"George Orwell's '1984' Sales Skyrocket in Wake of NSA Spying Scandal"

"We've received many negative comments about the author using the marathon as an excuse for publicity. We first contacted the author ourselves, after we read about the book on Slate.com, and invited him to respond to our questions and to write a blogpost. Also, we included a link to his book on Amazon as context to the story. He did not request these links or any publicity for his work."

Now that everyone's been enormously sick, and for such a long time, we are all tired of staying in our homes in our segregated sickbeds. Let's just take our flus to the subways and to the offices of Manhattan! I mean everyone else has it, so why should we worry, AM I RIGHT? And besides, what if they forget about you at work and lay you off? Here's that attitude: "I work in a huge company, in a giant skyscraper, in the middle of Manhattan. I would say that in a typical day, 100% of my co-workers come into close proximity (on the subway, in the streets ,in [...]

Have you been following the recent travails of New York Times art critic Ken Johnson? It is probably coming soon, for an unhappy non-resolution, to a public editor near you. The long and short of it is that there is a petition calling for his head, or at least an ear. In short, he's gone in against "identity-based" art shows—exhibitions of ladies and the black folks and what have you—as an “evil whose necessity would disappear in a more equitable world." (This is exceedingly contrary to the position held by his colleague Holland Cotter, who has often supported this sort of exhibition.) Here is a very good [...]

Muslim-Chicago Secret Government Just Making Up These Jobs Numbers Now, Alleges White Man. (That white man being Jack Welch.)

@paulryanvp says Forcible rape, @toddakin says #LegitimateRape, @ronpaul says honest rape. Nice.

— Jennifer Gunter (@DrJenGunter) August 21, 2012

Rape was so much simpler last year, when we just had rape and rape-rape. Now that we're having the War on Women Election—it's your turn again, ladies!—we have to be really cognizant of how many different kinds of rape there are and which are more serious, important and bad.

You know that thing about how if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, it can cause a tornado in Texas? Well, something like that is happening right now. Except in this case, it's more like, if a butterfly hatches out of its cocoon in Montreal, it means that everyone south of there is going to die in fire. Because this particular butterfly is a Giant swallowtail butterfly called a Papilio cresphontes Cramer, indigenous to tropical areas in Central and South America, and the fact that it is now able to live in northern Nordic zones is attributable to climate change. There are plenty of other videos I [...]

"Iain's more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. But in his science fiction he achieved something more: something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do. He was intensely political, and he infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic [...]

"An earlier version of this post ["Here Are The Massive Boston Globe Web Traffic Numbers From Yesterday"] mindlessly used the verb 'explode' to describe the sudden rise in traffic. This was poor judgement on my part and I deeply apologize. "

Did you have a good racism morning? There's only 13 shopping days left until Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained hits theaters. But already whites are rising up against this film, which accurately depicts the intolerable cruelty of The Blacks to white people throughout American history. "Many of us are tired of blatant anti-white racism being couched in 'satire' or 'comedic routines' just so we can be called 'thin-skinned' when we take offense," is how people are responding. Think that's an outlier? Oh there is so much more, when Drudge commenters flood the Hollywood Reporter, which is so grateful for the sweet, sweet traffic flood that they're too stunned to TURN [...]

"We may be on the verge of a new Babylonian captivity for religious conservatives."

Welcome to the most bizarre thing we've read yet this crazy election week. Marc Leder, who hosted the now wildly infamous covertly recorded Romney fundraiser, at which normal everyday white people learned that Mitt Romney hates them in the way that most Republicans only hate black people and gays, is going to nail that wonderful brave video-recording person to a wall and use him (or her!) as a sconce. "He is in the process of narrowing down the suspects and is contemplating contacting law enforcement," is what they say. Good luck with that, because I can think of about 47% of America who'll happily contribute to the legal [...]

Straight men don't really know anything about penises, because they never see any. Except apparently for Gawker's John Cook, who really knows from cock.

Why don't you lazy women want to throw away your money investing in pyramid schemes startups? This man literally doubled his money by angel investing—in just eight short years. Don't you silly girls want in on this big man business?

In this one, the first 40 minutes are just the ladies on a rooftop in Williamsburg, throwing rotten vegetables at the 20-somethings below. Then Miranda does a $12-million Kickstarter to fund her new boutique law firm. Charlotte fires her household staff. Samantha has sex with some men. Carrie, now single, writes a column for XO Jane and, whilst picking up her $45 check in the office, meets Lena Dunham and then goes home and hangs herself. Sounds good, can't wait!

Jon Methven's This Is Your Captain Speaking can be ordered here.

The long-expected death of The Daily, the iPad publication of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, has finally come to pass. Layoffs took place over the summer, when the publication discarded 50 of its 170 workers. Eleven months ago, The Daily's plans for becoming profitable were described as such: "A $30 million tablet-only news publication… with 100,000 subscribers paying 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year, and 250,000 unique readers each month, The Daily is on target to break even in five years." The Daily cost $500,000 per week, and that was just according to the company.

Our best goes out to people who are losing their jobs [...]

So let's see, we convicted for war crimes all of seven people who have gone through Guantanamo. Now they're all going to get off, thanks to a ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, on the grounds that none of the things they were doing were war crimes until after they did them. (Such as: being Osama bin Laden's gardener.) But at least we got Omar Ahmed Khadr, because he actually murdered someone! Oh, but but he's Canadian. So he's up for parole next year. He'll be just another friendly dude running a Tim Hortons a year from now.

Also haha, can't [...]

"The White House has been too late in reaching out to their donors and making them feel appreciated. You can't go and ask for a million dollars from someone who can't get a White House tour for his daughter."

How is @guyadams STILL suspended? The longer this goes on, the worse Twitter looks.

— felix salmon (@felixsalmon) July 31, 2012

TwitterGate 2012 has escalated in a remarkable and bad way, with today's revelation that Twitter actually went to NBC to inform them that journalist Guy Adams had put forward NBC exec Gary Zenkel's work email address, not the other way around. (Also, Gary Zenkel has a JD from Georgetown, so it makes it extra sad that he's all up in this mess.)

Twitter is a company with enormous customer good will. They've gotten away with incorporating advertising into their product without harming themselves. [...]