The first time you hear a very clear Chinese woman's voice say "Sou Sou!" in your living room while you are supposedly alone, it is natural to brush it off. There are so many things making noises all the time! The second time, weeks later, when you're sitting alone by the fireplace reading at midnight, is terrifying. At this point, it is natural to wonder if this is how Moses or Allah or Jesus or Neale Donald Walsch or Oral Roberts or Ted Nugent or Charles Manson felt, when they first heard voices telling them what to do. But what did "Sou Sou!" even mean? It seemed less like [...]

With just over a week remaining before the Mayan Apocalypse, the situation around Planet Earth has been anything but calm. If you've been busy getting drunk at Christmas parties, you may be blissfully unaware of the huge flying mountains that have very nearly obliterated our world. But the asteroids are only half of the story: broken comets, secret meteor storms and a mysterious robot space shuttle are also haunting our skies this week.

I'm sorry for reporting you to campus security.

This was September 1989, at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut. In the Marshall Dormitory at the north end of campus, where I shared a much-too-small space with two roommates, Sean and Jeremy. (Sean is now the communications director for the Republican National Committee—he had to shave his head on live television last fall after losing a bet he'd made that Mitt Romney would be president. Did you know that? Crazy, right?)

You and I didn't know each other at the time. I didn't know anybody, really. Classes had just started that week. I had come to recognize most of the [...]

Particularly pernicious is the much-trumpeted idea that if he were President, Romney’s Mormonism would rub off on the rest of us: Ian Williams, writing in the New York Times, says, “With no marriages outside the church, zero tolerance of homosexuality and very little coffee, the L.D.S. worldview would positively smother most Americans.” Writers and scholars have also exhumed the same accusations of cabalism and religious enforcement that dogged John F. Kennedy, whose Catholicism made some wonder if his chief allegiance would be to the U.S. or the pope. The Atlantic’s Brian Fung goes so far as to compare Romney to a robot, no doubt because that is what [...]

You're not going to escape this one. According to this NASA satellite photo, the best thing to do is buy ALL the booze and cigarettes and pizza and batteries from the very nearest bodega and then just hope to Christ that Netflix Streaming doesn't go out. But it will go out, along with the power.

In positive news, it will be very beautiful after the storm. Just be careful not to step on frozen people and frozen stray pets, under the foot or three of fresh snow. What are your storm-coping tips?

Well. The thought of a Run-DMC Broadway musical makes me want to puke in my shell-toes. (Just kidding, I don't really have shell-toes.) True rap greats, going the way of Billy Joel? This cannot be good. (It certainly was not good for true rock greats, The Who.) But wait, maybe I shouldn't be so quick to diss and dismiss. After all, Awl pal Sacha Jenkins' recent foray into rap musical theater, met with rave reviews. And if Big Boi can pull off a ballet and still kill the mic (and talk to penguins) anything's possible. And Jordan Galloway of the New [...]