“Justified” doesn’t immediately seem like the best western on television. Indeed, with its modern setting and modest budget, it doesn’t look much like a western at all. But don’t let the trappings fool you — based on the works of Elmore Leonard and premiering on FX, “Justified” is tight, thrilling television of the highest caliber.

Raylan Givens, U.S. Marshal, is an unhappy man. Re-assigned to his home county of Harlan, Ky. after a controversial Miami, Fla., shooting, the Marshal finds himself embroiled with violent felons, scheming drug runners and the sinister Dixie Mafia. But the most dangerous people around him may be his own friends and family.

“Justified” is probably the best written cop show on television, and that is not said lightly. Much of the pleasure of the show comes from its deft juggling of stand alone cases with more serialized elements.

The story arc of the first season is introduced quietly in the background, gathering tension and momentum with each episode until it explodes into a bloody and devastating climax. That attention to detail affects other aspects of the show as well, including the uncommonly sharp dialogue. Scenes manage to veer between hilarious and serious without ever sounding unrealistic. During one particularly tense standoff, Raylan douses a gun-holding felon with gasoline from a pump. When the man cocks the gun, Raylan bemusedly asks if he knows how firearms work, and proceeds to explain basic chemistry to him.It’s bits like this that make Raylan such a compelling lead. A soft spoken man with a hidden temper and a lightening quick draw, Timothy Olyphant plays him with easy charisma and a charmingly understated sense of humor. The swagger masks a deeply conflicted character; Raylan is a good man, but also an occasionally selfish and thoughtless one, and the writers do a nice job of exploring the contradiction between his cool affect and the anger boiling within.

Of course, every hero needs a villain, and into this role steps the marvelously complicated and enigmatic Boyd Crowder. A white supremacist turned evangelical preacher, he knows his scripture back to front and has a penchant for blowing things up with rocket launchers. As portrayed by the excellent Walter Goggins, Boyd speaks with a slow articulate drawl and hypnotic eyes, dominating every scene he’s in. Watching him and Raylan in their verbal duels is never anything short of thrilling.It would be very easy for a show set in rural Kentucky to slip into caricature, but “Justified” balances humor, violence and pathos with uncommon skill. Those looking for gripping and addictive television will not be disappointed.

During the holiday break, we all awoke to the terrible news coming out of Newtown, Conn. Our nation has endured a number of school shootings in the past — I can personally remember the Columbine shootings quite well — but the fact that an adult would take a gun into an elementary school and turn it on little boys and girls was both shocking and heartbreaking. However, before the shooter had even been successfully identified, the media and others took to the airwaves and the internet with one of two responses — either that the government needs to institute gun control or that the government better not come after anyone’s guns. Unfortunately, cries for the government to act are often ill-informed and lead to bad policy. Also unfortunate is the “out of my cold, dead hands” attitude that prevents any discussion on banning, much less controlling guns.

I have come to notice that many people advocating for gun control know precious little about gun policy or even the subject in question: guns. Only hours after the massacre, I read a Facebook post by a Dartmouth student who hoped that the U.S. would “finally address the major issue of automatic weapons in this country.” The post was “liked” by quite a few people, including other Dartmouth students. However, automatic weapons are not a major issue and the Newtown shootings had nothing to do with automatic weapons. These kinds of knee-jerk responses actually harm the debate on gun control because anyone who knows a thing or two about weapons will quickly write these poorly informed critics off as imbeciles.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a similar gaffe in an interview with ABC News correspondent Cynthia McFadden when he equated assault weapons with automatic weapons. When McFadden politely corrected Bloomberg, the mayor did not acknowledge his ignorance but instead changed the subject to high-capacity magazines. The head of a media empire and of the largest city in the U.S., who funds gun policy studies at Johns Hopkins University did not know the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and an automatic weapon. How can you advocate policy for a subject you really have no knowledge about?

