A new survey from the Pew Research Center reveals that political polarization in the United States has reached a dangerous extreme. The gap between what Democrats and Republicans believe is enormous, with almost no center ground. We haven't seen such strong polarization since the Civil War.

Photo by Andrew Kuznetsov

At this point, you might be thinking, "bullshit." We're seeing more polarization than the 1960s, with Vietnam and the culture wars? The 1950s, with segregation and McCarthyism? The answer is yes, those were decades of profound ideological division with the United States. But they weren't the apex. Political polarization has grown more pronounced with each passing decade, until we've reached…well, now.

A quick visualization (below):

In 2012, political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal quantified the degree to which Democrats and Republicans have become ideologically homogenous and separated from one another. In the chart below, which portrays voting patterns in Congress, high numbers represent polarization—the House and Senate vote predictably along party lines, even on issues that are not typically sources of division—while low numbers represent voting that was less predictable and more mixed, indicating there were opportunities for compromise and bipartisan coalitions. The post-Civil War, Reconstruction era saw divisions gradually erode as we entered into the two World Wars and the Depression, and picked up again as we moved into the latter half of the century.

So, in one sense, the results of the new Pew survey were not entirely unexpected—but they still manage to surprise, in terms of the extent to which our ideologies have come to define us.

Enemy Mine

According to the Pew survey, during the last two decades, an increasing number of people have chosen to veer Right or Left in their political orientation:

The overall share of Americans who express consistently conservative or consistently liberal opinions has doubled over the past two decades, from 10% to 21%. And ideological thinking is now much more closely aligned with partisanship than in the past. As a result, ideological overlap between the two parties has diminished: Today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.

This translates into a growing number of Republicans and Democrats who are on completely opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, making it harder to find common ground in policy debates. The share of Democrats who hold consistently liberal positions has quadrupled over the course of the last 20 years, growing from just 5% in 1994 to 13% in 2004 to 23% today. And more Republicans are consistently conservative than in the past (20% today, up from 6% in 2004 and 13% in 1994), even as the country as a whole has shifted slightly to the left.

Partisan animosity has increased substantially over the same period. In each party, the share with a highly negative view of the opposing party has more than doubled since 1994. Most of these intense partisans believe the opposing party's policies "are so misguided that they threaten the nation's well-being."

On measure after measure – whether primary voting, writing letters to officials, volunteering for or donating to a campaign – the most politically polarized are more actively involved in politics, amplifying the voices that are the least willing to see the parties meet each other halfway.

The majority of Americans don't share these sentiments. They don't adhere to uniformly conservative or liberal views. They don't see either party as a threat and they don't see compromise as surrender. So why do we see so much gridlock in Washington? It appears that apathy is also playing a role in polarization. The political center has become increasingly disengaged, ceding the playing field to the most ideological Americans, whose voices have become louder through increased activism.

The two charts below illustrate the median divide between the general population and those who are politically active:

Conveniently, for Pew, their survey came out at the precise time that Eric Cantor suffered a surprise defeat by a Tea Party challenger. The story of Cantor's downfall—the first-ever primary thumping of a majority leader since the position was created in 1899—is a microcosm of the political dynamics that Pew describes. As David Weigel observes in Slate:

Less than a month after Obama's second inauguration, Cantor debuted a vision for a new GOP that would "make life work." What if the GOP incentivized people to buy better health care and seek more useful college degrees? What if it went a little easier on immigrants?

None of this was "liberal," per se. It just wasn't what the conservative base had asked for, campaigned for, voted for. It was the agenda of the establishment…. Cantor went with Democrats on a three-day tour to boost reform; he sought out a number of ways to avoid a shutdown, including a failed gambit to split the "defund Obamacare" vote from a separate appropriations vote.

Conservatives came to view Cantor as at best unreliable, at worst an outright enemy.

Life on the Fringe

Pew also found that "ideological silos" are now common on both the left and right. People with down-the-line ideological positions disagree over where they want to live, the kind of people they want to live around and even whom they would welcome into their families.

