At this point, I'm within 3 leaked depositions, 26 victims, and a couple colorful sweaters of losing faith in Bill Cosby. That sounds crazy. But, for a long time that was a common reaction even as the list of accusers accumulated. What were people waiting for; Cosby to take his dates home in a White Ford Bronco? At this point, even Fat Albert is like, "Hey! Hey! ... Huh?" There will be few remaining doubters after this powerful NY Mag piece that allowed 35 women to tell their stories about being assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the culture that wouldn't listen.

+ Who knows? Maybe there will still be doubters. After all, this story has been around for years. Just take a look back at Robert Huber's Philly Mag story you'd assume would have been a career-ender (or much worse). Dr. Huxtable & Mr. Hyde: "It's a crazy game Americans in particular seem to play, the way we need to believe desperately in our heroes -- we want Bill Cosby to be as sweet as Cliff, to be as noble as his desire to lift up his people."

"Maine is at the burning core of a nationwide heroin epidemic, the perverse outcome of a well-intentioned drive to save Americans from the last drug craze, a widespread hunger for heroin's chemical cousin, prescription opiate pills such as Oxycontin." WaPo's Marc Fisher tells the story of America's Heroin disaster through the life and death of David McCarthy. "He finally seemed like a man. So alert, so in the world. And then he decided not to be?

"'What the hell, girl?! I was supposed to be the one who went first! You had so much to live for!' Despite her cheery countenance and assiduous completion of assignments, Ms. DeWitt had already bought razor blades and written a stack of goodbye letters to loved ones." The NYT's Julie Scelfo on campus suicide and the pressure of perfection

There are 50 United States, but according to Colin Woodard, there are really 11 distinct American nations. Which one do you live in? (I live in the one where we text people standing right next to us, our coffee costs five bucks, and we measure time in vesting schedules.)

The folks at Vice asked me to write a NextDraft from the future. So here's the day's most fascinating news, 2020 Edition. This is part of the fiction project called Terraform that's been running in Vice's Motherboard section.

The police in Hammond refused to allow a rapper (with outstanding arrest warrants) known as Chief Keef to perform live at a local music festival. And that apparently included appearing "live" via hologram. They even pulled the plug on the digital version of the rapper.

+ "The endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting." Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and other notable technologists wrote an open letter calling for a pre-emptive end to the AI arms race.

+ "If a thing is designed to kill you, it is, by definition, bad design." Mike Monteiro in Dear Design Student: In Praise of the AK-47.

A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. But it might go down even better with a couple packets of artificial sweetener. Upshot's Aaron E. Carroll takes a look at the much-maligned history of sugar substitutes and the compelling evidence that they're actually healthier than the real thing.

"I had done this a few dozen times myself, 6,000 miles away from my Alexandria, Va., apartment. As an Army infantryman in Iraq, I'd always been on the trigger side of the weapon. Now that I was on the barrel side, I recalled basic training's most important firearm rule: Aim only at something you intend to kill." Alex Horton with timely piece on an interaction with law enforcement: In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me.

"There is no group more slighted, more narrowly cast, than the Muslim-American actors who earn virtually their entire livings pretending to hijack planes and slaughter infidels." GQ's Jon Ronson on the most extreme type casting in Hollywood. You May Know Me from Such Roles as Terrorist #4.

"Our best chance to defeat ISIS is if they're stupid enough to try to put a cap on the number of Ubers in the Middle East." By popular demand, here is our second installment of Just Admit It. (This will feel good, I promise.)

+ Apparently, your plagiarized Twitter joke can be deleted on copyright grounds. (That's what she said.)

+ "John Horton Conway is perhaps the world's most lovable egomaniac. He is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, and Richard Feynman, all rolled into one." The Guardian on the world's most charismatic mathematician.

+ Your yoga teacher co-opted the word Namaste.

+ Amazon is planning to open drive-up grocery stores. (Face it. You're gonna buy whatever Jeff Bezos tells you to buy.)