Before making their way to Mexico’s Pacific coast, where they were eventually detained, “affluenza teen” Ethan Couch and his mother threw themselves a party, officials said Tuesday. Later, as the duo drove south, police received “dozens and dozens of calls of sightings” of them or their truck.

Citing the Jalisco State prosecutor’s office, the New York Times reports that the Couches were arrested Monday evening in Colonia 5 de Diciembre, a neighborhood popular with American tourists in Puerto Vallarta, a Mexican resort town. Because they were in Mexico illegally, the prosecutor’s office said, they were turned over to the National Institute of Migration. They are expected to be returned to the United States.

The Couches had had some unfinished business to tend to before making their way across the border, however. “We learned through some interviews that what we suspected all along had happened, that they had planned to disappear, that they even had something that was akin to a going-away party before they left town,” Tarrant County sheriff Dee Anderson said at a news conference Monday. This indicated to investigators that Couch’s disappearance “was carefully planned and timed to get out of the country.”

In 2013, Ethan Couch—who has died his blond hair and red facial patches dark brown—was sentenced to 10 years probation after admitting to four counts of manslaughter in a drunk driving incident that left four people dead. (Couch was 16 at the time.) He is wanted for violating the terms of that probation.

Since the time of the incident, Sheriff Anderson said, it has been clear that his mother, Tonya Couch, did not believe that her son needed to be punished. (After all, it’s her fault he had affluenza in the first place.) “There’s just no chance that she will ever think he needs to be punished or held accountable,” the sheriff said. A warrant has been issued for her arrest for hindering apprehension.

Officials don’t believe that Couch’s father—who is divorced from his mother (and who was arrested last year for impersonating a police officer)—assisted in their escape. Plenty of people assisted the police, though: Investigators received “dozens and dozens of calls of sightings” from people who knew the Couches, Anderson said.

From the Times:

Investigators received helpful information from people who know the Couches, and “dozens and dozens of calls of sightings” of them or their pickup truck, he said. The pair are believed to have driven the truck from the Fort Worth area deep into Mexico, but he would not say whether they still had it with them, or how they supported themselves on the run.

“He was, at best, looking at a life of exile,” Sheriff Anderson said of Mr. Couch.

A crucial piece of information indicating that they were in Puerto Vallarta came on Dec. 24, the sheriff said, but he would not elaborate. “The problem with it was, as you can imagine, Puerto Vallarta at Christmas time, a tremendous amount of tourists down there, so American people were prevalent everywhere, it wouldn’t be somewhere they were going to stick out,” he said.

Jalisco state officials said that the Marshals Service, through the American Consulate in the state capital, Guadalajara, asked local authorities to search for the Couches in Puerto Vallarta.

Texas prosecutors have been trying to move Couch’s case to adult court for some time. At a news conference Tuesday, Tarrant County District Attorney Sharon Wilson said her office would take this opportunity to make that change, before Couch turns 19. “We no longer have to be concerned about the best interest of the child,” she said.

If Couch’s case remains in the juvenile system, NBC News reports, he could end up spending just a few months in jail, as Texas usually releases incarcerated juveniles when they turn 19. (Couch turns 19 in April.) “We can move him to adult court,” said Wilson, “and an adult judge can instate or enforce his 10-year probated sentence that was given to him before—which means he’d be on additional eight years probation.”

The sheriff echoed the DA’s sentiments. “I personally felt like justice was denied at the first juncture, and I had everything possible invested in this to get him back and I’m not apologizing for it,” Anderson said. “I don’t believe that the community and the public wanted anything less than us to use every available means to bring him back.”

A hearing has been scheduled for January 19th.

Images via Jalisco State Prosecutor/Marshals Service/AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Have you ever seen Sister Act? Ha, look who I’m talking to. Of course you’ve seen Sister Act. Do you, as a huge fan of Sister Act, remember the scenes in which the sounds of Sister Mary Clarence’s revamped choir lure in unbelievers from the outside and call them to worship? The success Mary Clarence has in making the Catholic church “cool” to outsiders is one of the film’s more substantial narrative arcs.

Her efforts were so successful, that the Pope—yes, that Pope—came to watch Mary Clarence, Mary Patrick, Mary Lazarus, Mary Robert, and all the other Marys praise His name with Christ-centric rewrites of their favorite oldies. Then they raised enough money to renovate the church, the nuns found greater happiness, Harvey Keitel was caught, and Mary Clarence was allowed to be Deloris Van Cartier once again. But, like I said, you remember all that.

Now, what would do if I told you Sister Act is a lie—and that, in the real world, the Catholic church wants nothing to do with anything remotely resembling fun? Would you cry? Would you call me a liar? Would you say, “Bobby, baby, we knew.”

