Brandon Scott Gorrell

Downtown LA in the hottest heatwave ever, Mexico seems bleak, a shooting in Boston, the owner of Segway, Inc. drives his Segway off a cliff and dies, a man commits suicide with an AK-47 at the UT Austin library and a bleak earth keeps turning.

Last Saturday a man named Mitchell Heisman shot himself in Harvard Yard. A group of high school students on a tour of the campus were apparently close by. And aside from his relatively sensational suicide, he left a pretty intense suicide note at suicidenote.info.

I saw that The Blogosphere dictated that if you are going to be a blogger, you must create a spectacle. But you must do it in a way that makes it appear as if the spectacle existed before you created it.

The modern definition of biological death is the cessation of electrical activity in your brain. The most common causes of biological death in the United States are heart attack, cancer, stroke and emphysema (read: you’ll probably die one of these ways). Wonder how each of these afflictions actually feel when you’re dying from them.

More stock shit talking on Tao Lin, word of murdering hipsters, Sean Penn on cocaine and a butt-hurt Wyclef Jean on this week’s Internet Shit Talking in review.

The five serial killers cataloged in this article are from Ukraine, the United States, and Japan. When they committed their crimes, they were 19, 48, 32 and 60 years old. Their murders were characterized by, among other practices, bludgeoning with hammers, mutilation, “skin suits,” rape, cannibalization, torture, video taping and necrophilia.

Shit talking this week experienced somewhat of a lull. While we did start off the week strong with the Glenn Beck’s rally—an event that later gained the enigmatic spiritual warrior the title “The White Malcom X” from one reporter at The Daily Beast—shit talking slacked during the middle of the week…

Someone directed me to the Wikipedia entry for “stampede” the other day. I read crazy things there—stampedes that caused the suffocation of over 4,000 people, weird instances of mass hysteria, a link between consumerism and human herd-like behavior. This article explains and catalogs, to a somewhat limited extent, human stampeding and mass hysteria. Overall, the phenomena mostly seem bleak, as these behaviors allow us to witness, generally, people losing control of their minds.

Forbes reported on Sunday that in the very near future there may be unmarked white government vans that drive around cities taking pictures with technology that sees through walls and cars and peoples’ clothes…

Welcome to a new column on TC—The Week’s Internet Shit Talking in Review. Here, I’ll catalog, analyze and speculate on the small- and large-scale shit talking that’s one of the hallmark phenomena of the internet. Today’s column includes shit talking from the ranks of Facebook, HTMLGIANT, Thought Catalog, Huffington Post, Gawker, Salon.com, 4chan and more.

“I yelled, ‘I want my multigrain bagel!'” she told the Post. “The barista said, ‘You’re not going to get anything unless you say butter or cheese!'” Eventually, the cops were called. The woman holds a PhD from Columbia.

Antiques Roadshow is a program aired by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in which we watch a touring group of antiques appraisers stop in major cities across the United States and determine the value of antiques that locals bring to the tour.