Yet the media keeps fueling the hype. The Los Angeles Times easily wins the prize for the most ridiculous piece of feigned outrage. When the Los Angeles Police Department held a gun buyback program in the wake of the Newtown shootings, the paper ran an article about two rocket launchers being bought at a gun buyback program. As part of the program, people could bring in their guns and receive $100 to $200 gift cards in exchange for their weapons. Apparently, two inspired entrepreneurs even brought in the spent tubes of an AT-4 anti-tank weapon. To be clear, these are military arms that once fired can never, under any circumstances, be reloaded or used again. However, the LAPD happily paid for both tubes, which is the equivalent of buying bullet casings and celebrating the guns you took off the street.

Seriously, in Afghanistan, AT-4 tubes are used as makeshift poles. Furthermore, it is illegal to own an AT-4. Even if these weapons had been live, their resale was not the consequence of loose gun laws, but rather a serious crime.

Stirring up outrage or advocating policy with woeful ignorance of the subject is detrimental to the debate on gun control. Gun loyalists view these gaffes with the same disdain most liberals would a birther. This fuels the idea among the gun crowd that there must be something more at play — the government is coming for their guns or there’s some sort of conspiracy at work. The gun lobby, with its “over my dead body” rhetoric, also hurts the debate, as most discussion of gun control is interpreted as a gun ban.

Yet gun control does not equal gun prohibition, and I fail to see the harm in waiting periods or registering a weapon as one would a car. Ultimately, both sides of the divide prevent meaningful discussion: one by viewing the subject as a totalitarian takeover and the other by demanding action with a stunning lack of awareness about the subject.

As 2012 came to a close, Congress created a deal to prevent the country from going over a “fiscal cliff.”

After having 507 days to address the problem, the Senate agreed to a deal three hours before the deadline. This deal prevented the country from spiraling off the proverbial cliff, and 21 hours later, the House of Representatives approved the deal. The resolution led to an extension of the Bush tax cuts for middle class families while also creating a 2 percentage point increase in the payroll tax rate for most workers.

Unlike other parts of the resolution, the 2 percentage point increase directly affects more consumers by making their paychecks smaller. Sean Snaith, a U. Central Florida economics professor, said the payroll tax raise will impact those working students while also affecting faculty and staff.

“It is going to impact working UCF students; they are going to see 2 percent[age points] less in their pay checks. That affects everyone. People across the spectrum are getting less, from millionaires to the middle class to the working poor,” Snaith said.

UCF freshman health sciences major Kim Tran will face financial consequences from receiving less of her paycheck due to the resolution.

“It’d definitely be harder to pay for my car payments and my credit card bill. I mean, each month I’m gonna be spending about $500 for my car and gas, so I definitely won’t be happy,” Tran said.

The Bush tax cuts were extended for people who make less than $400,000 and families that make less than $450,000.

“The fiscal cliff extended tax cuts for middle class families — that’s $2,000 that middle class families and students can put towards paying the cost of tuition and books,” Brian Zagrocki, a freshman economics major, said. “The middle class tax cut also gives our families money that would prevent UCF students from taking out an additional student loan.”

Snaith also talked about the benefit of having the extension of the Bush tax cuts.

“The benefit, besides for people making $400,000 above, is the agreement keeps the Bush tax rates so income taxes will not go as scheduled. Future negotiations may change that though,” Snaith said.

Zagrocki believes the fiscal cliff results will help middle class families and students.

“Extending the tax credit for the middle class was very beneficial to the economy, since we need a strong middle class in order to grow our economy. We need an economy that is grown from the middle out, not the top down,” Zagrocki said.

Snaith, on the other hand, said that due to the increased payroll tax rate, the middle class would have less spending money to put back into the economy.

“It is a loss of disposable income. This simply means that there is less money to spend in consumers’ pockets. It will impact purchases of food, clothing, health care, you name it,” Snaith said.