Well, I hate to break it to you, but it’s the truth, and the sad tale of a hoverboard-riding Catholic priest from the Philippines is proof. NBC reports that after singing a hymn to his parishioners while rolling around on two wheels, the unidentified priest was “yanked from his church in metro Manila and ‘will spend some time to reflect on this past event.’”

In a statement, the archdiocese wrote:

“That was wrong. It is not a personal celebration where one can capriciously introduce something to get the attention of people...The priest said that it was a wake-up call for him. He acknowledged that his action was not right and promised that it will not happen again.”

Though he may have “drawn the ire of the Diocese of San Pablo,” he has received my utmost respect for bringing a little creativity and joy to his work. I will follow him, follow him wherever he may go. There isn’t an ocean too deep, a mountain so high it can keep, keep me away.

Break it down, Alma!

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Gif via screengrab.

Flooding in the Midwest Tuesday shut down portions of two interstates and threatened hundreds of homes, the Associated Press reports. At least 18 people have been killed. South of St. Louis, the Mississippi river, swollen after days of torrential rain, is expected to crest at record levels later this week.

From the AP:

On Tuesday the river spilled over the top of the levee at West Alton, Missouri, about 20 miles north of St Louis. Mayor William Richter ordered any of the town’s approximate 520 residents who had not already evacuated to get out of harm’s way.

Interstate 44 was closed near the central Missouri town of Rolla, and a section of Interstate 70 was shut down in southern Illinois. Hundreds of smaller roads and highways were also closed across the two states, and flood warnings were in effect.

On Tuesday, the Coast Guard shut down a five-mile stretch of the Mississippi near St. Louis, and a 3,700-person prison in Illinois was preparing for possible flooding. Wastewater plants across both states shut down, sending untreated sewage into the overflowing streams and rivers nearby.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton and his predecessor Ray Kelly have not been getting on of late. Last week, Kelly—who is promoting his book—accused Bratton of manipulating crime statistics. “Shame on him,” Bratton said at a press conference Tuesday. “Let him back up that accusation.” Aw yeah, back that thing up.

http://gawker.com/ray-kelly-accu...

New York City is expected to see a 2 percent decrease in reported crime by the end of the year, according to statistics released by the city and tracked by the FBI. Arrests have fallen 13 percent. Kelly, Bratton pointed out, did not offer any evidence for his claim.

“If you’re going to make it, stand up, be a big man, and explain what you’re talking about,” Bratton said at the unrelated press conference, according to Politico New York and the New York Times. “It’s amazing what comments you’ll make when selling a book.” (The NYPD’s chief spokesman tweeted that Kelly’s line of thinking was “fiction.”)

Kelly responded in a statement to Politico:

Kelly said that “like all New Yorkers, I am troubled by the eroding qualify of the life in the city that is obvious to anyone who lives here.” In support of his earlier claims, Kelly said “active members” of the NYPD have told him that the de Blasio administration “has changed the way shootings victims are calculated. For example, victim who incurs a graze wound are often not counted as a shooting victim, as was done previously. Similarly, a victim who sustains wounds by flying glass caused by a shooting is not recorded as a shooting victim.

Further, wounds sustained by a victim who refuses to cooperate with a police investigation have been recorded as self-inflicted.”

Kelly added that “In homicide, the category of ‘circumstances undetermined pending investigation’ has been misapplied to manipulate murder totals.”

Anyway, now they have to kiss. Be a big man. Arrest me. Handcuff me. Manipulate my statistics. Sorry, it’s the law.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

George Pataki surprised everyone tonight with the news that he was running for president, in a video announcing that he was suspending his campaign for president. Go home, man.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

I had just finished Christmas dinner with my family when I got the call: “A picture of you is on the front page of r/funny,” my friend told me. I’m not a regular Reddit user, but I know about r/funny—it’s a popular subpage, a place with a lot of cat pictures. Funny? Had I been funny? I traced back through the past week, wondering if I had finally made one of my 119 Twitter followers laugh, but then my stomach clenched as my friend explained my stardom wasn’t because I had been funny. It was because I had gotten fat.

Entitled “Empowered Feminist,” the post on Imgur (a photo-sharing site that serves as unofficial Reddit companion) went up 10 months ago and now has over 750,000 views, a number that goes up by the thousands each day. The picture on the left—me, as a skinny girl—is taken from my high school yearbook. It doesn’t exist on social media, or it didn’t until someone I went to school with took a grainy, washed-out cell phone pic to post on Imgur. It’s labeled “2009,” but it was actually taken in 2007. I had just turned 16 and was entering my junior year.