For instance:

• Liberals would rather live in cities, while conservatives prefer rural areas and small towns.
• Liberals are more likely than conservatives to say racial and ethnic diversity is important in a community.
• Conservatives are more likely than liberals to want to live in a place where many people share their religious faith.
• 15% of Democrats and 17% of Republicans would be unhappy welcoming someone from the other party into their family.
• Just 35% of Americans say most of their close friends share their views on government and politics.

That last indicator is an important one, because it reveals the extent to which those on the Left and Right have hunkered down in their silos. While only 35% of Americans say most of their close friends share their political beliefs, among conservatives, roughly twice as many say most of their close friends share their views as say many of their friends do not (63% vs. 30%). Among liberals, that attitude is less extreme, but still a plurality: 49% vs. 39%.

As Pew notes:

These indicators suggest that there is a tendency on the left and the right to associate primarily with like-minded people, to the point of actively avoiding those who disagree. Not surprisingly, this tendency is also tightly entwined with the growing level of partisan antipathy. In both political parties, those with strongly negative views of the other side are more likely to be those who seek out compatible viewpoints.

The Political Climate

The Pew survey measured the extent of political polarization around 10 key issues that are traditional ideological flashpoints, such as the size of government, protecting the environment, minorities and military strength:

Disappointingly, the survey didn't touch upon any science-related issues, including the one that is arguably among the most divisive today: climate change. That said, the findings of the poll lend credence to previous studies that have examined the division over climate change. Those studies found that views on the issue had less to do with the actual scientific findings than it did with ideology—and, more specifically, how people formed their opinions.

One of the most respected and cited studies was written by political scientists Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap. They examined polarization over climate change by analyzing data from 10 nationally representative Gallup Polls between 2001 and 2010.

Their results showed that the percentage of conservatives and Republicans who believed in global warming had already begun to decline—from roughly 50% in 2001 to about 30% in 2010, whereas the corresponding percentage of liberals and Democrats increased from roughly 60% in 2001 to about 70% in 2010.

What explained this outcome? McCright and Dunlap argued that the divide over climate change was almost a forgone outcome:

American conservatives champion ideals of individual freedom, private property rights, limited government, and the promotion of free markets, while American liberals promote collective rights, view market regulation as crucial for protecting citizens and public goods, seek to increase the quantity and quality of government's social service provision, and support governmental intervention to extend rights to previously underprotected groups. Environmental protection typically entails governmental intervention into markets and restrictions on property rights, challenging conservative values, but is consistent with liberals' view that protecting collective welfare is a proper role of government.

Compared with local environmental problems such as water and air pollution, global environmental problems like climate change pose a stronger challenge to conservatives' faith in unfettered industrial capitalism as the desirable and inevitable path to progress. More specifically, the possibility of an internationally binding treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions is viewed as a direct threat to sustained economic growth, the spread of free markets, the maintenance of national sovereignty, and the continued abolition of governmental regulations—key goals of conservatives. Thus, conservatives and Republicans can be expected to question the scientific consensus on climate change, as this body of knowledge highlights the deleterious consequences of industrial capitalism. On the other hand, liberals and Democrats can be expected to accommodate evidence of climate change and the necessity of dealing with it, as employing governmental regulations in an effort to reduce the danger of climate change is likely to seem quite legitimate to them.

McCright and Dunlap, however, believe that the general public was more likely to be polarized on this issue because the debate over climate change has often taken the form of citing opposing scientific theories. The media gave "equal time" to climate change deniers, even though they were a minority opinion within scientific circles. As a result, from the perspective of the general public, the issue became increasingly ambiguous—and, when faced with ambiguous information, people tend to turn toward political elites to help them form their opinions.

In the parlance of political scientists, this is known as "party sorting" theory —a top-down process wherein the more visible and active members of a party establish views on an issue and then communicate the accepted positions to the public. The increasing divide between both the parties and the ideological elites from the Left and the Right on climate change over the past two decades has made it easier for American citizens to sort themselves along both ideological and partisan lines.

If that's so, the polarization over this issue will continue until the political center becomes more assertive—or, ocean waves begin smacking against the stairs of the Capitol Building.

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Today is the debut of Clickhole, the new site from The Onion that takes on your Buzzfeeds and Upworthys, and it's already off to a very encouraging start. Here is the funniest video so far.