Justin Karpf, a UCF senior legal studies major, thought the resolution, with its flaws, did do something for the economy.

“It was far from perfect, but it was better than doing nothing,” Karpf said.

While the fiscal cliff was averted for now, the question of the debt ceiling and spending cuts were delayed for two months, according to the Huffington Post.

“What they did is they basically created a new fiscal cliff, but a smaller one. None of the tax stuff will affect students because students are poor,” UCF senior economics major Isaac Fratti said. “If we go over this new cliff, it will slow the economy.”

Lennay Kekua, the girl believed to have been former Irish linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend and who was reported to have died of leukemia in September, never existed.

After an afternoon of questions and swirling controversy, Notre Dame Director of Athletics Jack Swarbrick addressed the situation, originally reported by Deadspin.com, at a press conference Wednesday evening.

Swarbrick said Te’o received a phone call from the number he associated with Lennay Kekua while he was in Orlando in early December for an ESPN awards show that took place Dec. 6.

“When he answered it, it was a person whose voice sounded like the same voice he had talked to, who told him that she was, in fact, not dead,” Swarbrick said.

Following the phone call that day, Te’o received what Swarbrick called “persistent” contact from the number; the frequency dissipated in time because Te’o stopped responding, Swarbrick said.

Te’o waited to act on the situation until he went home for Christmas on Dec. 21 because he wanted to speak with his family about it in person, Swarbrick said. When he returned to campus, Te’o alerted head coach Brian Kelly and defensive coordinator Bob Diaco before Swarbrick was notified.

Swarbrick said he met with Te’o on Dec. 27 and 28 after the linebacker returned to campus for practice leading up to the Jan. 7 BCS National Championship Game. In those meetings, Swarbrick interviewed Te’o about the chain of events.

“I want to stress, as someone who has probably been as engaged in this as anyone in the past couple of weeks, that nothing about what I have learned has shaken my faith in Manti Te’o one iota,” Swarbrick said. “The same great young man, great student and great athlete that we have been so proud to have be a member of our family is the same guy tonight, unchanged in any way, except for, as he indicated in a statement in his release, the embarrassment associated with having been a victim in this case.”

Following the meetings, Swarbrick met with University leaders and they made the decision to acquire the services of an independent investigative firm. Swarbrick said he met with Te’o’s parents — Brian and Ottilia Te’o — on Jan. 4, and the family made the decision to release the story sometime the week of Jan. 20.

Swarbrick refused to release many of the details regarding Te’o’s perceived relationship with Kekua, saying it’s “Manti’s story to tell.” He added that the University does not plan to publish the investigative firm’s results. Swarbrick said he does not know the details of when or how Te’o plans to speak about this, but said it could come as early as Thursday.

Swarbrick said authorities have not been alerted to the case, due in large part to the lack of criminal activity such as extortion.

Swarbrick said Te’o never met with anyone claiming to be Kekua in person and that the entire relationship was conducted electronically and over the telephone. Te’o had spoken of falling to sleep in bed with Kekua on the line in a story that appeared in the Oct. 1 issue of Sports Illustrated.

“There were lengthy, long telephone conversations,” Swarbrick said.

“The issue of who it is, who’s playing what role, what’s real and what’s not here is a more complex question than I can get into.”

The comments contradicted published reports in October that Te’o met Kekua in person in Palo Alto, Calif., in Nov. 2009 when Notre Dame played at Stanford over Thanksgiving weekend.

“I’ll let Manti provide the details, but as I said earlier in this press conference, when Manti took me through the entire story from start to finish, when he first described the contact, he used the verb ‘met,’” Swarbrick said. “For him, the fact that they connected online, that they met online, was consistent with using that verb.

“Not one that I might have chosen, but it was for him. And the timing was consistent with the playing of that game.”

Stanford University spokesperson Lisa Lapin issued the following statement to The Observer regarding Kekua’s alleged enrollment at the school:

“We’ve had no student attending Stanford by that name or any other similar name.”