On the right, my hair is shorter, I now have glasses, and I am fat. Get the joke? I was skinny, and now I’m not. The likely cause of my weight gain, says the internet, is Tumblr and my (not actually) recent flirtation with social justice.

After a few apologies from my friend and some quiet thank yous from me, I hung up. My family rushed to my defense when I told them what had happened; they were livid, with raised voices and tears in their eyes. For a moment I was furious, too. I clicked the link my friend had texted me to Reddit. I looked at the image. I read the comments. And then, I laughed.

“Well, they’re not wrong?” I said, shrugging on that last word, my inflection suggesting a question. They’re not wrong that I was skinny, and now I’m not anymore. So what?

I think I look pretty good in that “after” picture, the one on the right where I am very fat. It’s from when my now-husband and I announced our engagement in June 2014, and it was taken on a MacBook near the best source of light in our shitty Chicago apartment. I think of my lipstick, dark red and painstakingly painted, as a moment of perfection frozen in time. If my husband’s face hadn’t been cropped out of the meme, you would see his bushy, red beard and thoughtfully closed eyes. We had spent all day calling our families, telling them the news, and then we took a round of pictures to send to our friends. This is the same picture that’s sitting on my husband’s dresser, printed and framed by my mother-in-law. This is us, happy and cute and in love.

Of course, 750,000 of my closest friends do not agree. Cross-posted between MRA sites and Reddit boards aimed at humor and fat-shaming, my 16-year-old self smiles on the left while my 23-year-old self smiles on the right. The comments debate my fuckability, posing inquiries like: How many dicks would I have gotten had I stayed thin? Didn’t I know the dangers of being obese and the medical conditions that could arise? And, was that really even the same person?

The thousands of comments were as repetitive as if the people writing them had just hit copy-paste. The same sentiments appeared over and over again, yet everyone felt equally compelled to write them. She’s fat, she’s gross, how can this happen? And so on.

It makes me wonder what they’re like to their friends, to their families, to their coworkers. If they met me at a party, would they laugh in my face? Based on the good time I generally have at parties, my instinct says no. But just to be safe, maybe I should start carrying my junior year ID around so we can get this out of the way: I used to be thin, and now I’m as fat as what’s in front of you. Me, then. Me, now. Get it?

The odd thing is that I post plenty of fodder for Reddit ridicule, a lot of ideas these same commenters must find hilarious. I run a blog with a friend of mine, and we write about women in media as creators and characters. I wrote about Gamergate, about sexism in Doctor Who, about Fake Geek Girls. They could link to any of these pieces and highlight the hilarious nonsense parts where I talk about equal rights or whatever, but none of the pages link to or quote anything I’ve written. It’s just my fat face over and over again, the views overshadowing my blog hits by hundreds of thousands of views.

Because the original poster who went trawling through our yearbook is very inconsiderate towards my needs, they didn’t post their own high school photo so that I could also recognize them. I’ve tried to figure out who the culprit is, but from as far back as I could find, the first appearance of my picture was on a politically-driven site with the word “Feminazi” above it—a word, as you know, that very serious and politically-driven people often say. Following it was the suggestion that I looked hotter as a fat girl (met with adamant protest), jokes about me eating my former self (cool, but impossible), and then the scientific claim that this is why mistresses were “invented.”

The dead end was frustrating, because, as a fat feminist, I was hungry to find out who the original poster could be so I could then eat them. When repeated dives led me nowhere, I tried to understand “who” the original poster was by seeing their point of view. I drew out the argument: they saw a picture of me when I got engaged, noticed that I had a double chin, and decided to pull out their 2008-2009 Muscatine Muskies yearbook.

“Ah,” the OP presumably noted, “she is fatter than she was then.” They then decided this must be due to my experience on Tumblr, merged the two images together into one .jpeg, and then posted it with bold, white text (a meme!) for...?

And that’s where I get lost. Why? Why was somebody so interested in my weight gain? If I was skinny in high school and stayed skinny through college, would my feminism look inconsequential? What if I’d been fat in high school and stayed fat through college? What would have been the perfect formula to stay off this radar?

No matter the answers, my desire to find the offending party faded within a few hours. I figured, 1) If they want to look at pictures of me and feel like they were done a disservice, then that’s what they were going to do; and 2) it was just so boring to page through pages with the same old rhetoric plastered throughout. I must believe in rape culture, said one. (I do). Fat people don’t know they’re fat because the chemicals in their brain make them think they’re attractive. (Is this a peer-reviewed study, and can I see?)

“Just, like, wanna destroy whoever made that,” said a friend, followed by the bubbled “...” as I waited for her to elaborate. “Like, I want them wiped from this earth.”