It's called "This Video Seems Silly, But it Makes a Good Point."

True!

There's also "5 Iconic Movie Scenes That Were Actually Fake," which is exactly what you think it is, but—like much of what The Onion does—still manages to be hilarious.

Clickhole will be enjoyable, and Buzzfeed employees will be annoyed by it and eventually something from the site will go accidentally viral. A "win" all around.

[image via Clickhole]

Cups: we all use them. But how do we know what's splashing around inside? Thanks to Vessyl, humanity will never again struggle to remember what we just poured into our glass.

Justin Lee, co-founder and CEO of Vessyl's parent company, lays out the problem we face:

Within this field of consumer health, we've seen these really interesting activity trackers. And at our company, we think they are really powerful. But what we consume—you know, our food, our beverages—that's as important, if not more important, than burning calories through exercise. To solve this problem, we're introducing our first product: the Vessyl.

Vessyl isn't just a cup: it's a 13-ounce, Bluetooth-enabled, smartphone-syncing, battery-powered supercup. Just dump any beverage from its low-tech, labeled container into Vessyl, and the supercup's display will light up, telling you exactly what you are drinking.

According to The Verge's Ellis Hamburger, who was given an hour to experiment with pouring liquids into a cup, Vessyl's drink detection tech is damn accurate.

Let's cut to the chase: while I only had an hour with a Vessyl prototype, I tried nearly a dozen beverages in it — and it successfully identified all of them. Within 10 seconds, the device, which currently resembles more of a Thermos than a finished product, recognized Crush orange soda, Vitamin Water XXX, Tropicana orange juice, Gatorade Cool Blue, plain-old water, and a few other beverages, all by name. Yes, this cup knows the difference between Gatorade Cool Blue and Glacier Freeze.

All that sounds pretty pointless, unless your brain routinely fails to write to disk. But the company claims beverage identification will help users make healthy decisions "in real time" by monitoring how many calories, fats, and protein they slurp up.

The main goal is to actually help you make healthier and more informed decisions in real time. Little by little these decisions translate into big changes over time, so much so, it can transform your life.

The Vessyl has been seven years in the making, and the team here at Mark One has been working so hard to create a product that can really make an impact on your life.

All that from a $199 cup.

Hero/traitor/cyberman Edward Snowden is physically still stuck in Russia, but he gives talks and interviews in the U.S. via a telepresence robot that shows his face in real time and allows him to see his interviewers. And help rescue them during seizures.

As part of a longer piece on Snowdenbot and his human handlers, Tagesspiegel reporter Julia Prosinger recounted an incident at the ACLU offices in New York City when her epilepsy triggered and Snowden, Skyping in from Russia, knew exactly what to do.

When he saw Prosinger about to faint, he quickly told his ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, to catch her before she could hit her head on the metal filing cabinets.

"The first fits are always the worst," he said when she came to.

Prosinger writes:

I am lucky: Snowden is not only a patriot or traitor, he is also an epileptic. He instantly recognised what was happening to me. He tells me that he was only diagnosed when he was 28 years old. When he fled the US a little more than a year ago, he told his employer that he had to go away for a few weeks for treatment for his epilepsy. Then Snowden apologises for making me look at the flickering screen, it had triggered the fit, he says.

Snowden also made sure that Wizner put the reporter in the recovery position and brought her a glass of juice.

"For a moment," Prosinger wrote, "Edward Snowden became three-dimensional."

[H/T Daily Dot, Photo: TED]

Glee used to be the popular one at network TV high school. Ratings were as high as a falsetto and the show's stars covered magazines like GQ, Rolling Stone and People. But now Glee is the lonely goth nibbling a sandwich all alone during lunchtime.

Today, Vulture has a chart showing ratings changes at network TV shows from 2012-2013 to 2013-2014. One takeaway is Vulture's, which is that a lot less people watched network television this year than they did last year. Another takeaway is this: God damn, people don't give a shit about Glee anymore.

That is Glee all the way down there at second-to-last, with a 45% drop in viewership year-to-year. It's sandwiched in between two shows—Raising Hope and Revolution, which is actually a show—that have been cancelled. Glee might have been cancelled this year, too, except it signed a deal early last year that guaranteed it two more seasons.

