One Day, Michelle Branch Will Write a Happy Love Song

Nashville law enforcement just wanted Michelle Branch to be comfortable in jail. “I had a really cute dress on, and one of the police officers was a woman. She was like, ‘You’re not going to want to wear that,’” the singer says of her arrest for domestic assault on August 11. “Wait, I didn’t even think about that. She’s like, ‘It’s going to be cold in there. You should probably throw on some sweats or something.’”

In her mug shot, Branch’s hair is disheveled and her mascara smudged. What appears to be bruising around her eye is actually the port-wine birthmark she covers onstage and on the red carpet. “I just wish that I hadn’t been crying all night, so my makeup was at least intact,” she says now. “Someone made ‘Free Michelle’ shirts with my mug shot. I’m like, Wow, I’m going to buy someone’s mugs with my mug shot on it for my parents for Christmas.”

Who are the clout-chasing parents signing NDAs so their kids can go to Kanye West’s unaccredited Christian school? A moose crash test dummy, constipated scorpions, and more winners of the Ig Nobel comical scientific-achievement awards. And just when we thought there was nothing new under the sun, a chess grand master has been accused of using signals sent through wireless anal beads to cheat his way to success. America’s epidemic of opioid-overdose deaths is posing a growing threat to teens. Here’s how Martha’s Vineyard communities responded to the unexpected arrival of migrants. Could the city’s rat problem hasten a revolutionary change in waste management? Men working in tech are paying $75K for painful, complicated leg-lengthening surgery. And Studio Ghibli has released a short video teasing Ghibli Park, which opens in November in Japan.

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