With the knowledge gained from a bachelor’s in writing at my disposal, I wrote back, “LOL.”

I couldn’t get in touch with the anger my friends and family felt. A year ago, I might have popped on Reddit to defend myself to the people who shamed me, but it just seems so pointless now. What’s the argument? What am I supposed to be defending?

A lot of people in the feminist community encourage you to love your body no matter what, but I don’t. The love for my body is the same it’s always been: a little mark on the scale between annoyance and acceptance. I’ve lost 30 pounds since the picture on the right, and I’ll probably lose more, and then maybe I’ll gain some back. Bodies sag and they droop and they tighten and stretch. My body is a part of me, I give it a lot of vegetables and a lot of water, and I use sugar scrubs and coconut oil to make my skin soft. Sometimes I look in the mirror, stand to the side, and push out my belly to get a better look. Weird, I think. Bodies are weird.

To me, being fat is just another bullet point on my list of attributes, something factual but not all that interesting, like how I’m 5’6” or that I dye my hair. But thousands of pictures like the one I found of me exist; I saw them stacked up in piles with my own. What is it about us that makes people so mad? Maybe someday being a fat woman won’t feel like a political statement, but for now, I’m happy to exist in accidental defiance: I am happy and I am fat. Let’s eat.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.

Hale Goetz is a 20-something Chicago suburbanite and D&D enthusiast. As a newbie freelancer and blogger, she writes about feminism, identity, and guilty pleasures.

According to a police report, an aide to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Vance Henry, was physically assaulted at a prayer vigil on Sunday, the Chicago Tribune reports. The vigil was being held on the block where two people were shot and killed by Chicago police over the weekend.

http://gawker.com/chicago-police...

A police spokesman, Sgt. Bob Kane, told the Tribune that the 50-year-old Henry was punched, tackled, and kicked while walking with Jason Ervin, alderman for the 28th Ward. At present, no one is in custody for the assault.

Ervin said that he and Henry were first confronted after the prayer vigil, when the first alleged assailant approached them while they were standing near Ervin’s car. From the Tribune:

The man told Henry that he “should go back downtown,” Ervin said. At that point, Henry and Ervin told the man to “go home with that . . . We’re here with the family. This is not the time and place for this,” Ervin said.

The man also said that “the police are killing us,” according to the report. The man and a second person left the area briefly but returned, repeating the complaints, according to the report.

Henry then told the assailant to “get out of his face,” and the man swung at Henry, striking him in the face, the report said. A second person tackled Henry and shoved him to the ground, the report said. According to the report, the two assailants attempted to kick Henry, grazing him in the back of the head.

Elsewhere in Chicago, on Tuesday, protestors gathered outside the mayor’s house in Lakeview, chanting and calling for Emanuel’s resignation.

“No one here in this neighborhood is afraid to open their doors when they hear police are coming,” Coalition for a New Chicago’s Gregory Livingston said, according to the Tribune. However, people in the neighborhood where Quintonio Legrier and Bettie Jones, who were killed on Saturday, “live in a state of fear. It’s not a code of silence, it’s a state of fear.”

“We believe that Austin and Englewood and all these neighborhoods should have the same type of policing as they do in Ravenswood, Lakeview and Lincoln Park.”

The violence this weekend forced Emanuel to truncate his family vacation in Cuba.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Fans of A Song Of Ice And Fire—the books on which the popular HBO drama Game of Thrones are based—have a lot of theories. Some are about Jon Snow’s true parentage; some are about whether Brandon Stark ate his friend Jojen Reed; some are about whether Tyrion Lannister is the product of Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo having conceived a time-traveling fetus; some of the craziest ones involve author George R.R. Martin publishing The Winds of Winter, the highly-anticipated next book in the acclaimed fantasy series. Here’s a theory: he never will!

If you want to go down the rabbithole on this, you’ll find lots of opinions, with some people even offering statistical analysis projecting when he’ll turn pages in to his editors. A credible alternate analysis? This dude has no pages to turn in. Since the 2000 publication of A Storm of Swords, the well-received third book in his series, he’s published one (great) sort-of book, split into two volumes, that wasn’t even close to being finished, and spent a lot of time being a famous person enjoying life. In the four years from 1996 to 2000 he published three books; in the 15 years since he’s published part of one. People have been waiting to read his new pages since the last ones came out almost four years ago, this theory argues, because there are no new pages.

