This week, Republicans made their motivation for the Benghazi hearings a little too obvious when swearing in their expert witness.

• Old Print Articles: A couple thousand spectators watched a six-day foot race at Madison Square Garden (1882) + Conventioneers at Madison Square Garden are greeted by a talking robot (1930) + Postbellum underground moonshine vaults discovered in Brooklyn (1909).

• Featured Videos: A closeout sale on DeLoreans in California (1983) + A consumer-goods fair was held in Khrushchev-era Moscow (1959) + Braniff Airlines unveils Emilio Pucci-designed NASA-ish unis for flight attendants (1965) + William F. Buckley and Diana Trilling discuss the Jean Harris murder case (1981) + Designer Rudi Gernreich thought the future would be computerized, unisex and hairless (1960s).

• Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Humanitarian aid for Syria at last + I missed the Obamacare deadline + Keep the unclean rabbit manure for someone less classy.

• 10 recent Huffington Post headlines.

• Athletes shouldn’t be encouraged to offer “hometown discounts.”

• Stephen Hawking thinks AI might be the worst thing ever.

• Aubrey de Grey believes someone alive in 2014 may live to 1000.

• Paul Krugman thinks GOP attacks on Obamacare are working. 

• Slavoj Žižek believes the new world order has left us without boundaries.

• Lenny Bruce and Joan Rivers lectured at UCLA decades ago.

• In 1970, conservative wit Al Capp tried to enrage the UCLA campus.

• Wire walker Philippe Petite has a complex relationship with technology.

• Future citizens should probably vote now.

• Trying to explain the Thomas Piketty sensation.

• Piketty thinks both progressive taxation and education are necessary.

• Alex Pentland’s work with Big Data was influenced by Canadian beavers.

• Sun Ra is celebrating his centennial on Saturn.

• Dr. Dre may be a trillionaire within 25 years.

• Steven Pinker mounts a defense of tweeting and texting.

• Car culture might decline with the perfection of robocars.

• Among other things, pesticides are causing Colony Collapse Disorder.

• There are so many TV channels, most of them unwatched.

• A small investment in people can mean so much.

• Every country in the world will soon have military drones.

• Extreme gasoline efficiency and 3D printed makeup make progress.

• You’ve been entered into the system. You’ll never be anonymous again.

• In 1970, Joseph Heller brought Yossarian to UCLA.

• Japan is unsteadily trying to find its place in the modern world.

• A brief note from 1910 about an overreaction.

• A brief note from 1934 about a hungry dog.

• This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

1. donald trump celebrity apprentice
2. google throat tattoo
3. computer for adding bowling scores from the 1970s
4. should performance-enhancing drugs be legal?
5. cities on earth that are like mars
6. george plimpton article about playing football
7. 1940s new yorker article about norman mailer
8. dorothy stratten and paul snider murder
9. tom lehrer song about NASA nazi
10. computers in ernest callenbach’s ecotopia

This week, the independence of two great entities was threatened.

• Old Print Articles: Rudolph Valentino is not permitted to rest in peace (1926) + Swapping wives in New Jersey during WWII (1942).

• Featured Videos: Evel Knievel visits Johnny Carson (1973) and makes a ludicrous TV drama pilot (1970s) + 3 interviews with sex-change pioneer Christine Jorgensen (1950s-80s) + Willie Mays says hey to Merv Griffin and Tallulah Bankhead (1966) + Orson Welles narrated the cockamamie Late, Great Planet Earth (1979) + Commercial for a Texas Instruments Spell-Checker (1989).

• Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: I’m also leasing a frog with an option to buy + Probably won’t work if you’re not a moaner + Film noir in the computer age.

• 10 recent Huffington Post headlines.

• Red Sox owner John Henry has brought finance thinking to baseball.

• The Pelican imprint is being revived with some exciting, new titles.

• In 1883, John L. Sullivan wanted to punch John Q. Public in the face.

• In 1983, Michael O’Donoghue tried to go mainstream.

• Thomas Piketty believes the relative postwar equality was an exception.

• Financial reporter Jesse Eisinger did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit.

• Economist Ha-Joon Chang prefers technological innovation to natural resources.

• Google wants autonomous city driving and robot butlers.

• Circus freak shows have been replaced by reality television.

• In 1964, Timothy Leary married fashion model Nena von Schlebrügge.