Glee's sixth and final season is in the works, then it will be time for college and everyone will lose touch with each other.

[promo image via Glee]

The FBI doesn't care much for the future of cryptocurrency: over $17 million worth of wacky internet money, seized from internet drug barons on the Silk Road, will be dumped via auction. Now's your chance to buy some bargain Bitcoins and feel like you're in a cool crime thriller.

The auction itself, which the Wall Street Journal smartly speculates could depress the value of Bitcoin worldwide, begins June 27th. So, you have until then to get the $200,000 deposit together (that's US dollars, not pixel dust) before the bidding begins. If that's too much, too soon, this is just the beginning: the Journal also reports that FBI auctioneers are preparing to offload another (roughly) $83 million worth of seized Silk Road coins sometime down the line.

This must represent some sort of turning point for the still-shady virtual currency. Bitcoin now it joins the company of tinted pink hummers, jet skis—and of course, cold hard cash—in the pantheon of seized drug dealer accoutrements.

Photo: Getty

Neocons' first move in their renewed offensive against the reality-based community: Get the year of the Iraq invasion wrong.

Well played, ex-Bush press secretary! We all remember 2002 just like it was March 20, 2003. Which it was.

In the slightly NSFW clip above from the Brazilian talk show The Noite, American singer-songwriter Sky Ferreira is presented with the cover of her album Night Time, My Time, on which she appears topless (photographer/director Gaspar Noé shot it). The comedian host of the show, Danilo Gentili, asks Ferreira, via a translator, "Do you think everybody loves your work because of the music or also because of the cover...and because of the tits, of course?"

"Um," says Ferreira, whose awkwardness is an aesthetic, "I'm pretty sure it's because of my work, but I guess it helps if you're a pervert."

Indeed. It often does. Watch the full interview below:

[H/t Pitchfork]

Because there is endless Internet and 24 hours in every single day that demand to be filled, (and in order to celebrate the release of Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel on Blu-Ray), Fox Searchlight has released a video of the Grand Budapest Hotel being built entirely out of Legos.

To construct the hotel, the team spent 575 hours of the one life they were given and used 50,000 certified Lego bricks. The final model will weigh approximately 150 pounds, at 7 feet tall and 6.5 feet wide.

The Lego hotel will be unveiled at The Grove in Los Angeles this weekend if any fully grown adult would like to visit it for Instagram.

[h/t PopCultureBrain.]

Bad news: Since 1764, the United States has had one fewer school shooting than the next 38 nations combined. Good news: That study only counted up to 2009, so we're probably the world's undisputed No. 1 now.

The owners of the 4,000-square-foot mansion currently dangling off a cliff near Texas' Lake Whitney decided to hasten their home's demise by setting it on fire Friday afternoon.

Owners Denise and Robert Webb made the decision after consulting demolition experts and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according to Hill County emergency management coordinator Tom Hemrick.

The fire was set in the garage, which workers filled with hay ahead of time. It quickly spread to other parts of the house, which crumbled in flames to the lake below. Firefighters estimate it will take four to six hours to burn.

Cliffhanger mansion set on fire. @FOX4 pic.twitter.com/EhohEIODpO

— Fil Alvarado (@FilAlvaradoFox4) June 13, 2014

Looks like a low-tech approach. Guy with a sledgehammer and a gas can. Hope that works! pic.twitter.com/pcv88FwLeR

— LARI BARAGER (@laribaragerfox4) June 13, 2014

"It's gone. It's just gone," Denise Webb told WTSB. "And you don't see how something that huge can just disintegrate right in front of your face."

Flaming chunk falls to lake below. pic.twitter.com/C8ymvCKuP1

— LARI BARAGER (@laribaragerfox4) June 13, 2014

Once the debris has stopped burning, the Webbs will have it, along with the home's foundation, removed to stable land.

[Image via Fox Dallas]

It's not all inspirational Facebook fan art, dancing to "Drunk In Love," and singing sad Rihanna songs for odd internet favorite Vin Diesel. Apparently it's also acting like an asshole on the set of Fast & Furious 7!