Leaving aside that this dude has put out one unfinished book since the Clinton presidency, there are a few points in favor of the theory that he’s published no pages over the past several years because he has none to publish. First, the only pages he’s known to have actually given his editors since the publication of his most recent book appear to have just been around 150 pages that didn’t fit into that book; second, the man is 67 years old, not an age where people can usually be expected to put out a lot of pages; third, he seems to spend a lot of time not writing, which is fair enough; fourth, whatever pages he does or doesn’t have have to deal with literally dozens of nonsensical plot lines, most of which are extremely complex and involve open questions that any reasonable person couldn’t be assed to answer, so that if the dude has any sense, he probably is saying or has said, “Ah, fuck it!”

All ASOIAF fans have their own theories. I know really sharp people who strongly suspect that this dude has thousands of pages and is trolling HBO and the public by sitting on them. I know equally sharp people who think that this promotional image of Brandon Stark riding a donkey released by the producers of the hit Game of Thrones series, the plot lines of which have by now advanced past those in the books, so that show teasers also tease future book developments, may imply that he’s using the psychic powers he’s gained by becoming a tree to travel through the past to impregnate his aunt Lyanna with his own cousin-brother Jon, thus ensuring that he will eventually be able to become a tree and so psychic and so able to fight ice zombies:

Doesn’t look a day under 35. Photo via HBO.

What all people with theories can agree on is that this dude is old and rich, appears to really like traveling and writing takes about the New York Giants and science fiction awards and doing other things that aren’t writing new books in his famous ASOIAF series, and hasn’t published a finished book in that series this millennium. None of this suggests more books are coming our way. It would be great if this dude gave us some pages that explained whether or not Jon Snow and Stannis Baratheon are dead, whether Aegon Targaryen is or isn’t a fake, etc. etc., but he can only do so if he has those pages, which he probably doesn’t. Pages will turn up eventually, at which point people will have theories about whether he actually wrote them—one credible theory will be no, because he never had any pages—but either way the question of whether Bran traveled through time to bone his own aunt will have been (sort of) resolved, and what more do you want than that?

If you have evidence that George R.R. Martin has pages, contact us at tips@deadspin.com; photo via Getty

A husband and wife who prosecutors alleged were interested in supporting the Islamic State have been found guilty of preparing an act of terrorism, the Guardian reports. Mohammed Rehman, 25, intended to detonate a suicide bomb either at a shopping center in London or on the Underground.

In May, under the display name “Silent Bomber,” Rehman, 25, asked his Twitter followers to help him pick a target. “Westfield shopping centre or London Underground? Any advice would be appreciated greatly,” he tweeted. The attack would be timed, prosecutors said, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the London bombings of July 7, 2005 that left 52 people dead

According to the Associated Press, Rehman and his wife Sana Ahmed Khan, 24, lived in Reading, about 40 miles west of London. Prosecutor Tony Badenoch said they had a “common interest” in extremist ideology. Khan allegedly helped Rehman pay for chemical bomb-ingredients on eBay.

The couple’s marriage, it turned out, was secret: Rehman was divorced, and Khan’s parents did not approve of him. Both lived with their families. From the Guardian:

They had a keen interest in Islamic State and Rehman’s online research showed he “wished to play his own part”. One online post used a profile picture of Jihadi John.

The same day, he trawled YouTube for details about the London bombings and the “martyrdom” video of Shehzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers whom he referred to as his “beloved predecessor”. Rehman also told a Twitter user: “Why don’t you head to the London Underground on the 7th July if you got the balls.”

The undercover investigator engaged Rehman in a private conversation in which the defendant subsequently asked him “how dumb these Kuffar [non-Muslims] are lol”.

Rehman told the officer that he was preparing to die. He also asked whether the officer would like to join him, or whether he would go the “lone wolf route.” According to the Guardian, Rehman even broadcast his intentions on Twitter: “Now I just make explosives in preparation for kuffar lol and when I’ve made the required amount I’ll be wearing them on my chest.”

The jury deliberated for three days before finding the couple guilty of planning a terrorist act. Rehman was also convicted of possessing an article to be used for terrorist purposes. They will be sentenced later this week, the AP reports.

Image via Thames Valley Police/AP. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

New York City luxury building owners are not paying their employees what they’re supposed to be paying them. They might change their ways, if only the city gave them any indication at all that the rules are being enforced.

https://www.propublica.org/article/nyc-le...

Today, ProPublica published a deep examination of NYC’s 421-a tax abatement, which grants real estate developers big tax breaks in exchange for things like keeping rent on some units affordable and paying doormen and janitors decent wages. Specifically, the 421-a owners are required to pay their workers something called the “prevailing wage”—a number, set by the city, that’s designed to bring non-union paychecks close to the standards set by relevant local unions.