• In 1967, Leary gave his “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out” speech at UCLA.

• For better or worse, Wally Olins turned branding into a thing.

• Synthetic biology is definitely coming. What will it change?

• SI reported on Deep Blue very differently in 1996 and 1997.

• In 2014, baseball’s all-star voting is still done with punch cards.

• A Libertarian utopia might, perhaps, bloom in New Hampshire.

• E.O. Wilson thinks humanity might be suicidal.

• William James hosted nitrous oxide parties at Harvard.

• Will Self eulogizes the novel.

• Larry King did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit.

• Qataris are fabulously rich as well as overweight and unhappy.

• Al Feldstein, who just passed away, edited Mad in its glory years

• A non-believer argues against the nature of New Atheism.

• Men with pencils and pads take down Kim Jong-un’s every word.

• Giant 3D printers in China can build 10 houses in a day.

• Robotic rodents may help explain polymorphism.

• A brief note from 1910 about a weary stork

• A brief note from 1910 about a stubborn mule.

• A brief note from 1921 about a romance.

• A brief note from 1911 about an exhibition.

• This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

1. does donald trump smell bad?
2. who was the youngest pimp ever?
3. michael pollan writing about geoengineering
4. did rocky marciano fight a computer?
5. barbara walters interviewing claus von bulow
6. rich children with private zoos
7. billy carter interview
8. vanity fair story about bob guccione
9. the science of facial attractiveness
10. we have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for quite literally billions of people on the planet

This week, Fox News was actually right about something.

Rancher Cliven Bundy is reminiscent of our forefathers in one way.

We owned lots of slaves.

• Old Print Articles: One Collyer brother found dead, the other still missing (1947) + Thomas Edison’s talking pictures prove a (temporary) success + Heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey has part of his ear surgically attached to his nose (1924).

• Featured Videos: Great bull session between Marshall McLuhan and typographer Harley Parker (1967) + Honda introduces its third iteration of the Asimo robot + Novelist Jacqueline Susann is baited during an interview (1960s) + Professor Irwin Corey accepts Thomas Pynchon’s National Book Award (1973) + Evel Knievel makes his debut on Wide World of Sports (1967).

• Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Thanks to de Blasio’s liberal policies, NYC is a murder capital again + A career fallback option + Maybe check with Mick and Keith first + Girlfriend said “no” to the three-way.

• 10 recent Huffington Post headlines.

• 2 Thoughts on Media-Related Things.

• In 1970, a Pennsylvania family got a networked personal computer.

• In 1934, H.G. Wells went too easy on Joseph Stalin.

• Vile ventriloquist act Otto and George has been laid to rest.

• Las Vegas lawns may eventually kill Sin City.

• Perhaps animals, like humans, should have legal recourse.

• A worm may soon live entirely inside a computer.

• Tyler Cowen is awed, yet disappointed, by Thomas Piketty’s bestseller.

• Michael Rockefeller’s mysterious disappearance still fascinates.

• Delivery robots might need different regulations than driverless cars.

• Jack Shafer believes no whistleblowers is more dangerous than whistleblowers.

• Life often lingers beneath the surface when humans are in a vegetative state.

• In 1974, modern minor-league baseball was born in El Paso.

• NPR Shanghai correspondent Frank Langfitt did an AMA about China.

• Nudging people’s behavior likely produces more good than bad.

• Cory Arcangel has uncovered a trove of Warhol computer art.

• Software that decides which inmates should be paroled.

• David J. Cord, analyst of Nokia’s collapse, did an AMA about all things mobile.

• There still may be a future for atomic-powered spacecraft.

• An argument that Alexis de Tocqueville was actually tech-savvy.

• Fixating on the apocalypse may be a way to avoid making hard decisions.

• Silicon Valley wants drones to spread the Internet to remote places.

• Perhaps we’ve finally figured out how to make it rain.

• A brief note from 1885 about a zoologist’s appetite.

• A brief note from 1925 about ugliness.

• A brief note from 1913 about a reunion.

• This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.

