Larry Flynt's venerable publishing enterprise has, throughout its history, championed freedom of expression in its own unique way. In 1984, Flynt famously went all the way to the Supreme Court over the right to run a parody ad of inexhaustible loon Jerry Falwell reminiscing about losing his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Tasteless? Yes. An obvious lampooning of a public figure? Also yes. But when Hustler recently ran a photo of conservative writer S.E. Cupp Photoshopped to look like she was performing oral sex, that was something altogether different.

The Cupp photo exists as a "celebrity fantasy" – i.e., an imaginary hate bang. And though Hustler takes pains to cover its butt, noting that "No such picture of S.E. Cupp actually exists. This composite fantasy is altered from the original for our imagination, does not depict reality, and is not to be taken seriously for any purpose," it ponders, grossly, "What would S.E. Cupp look like with a dick in her mouth?"

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You'd think that after that ranting, complaining voice mail that "Community" star Chevy Chase left showrunner Dan Harmon went viral this spring they'd have learned. Or maybe after Harmon responded to his dismissal just last Friday by spilling his guts on Tumblr. You'd think the muckety-mucks would have figured out by now that the best you can do when there's tension in your little creative family is to be forthright and creative about it.

Note, for example, how the show's star Joel McHale spent the spring diplomatically – and wittily -- handling the talk-show circuit after Chase's meltdown, joking that the voice mail had to be fake because "there’s no way Chevy could figure out voice mail." See, it's glib and funny and sounds magically off-the-cuff! Get it? The cast of "Community" -- which includes the incredibly on-the-ball Danny Pudi, Alison Brie and Donald Glover – knows how to handle itself.

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Pretty much immediately upon the death of his father, Luke Russert inexplicably had a full-time broadcasting job, supplanting his part-time broadcasting job co-hosting a satellite radio sports talk show with James Carville. (That was a real thing that actually existed. Can you imagine a human who would want to listen to that?)

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Yet now I find myself linked not only with the Unabomber, but also Charles Manson and Fidel Castro. Or so says the Chicago-based think tank the Heartland Institute, for which I’ve done work. Heartland erected billboards depicting the above three declaring: "I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?" Climate scientists now, evidently, share something in common with dictators and mass murderers. Reportedly bin Laden was scheduled to make such an appearance, too.

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The talk seemed reasonably well-received by the audience, but TED "curator" Chris Anderson told Hanauer that it would not be featured on TED's site, in part because the audience response was mixed but also because it was too political and this was an "election year."

Hanauer had his PR people go to the press immediately and accused TED of censorship, which is obnoxious -- TED didn't have to host his talk, obviously, and his talk was not hugely revelatory for anyone familiar with recent writings on income inequity from a variety of experts -- but Anderson's responses were still a good distillation of TED's ideology.

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Let's get something straight, so to speak, right off the bat. There's no disputing that Manny Pacquiao is not the most enlightened guy to ever put on gloves and fight for a belt. In a story for Examiner.com this past weekend, blogger Granville Ampong wrote of how the boxing champ takes issue with Barack Obama's recent groundbreaking declaration of support for same-sex unions. "God's words first ... obey God's law first before considering the laws of man," Pacquiao told Ampong, in what the writer described as "an exclusive interview." Pacquiao was further quoted explaining that "God only expects man and woman to be together and to be legally married, only if they so are in love with each other… It should not be of the same sex so as to adulterate the altar of matrimony, like in the days of Sodom and Gomorrah of Old."

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Here's how the story got started. Back in October, the FBI announced that it had broken up an international crime ring when it arrested six Estonians in what was then heralded as “the biggest cyber criminal takedown in history.” The Estonians had, over the course of four years, hijacked more than 4 million computers in 100 countries through the use of malware known as DNSChanger. By redirecting the infected browsers of unwitting users, DNSChanger was able to send high volumes of traffic to the criminal ring’s rogue websites and servers, collecting more than $14 million in fraudulent advertising revenue and exposing their victims to information theft in the process.

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Six months later, "John Carter" became one of the costliest flops in Hollywood history, and while the film may have its redeeming qualities, story structure isn’t among them. Read in retrospect, the Stanton profile now seems laden with irony, and it isn’t alone: A striking number of recent New Yorker features on movie directors and actors have been followed by embarrassing setbacks for the artists in question, usually involving the very projects that the articles are extolling.

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Unshockingly, the National Review Online was quickest to leap into pearl-clutching position. After deeming the image "as bad as it will ever get," Glenn T. Stanton pronounced that "This poor boy may be diggin' life now, but will soon be forever teased as the Got Milk? boy that Time magazine and his indulgent mom made infamous." And in the Contra Costra Times, Tony Hicks decided that all the mothers who appeared in the story's photos did so "simply to have something really embarrassing to use against their kids when they become teenagers."

