Link Roundup!

Ariel Levy’s piece in The New Yorker. I want to make it very clear that this is the saddest story in the world, and it will be a very long time before you may also be able to understand how it is also a work of great beauty, and you do not have to read it unless that sounds okay to you. Mom and Aunt Peggy, I know you read The Toast, please do not click through.

Also in the new issue of The New Yorker, Simon Rich’s “Guy Walks Into a Bar.” It’s paywalled, but what a great opportunity to remind everyone that The New Yorker is still the crowning achievement of high-quality journalism in our nation, and you can subscribe at any time. I can honestly say that I envy Simon Rich’s extraordinary talent over his connections. Go buy Ant Farm and Free-Range Chickens and The Last Girlfriend on Earth.

LIST ALERT: Entertainers who died during performances, and inventors who were killed by their inventions.

Thanks for the whooping cough, Jenny McCarthy:

At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though laughing, which, it turns out, I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

Yoko Ono, international treasure: