeros, a yoga instructor who has now reportedly fled to Mexico. But that hasn't stopped him from making beautiful, fugitive poetry.

Jon Huntsman, the former Utah governor and ambassador to China, is already a Serious Presidential Candidate, according to something we wrote a few hours ago. Do you have any questions about this mysterious man that no one's heard of? Well five minutes at the website of Horizon PAC, Huntsman's campaign-in-waiting,…