Additionally, Dan Anderson, an employee at the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, told The Observer there is no record of Lennay Kekua or anyone with a similar name dying in the county from Sept. 11 to 13. It had been reported that Kekua died in Carson, Calif., sometime around those dates.

Te’o released a statement to ESPN Wednesday afternoon in which he said the situation has been “painful and humiliating.”

“This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her,” Te’o said.

“It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother’s death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life.”

Until Te’o speaks in more detail, the controversy surrounding the star player who helped return Notre Dame to national prominence on the field will continue to build. But Swarbrick made it clear throughout Wednesday’s press conference that Te’o has the University’s full trust and support.

“There’s a lot of tragedy here,” Swarbrick said. “There’s a lot of sorrow here.  But the thing I am most sad of, sad about is … that the single most trusting human being I’ve ever met will never be able to trust in the same way again in his life.  That’s an incredible tragedy.”

Lennay Kekua, the girl believed to have been former Irish linebacker Manti Te’o’s girlfriend and who was reported to have died of leukemia in September, never existed, according to a report published by Deadspin.com. Notre Dame spokesman Dennis Brown released a statement this afternoon after the report.

“On Dec. 26, Notre Dame coaches were informed by Manti Te’o and his parents that Manti had been the victim of what appears to be a hoax in which someone using the fictitious name Lennay Kekua apparently ingratiated herself with Manti and then conspired with others to lead him to believe she had tragically died of leukemia. The University immediately initiated an investigation to assist Manti and his family in discovering the motive for and nature of this hoax. While the proper authorities will continue to investigate this troubling matter, this appears to be, at a minimum, a sad and very cruel deception to entertain its perpetrators,” Brown’s statement said.

Te’o also issued a statement.

“This is incredibly embarrassing to talk about, but over an extended period of time, I developed an emotional relationship with a woman I met online. We maintained what I thought to be an authentic relationship by communicating frequently online and on the phone, and I grew to care deeply about her. To realize that I was the victim of what was apparently someone’s sick joke and constant lies was, and is, painful and humiliating. It further pains me that the grief I felt and the sympathies expressed to me at the time of my grandmother’s death in September were in any way deepened by what I believed to be another significant loss in my life. I am enormously grateful for the support of my family, friends and Notre Dame fans throughout this year. To think that I shared with them my happiness about my relationship and details that I thought to be true about her just makes me sick. I hope that people can understand how trying and confusing this whole experience has been. In retrospect, I obviously should have been much more cautious. If anything good comes of this, I hope it is that others will be far more guarded when they engage with people online than I was. Fortunately, I have many wonderful things in my life, and I’m looking forward to putting this painful experience behind me as I focus on preparing for the NFL Draft.”

Lisa Lapin, Stanford University spokesperson, issued the following statement to The Observer:

“We’ve had no student attending Stanford by that name or any other similar name.”

The South Bend Tribune reported in October that Te’o met Kekua at Stanford in 2009 following a game against the Cardinal.

Dan Anderson, an employee at the Los Angeles County Department of Coroner, told The Observer there is no record of Lennay Kekua or anyone with a similar name dying in the county from Sept. 11-13.

Reports of Kekua’s alleged death surfaced in September, leading up to Notre Dame’s road contest at Michigan State. Te’o’s grandmother died within hours of when Kekua was reported to have passed away.

Te’o’s athletic achievements, combined with a personal story involving the two deaths reported to be close to him, led to a second-place finish in the Heisman Trophy balloting in December.

Oregon head coach Chip Kelly is leaving the Ducks to become the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles.

The Eagles announced Kelly as the successor to former Philadelphia head coach Andy Reid, who was fired on Dec. 31.

“Chip Kelly will be an outstanding head coach for the Eagles,” said Philadelphia owner Jeffrey Lurie in a statement, per ESPN. “He has a brilliant football mind. He motivates his team with his actions as well as his words. He will be a great leader for us and will bring a fresh, energetic approach to our team.”

