On the day of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, two new petitions were added to the Obama administration's home-brewed "We the People" petitioning system.
If you'd considered getting or giving "wrinkle treatment" as holiday gift, perhaps you should reconsider. Of course, there are many reasons why you should reconsider but here's the most urgent one: Last month, the FDA sent a letter to 350 doctors warning them that they may have received counterfeit or unsafe Botox from a Canadian supplier.
"6,600 Americans have currently signed the petition to deport me - meaning 311,993,400 clearly want me to stay," CNN personality Piers Morgan tweeted on Saturday in response to a We the People petition launched on Friday by pro-gun advocates who seek to ship Morgan back across the pond over his outspoken views in favor of more gun control in the aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
If there is one thing that brings joy to my heart, it is charting the growth of newly invented genres. You can argue over whether trend pieces about "new adult" fiction or "baby boomer" literature are describing truly original developments or ginned-up marketing terms with no relation to measurable changes in book-buying practices (in fact, our very own Katie Baker has already done so in a very neat analysis). But at a certain point the distinction becomes meaningless; talk about "new adult" fiction long enough and Amazon will eventually dedicate a department to it.
Long reviled by Democrats, John Boehner is now getting some hate from his own party. Yes, the tearful and fearless leader of the Republicans in the House is learning the hard way that having a complete disregard for economic principles isn't beneficial to your popularity.
Should you care to hear about the vanishing of bats, islands that melt under the relentless hand of time, and the problems facing modern birds, then this is the week for you. I even managed to scrounge up a bit of cave-related news, although I should warn you now, it isn't very good news. I never promised you I would only bring you rosy-colored cave information; I only promised to talk about caves as much as I possibly could before someone at Gawker Headquarters got wise and fired me.
At the intersection of celebrity and "weird twitter," there is the personal twitter account of singer Cher.
One day before it's scheduled to hold a press conference on "meaningful contributions" it plans to offer in the fight against rampant mass shooting incidents, the National Rifle Association appears to be signaling that it's not nearly ready to let the government pry the gun from its cold, dead hands seeing as how it's very much alive.
With just a couple weeks left in December, it's looking like 2012 is going to go down as the hottest year on record here in New York City (average temperature 57.2 degrees—balmy!). Coincidentally, it looks like 2012 will also be the hottest year on record in Dallas. And in Houston, and in the rest of Texas. And in Detroit. And in Cleveland. And in Missouri. And, fuck it, in the entire United States of America.
Everyone has a subway horror story. In addition to the day-to-day awfulness of crowded rush hour commutes, there are occasional subway parties, flashers, seats filled with mysterious liquids and, sometimes, there's even poo on the floor. But all of that pales in comparison to life on Chicago's Blue Line, where the poo doesn't just harmlessly lie on the floor; instead, as a young Chicago woman recently discovered, it's flung at innocent passengers while inside of a sock.
It's been less than a week since Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, but local residents are already fed up with the media circus tent that's enveloped their once-peaceful community.
