The offensive costume is a Halloween staple. Because some people, you just can’t reach teach. Combine a need for attention with alcohol and some markers and duct tape and sometimes you get something great. Sometimes you get something…

It’s been ten years since the Rock Critical List-a zine, of sorts, a paper-published one-time complaint about rock music critics-made the rounds, and today The Morning News takes a thorough look back. The screed was vicious…

So in today’s Times Janet Maslin tears into Malcolm Gladwell’s new greatest hits book collection. It is brutal, because she is endlessly making fun of his sentences and his paragraphs: “He liked to begin by framing some kind of…

Der Spiegel takes a look back at Romania’s 1989 revolution and talks to some of the key players responsible for the executions of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Fascinating stuff.

Say, that’s cool. The medals to be awarded at the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver will be made out of melted-down electronic devices. Maybe the folks running the Rio Olympics in 2016 can make theirs out of police helicopters?

Negating the negatory: “If the point of ‘no homo’ is truly, as Weiner argues, to slowly make hip-hop less heteronormative, censoring ‘no homo’ can only speed up the term’s intended progress. Why not encourage rappers to express alternate interpretations of masculinity without an easily deconstructed verbal safety net?”

From the inbox, regarding this excerpt from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail: “Substitute any utilitarian object name for “Lehman Brothers” (i.e. “my used pool filter pump”) in this article, and both the astonishing incompetence and absurdity of the compensation these men receive is made clear.” Ooh, try it! It really works!

Interesting detail from New York Times reporter David Rohde’s account of his captivity at the hands of the Taliban:

I argued that the United States was not the menacing, predatory caricature that…

With two weeks remaining until New Jersey’s gubernatorial election, Republican Chris Christie’s lead-which was at one point in the double digits-has completely evaporated; the latest poll finds him completely even with Governor Jon Corzine. Whether or not Christie can pull it…

It is unbylined, so I’m not sure who deserves the credit for it, but the BBC’s daily press roundup is one of the great joys of my morning. Today’s edition, which focused exclusively on the Sun, was particularly good. Give it a read, I think you’ll like it.

I have already left explicit instructions that when I go my friends are to drop me in the Hudson and walk away, but were I to have some sort of funeral service, I’d want this guy to do it: “A Church of England vicar has said that he is fed up with…

I read Bob Herbert’s column in the Times today-which once again expresses his continuing disgust with Wall Street and the way our financial system is rigged to protect the most wealthy-in the same way I read all of Bob Herbert’s columns: in a detached, world-weary, “yeah, whatever…

Ah, New Jersey: “In yet another bizarre turn in an already crazy gubernatorial campaign, independent candidate Chris Daggett this week made a mistake he’ll not soon forget: His returned a loaner car to a dealership with a loaded gun in it.” Now, to be fair, the gun apparently belongs to Daggett’s driver, a retired state trooper. But who wants to be fair?

This Cat Looks Like This Other Cat

THIS CAT was trapped in an SUV and driven across town. (Cat survived.)