Big surprise: plenty of owners who received tax breaks worth six figures are not holding up their end of the deal. That’s because the city department that administers 421-a claims it does not have authority to enforce it for landlords who don’t hold up their end of the deal. Whether this very big loophole was written into the law intentionally is “unclear,” ProPublica reports.

The story, which includes interviews with laborers who make several dollars per hour less than required by law, also functions as a poignant illustration of the people who keep New York City’s shiny towers running every day. Domenick Penteck, a doorman at a building that advertises itself as the “pinnacle of Williamsburg luxury,” lives in public housing and works two jobs to stay afloat. “They don’t care about a guy like me busting his ass, going to work and leaving one job and going to another job and not sleeping,” he told ProPublica.

Image of “The Exo,” one such luxury building, via Google Maps. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

For the second week in a row, we’re sifting through Wikipedia’s deleted detritus to bring you those few, nearly lost-forever encyclopedic gems. This week, that means forgotten porn stars, creepy tales of time travel, and perhaps the worst song about liquor you will ever hear.

http://gawker.com/the-10-best-ar...

Here’s the latest set of the best articles Wikipedia didn’t want you to see.

New Cops

New Cops is an upcoming film (to use the term very, very loosely) in which an Ordinary Man lets his friend Chet stay over. Hijinks and inscrutable plot holes ensue.

Best Line:

His friend ropes him to various schemes and generally makes a bunch of faux pas.

Why it got deleted:

The film is notable in no way and also does not exist yet, say Wikipedia’s heartless editors.

Why it shouldn’t have been:

The trailer alone is absolutely notable. The different-types-of-liquor rap at the end, the way in which they yell words and phrases that have no discernible meaning, the fact that the trailer has absolutely nothing to do with the supposed plot. New Cops is a film to be cherished, not dismissed.

Ottie Cline Powell

Ottie tells the tale of a four-year-old boy who wandered away from his school in November of 1890, never to be seen again. Or at least not until the following spring—when he finally thawed.

Best Line:

The monument on Bluff mountain reads:

THIS IS THE EXACT SPOT.

LITTLE OTTIE CLINE POWELL’S

BODY WAS FOUND APRIL 5, 1891, AFTER

STRAYING FROM TOWER HILL SCHOOL HOUSE

NOV. 9, A DISTANCE OF 7 MILES.

AGE 4 YEARS 11 MONTHS.

Why it got deleted:

“Wikipedia is not a memorial.”

Why it shouldn’t have been:

Children should know what the consequences are should they ever skip school (namely, that they will freeze to death in the woods with a stomach full of undigested chestnuts. Always.).

Carrie Sahmaunt

Carrie, who died in 2006, was once “the oldest Kiowa Indian.” Which is nice for Carrie, but the real treasure here—and what we will focus on—is in the editors’ discussion of the article’s pending deletion.

Best Line:

I spent today in a nursing home talking with people, and it reinforced the idea that living a long time does not equal notable. Living a really long time is not an achievement in the normal sense, but more like a punishment for most people. Being really old generally sucks and comes with pain, loss of freedom, family, senses, mobility, mental agility and so much more.

Why it got deleted:

Who ISN’T 101 these days.

Why it shouldn’t have been:

Just look at the lively, deeply depressing debate Carrie inspired! After recounting his nice day volunteering, user Legacypac went on to say:

Unlike the person who works hard and dreams of getting to the Olympics/top of Business/President/famous actor etc no one in the care home is thinking ‘if I can just breath longer then Fred I’ll be the oldest person in South Dakota or born the former Russian Empire or the oldest person living in the USA to have immigrated from Ireland. I can’t wait for Grace and Wilma to die so I can seize the title of oldest woman in wherever and get my Wikipedia article finally.’

And he’s probably right. If I’d just had to spend the day with him at my nursing home, I wouldn’t want to live another day either.

Jenner

Jenner is a male porn star and an AVN nominee for Most Outrageous Sex Scene in Girlvert 19 .

Best Line:

This photo:

Why it got deleted:

“Fails PORNBIO and the GNG. No awards, only nominations. No meaningful biographical content.”

Why it shouldn’t have ban:

A) Jenner doesn’t need that kind of negativity in his life.

B) This photo:

Praise and veneration of Muhammad

Pretty much exactly what it sounds like—a collection of various praises for Muhammad across a number of cultures and mediums.

Best Line:

The Supreme Court of the United States includes The Holy Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) among the greatest lawgivers of history using a sculpted image.

Why it got deleted:

Wikipedia is supposed to be written from a neutral point of view. So while some wanted to keep the article because they believed it acted as a counterbalance to the (still not deleted!) article Criticism of Muhammad, each article is still supposed to be evaluated based on its own merits. In this case, the deciding editor determined that the article was more of an essay attempting to prove a point than an encyclopedic entry and gave it the ax.

