We hear . . . that reality TV is getting too real over at a certain midtown plaza. For one executive, his own network may be hitting a little close to home as he waits to hear from the boss whether he’s kept it tight or whether they no longer wanna hit that. But with his latest show a huge hit among all the most profitable demographics—soccer moms, NASCAR dads, white-collar pervs, and the obese—we have a feeling things will work out well.

Delivery androids never took over the office, with email replacing the messenger boy for routine internal communication, but they’re still a technology worth looking back on. Roaming the halls in a preplanned route with sensors to prevent them from running into people and other obstacles, these devices were the forerunners of the robotic vacuum cleaners and warehouse workers used by companies like Amazon. But they also had their dark side, like when Soviet spies hid a bug in a top-secret device used in the FBI headquarters.

Pomeranians are an intelligent and perceptive breed, so it’s not a surprise to see them play such a key role here. They’re clearly the brains behind the monkish matchmaker who takes all the credit for bringing together two rival crime families. It’s just his luck that the Romeo-and-Juliet scheme left a body count the last time he tried it. But with the fate of our masterminds left unresolved, we’re confident the gifted pups will find a way to keep the enterprise going.

The second startup bubble has seen its share of derivative social-media plays, but every now and then something truly innovative emerges. When software can take everything subjective and unspoken about human interactions and reduce it to explicit, objective numbers, then a truly transparent social economy can finally emerge. Here we see the transformational results. Exponentially weighted ratings reveal an innate social hierarchy: fours and fives running the place; threes and twos hoping to move up; a Colosseum-cum-America’s Got Talent to entertain the elite. If only they hadn’t run out of apples to keep the twos in check, we might have seen the future of higher education in the form of a remarkable new social tool.

Mysterious tv doc’s hospital visit revealed! Evan’s recent absence from the set has soap fans buzzing—and now we know how close he was to death. The fake doc’s real-life medical scare is the stuff of his own soap. From vision loss to inability to walk to low libido to heart and kidney failure and finally coma, it seems like nothing would go right, at least until the end of the episode. But will there be a cliffhanger—a new baby Sterling, just like the last time the hunky doc was in a coma?

Dusty old theory is out and practice-based learning is in. That’s especially true in a field like architecture that is heavy on lab and studio work. But it’s possible to take the trend too far, and when that happens, it’s time for the university to step in and right the ship. Columbia is a school in turmoil, with the latest shenanigans in its architecture department the talk of the academy. First they hire a tenure-track professor with no academic experience and no clear ideas or research agenda without even doing a national search. But now it turns out he’s not much of an architect—or a teacher—either. All his buildings are failures, and he can’t even find the right classroom. It’s no wonder enrollment in departments like economics are spiking while enrollments in the architecture program are in free-fall.

It’s great to see some mainstream respectability for the adult entertainment industry, but the days are long since gone when a single new performer, even one with a giant and distinctive feature, would be enough to interest Korean investors. And no male performer could earn enough in three months to buy a Soup ’R Crackers franchise. When the new performer is as shy and awkward as Ron Don? Forget about it.

Richie was a promising comedian whose career, like so many before him, was derailed by drugs. Drug dependency is the health crisis of our time, but experiments with new treatment methods are providing promising insights into potential cures. Interventions have been part of the treatment landscape for decades, and therapists have long used objects to overcome patients’ inhibitions. Pairing these techniques in a nonconfrontational setting, though, was able to help Richie when nothing else could. Of course, not everyone will respond to candy toy therapy—different addictions have different causes—but finding the right pairing of patient and object may be the treatment plan of the future.

Ask any guy for his fantasies, and you’ll probably hear about having a threesome. What’s the appeal? Is there something sexy about a first-timer? Were we always meant to bring in a special guest star? Can they bring people closer together? Maybe all of that; but maybe we just want something easy. After all, we don’t really know the people we sleep with; intimacy’s the real bitch.

The collapse of the Obama coalition and the election of Donald Trump is the latest reminder that labor unions are some of last obstacles left standing in the way of the total destruction of progressivism. But the way forward requires organization, concrete goals, and some old-fashioned activism. When workers rally for fair working conditions and health benefits in the face of Big Nuclear and literal hired goons, the short-term result may be painful blackouts, but in the long term, the organized workers of the International Brotherhood of Jazz Dancers, Pastry Chefs and Nuclear Technicians can show that labor isn’t the lumbering dinosaur the media portrays it to be.

These days, it’s laughable to think that the biggest secrets the government covers up are about a boxcar full of alien corpses. The idea, though, that the government would kill to keep its secrets and look far and wide for new ways to hide those secrets is all too real. Nothing in the Snowden papers talks about using Navajo code talkers to hide secrets—but some secrets are too secret to keep on even a top-secret computer network, and secrets about a shadowy global cabal are among them. You would think that a cabal big enough to poison the water and have gunmen all over the place would leak eventually, but maybe it’s finally being exposed. Kind of cruel of the producers to make us wait all summer to find out though.

Count us among fans of Sam’s “courageously headachey” personal style, and we’re still hoping the trio gets back together soon. But if a little mocking leads to more classic dis tracks like “New Phone Who Dis?,” we’re all ears.