Oh, Dave Berrgren of KARE, I feel your shame in having to end your report on the fact that people are eating Chia seeds with the line, "Experts suggest give Ch-Chia a ch-ch-try." There's no way a man can spit that out and still feel good about himself.

Are you enjoying Bonus Day? (It's every New Yorker's favorite holiday, in this long stretch between Christmas and Passover.) The verdicts have been rolling in all day, as they are also rolling across the world between now and the end of the month. It's a funny thing! Remember how we used to hear about "talent retention"? That big compensation was mandatory to keep great talent at a firm (that was performing quite poorly)? That was already rich coming from a small industry that ditched of tens of thousands of staff, but it seems extra-hilarious now in the season of the wee bonus. READ MORE

Luke Ethan's author page listed four works with titles like My Step Mom Loves Me and OMG My Step-Brother in Bisexual [sic], and it doesn't appear he wrote any of them. Maria Cruz had 19 ebooks and two paperbacks, all of which were created by other authors and republished without their consent, while her typo-addled alter ego Mariz Cruz was hawking Wicked Desire: Steamy bondage picture volume 1.... A highly prolific scribe with the pen name Boston Fiction Writer, whose story, "Boston Halloween Massacre" had been transposed into an ebook titled Massacre on Halloween and sold under Robin Scott's name, threatened to hurt the person who stole her work, "even more than they hurt me, so that they'd think twice about stealing another story from me. I dare say, she'd have no more fingers left to steal anyone's stories, ever again."

—It's hard out there for a literary pimp.

Walking into McCormick Place, Chicago’s half-hangar, half-labyrinth convention center, I looked at the schedule to find that I had just missed “Canadians Do Cremation Right.” The 130th National Funeral Directors Conference, was underway; held each year in a different city, the conference brings together funeral directors from across the country for three days of presentations, trade talk, awards and camaraderie. After shaking off my initial disappointment at having missed the Canadian talk, I scanned the remaining workshops. After passing on “Marketing Your Cemetery: Connecting With Your Community” and “Managing Mass Fatality Situations,” I circled “The Difference Is In The Details,” an embalming workshop. READ MORE

READ MORE

"Amy, a single mother living in a middle-class suburb (she asked that only her middle name be used), is an educated professional who is reasonably savvy in most medical matters. But every month she goes through an arduous, prolonged and humiliating process: filling a Ritalin prescription for herself and her 11-year-old son." READ MORE

Second in a pair of essays today on Louis C.K. Previously: The Louie Bubble. READ MORE