Even in the deep dark depths of the Great Magazine Die-Off a half-decade ago, struggling print magazines did not get so desperate as to breezily stick ads on the cover of their struggling print editions. Hey, times have changed.

Right now, in a place you've never visited, a person you'll never know is dying. If he's dying in a particularly devastating way—and, more importantly, if he is leaving behind shareable content—it is possible that millions of strangers will mourn his or her death tomorrow. Why?

Brand social media accounts frequently publish offensive or otherwise ill-advised tweets, messages, or status updates. To keep readers of Gawker better appraised of offensive brand social-media activity, we're collecting all future coverage into a single, updating post, with the latest brand offense at the top.

Today's New York Times treats its readers to two whole articles about Facebook's News Feed (capital letters because it's a brand name). One, by Ravi Somaiya, focuses in part on the 26-year-old engineer who runs the News Feed team; the other, by David Carr, examines Facebook's pitch to publishers: Let us host your content, and also, uh, serve ads against it.

Because the contemplation of death is the highest level of human activity, every year we meditate on the passage of time by examining the pop-culture artifacts that were omnipresent at the time of birth of the students now entering high school and/or college. What was the world like when the high school class of 2018 was born? The world was like, as it turns out, the pop-culture diet of a middle-class American adolescent.

Late last week, Facebook announced that it would be reworking the set of various formats it offers to advertisers, to "simplify" its ad offerings. Among the changes, Ad Age reported, will be the end of a product called "sponsored stories" (although a Facebook executive said the stories would survive "as an idea"). Wired wrote that the changes will make it so that "every ad is automatically retrofitted with a social component."