This great work is possible thanks to those of you who have supported Salon and become members of Salon Core, our membership program (read more about it here). To the rest of you: If the work Glenn does is important to you, I hope you’ll join, too. Great work needs great supporters. And the Core perks are pretty cool, too.

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Salon doesn't just feel different. It is different. Along with this speedy new publishing platform, we're taking a bolder editorial direction. We're doing more of the deep, provocative reporting that you, our readers, have asked us for – the kind that is pursued less and less in the media. Salon is making a stronger commitment to do what we've always done best: speak the uncomfortable truths, and uncover the stories that those in power want to keep hidden.

Like a lot of our online peers, we've toyed with the shorter-faster-punchier approach in recent years, chronicling what mattered with a speed that matched readers' habits, cheerfully grazing on Twitter sprouts or Tumblr bonbons. We'll continue to be fast when it matters. But we know our readers want more than aggregated cheat sheets; they don't want to just seem smarter, they want to be smarter. So we're increasing our deep dives into the important and fascinating stories of our time, and offering more investigative reports that require time and care to develop. We're plunging into this deep and passionate journalism because we know that these critical times (captured well here by our returning founder David Talbot) demand it.

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The story's art clumsily, hilariously, seems to include Fox News in its loser lineup (I like to imagine it as the subversive handiwork of a pissed-off graphic designer):

The write-up has Salon shedding readers like scales from Roger Ailes' backside -- "losing about 1 million regular visitors over the past year, a 37 percent decline." The fizzling started "almost immediately last November when the main editor, Joan Walsh, took a back-seat to write a new book." Fox reports that we're "ad-heavy" (not actually a bad thing for a site relying on ad revenue, by the way) and that we have a hard time competing with the "classier" New Yorker. 

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Early readers who discovered his Savage Love advice column (which he launched in 1991 for Seattle's the Stranger and which went into heavy syndication in the nation's free weeklies) were first jarred by how readers' questions began -- "Hey, Faggot," Savage's attempt to reclaim and defuse the word -- then hooked by his remarkably candid style. In that just barely pre-Internet world, when sex was a subject left to breathy advice columnists in the glossies and late-night radio, Savage was like a breath of fresh air. Or maybe a quick whiff of poppers.

His was a blazing, rude voice bursting out in a '90s culture still weirded out by reports of teens, gays and presidents actually having sex. Along the way, he dropped the "faggot" tag, created a wildly popular podcast, and coined irresistible expressions -- from "GGG" (his advice that partners should be "good, giving and game"), to "pegging" and "diamondbacking" (go ahead, look them up) -- that are as rudely hilarious as he is. He's got a show slated for MTV, and he's emerged as the leading voice not only on sex information but also sexual identity, and may well be the most effective gay rights spokesman around.

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But his subjective approach can, at minimum, offer illuminating deconstructions of his own complex emotions, and also often captures a larger truth about the way we think or feel. When he says, "I don't know if that's true, but I feel it very deeply as fact" -- as he does in the interview below -- it's likely to drive the more literal reader a little bonkers. But Koestenbaum follows his own internal compass of what counts, and it can lead him to sparkling insights about human nature that all those "Tipping Point" knockoffs can't match. He's a master at overthinking a simple subject to both an exhaustive -- and endlessly exhilarating -- degree.

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You can also let him enter a room before you, and you can let him win at a game of tug of war, all without fearing that you will somehow signal that you are the submissive one and he is in charge. Contrary to long-cherished theories, dogs aren't competing with us for position in the pack, but are largely performing for our approval. And that -- no matter what the Cesar Millans of the world would have you believe -- is because much of what we've been led to be believe about dogs' hard-wired behavior has been totally wrong.

In his densely illuminating new book, "Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet,"  John Bradshaw explains how our understanding has been skewed by deeply flawed research, and exploited by a sensationalized media. In place of the rigid, often violent, alpha-led wolf societies we once believed produced the modern dog were actually cooperative, familial groups. And in place of the choke-chain school of negative reinforcement should be a training program based primarily on the positive.

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We're thrilled. David patrols a distinct -- and classic Salon -- intersection of politcs and culture; for those of us who obsess as mightily about movies as we do the great political debates, he's a trusted voice. I like to think his Denver outpost gives him a better view of the whole country, without the distractions of the West Coast cause du jour or the myopia of the East Coast chattering class. It lets him see issues that other blinkered peers miss, as when he raised  questions about the wild -- and wildly hyped -- response to the death of Osama bin Laden (a monster post, which many are still talking about).

Read him here. Follow him on Twitter. Listen to his radio show. Buy his great new book. You won't be disappointed.

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Sure, they weren't just any jokes. (Buzzfeed has ranked the most jaw-dropping of them.) But in many ways, they are typical ones for Gottfried, 56, who has paved a long career with the shock and awe of the taboo. He is famous for his version of the notorious "Aristocrats" joke, delivered a mere three weeks after Sept. 11, at a New York Friars Club roast for Hugh Hefner, which has somewhat romantically been christened (by Frank Rich, the New York Observer and the film made in honor of the joke) as the moment it was OK to laugh again. That epic release was made possible, though, only by the World Trade Center joke Gottfried detonated right before, which drew boos, hisses and the refrain that could wind end up as Gottfried's epitaph: "Too soon!"