According to sources at the Hollywood Reporter, Vin Diesel hasn't been 2 easy 2 get along with on the set of the upcoming Fast and Furious film. The site goes as far as to say that Diesel has been so hard to work with "that some on set have fantasized about using the facial-replacement technology being deployed to put Paul Walker in the film for Diesel as well," which seems super uncomfortably close to saying that you wish Vin Diesel died in a devastating car accident.

Here's what their insider says:

"Vin spent a whole day in his trailer one day," says one insider. "The next day, they waited four hours for him. He called a meeting [May 28] of studio execs to his trailer for two-and-a-half hours to say, 'What the f— am I doing here?' " The next day, work was done with doubles.

Wait, why did it take him two-and-a-half hours to ask what the fuck he was doing there? ("Whaaaaaat...theeeeee...fuuuuuuck...ammmmmmm..., etc.") Another source "confirms that progress has been frustrating" and that the crew has been suffering from "low morale."

(Though—to be fair—low morale is probably a natural problem that arises out of spending every day working a movie that will likely only serve to remind you of a friend or acquaintance's horrible, untimely death.)

Universal Pictures chairman Donna Langley denies any problem:

"This production is working through some challenges that are historically unprecedented. The crew and cast, led by Vin, have been nothing but terrific under these circumstances."

Luckily, Vin has Vin to get him through this reportedly-hard-to-get-along-with time.

[image via Getty]

In October 2013, an Albanian 20-year-old survived a game of Russian roulette after shooting himself through the head. The (very graphic) photo of the resulting injury is insane:

The Department of Maxillofacial Surgery at the University of Florence released a report about the incident this week that details the various surgeries the man went through during a 30-day hospital stay. The report notes that he used a .22-caliber revolver and was drunk at the time of the incident. There was one other player (who didn't get a bullet) and a female observer who fled the scene. Here's how his injuries were described in the report:

Clinically, the patient presented a circled entry wound at the level of the right inferior border of the mandible and the exit wound at the level of the left frontotemporal region. The bullet passed through the head in a left-to-right direction, involving the floor of the mouth, the left maxillary bone, and the left orbital cavity, with traumatic orbital exenteration and cerebral frontal hernia.

And here he is, amazingly alive, 30 days after he shot himself:

Don't play Russian roulette.

[Images via Department of Maxillofacial Surgery]

The Wall Street Journal warns of "The Terrorist Army Marching on Baghdad." Once it's an army, can you still call it "terrorist?" Either armies are different from terrorists, or all armies are terrorists. Consistency, please. Arguments on this point are welcome.

When we first heard L.A. had a members only club for techies like The Battery in San Francisco, we were stoked. More Bling Ring, less Social Network, fingers crossed. But during a visit in March, I was told not to bother sneaking in: "There weren't enough members to support the place."

Now even one of the founders of the exclusive venue tells Re/code it turned out pretty lame:

"Don't go to 41 Ocean. It's already over," said one of the 41 Ocean founders, Josh Berman, who runs the e-commerce company Beachmint. "Like, it would be a little embarrassing. We're starting a new thing, actually."

Why is it so hard to get Hollywood entrepreneurs to adopt Silicon Valley's pack mentality and silo themselves off? Perhaps because 41 Ocean was "an explicitly tech space," reports Re/code:

"We had a vision. We wanted to install plugs, we wanted to make it a place to work and meet," Berman said. "The guy running it just wanted it to be a nightclub."

It's not that they don't wanna pardy, they just want to be celebrity adjacent:

At one entrepreneur's birthday party, Selena Gomez was there, and somehow I found myself wedged between her and some founders in a selfie. The Winklevoss twins of Facebook infamy — the Winklevii — and Troy Carter both have excellent parties, many people said. And almost everyone agreed that Elon Musk has the best parties. He recently bused partygoers half an hour outside LA for a Renaissance party.

Sigh. You can take the founder out of the Renn Faire . . .

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

[Image via Thrillist]

Lana Del Rey, the pop singer most likely to be a phantom sent by Livejournal circa 2003 to haunt us, told a Guardian interviewer this week, "I wish I was dead already."

Read on, and you will learn that what troubles Del Rey is her fame, just like Norma Desmond. Of the success of her first single, she says:

I never felt any of the enjoyment... It was all bad, all of it.

