For reasons unfathomable to mortal man, the United States is unable to secure a supply of drugs to use to lethally inject into its own citizens. Therefore, one of our states may now bring back the electric chair as a mandatory punishment. The year is 2014.

After retiring from writing novels in 2012, Philip Roth has felt "no desire to write fiction," he says in a new interview. Having taken up swimming, music, and appreciating nature, he has "barely time left for a continuing preoccupation with aging, writing, sex, and death." It's difficult to make room for all your hobbies.

In 2012, there were an estimated 14 million new cases of cancer worldwide. Man, that's nothing.

Reince Priebus

When the huge invasion of snowy owls began this winter, was it wrong for us to feel delight? These beautiful raptors from the arctic tundra do not often show up on the American East Coast, after all. But the sheer number of snowy owls should have been a warning, both to the owls themselves and to our sense of wonder.

Last weekend, Medrick Cecil Mills, 77, collapsed in the street in Washington, DC. Fortunately, he was across the street from a firehouse. Unfortunately, they wouldn't help him.

A man fishing on the beach alone at Point Reyes National Seashore was swept out to sea and killed on Monday. Witnesses said the fisherman was trying to retrieve his ice chest, which was pulled off the beach by the surf.

Almost everyone has thought about what their obituary will say, but one Swedish man got to read it in a local newspaper after his 90-year-old sister mistakenly thought he died.

Sure, everyone knows that smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and stankness. But that's not all!

Usually, I lie. At a party, someone asks the question. It’s someone who hasn’t smelled the rancid decay of week-dead flesh or heard the rattle of fluid flooding lungs. I shake the ice in my glass, smile, and lie. When they say, “I bet you always get that question,” I roll my eyes and agree.

Eight days after I buried my mother, I learned that she was considered indigent in the state of Colorado. This, above all else, broke my heart. Somehow, the knowledge that my mother was officially poor erased all the progress we’d made in the second half of her life—poof—just like that. There we were again, in the mid '80s, after my father left us, bankrupted his company and tried to bring us down with him. My mother and I hunkering down while she tried to fight him in court, garnish his wages. Me, working one, two and then three jobs during high school, shape-shifting on a daily, if not hourly, basis.

In California—the state with the most military veterans—veterans under age 35 have a higher death rate than active duty service members, and are twice as likely as civilians to commit suicide or die in a car crash.

In roughly the past decade, the rate of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. has risen almost 300% in urban counties, and almost 400% in rural counties.

If you love excitement, you're going to love these last years of your life. Civil war, food riots, monster storms and a lot more apocalyptic religious extremism will spice up even the dullest and most comfortable existence, according to a new United Nations report on the now-constant insanity we boringly call "climate change." But even the weather seems to be capitalist, because the demons of global warming most enjoy hurting the poor.

Poor chickens. They don't get six million ways to die. They get, basically, two. Both of which are bad. And more chickens than you might think get the worst one: boiling alive.

This past Saturday, a group of Breaking Bad rubberneckers turned up for a mock funeral that mourned the AMC series' protagonist, Walter White. Pitched as a fundraiser for the homeless, the ceremony was held at a real cemetery in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where inconsiderate shitbags loitered on grave markers of real dead people, including one of a child who didn't live to see his third birthday. For fuck's sake.

Jerry Moon’s family opened his casket to say their final goodbyes at his funeral on Monday. But what they saw was not their father’s corpse: inside the casket was the body of an unknown man with a plastic bag over his head. Even worse, the dead man inside the casket was dressed in their father’s clothes and had a picture of their mother tucked under his arm.

When that brave lady started ranting last night about the Freemasons and a United States controlled from the beginning by satanic money-worshipping pigs, the otherwise dull Congressional proceedings finally got a moment of excitement. Maybe this one lady, working within the House of Representatives all these years, could set off a devastating civil war that would leave the United States in ruins.

Last week, the young son of NFL star Adrian Peterson died after being beaten by the boyfriend of the child's mother. Today, a columnist from New York's most pungent gutter tabloid has figured out a way to insult Adrian Peterson.

Margaret Mary Vojtko was a longtime adjunct professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Earlier this month, she died penniless. She may have an even greater effect in death than in life.