Few details yet. Earlier this week, Whitney was spotted leaving a Hollywood nightclub with scratches on her arm, blood dripping down her leg and her wig askew. Remember, I Will Always Love You…

Soul Train creator and television pioneer Don Cornelius died by suicide yesterday at the age of 75. Why? Some close to the smooth-voiced television host described a man hurt and distraught by bad business decisions, poor health, and an ugly divorce that took hundreds of thousands of dollars from his children and other family members…. In 1982, he underwent a 21-hour operation to fix a congenital malformation in blood vessels in his brain. “You choose your brain surgeons for their stamina,”...

Maybe: Academy of Sciences published a study purporting to show how psilocybin, the active ingredient in what are known as “magic mushrooms” is helpful in the treatment of depression, PTSD and anxiety. Another study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found similar results. Meantime, researchers around the world have been experimenting with Ecstasy, whose active ingredient, MDMA, has been linked to improvements among people suffering from depression. The Academy of Sciences...

In 2009 filmmaker Casey Pugh and Jamie Wilkinson began collecting 15 second user-created scenes of the original Star Wars. The project, dubbed Star Wars Uncut, grew a devoted following, even winning an Emmy for Outstanding Creative Achievement In Interactive Media in 2010. Now, the 472 segments have been edited by Aaron Valdez and Michael Pugh into a full 2 hour remake. And Pugh and Wilkinson have posted that finished product to the web, in all it’s brilliant and ridiculous crowdsourced glory,...

An excellent 11-minute documentary explaining how the bills would work, who’s behind them and why we should be concerned from New Left Media. Meanwhile, protest works. A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company’s anti-SOPA petition today. A total of 103,785 people signed We the People petitions asking the Obama Administration to protect an open and innovative internet. A petition asking President Obama to veto the Stop Online Piracy Act...

Wikipedia is shutting down its English language site tomorrow to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales tweeted the announcement yesterday, “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!” “The whole thing is just a poorly designed mess,” Wales said in an email to The Associated Press. “I am personally asking everyone who cares about freedom and openness on the Internet to contact their Senators...

Mitt Romney at the debate last night: My care by getting in this race is about my belief in America and my concern that what we’re seeing with this president is a change in course for America to be become something we wouldn’t recognize. I think he is drawing us into becoming more like a European social welfare state. I think he wants us to become an entitlement society where people in this country feel they’re entitled to something from government and where government takes from some to give...

Steve Roth wonders, how do incarceration rates affect unemployment numbers? Europe has consistently higher unemployment than the U.S., but the U.S. has far and away the highest incarceration rate in the world — .75% of the population. (World Prison Population List [PDF], compiled since 1992 by Roy Walmsley of the International Centre for Prison Studies.) Only Russia comes even close, at .63%. (Canada: .12%. Australia: .13%. China .18%. Germany .09%.) Our rate is four to eight times that of...

From the Super PAC now headed by Jon Stewart, Attack In B Minor For Strings, “If corporations are people, then Mitt Romney is Mitt the Ripper.” Watch: The ad is narrated by John Lithgow, who won an Emmy for his role as a family man serial killer in season 4 of Dexter. The note and press release from Jon Stewart, who took over Colbert’s Americans For A Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow Super PAC, is below. Colbert handed off the Super PAC on Thursday in order to “announce that I am...

Last night: On Thursday night’s “Colbert Report,” Mr. Colbert took [his Super PAC riff] a big step further, handing control of his group to his friend and fellow host Jon Stewart so that he can legally run for president, or at least pretend to. Mr. Colbert, who has comically flirted with — and mocked the possibility of — runs for political office before, said he would form an “exploratory committee for president of the United States of South Carolina.” Riffing off his claimed dissatisfaction...

But then, Rick believes they have too much regulation and government intervention over there. Ars Technica: A court in Paris, France has fined Google $65,000 because its search engine’s autocomplete feature brings up the French word for “crook” when users type the name of an insurance company. RELATED: How Rick Santorum Is Making His “Google Problem” Worse.

She’s using a typewriter to write a letter… The letter is to a friend in Spain who sent a postcard — “apparently people don’t send them anymore, either” — asking for a real letter. She bought the typewriter last summer at Goodwill. “I just love old things… I was surprised that the ribbon is still good.” Note the paper dictionary she must use to find the correct spelling of words. All of which proves once again that Kevin Kelly is right...

(Clean Version.) To pass some time while we wait… “A response to national media coverage of our beloved home state.” You want NSFW? See Andrew.