She felt bombarded by critics. Her life is a "really fucked-up movie." And she is not turned on by money:

What I actually wanted was something quiet and simple: a writer's community and respect.

All emotionally sentient humans feel a little sorry for her, reading that. It's also impossible not to notice that this sort of confession makes Del Rey seem even more like a stereotype than the real person she obviously also is.

Let me be clear: In the matter of authenticity in pop music figures, I'm an agnostic. It seems obvious to me that pop music stars are the subject of huge media-image manufacturing machines that bend and contort the real humans stuck to their candy-colored centers. It is also obvious to me that sometimes the real human in the middle has some control over the machine. The degree obviously varies from person to person. So it's kind of pointless to argue either that she's faking or that she's not.

But it's hard to imagine that Lana Del Rey is not aware that her persona as the depressed, disconnected, unhappy, journal-writing type is what rocketed her to fame in the first place. It was that affect of hers that made "Video Games" memorable, even if you found her cloying and hated the song. It's what makes that gif of her dancing in a microwave kind of fun.

It's plainly more than a lowbrow thing, too. Depressed, troubled women are having A Moment right now in literary-artistic circles. That Magazine did a photoshoot, a bad one, of suicidal women artists last year that I think provoked a backlash because the figure is kind of treasured right now. Eimear McBride just won the new Bailey Prize for her experimental novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, whose title gives you an idea of the contents. Even Obvious Child, the indie Jenny Slate movie that everyone I know who's seen it has loved, has a melancholy, disaffected element to it. It's not a "trend," per se. But it is a cultural groundswell that seems likely to go on for some time.

Which means, for someone like Del Rey, that she can't help but seem like something that fits into it. Even if she really is that depressed—and often the rich and famous are, there are a great many Donald Spoto biographies that testify to that—she's stuck sounding like everyone else when she expresses it. She sounds like she's reading from a script.

Because paradoxically, by becoming something everyone is interested in, and talks about, the female depressive risks becoming a cliché.

[Photo via Getty]

Backdoor Teen Mom Farrah Abraham is spending her 14th minute of fame promoting the first book in her Celebrity Sex Tape trilogy(!) of erotic novels, based on the "private" sex tape she made with porn star James Deen. Advance reader copies of In The Making have arrived, and they confirm what you already suspected: Life is suffering and everything is terrible.

Erotica expert Rachel Kramer Bussel, writing at The Frisky, spoiled a handful of painful-to-read scenes that hit on the main themes of Farrah's novel. To wit: "Other celebrities = lame; Farrah = fierce, independent sex warrior who is too good for the porn industry."

Here's a passage about the male costar character, who she trashes throughout the book and eventually punishes with (I am not making this up) colon cancer:

I'd certainly woken up and realized that Jimmy Heinz wasn't who I'd wanted him to be. He was a thirty-six-year-old porn star, who tried to do things outside of porn but would only ever be known for the use of his dick. He wasn't my Prince Charming. He wasn't even really stable, but he would be my on-screen heartthrob.

It reads like a poorly-disguised burn on James Deen—Jimmy Deen? Jimmy Heinz? Get it? Because food—who's 28 and not especially interested in "crossover" success. Farrah hasn't hidden her distaste for her two-time costar, once telling TMZ, "He should really just get out of the porn industry because things have gotten to his head, he disrespects women and his penis is small."

"And I hope he gets colon cancer," she added, fictionally.

Of course, Farrah only had positive things to say about her character, Fallon Opal:

My gaze went to Jimmy and I smiled, playing with my lingerie and infusing the feel of the video with the feeling that we'd been dating for a while. "Baby, come on, let's have some fun while you have the recorder on."

I held out my hand, no longer Fallon the actress. I was Fallon the best-selling celebrity sex tape star. The one to beat every other wanna-be celebrities before and after me. It was an act, a role to play…except this time I wasn't just fulfilling a role, I was revealing a side of myself no one else had seen before. It was also an act for Jimmy and everyone who could hear or sneak a peek into the condo. It was a show for the camera, all the watchers behind it and the people who would watch.