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In case you thought, nay, hoped, that the barrel-bottom had been fully scraped last week when the New York Times asked, in a query straight out of the Onion, "Has women’s obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism?," now Time magazine has upped the ante with a cover story brazenly challenging "Are You Mom Enough?"

It's accompanied, by the way, by a picture of a hot blonde and her 3-year-old son standing on a chair to suckle her breast.  Yo, take THAT, Room for Debate page! I guess Time felt it really had to bring it after uber-troll Katie Roiphe's piece last month on why feminists just want a good spanking.

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As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.

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As first reported in the Canadian site the Province last month – complete with a snuggly picture of a happy couple in bed – a 43-year-old German man told Munich police he had met the 47-year-old woman in a bar, went home with her, and had sex a few times. But when he said he'd had enough, she demanded more and refused to let him leave.  He then fled out a balcony and called the cops. The Mirror then picked up the tale -- this time along with a coy image of a pair of feet in bed – and described the woman as an "insatiable lover."  She then allegedly struck again early this week, leaving a second man who'd gone home with her after a chance meeting on a bus "sobbing in the street" and pleading to police, "Oh God, it was hell. I can’t walk. Please help me." She has reportedly now been placed under psychiatric evaluation.

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You'd have to go all the way back to January, when the Times hilariously asked if it should be a "truth vigilante" – i.e., fact-check its sources – to find such a fanciful query in the paper of record. This time, the "Room for Debate" Op-Ed page jumps off from French feminist Elisabeth Badinter's contentious book "The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women," asking, I kid you not, "Has women's obsession with being the perfect mother destroyed feminism?" It may take its inspiration from a controversial book on the tyranny of attachment parenting, but rarely has a single, short sentence strung together so many incendiary words. You've got obsession, motherhood, perfection and the destruction of feminism all in one tidy package, centered about the tacit acceptance of the notion that by, say, co-sleeping with your infant, you're undermining The Sisterhood. As Time.com editor Jessica Winter mused Tuesday, "Next up:  Fatherhood vs. Sports, Childhood vs. School, Coats vs. Shoes and Cats vs. Dogs."

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The files — which, among other information, detail the times ads aired, how much they cost, and whether stations rejected ad buy requests from campaigns — are currently available only on paper at stations.

The FCC rejected a push by the industry to water down the measure. But the rule as passed also has serious limits. For example, the data will not be searchable or uploaded in a common format.

The rule will first apply to affiliates of the four major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) in the top 50 TV markets. All other stations will have until July 2014 to come into compliance.

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The Daily Caller, the site he launched with a promise to offer a new model for conservative journalism, is primarily a catalog of sleazy traffic-baiting aggregated Web garbage ("Top 10: Most beautiful ‘most beautiful’ women [SLIDESHOW]"), ancient relics of online commentary with nowhere else left to publish (Ann Coulter, Mickey Kaus), and overblown scandal-mongering headlines that promise much more than they can deliver. In other words it is like a mean-spirited parody of a conservative version of the pre-AOL Huffington Post, with a healthy dose, recently, of attention-grabbing race baiting. This is not the sort of thing Carlson used to be known for.

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But in which language does one speak to a machine, and what can be expected by way of response? The questions arise from the accelerating data-streams out of which we’ve learned to draw the breath of life, posed in consultation with the equipment that scans the flesh and tracks the spirit, cues the ATM, the GPS and the EKG, arranges the assignations on Match.com and the high-frequency trades at Goldman Sachs, catalogs the pornography and drives the car, tells us how and when and where to connect the dots and thus recognize ourselves as human beings.

Why then does it come to pass that the more data we collect -- from Google, YouTube and Facebook -- the less likely we are to know what it means?

The conundrum is in line with the late Marshall McLuhan’s noticing 50 years ago the presence of “an acoustic world,” one with “no continuity, no homogeneity, no connections, no stasis,” a new “information environment of which humanity has no experience whatever.” He published "Understanding Media" in 1964, proceeding from the premise that “we become what we behold,” that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

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The L.A. Times informed the Pentagon of its story and waited 72 hours before publishing. The Army, notably, had not launched a criminal investigation into the troops responsible for the photos until the Times contacted them. The Obama administration and the Pentagon have both condemned the soldiers responsible for the pictures, but also expressed disappointment in the Times for publishing them. Wired's Spencer Ackerman refers to the photos as "yet another unforced error" for U.S. forces in Afghanistan. It's a depressing and disturbing story, from a long and miserable war.

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But what you will see, regularly, is Paul Krugman criticizing unnamed people who happen to have made the exact same argument as David Brooks. (Or Thomas Friedman.)

Last week, Krugman wrote a column attacking so-called "centrists" who defend the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticize the president for being too "partisan" about it. The column came a few days after Mr. Brooks defended the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticized the president for being too "partisan" about it.

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