Pop taught me how to play catch and swing a bat. Soon after, he signed me up for little league, and then signed himself up to manage my team. Teammates called him Coach Richard, but to my sister and I he was always Pop. That was how our mother referred to him in the beginning of their relationship, after learning Pop was the nickname Richard was given during his days as an air traffic controller. She meant it as a term of endearment; my sister and I meant it as a title. Pop was our way of calling Richard dad without actually using the word.

Wendy Davis is running for governor of Texas as a Democrat. Wendy Davis vaulted to fame for filibustering anti-abortion bills. Right-wing partisans call Wendy Davis "Abortion Barbie" and intimate that she's a gold-digger. Wendy Davis also has two daughters, and they say you can shut the fuck up now, please.

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.

Kim Jong-un has let his aunt remain a top official in North Korea, even after he executed her husband, Jang Song-thaek, on Friday. Jang Song-thaek was a mentor to Kim Jong-un and second-in-command of the security-minded nation.

It's that time again. You're all gathering in homes across the country to converge on a dead bird (or vegan substitute for cousin Sparrow) and discuss what you've done, where you've been, and whether ObamaCare/HAARP will destroy civilization as we know it.

We are a nation divided, and we are antsy about inviting those divisions into our homes, on the nuclear level, as we connect with our families for holiday feasts.

We've showcased several amazing (and amazingly useless) talents over the last couple of weeks, but only this waiter's impressive echo talent comes with an equally amusing backstory.

TMZ just posted footage of Jenna Jameson discussing her return to the world of adult entertainment (via webcam). It seems like just yesterday that she was on Oprah: Where Are They Now?, discussing why there's no way she'd "ever, ever, ever" go back to porn.

A West Virginia man and his stepdaughter were taken into custody earlier this month and charged with seven counts of felony incest despite both being above the legal age of consent and having not a drop of shared blood between them.

This is love. An Ohio man remembered he might have a copy of the first Spider-Man comic ever in a box in his attic, found it, and sold it to help pay for his daughter's wedding.

Liz Cheney doesn't think her sister should have been permitted to get married.

Photographs, he likes to say, are the only things that remain.

As of Tuesday morning, Kanye West's only tweet is a low-quality Getty Image cropped to just the faces of West, Kim Kardashian, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé. The picture is captioned "FAM." Beyoncé and Jay-Z's real life FAM, Beyoncé's sister Solange, has been cropped out of the image; you can see her in the original here.

A new law in China requires that adult children visit their elderly parents "often," or risk being sued by them. Awww.

This is the first installment of New Year's Absolutions, an exercise in unburdening guilt before 2013.

When it was announced earlier today that future Queen of England Kate Middleton had created, inside her body, with help from Prince William, the eventual ruler of the United Kingdom and its associated territories, Twitter quickly jumped into the fray, doing what it does best: unfunny jokes.

It's the holidays, and what better way to celebrate than with heartwarming stories about the power of familial love? Like this one, about the father who sent his three adult children a long letter expressing his "bitter disappointment" and listing the many "copulation-driven" things that they had done wrong in life. Talk about Christmas cheer!

WKRN-TV in Nashville reports that police arrested 37-year-old Henry Baxter for the murder of his adoptive father last Friday, but that's not the weird part.

While Oprah Winfrey may seem, like an endless forest or a mighty river, to be something that always has been and always will be, it turns out she actually does have parents. One of them is getting divorced. His second wife says he tried to kill her.

Jimmy Kimmel went on fellow comic Marc Maron's podcast-slash-psychotherapy-couch WTF to talk about his unusual career path. But he couldn't resist taking his famously neurotic host on a detour into some of his family issues, including the "very sadistic" mom who used to make him pay her begging homage and who pretended she was dead to make him cry.