Later on, she's a "sex warrior" who does all the work on her porn shoot—a somewhat generous retelling of the real-life video—and then hits the showers to wash off the disgusting aura of adult film (the industry she would later write a three-novel series about participating in):

I retreated to the bathroom and stepped into the shower. It was a long day. It fucking started at sunup and I would still be fucking by sundown. I remembered with boyfriends, we would have sex all day and it was amazing—not exhausting. I was more than ready for a shower, I didn't do a bukkake scene but it felt like it. My body was swimming with Jimmy semen.

To recap: Swimming with Jimmy semen.

Read some more choice excerpts at the Frisky, including the solo sex scene that RKB rated as the hottest in the book.

Would you believe Farrah didn't have a ghost writer?

[H/T Uproxx, Photo: AP Images]

Well, it is finally getting to be that time when Summer TV is actually a thing, rather than the absence of a thing. Do you find that you get itchy and hard to pin down in the summer, despite not being a student or a small child? (Unless you are one or the other, in which case clearly I am not saying you don't exist. Don't get all #notallsmallchildren on me.) One reason I'll never leave Austin, but can't live anywhere else in Texas, is about the summer weather here. Nothing like it! Except maybe being microwaved in a very large microwave oven to a simmering boil. But what is to watch until then?

This week has already given us Orange Is The New Black's second season on Netflix, the NBA finals, and the return of Comedy Central's late-night Half Hour. The former Learning Channel offers up Sister Wives and Return To Amish, and OWN's back with another season of Life With La Toya. If you like your freaky extra freaky-deaky, there's always Finding Bigfoot and Keeping Up With The Kardashians, or if you have found this website by accident but still love monsters, you might enjoy Duck Dynasty, or CMT's Dog And Beth. Drama-wise, Power premiered this week on Starz, TNT offered up Major Crimes and Murder In The First, while USA brought back Royal Pains, Suits and Graceland. We also got new episodes of Pretty Little Liars and Chasing Life on ABC Family, a channel that sounds like something it really is not.

The week of June 15, ABC's got the fifth season of Rookie Blue rolling out, that show Wipeout where the people almost die, and Rising Star, which I guess is like American Idol without judges? Which is fine, but no Seacrest is a dealbreaker. ABC Family finally brings back the best show on television, The Fosters, along with the third season premiere of Switched At Birth. BBC America's bringing drama—The Musketeers—and comedy—Almost Royal, while basically the same thing happens over on TLC, with the fourth season premiere of Honey Boo Boo. There's a new cartoon that sounds cute, called Kid President, coming on the Hub. Other dramas include new seasons of Rectify, Rizzoli And Isles, and Perception; more post-apocalyptic fare can be found on TNT (Michael Bay's The Last Ship) and Syfy (a second season of Defiance; new angel drama Dominion).

June 22 begins a week of high-profile dramas: True Blood, Tyrant, and Girl Meets World all take their bows. You've also got Falling Skies, Covert Affairs and N.Y. Med (ABC) coming in this week, the final season of Wilfred on FXX, and that new Tori Spelling/Jennie Garth comedy Mystery Girls on ABC Family. Most importantly (well, besides Teen Wolf's return), the most revered sign that summer is upon us—Big Brother—finally makes its 16th debut.

By June 29, So You Think You Can Dance will still only be getting into live performances. CBS is bringing Under The Dome and Unforgettable back once again, and introducing a new drama, Reckless, which notably stars Cam Gigandet as an attorney at law. PBS is offering up some esteemed old-people romances in both straight (Last Tango In Halifax) and gay (Vicious) versions, with Endeavor's second crimesolving season sandwiched between them. Nick Cannon's Wild 'N Out makes its fourth season debut on MTV2, Comedy Central premieres second seasons of their beloved series Drunk History and Nathan For You, and this is also the week that HBO's Leftovers finally drops.

July 6 brings out the second season of Hemlock Grove on Netflix, a new MTV drama called Finding Carter, and the fifth season of Ridiculousness. Witches of East End and The Bridge both make their second-season debuts, and the highly anticipated CBS drama, Extant, and NBC's equally exciting Welcome To Sweden and Working The Engels are finally arriving.