• The Huffington Post recently tried to pull a fast one once again in regards to its past behavior as a platform for anti-immunization zealots. Jenny McCarthy’s main outlet for her nonsense back in the day was, yes, the Huffington Post. It’s great that HuffPo came to its senses after receiving an avalanche of criticism, but the site actually had the chutzpah to recently publish a story about how McCarthy is being accused of trying to whitewash her past opposition to inoculations, while ignoring that the site has likewise disappeared its own involvement. I’m not blaming Arianna Huffington herself for this because I don’t know how much control over the property she maintains at this point, but the site as a whole is culpable. It’s not the first time I’ve criticized HuffPo for such behavior. Sadly, it won’t likely be the last.

• Malcolm Gladwell’s continued blind spot for the serial liar Jonah Lehrer is perplexing. I don’t believe in throwing away a human being who’s screwed up, even repeatedly, and I hope the disgraced journalist and neuroscientist is receiving therapy to try and locate the source of his bizarre behavior and become a more well-adjusted person, but he should not be anywhere near journalism, even in a blog form. Gladwell should know better at this point than to further encourage Lehrer in a field he clearly has shown he lacks the ethics for, especially since the publication he most embarrassed was Gladwell’s employer, the New Yorker, becoming, as far as we know, the only plagiarist and fabricator of the David Remnick era. Gladwell actually sent out this tweet last week: ‘Jonah Lehrer is back with a new blog. It is well worth reading. Welcome back Jonah.” Yikes. How can someone as smart as Gladwell continue to do something so foolish?•

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

1. the lyman family cult madness
2. whiskey scion jameson who paid for cannibal acts
3. do jockeys take performance enhancing drugs?
4. john denver interviewing werner erhard
5. henry miller insulting new york city
6. party where adults dress like babies
7. what happened to ron luciano the umpire?
8. otto lilienthal man who could fly
9. who invented the cure for polo?
10. the new species or “posthuman  will view the old “normal” humans as inferior

After this week, Oscar Pistorius has only one supporter left.

He’s like the best boyfriend ever. Everybody’s great.

• Old Print Articles: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s second wife talks to the dead (1923) + “Witch” is chased from Allentown by neighbors (1911) + Cannibals defeat Mussolini (1926).

• Featured Videos: VH1 tortured/paid Zach Galifianakis for awhile (2002) + Germany thought that in the year 2000, we would cook with punch cards (1957) + Great documentary about a weekend with Salvador Dali (1973) + Jackie Stewart and Roman Polanski discuss auto racing and self-deception (972) + Peter Sellers tells Steve Allen how Weegee influenced his acting (1964) + Ridley Scott discusses Aliens (1979) + Robotic insects that employ swarm techniques for macro manufacturing + Festo has developed a robotic kangaroo + John Belushi, Donald Sutherland and John Landis discuss Animal House (1978).

• Recently Posted n NYC’s Craigslist: Remember how romantic life was before email? + Bryan Singer is casting his latest film + I also wouldn’t mind rooting around in your garbage.

• 10 recent Huffington Post headlines.

• In 1966, Gene Shalit reported about computer dating on campus.

• Philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests three ways we can create a Utopia.

• Jon Gertner takes a peek inside the ultra-secretive Google X lab.

• William Gibson discusses the influence of Chris Marker.

• In 1969, Gabriel Garcia Marquez pondered UFOs and ETs.

• In 1974, Roman Polanski discussed Chinatown with Penthouse.

• Julian Assange is publishing a book about his meeting with Eric Schmidt.

• Michael Kinsley thinks serious journalism will survive the Digital Age.

• Barbara Ehrenreich thinks it’s immoral to not raise the minimum wage.

• Until holograms are realized, Socibot will keep you company, creep you out.

• China’s Tianjin Eco-city is a dream that may never be realized.

• Astra Taylor discusses inequality fostered in part by the Internet.

• The public and private sectors are both useful in building great things.

• Former eco-activist Paul Kingsnorth thinks we’re largely doomed.

• Drones are descending on Europe, with no legislation in place.

• Big Data can shine a light but also cloud the truth.

• MLB umpires may be influenced by the reputations of the players.

• The Formula E championship may bring innovation to our roads.

• Shape-shifting furniture can transform with the wave of a hand.

• Military tests can evaluate which adults can learn languages swiftly.

• A person in a Brooklyn cafe just said this…

• A brief note from 1876 about a thirsty man.

• A brief note from 1930 about a new sect.

• A brief note from 1886 about jewelers.

• This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.

“He’s like a young James Franco. He’s got a brilliant mind.”