What's possibly in these "full syndication" deals for publications taking their material to other publications? We find most of them don't do us much good, with a few exceptions. (One good exception being partial syndication with some Huffington Post sections, particularly Business.) More and more, publications are throwing up their hands and just going with it. Syndication, once a brave act of sucking it all in for free, is now just the machines at work, folding the layer cake that is the Internet into itself over and over again. For example?

Today Slate publishes "A Death in Yellowstone: On the trail of a killer grizzly bear," an 8000-word investigation by Awl pal Jessica Grose about the search for “the Wapiti sow," a 250-pound grizzly bear implicated in the killing of two separate visitors to Yellowstone National Park in 2011. The story is both about the hunt for the bear and the larger implications of man's sometimes fatal interactions with nature. It's a remarkably compelling report that you absolutely need to read. Here's a brief conversation about the piece.

Jess Grose, I loved this report. But I am a confirmed bear aficionado. What drew you to the story?

My [...]

Profound congratulations to Slate for finally stabbing to death its creaky, ancient, and very angry CMS. Called "Gutenberg," it was nearly as old as its namesake. The first rule of Media Club is: never build your own CMS. Someone will build it for you. Speaking of! Now someone is going to build me a Chrome extension to do for New Slate what "Ochs" does for the Times' site.

Writing 1100 words on the purported "GIF renaissance"-"the present-day GIF love goes beyond aesthetics and nostalgia. Animated GIFs aren't just throwbacks-they're uniquely suited to some very contemporary modes of cultural consumption, and they perform distinct functions that other formats can't"-seems like an awful lot of work in order to justify showing this GIF of Christina Hendricks' ass, but I've got to give it to the folks at Slate on this one: it's a pretty amazing ass. I mean, I'd much rather this than a contrarian piece on why Christina Hendricks' astounding ass really isn't one of the world's most phenomenal asses. Which was probably their [...]

Oh, look! Ha ha ha. Slate's been at it hard this last week with the counterintuitiveness. That's Slate's "thing," you know, much like there's always one guy at the dinner party whose "thing" is to go on and on about how Mein Kampf is "actually very lucid." Last week, the band Creed was good, instead of being unlistenable Jesus-growling for hockey moms. Then? Newspapers were fine! That's right, newspapers-those shuttering, bankrupt, decreasingly-staffed things everyone throws in the garbage as soon as they get to the top of the subway steps-"aren't doing as badly as you think." Hmmmmmmm.

Slate claims that no one wants to be a dentist anymore, and that everyone hates them because of the movies. (There may be some truth in that! But I think people hated them first. Mostly people hate them because people hate dental work and are suspect of anyone who would do it all day!) Says Slate: "during the 20th century's final decades, a dwindling number of Americans chose to become dentists. In the early 1980s, U.S. dental schools produced about 5,750 new graduates per year. In 2007, with a population that's nearly one-third larger, there were about 4,700." And that: "In 1980, the United States had 60 dental schools; [...]

Slate today takes the Black Eyed Peas to task for "selling out" with their new Target ad (above). Whether the concept of "selling out" still holds currency, one thing is definitely clear: Slate hates the Black Eyed Peas. Just like Perez!

My poor friend Dan Kois. Apparently he lost a big bet, and had to write a bizarre and maniacal Slate piece to prove that literally anything could be denounced in a counterintuitive Andy Rooney freakout. And here it is: "Tilting your seat back on an airplane is pure evil." His solution: don't bother replacing the seats, just outlaw people from reclining in them. AM I STILL ASLEEP UP HERE IN MY FULLY FLAT BUSINESS CLASS SEAT, IS THIS A SURREAL DREAM???

Exciting news for bibliophiles: Slate is launching the Slate Book Review, a monthly supplement "delivering reviews of the newest fiction and nonfiction; essays on reading, writing, and the great (and terrible) books of years gone by; author interviews; videos and podcasts; and much more." The first edition hits tomorrow, but if the pieces they've previewed so far ("Is Jonathan Franzen Too Sympathetic To His Female Characters?", "Huckleberry Finn: Two Schmucks on a Boat" and "Danielle Steel, American Proust") are any indication, this thing is going to be a rousing success.

We have such terrible metrics for judging websites! There's income, and there's traffic, and that's about it. But neither of those take into account burn rate, overall expenditure or organization size, just for starters. One way to look at things might be: unique visitors per month, divided by employees. Size of staff is something of a predictor of size of traffic, it turns out! If you have no staff, you cannot make the traffic, for one thing. Obviously there's a slight variable in this metric—which has to do with number of part-time contributors, freelance and marketing budgets and, of course, certainly at the big behemoth, unpaid contributors. Speaking of, [...]

Hand sanitizers don't do jack to protect you from the flu, says Slate. Bonus fun fact: "In 1847, Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that washing one's hands with chlorine between deliveries practically eliminated fatal infections among laboring women. (His colleagues ignored him and later committed him to a mental hospital, where he was beaten to death by guards.)"

So what purposefully counter-intuitive music article raised a lot of question marks for you yesterday?

Slate's Jonah Weiner writes a good piece about why music magazines are dying. Part of the problem is what they like to call "access": "When I profiled Beyoncé for a 2006 Blender cover story, I was granted one hour to interview her and one hour to observe her at a video shoot. I stayed on the set for three hours, hoping to wring some lively detail from the mundane proceedings, until a bodyguard showed me the door. Beyoncé's mother, Tina, gave me a warm goodbye, then called a publicist to chew her out for letting me hang around so long and accused me of 'going through Beyoncé's underwear.' (I'd [...]

"If she feels about you the way you feel about her, surely she wants to snatch this opportunity to make a good impression on your parents…. Since she's lived a cross-cultural life, she knows that making a small gesture can be all that's needed to keep from muffing a sensitive encounter…. Explain that if her pubic hair is also her public hair, you're going to want to hide in the bushes."

Slate offers advice on how to get your girfriend to trim her triangle. Clearly, I am no longer needed now.

It's a perfectly reasonable Monday morning, people are going about their business, and blammo, Slate comes and makes a huge filthy mess of it with their bizarre ramblings about grapefruit. It's just not right.

"'Rewilding'—bringing elephants, cheetahs, and lions out of captivity to run free in parts of North America—could help save these megafauna from global extinction. More important, it would restore to the continent biological functions lost millenniums ago. The big guys would help stop the march of the pests and weeds—rats and dandelions—that will otherwise take over the landscape. And they would promote the natural processes that generate biodiversity." —Today is a good day to revisit the interesting idea that Josh Donlan wrote about six years ago: to populate the North American plains with African megafauna. Here's hoping the Siberian tiger is not one of the animals that [...]