According to the Eagles website, Kelly met with Lurie, team president Don Smolenski and general manager Howie Roseman for nearly nine hours in Arizona after his Fiesta Bowl win. Both parties were “engaging in a wide-ranging, enthusiastic discussion of everything from football philosophy to management and organizational values and ideas.”

In the days after the Ducks’ Fiesta Bowl win, Kelly met with representatives from the Eagles, the Cleveland Browns and the Buffalo Bills. On the night of Jan. 6, reports indicated that Kelly had decided to stay at Oregon, though no extended contract had been signed.

Just 10 days after he said he was “ecstatic” that Kelly had decided to stay with the Ducks, Oregon director of athletics Rob Mullens released a statement after the athletic department confirmed the move:

“I want to thank Chip for his leadership and commitment to building on the Oregon Football foundation of excellence. We have enjoyed incredible success over the past four years. I have great respect for Chip, consider him a friend and wish him the best of luck in the NFL. Oregon Athletics has executed two successful head coach transitions in the past 18 years and each time we continued our ascent. We are focused on identifying a leader who is the right fit to guide Oregon football.”

In the wake of the announcement, Kelly was so talked-about that he became a nationwide trending topic on Twitter. Former Ducks, current NFL players and sports media figures from around the U.S. sounded off on the surprise move.

Mat Kearney, the singer-songwriter and Eugene native who became a viral sensation in the days after the Fiesta Bowl for his “Chip Don’t Go” plea, was particularly heartbroken. “Should have been more specific about Philly. I failed,” he tweeted.

In four seasons at Oregon, Kelly had as many conference championships as he did conference losses (three), and guided the Ducks to four straight BCS bowl games, the longest active streak in the nation. Oregon was among the nation’s leaders in rushing yards, total offense and scoring offense throughout the Kelly era thanks to a high-octane, uptempo offense that has already been mimicked by several other coaches.

Kelly finished his career at Oregon with a 46-7 record, including Rose and Fiesta Bowl wins. This will be the 49-year-old’s first foray into coaching in the NFL.

With Boston named the “drunkest” city in America by the Daily Beast for the second year in a row, health professionals said the drinking trend is a cause for concern.

“The statistics worry me, and particularly worry me because drinking has such a negative impact on not just health, but often on performance and on family life and on communities, so there’s a rippling affect of this kind of behavior,” said Patricia Rieker, a medical sociologist at Boston U. and consultant to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On average, adults in Boston consume 15.6 drinks a month, according to Experian Marketing Services.

The Center for Disease Control reported that 20.1 percent of the population of Boston classified as binge drinkers and 7.4 percent of the population classified as heavy drinkers.

Rieker said the effects of heavy drinking not only burden the individual, but also the general public.

“Excessive drinking has lots of negative complications and consequences for not only individual health, but for the well-being of communities,” she said.

Archie Brodsky, co-founder of the program in psychiatry and the law at Harvard U., said student binge drinking is a major concern that the U.S. does not deal with.

“We don’t have ways of teaching young people about drinking that promote responsible behavior, responsible drinking,” he said. “And instead, what you have is a peer group culture has developed its own norms of binge drinking.”

William DeJong, a professor of community health sciences at the BU School of Public Health, said the large population of college students in Boston contributes to the high drinking rates.

“Boston has an awful lot of people in college and a lot of people in their twenties,” he said. “And, these are going to be groups that, compared to the rest of the population nationally, do drink more heavily.”

DeJong said many social problems are made worse by alcohol consumption.

“Almost every sexual assault involves either a perpetrator and/or a victim who’s been drinking,” he said.  “[Drinking can also influence] vandalism, property destruction, people getting into fights, and also different kinds of harassment against minority groups and harassment based on peoples’ sexual orientation.”

Brodsky said Boston’s large percentage of Irish Americans has an influence on the drinking rates.

