While Brand takes the top spot for Awful Column of the Year, honorary mention must collectively go to the once-interesting Salon.com, which now reads like the Evergreen College student newspaper. At a loss for what to write about? How about undergraduate analyses of popular culture through the prism of race, class, and gender? Is Breaking Bad sending coded messages of white supremacism? Is liberal comedian Patton Oswalt a racist? How about a helpful analysis of The Legend of Zelda, a video game celebrating its 15th anniversary, which concludes that “the ways it deals with class, race, gender and animal rights are all deeply problematic.” (The same writer followed up with an apparently serious column on the best “video game for vegans”).

Also deserving of mention: the sensitive chap who made a rather unfortunate comment on Twitter, calling writer Olivia Nuzzi a “social-climbing mercenary hobag.” His subsequent horror at his own insensitivity, of course, provided fodder for a column! On the environmentalist website Grist.com, he offered an effusive apology, which no one demanded because no one noticed the initial offense: “Looking back on it with a few hours’ perspective, this is a classic outbreak of White Dude Privilege Syndrome. Let’s walk through it and see what we can learn from it.” How about we don’t. This is, somehow, a perfect distillation of online commentary at the close of 2013: a writer being an asshole—possibly a sexist asshole—on Twitter, followed by the same writer coming to his senses and deciding instead to be reflective and insufferable in column form.