Why it shouldn’t have been:

Veneration of Mary in Roman Catholicism seems to be doing just fine.

Honorable Mentions:

The Valentine Constitution

Please Make Me Lesbian!

List of state governors of the United States who were Freemasons

Hammerschlagen

Criticism of Zwarte Piet

Taured mystery

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Katrina Pierson, a person Donald Trumps chooses to represent him on television, wore a necklace made out of ammunition last night on CNN. When someone on Twitter pointed this out, she countered with an insane remark about abortion.

There is basically no way to interpret the following as not bizarre and menacing:

What else, outside of a sort of “Mad Max” future scenario, does “bullet necklace” connote other than vague threats and instability? Remember that this is a woman who has said she hopes Donald Trump uses the American nuclear arsenal, so her views on harming/killing other people are more or less concrete.

Here was her reply, a non sequitur so powerful it should replace one corner of the nuclear triad:

Honestly that would be great television.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

“Sales of smartwatches and fitness trackers could outpace those of traditional watches by 2020, according to data from research firm Mintel.” Yeah right.

First of all “smartwatches” are for nerds who can’t get laid.

http://gawker.com/take-the-pledg...

Second of all regular watches are beloved by assholes.

http://gawker.com/5978737/why-do...

Do you think there are more nerds in this world than assholes?

Do you think there are more people who don’t want to get laid than want to get laid?

Dream on. Guess nerds aren’t as good at math as they say.

You see the size of my Breitling? It’s huge sonny. I can barely lift my hand. That’s okay. I guess it’s so heavy because it is made of PUSSY MAGNETS. Tell that to your survey—nerds.

My Breitling is so many fucking millimeters wide.

[You know who wears Breitlings? John fuckin Travolta. You wanna be a pussy magnet, you start there, kid. Not on a fuckin computer: Flickr]

We certainly read a lot of bad things this year—but we also read a bunch of stuff that was great. Here are our picks for the best books, essays, articles and Urban Baby blog posts of 2015.

Sam Biddle

Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command by Sean Naylor Even if you don’t care about military history, there are so many true yet impossible-sounding and confounding anecdotes of waste, mismanagement, incompetence, and incredibly poor planning in here to make it worthwhile. These are the people who (eventually) killed Bin Laden! What a world. A perfect record of expensive American messiness.

http://www.amazon.com/Relentless-Str...

“I Don’t Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium” by Jaime Lowe in the New York Times Magazine Almost everyone who tries to make their own life interesting fails, and almost everyone who writes about their own problems is annoying. Jaime Lowe’s story of a personal pharmacological dilemma is fascinating and never whiny or looking for sympathy. It’s just perfect.

“What Defeating ISIS Would Look Like” by Kurt Schlichter in the Independent Journal I don’t think I laughed at anything so hard in 2015 as “Get the Wildman on the line.”

Rich Juzwiak

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina “Projecting feelings onto other animals can lead us to misunderstanding their motivations,” writes Safina in his empathic dive into the emotional lives of animals. “But denying that they have any motivation guarantees that we’ll misunderstand it.” His case for what was once derided as “anthropomorphism,” is framed as simple common sense. “Humans are not the measure of all things,” Safina writes. We share the world with these apparently sentient beings—why should what we share stop there? Beyond Words is routinely moving and teeming with examples of animals exhibiting astonishingly recognizable behavior. Did you know that baby elephants throw tantrums and suck their trunks for comfort? Or that some females fake estrus for attention? Or that they’ll dress themselves in bushes, in apparent goofy dress-up play? Simple wonders like these are on virtually every page.

http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Words-W...

“I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen” by Noreen Malone and Amanda Demme in New York Exactly as overwhelming as it needed to be.

“The Fight To Save Atlantic City” by Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker “Hey, at least we’re not Detroit!” says the mayor of the crumbling South Jersey resort. What happens to a city that billions and billions of dollars have been poured into after its usefulness dries up? (The proliferation of legal gambling in nearby cities and states has severely depressed the former slot-machine mecca.) It gets a character like Glenn Straub, an eccentric of literary proportions, a developer who wants to build a “Tower of Geniuses” in the Revel (a $2.4 billion hotel casino that opened in 2012 and closed in 2014), an equestrian center, and the world’s largest water park in A.C. Is Straub the city’s “white knight” or yet another vampire who’s intent to suck out of Atlantic City whatever life is left? I have no idea, but I loved reading about him. This series of recollections of conversations with him made me lol for real:

Once, he answered his phone as he was getting fingerprinted by the Casino Control Commission, for his gambling-license application. Another time, he announced that he was at a urinal. With bankruptcy-court procedures in mind, I asked, “So what comes next?” and he replied, “I wash my hands.”