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Check out today's first post -- a Tax Day romp through the world's currencies -- and tell us what you think.

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We take threats against our own very seriously.

A bizarre plan for an attack on the whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks and journalists construed as sympathetic to it -- first reported by the Tech Herald -- clearly targets Salon's Glenn Greenwald, saying that his "level of support" for WikiLeaks "needs to be disrupted." The report (you can download the purported final draft here) is listed as an "overview by Palantir Technologies, HBGary Federal and Berico Technologies," and according to a string of e-mails also leaked, was developed following a request from Hunton and Williams, a law firm that represents, among others, Bank of America.

Bank of America is the presumed next target of WikiLeaks, and has reportedly been bracing for what's to come.

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"I loved 'Big Fan.' "

"I wish 'Comedians of Comedy' would come back."

"The voice of 'Ratatouille'!"

"Spence, from 'King of Queens!"

"He was the best thing about 'The Hangover.' "

Actually, he never appeared in "The Hangover." My friend had confused him with fellow "Comedians of Comedy" member and charmingly gnomish funnyman Zach Galifianakis. But it's a testament to how ubiquitous Oswalt is that, after nearly a decade of seeing him on stage, on TV and in films, you can have a vivid recollection of one particular performance yet have a hard time pinning down who he actually is.

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The piece was co-published with Rolling Stone magazine -- they fact-checked it and published it in print; we posted it online. In the days after running "Deadly Immunity," we amended the story with five corrections (which can still be found logged here) that went far in undermining Kennedy's exposé. At the time, we felt that correcting the piece -- and keeping it on the site, in the spirit of transparency -- was the best way to operate. But subsequent critics, including most recently, Seth Mnookin in his book "The Panic Virus," further eroded any faith we had in the story's value. We've grown to believe the best reader service is to delete the piece entirely.

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2011 has brought some new changes at Salon, and I wanted to fill you in on them. First:

Matt Zoller Seitz, who has been contributing regularly to Salon since his sensational series just over a year ago, is joining the staff as our full-time TV writer. It's not Matt's first run at this -- he's done standout work as a critic at the Newark Star-Ledger, New York Press and New York Times; and his influential arts site, The House Next Door, set a high bar for critical discourse online. But we really expect him to break outside the usual confines of the critic's role. His recent multimedia look at 2010's best film scenes is the type of innovative work we're looking for him to produce for Salon -- and yes, he'll continue his immensely popular Friday Night Seitz slide shows. He was made for this medium. Follow him here (Twitter), and give him plenty of feedback -- he even looks forward to answering your comments.

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But we did want to highlight the pieces in Salon that — through an unscientific staff poll — we decided we liked the best this year. None of these should be a huge surprise to Salon readers; they were all big hits with you, too. From Glenn Greenwald's incisive exploration of WikiLeaks, to Mary Elizabeth Williams' gripping accounts of her cancer diagnosis and treatment, our favorite stories this year run a familiar Salon gamut of world-changing importance to the expressly, meaningfully personal.

And with no more fanfare than that, in chronological order, our 10 staff favorites:

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It took a great many twists and turns before it became the Salon that exists today. But if there's one animating idea that continues to describe us it's the idea of a smart tabloid, a concept dreamed up by our founder, David Talbot (no matter what others would lead you to believe). We still don't aspire to the soporific, self-serious approach to politics and culture of many of our ink-stained, weather-beaten peers, but we also don't shrug it all off the way these younger, snark-bitten upstarts do, either. We're energized and engaged with what's going on in the world -- and we know you are, too.

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So instead, we came up with another idea: Spotlighting outstanding examples of sane behavior in 2010 so far. We're flipping one of our favorite features – This Week in Crazy – on its head, running a series that celebrates the Year in Sanity. The goal: We want to honor inspiring cases of clear-thinking in the face of madness. We want to reward honest reactions when evasion would've been applauded. We want to spotlight straight talk, when obfuscation would have been the easier, or expected, way to go.

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Our relationship, though, may go back much further and deeper than we realize. Some scientists believe our relationship with domesticated animals -- dogs, in particular -- goes back as far as 100,000 years. And that speculation has launched a nascent school of study into the theory that man and dog have co-evolved through the centuries in untold ways; one scientist speculates that we lost our own, keen sense of smell by relying on the sharper sniff of our beastly hunting partners.

In his new "The Dog Who Couldn't Stop Loving," Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson considers how a "mutual evolution" not only impacted dogs, but us as well, and our own capacity to love and feel empathy for other creatures. Warmly told through his relationship with his own dog, a joyfully failed guide dog named Benjy, Masson breezes through some of this curious new research while celebrating the seemingly bottomless capacity of dogs to express love and devotion to their owners.

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Or have they? In his fascinating new book, "Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat," Hal Herzog looks at the wild, tortured paradoxes in our relationship with the weaker, if sometimes more adorable, species. A professor of psychology at Western Carolina University, Herzog studies our complicated relationship with animals, from our devotion to our dogs, to our increasing devotion to that barbecued brisket.

We spoke to Herzog Friday about his new book, asking him about the notorious "cat bin lady" and "puppy throwing girl," whether children who harm animals grow up to be serial killers, and whether we'll have to come to peace with the undeniable similarities between the animals we love, and those we love to eat.

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