By mid-July, you're looking at new seasons of Real Housewives of New Jersey, Sex in the Wild on PBS, Leann and Eddie on VH1, and Ray Donovan. FX comedies Married and You're The Worst will also be airing, at least for a while. In happier news, Masters Of Sex and The Strain (FX) are also premiering.

The week of July 20, the presently announced new series/seasons seem to be reality shows, for the most part: Hotel Hell on FOX, Face Off on Syfy, Bring It! on Lifetime, and Who Do You Think You Are? on TLC. Lifetime's got a thriller about fertility coming, called The Lottery, but other than that—also, what? That sounds amazing—this far into the summer, the drama slate's pretty set.

End of July, you've got the fourth season of The Killing (Just six episodes! Last season was really good!) on Netflix, and a grip of historical dramas: Poirot, The Honorable Woman on Sundance, WGN tries again with Manhattan (as in Project), Scottish sci-fi historical romance Outlander on Starz, and Hell On Wheels at AMC. VH1 has an interesting take on the Duets concept with Soundclash, and ABC's offering both The Quest (like, live-action Dungeons & Dragons or something?) and Bachelor In Paradise. Lots of new comedy, though: nightmare scenario Partners (Martin Lawrence and Kelsey Grammer?) should pair well with Anger Management on FX, Garfunkel and Oates are taking their shtick to IFC, and Chris Lilley's back with more of the same on HBO (Jonah From Tonga). Showtime's putting up Morgan Spurlock's series, The Seven Deadly Sins, while Cinemax finally seems to have their head in the drama game, pairing Steven Soderbergh and Clive Owen for The Knick, a period piece about doctors in 1900 New York City.

The rest of August brings us more Dallas and Franklin and Bash on TNT, along with their new show Legends, featuring Sean Bean as an FBI undercover who maybe forgot who he actually is? By the end of the month football will have well and truly descended on us, but before that we also get the T.I. and Tiny and Atlanta Exes premieres on VH1, Jack Davenport as a 1961 London gynecologist in PBS's Breathless, and some reality surprises: A new cycle (21!) of America's Next Top Model, the 16th season of The Biggest Loser on NBC, and something called Wizard Wars on Syfy which is probably just like one of those two.

Trailers/clips for selected shows are in the comments. What do you think about all this? Isn't it so weird how many of these shows are still on, even though you thought they were cancelled years ago? The things that go on when you're not looking! They could fill a book. So, is there anything in particular you're dying to see, and if so: Why?

[Images via MTV, CBS, NBC, ABC, HBO, Netflix, Michael Muller, and BBC America]

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The NYPD: when they're not stopping and frisking black and Latino people just being black or Latino, they're arresting black and Latino people for possession of a plant that was supposedly decriminalized decades ago. This was all supposed to change when Bill de Blasio took office.

New York City's new mayor campaigned on reducing arrests for small amounts of cannabis, pointing out the "clear racial bias" in the city's pot bust numbers and arguing, correctly, that low-level possession arrests "have disastrous consequences for individuals and their families."

Half a year into his mayoralty, not much has changed. A report published by the Drug Policy Alliance shows that in de Blasio's first four months, possession arrest numbers were about the same as they were throughout 2013, Bloomberg's last year in office.

In 2013, 86 percent of pot busts were of black and Latino people. In 2014 so far, that number hasn't changed. Before opening their mouths, the racists in the audience should note that black and white people smoke weed in about equal numbers.

This is all particularly irksome considering that New York state passed a law in 1977 that made first-time possession offenses of less than 25 grams punishable only by a $100 fine, as long as the weed isn't in public view. Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson, who has pledged to stop prosecuting possession cases, is the only New York City official who seems interested in complying with it.

The NYPD skirts this legal annoyance with stop-and-frisk: if you're carrying a joint and a cop asks you to empty your pockets, complying means taking pot that was once private and making it public — and therefore punishable by arrest. When the stop-and-frisk numbers are so overwhelmingly racially skewed, it only follows that possession arrests would be, too.

Maybe we should have seen this all coming when the mayor named his police commissioner: Bill Bratton, who helped architect stop-and-frisk in New York when he led the department under Rudy Giuliani.

It's still early, and there's plenty of time for de Blasio to correct his path. But with Bratton running the NYPD, it's unclear whether he even wants to.

[Image via AP]