Maybe. But many live longer: [A] new study, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, finds that it’s not all bad for American leaders. By comparing presidents to other men of their eras, researchers discovered that commanders in chief die at about the same age as their peers. They certainly don’t age at double the speed [as was suggested by one physician]. Many live longer, probably because most have been wealthy, college-educated, and able to get good medical...

Update: The Daily Mail headlines, No wonder they looked sheepish! Wealthy bankers who claimed record $254m jackpot accused of collecting fortune as a ‘front’ for mysterious client. Who says it’s the poor who play the lottery? We all like the lottery. 3 Asset Managers Won $254 Million in Connecticut’s Powerball Lottery: Timothy C. Davidson, Brandon E. Lacoff and Gregory H. Skidmore, three executives at Belpointe Asset Management, an investment firm based in Greenwich, Conn.,...

Following up on the teenager who refused to apologize for tweeting disparaging remarks about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback… Yahoo! News: Hundreds of people have left negative comments on Brownback’s Facebook Thanksgiving message. "The imperial Gov needs to go to the school, apologize to the assembled students and then apologize in person to the young lady," one person wrote. In a comment to the Kansas City Star last week, Brownback’s communications director stood behind the...

NECN: Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts fourth Congressional District has said he will not seek re-election for 2012. Frank, a ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, planned to hold a press conference in Newton, Mass. on Monday afternoon, to formally announce and answer questions on the decision. CNN confirms. The Caucus: His Fourth District falls mostly in southern Massachusetts but also includes the famously liberal Boston suburbs of Newton and Brookline. Under a new...

Julie Sullivan isn’t angry with her daughter, Emma, for tweeting disparaging remarks about Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback during a Youth in Government program last week in Topeka: “She was talking to 65 friends. And also it’s the speech they use today. It’s more attention grabbing. I raised my kids to be independent, to be strong, to be free thinkers. If she wants to tweet her opinion about Gov. Brownback, I say for her to go for it and I stand totally behind her.” Brownback’s office,...

After reviewing what’s happened to other Western leaders confronting voters in this economic vortex (eight governments toppled in Europe in two years), and observing that President Obama’s “cautious centrism soured the left without reassuring the right,” Nick Kristof gives the president some due credit: Obama has done better than many critics on the left or the right give him credit for. He took office in the worst recession in more than half a century, amid fears of a complete...

New Scientist reports on the first contact lenses containing electronic displays. They’ve been put into the eyes of rabbits to prove they are safe for humans: The first version may only have one pixel, but higher resolution lens displays – like those seen in Terminator – could one day be used as satnav enhancers showing you directional arrows for example, or flash up texts and emails – perhaps even video. In the shorter term, the breakthrough also means people suffering from...

Would any of us disagree? Photo from the WSJ’s Kelly Evans… The cringe-worthy promo was given out to reporters attending last night’s 69th Annual Financial Follies Dinner and Entertainment event put on by The New York Financial Writers Association. Via.

Stephen Colbert remembers Newt’s two week Greek vacation in June. Apparently Newt now claims that luxury cruise was a fact-finding mission… ABC News: At a stop in Jefferson, Iowa on Monday Gingrich reiterated that the luxury vacation was a chance for him to listen and talk with the Greek people and “reflect” on the American economy. “I was in Greece in early June I took some flak from the press for going on a trip, but it was actually very helpful to be in Greece in early June,”...

Is anyone truly surprised to find that profligate spender and putative GOP presidential front runner Newt Gingrich has spent nearly three quarters of a million dollars on his ho-hum candidate website? Karoli at Crooks and Liars: According to his third quarter report, the campaign made weekly payments of $10,000 to High Tech Win, LLC for “website development”, with the exception of two payments in July for $20,000 each. The total paid in the third quarter to this vendor was $120,000. In...

Tenured Radical Claire Potter: As you absorb the news about the key people at Penn State who ought to have reported what they knew of coach Jerry Sandusky’s alleged assaults on little boys, please keep one thing in mind. Penn State’s cover-up is embedded in the interest it, and all universities, have in keeping many forms of sexual violence and sexual harassment a private, internal matter. The mistake Penn State made was, in many ways, a simple category error: they mistook these pubescent boys...

Jill Lepore’s must read New Yorker piece about the past and future of Planned Parenthood is locked up tight behind a paywall, so too few of us actually will read it. For those of you who don’t subscribe, I point to Amanda Marcotte: [W]hat I really enjoyed was Lepore’s depiction of the midcentury struggle between the feminist radicals and the moderate social conservatives that populated the movement to make contraception access more wildly available. The struggle was over...