“High rates … of alcohol abuse has been traditionally true in Irish culture and, of course, that has an influence on what goes on in Boston, because you have a lot of Irish Americans in Boston,” he said.

Brodsky also said Boston has a large mix of European cultures that have different ways of treating alcohol.

“In Boston, you have a lot of Irish Americans and Italian Americans and Greek Americans as well as Anglo Saxon Protestants,” Brodsky said. “But they’re all in contact with one another to varying degrees, so the cultures mix and they’re exposed to different models, so people in Boston get a mixed message.”

Rieker said she does not necessarily see alcohol rates going down in the future.

“I think it’s possible for the alcohol problem to escalate more,” she said. “I don’t see the rates going down. They seem to be increasing.”

Student loans are near and dear to all our hearts. You like them a lot more than I do at this point, I promise.  Making payments is not nearly as fun as receiving refunds. Refunds end up as new laptops or tablets, nights out with friends, and a spring break trip we never forget. Repayment means box wine at home instead of bar tabs, Netflix instead of cable, and stay-cation instead of vacation.

The student loan debt tally is soaring higher and higher and seemingly has no end in sight. Colleges and universities have little incentive to truly control prices because there are so many people willing to finance enormous amounts of money to get a degree.

We have been socialized to believe and think that everyone should get a college degree. Student loans exist to make that reality.

We thought the same about owning a home and sub-prime lending made that a possibility. The end result was and still is a huge disaster. Borrowers could borrow far more money than their home was worth with little correlation to their ability to repay. Financing a college education is no different.

Federal student loans are not based on your ability to repay. You can borrow the same amount of money for a degree that could land you a job making $35,000 as you could for one that could allow you to earn $75,000.

We should put the blame on the university for charging the same price for those two degrees because they don’t have the same economic value. We all decide what we want to study and I’m not suggesting that one is better or more important than the other; I mention that only because we need to make smart financial decisions about our future.

According to the university, the cost of attending U. Toledo with no grants or scholarships with living on campus is $23,108 per year. That is $93,432 for a four year degree. That is an enormous monthly payment to make after graduation, whether you are working or not. And that debt isn’t like other debts you have or will incur later – you own it forever.

It is almost impossible to discharge a student loan in bankruptcy and the lenders don’t play by the same rules as other creditors. They can garnish your wages, take your tax refunds, take a portion of your social security or the social security of your cosigner, and the list goes on.

The good news is that federal student loans have far more options for help than their private counterparts, so please avoid private loans if at all possible. One of the biggest advantages is loan forgiveness (not for private loans) if you work in public service. This option allows for graduates to take jobs in the public sector that typically don’t pay as well as private sector jobs, and have the balance of their loans forgiven after meeting certain requirements. You can read all the details at http://www.finaid.org/loans/publicservice.phtml.

As a bankruptcy attorney, the number of people I see with unmanageable student loan debt is staggering and frightening. In almost every case, they have borrowed far more money than they could ever possibly repay given the field they have chosen. I’m not talking just about artists, film, or liberal arts majors. I am talking about teachers, attorneys, accountants and even doctors and engineers. Even if they are lucky enough to get a job with a high salary, the student loan payment is equally as high. And filing bankruptcy isn’t as easy as it used to be, so now they may not qualify even if student loans were dischargeable.

Do yourself and your family a huge favor and borrow responsibly. Don’t borrow more than you have to. Work part time and use that money for rent and spring break, not student loan money. You have options; do some research before you sign any loan documents. Talk to someone in the financial aid office. Talk with your parents or someone you trust that understands finance and money to help you understand what you are getting yourself into. Your education is the door to a bright and successful futur,e and being as responsible as possible now will make sure that paying for that education doesn’t devastate your future.  Good luck!

Troy M. Hawkins is a Toledo bankruptcy lawyer who graduated from UT with his Juris Doctorate in 2008.