This is a really sad day.

Jonathan Franzen may finally get his wish to destroy experimental fiction fulfilled.

One can only hope this is some sort of a horrible joke, which is definitely a possibility since David Foster Wallace has been known to be quite an eccentric.

Paul F. Tompkins says so, so it must be.

Here, Ty Pennington is pushing Aspirin from Bayer Consumer Care, a unit of Bayer AG.

It appears Ty Pennington, the carpenter who has gained a C-list celebrity status recently through appearances on home improvement-themed reality shows and the male prostitute-inspired attires he dons regularly, has been quite busy recently hawking pharmaceuticals. This is quite understandable really since 1) fronting the interests of pharmaceutical giants is the most time-effective way to cash in on his quickly evaporating semi-celebrity status, and 2) people who watch his show are probably dumb enough to buy medications just because the television tells them to.

Nonetheless, I find it rather morbid that T.P. is pushing Adderall XR, a drug that can cause adverse heart events, including sudden death, while also promoting Aspirin as a “wonder drug” for heart disease risk reduction.

The worst news ever.

• “Hostile Acts” by Tad Friend. Published on newyorker.com and presumably also in print.

I was so fucking impressed with this article after I read it for the first time. Who other than a critic for a magazine as sharp as The New Yorker could observe that what Sarah Silverman really does through her offensive jokes is holding a mirror against the audience (metaphorically) and mocking their latent bigoted beliefs (also metaphorically)?

However, at another glance, the article proved to be rather disappointing. Take the last two sentences from the third paragraph counting up from the bottom:

His arrival reveals the fractures in the group—Sarah despises him, and Steve and Brian don’t even bother to be polite—and we realize that all of them are fundamentally loners who grew up in front of the TV. They enjoy bantering, as people on TV do, but they aren’t up for shouldering one another’s burdens.

The article blames the characters’ antisocial predisposition on “gr[owing] up in front of the TV” and being “loners.” This notion is not supported by the rest of the article, nor is it supported by the content of the show (as I watched it). In addition, to my knowledge, there is no scientific proof that this link exists. So in other words, what the fuck?

It’s not yet being broadcast in Canada though. The homeless man in the clip is Zach Galifianakis who I honestly don’t find funny but like anyways because he seems to know all the right people (he’s kinda like a male version of Janeane Garofalo).

One can only hope Comedy Central won’t kill this show prematurely like it did previous attempts to break away from the traditional sitcom format such as Stella and Strangers With Candy.