Congratulations to Awl pal Doree Shafrir, who will be leading the cultural coverage at the ever-expanding BuzzFeed.

So this finally happened: “A popular ‘meat-market’ smartphone app that spawned a sexual revolution in Australia’s gay community has been compromised by a Sydney hacker, potentially exposing intimate personal chats, explicit photos and private information of users.” Ta da! But wait, there’s more: “A security expert who did not wish to be named… said that the Grindr and Blendr apps ‘had no real security.’” The modern age is fun where we just trust all our data and naked pictures to anyone who makes an app!

Losingest front-page newspaper headline of the day, from the LA Times: “Legislation uproar delays solution to Internet piracy.” Yup. Congratulations, everyone, you have DELAYED SOLVING INTERNET PIRACY with your SOPA/PIPA protests. SHAME ON YOU.

Kim Dotcom, just 37, and the “founder, former CEO and current chief innovation officer” of the now-seized MegaUpload (and “Megavideo.com, Megaporn.com, and Megapay.com”), has lived a lot more than the rest of us. Arrested yesterday, again, he did it the hard way: “Mr. Dotcom, a 37-year-old with dual Finnish and German citizenship, retreated into a safe room, and the police had to cut their way in. He was eventually arrested with a firearm close by that the police said appeared to be a shortened shotgun.”

So what’s he been up to recently? “Dotcom has little to do with the Auckland social circuit and lived largely behind the walls of the mansion surrounded by bodyguards and parkland. He posted videos displaying his expensive tastes, including driving a Mercedes around a golf course and spending 1 million New Zealand dollars on a public fireworks display in Auckland in 2010.”

An Analysis of the Thomas Kinkade Calendar for January

by Drew Dernavich

“Formulaic.” “Schlocky.” “Tremendously successful.” These are some of the epithets that are routinely directed toward painter Thomas Kinkade by the cultural elitists in the current art and media establishments. But has anybody really taken a deep look at Kinkade’s work? You can dismiss his work as cheesy sentimentalism, but hey — can you name any other fine artist who has so thoroughly dominated the intellectual territory between Lids and Things Remembered? I didn’t think so. In an effort to plumb the complexities of Kinkade’s work, each month I’ll be discussing a page from his 2012 “Painter of Light” calendar. Let’s start with January, the month that Kinkade — slyly — has chosen to lead off with.

At first glance, January’s painting looks like a clichéd Currier & Ives-type ripoff: a sleepy New England cottage on a peaceful winter day. But this is no cliché. If you look closer you’ll see that this is, in fact, a scene from beachside Jamaica, specifically, the legendary Hotel Chickenstock, in the aftermath of the deadly July snowstorm of 1847 which killed thousands. Kinkade here has captured this disaster in all its horrific detail, despite the fact that absolutely no historical records of this event exist. A naïve critic would say that he has whitewashed all humanity from the picture, but this method is exactly how Kinkade invites us to participate in this human tragedy: by choosing not to paint a single person in the frame. No footprints, no tiny silhouettes, no stray fast-food wrappers — nothing anywhere to remind you of an actual human being.

Kinkade lets the painting do the storytelling, but I’ll give you some clues about the sources he’s drawn on for the imagery. Here I’ve taken photographs of the actual location and superimposed them on top of the painting. As you can see, the artist is not interested in sparing viewers’ emotions. The snow has stripped the hotel sign from the side of the building and flattened the palm trees into triangle shapes. Wintery weather has covered both the beach and the beachgoers, turning the shoreline into a graveyard. A young man whose drunken vacationing friends buried and left him to die in the sand, which is a hilarious prank, is now left to die in the snow, which is still pretty funny but less so. And with the musicians in a deep freeze, the volcano-like cloud of marijuana smoke which daily poured out of the recording studio next door was reduced to a wisp. This was the day that reggae music died (it came back again, as you know, so no worries).

Lastly, Kinkade’s meticulous eye for detail is nicely in evidence here. The tracks in the foreground belong to the taxi carriage pulled by Mitty, the last of the island’s natively Rastafarian horses (the covering up of hoof prints being, again, Kinkade’s loving tribute to life). Everybody loved Mitty, but Mitty did not survive the storm. And this is a clear allusion to faith: the line “It was then that I carried you” from the “Footprints” poem was inspired by what everybody in Jamaica had said at one time in his or her life: “I was so insanely high from smoking weed and grooving to rocksteady rhythms all night that I must have blacked out, but when I saw those tracks it was then that I realized that somebody must have tossed me in Mitty’s carriage and said ‘take him to the Hotel Chickenstock.’”

Are you a Kinkade admirer yet? If not, there’s still time — we’ve still got eleven months to go.

Drew Dernavich is a cartoonist for the New Yorker magazine (not that cartoonist — the other one) and the co-creator of the cartoon improv show Fisticuffs! He is on Twitter.

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.

• Morgan Stanley: Sounds like an invitation to quit: “Lots of zeroes at junior levels.”

• Goldman Sachs: works out to $367,000 on “average” across all employees, which is dumb, and don’t ever talk in public about “average bonuses”. Because they sure ain’t divided on the average.

• Elsewhere: Say goodbye to yearly raises — unless you’re in the Asian offices.

Did you get a great bonus this year? Let us know in the comments… how much you’ll be sending us.

Here you will find some upsetting footage of a bear with burnt paws. Get well soon, bear! I really am pulling for you. 🙁

Has Bill Kristol ever been right about anything?

Winter
4. Winter
3. Summer
2. Fall
1. Spring

Spring
4. Winter
3. Summer
2. Spring
1. Fall

Summer
4. Summer
3. Winter
2. Spring
1. Fall

Fall
4. Winter
3. Summer
2. Fall
1. Spring

If you’re having a hard time sleeping, you will probably catch schizophrenia. Don’t let it keep you up at night though. It could be nothing.