Hamilton Nolan

The best thing I read this year was Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell which taught me among other things that journalists were much more hardcore in George Orwell’s time. The best thing I read on the internet this year was UrbanBaby.com, shout out to all of the urban babies in the struggle.

http://www.amazon.com/Homage-Catalon...

Gabrielle Bluestone

Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff I couldn’t put down Lauren Groff’s two-part chronicle of the birth, life and death of a marriage. It’s a beautifully crafted, dreamily expressed horror story set in the mundanity of everyday life. And just when you think the story is done, the second act hits like a ton of bricks.

http://www.amazon.com/Fates-Furies-N...

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins This time last year, a girl I went on vacation with left this fun little book behind. I had, to my chagrin, finished it by the time I got home. I envy anyone who gets to read this for the first time. Olivia, I owe you one.

http://www.amazon.com/Jitterbug-Perf...

Remember When De Bat Flew in Carly Simon’s Face? by Leah Beckmann on Gawker

Ha ha, it’s racist!

Ashley Feinberg

My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf I generally don’t like “graphic novels” (I had to read Maus in college and it was fine/I bought The Watchmen and read a few pages before setting it down on my shelf to stare at me for the next five years), but I couldn’t put this down. It’s written by one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s only friends from high school. In this case, “friend” is used incredibly loosely as Dahmer didn’t really have friends in the conventional sense and they mostly just let him hang around for comic fodder. Still, the way the serial killer before he was a serial killer is portrayed in this is equal parts fascinating and unsettling. In no way is he fully humanized (I don’t think there’s much human in him to begin with), but you do see how a student with severe emotional issues spirals downward as every possible authority figure around him completely fails to do anything about it. You also see the very beginning of what’s to come as he starts to lash out (both emotionally and physically). The illustrations lend to the grotesque sort of humor that Dahmer seemed so fond of. It really only takes a few hours to get through, and I’ve read it nearly four times now. It’s great.

http://www.amazon.com/My-Friend-Dahm...

“Just Checkin” by Paul Ford on Medium Paul Ford is rare in that every single thing he has ever written is phenomenal. But this short piece he wrote in February about anxiety-inducing email subject lines is indescribably perfect. So rather than try to describe it and fail, I will just tell you to read it. Now.

And last but not least, this tweet from Kylie Jenner was objectively the best thing I read this year:

Andy Cush

“Access Denied” by John Herrman on The Awl The Awl’s John Herrman is our most perceptive critic of the torturous relationship between the media and tech, content and the content industry, and the work of journalism and the new platforms intended to support it. His essay “Access Denied,” about the slowly shrinking amount of leverage afforded to reporters and publications in their various exchanges with sources, feels like a culmination of the loose series about online media he’s been publishing since last year. Media criticism doesn’t have a reputation as riveting, page-turning stuff, but when I started reading “Access Denied” on my iPhone at an airport bar this month, I almost missed my flight because I didn’t want to get up before finishing.

“Joe Gould’s Teeth” by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker Jill Lepore’s investigation into the legend of the longest book ever written, tells the irresistible story of a writer who seemed psychologically unable to put down his pen and stop writing. Joe Gould brushed elbows with E.E. Cummings and Ezra Pound, slept in the streets of New York, fought through a series of mental breakdowns, and claimed to have documented nearly every single thing that ever happened to him in an impossibly lengthy handwritten manuscript he called “The Oral History of Our Time.” In 1941, a reporter claimed that the Oral History’s pages, stacked up, were over seven feet tall. Joe Gould was also a crank who stalked and assaulted women and obsessed over bogus race science. Most of his published work, Lepore writes, was dreadful.

The legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell profiled Joe Gould in 1942, introducing the Oral History to the larger world, and again in 1964, after Gould’s death, when he claimed that the history had been a lie all along—Gould had conceptualized the book, and told plenty of people about it, but never actually written more than a few pages, Mitchell claimed in “Joe Gould’s Secret,” the second profile. Since then, it has become clear that Mitchell himself was a world-class fabricator, who once wrote a profile of a man he seems to have invented entirely. “Had Mitchell seen it? Had Gould made it up? Had Mitchell made it up?” Lepore asks of a will that Gould supposedly carried in his breast pocket at all times. She continues, “For that matter, what about the Oral History? Mitchell hadn’t seen it, and said Gould had made it up, but maybe Mitchell had made that up.”

Lepore navigates these layers of fact and fiction, digging through dusty archival boxes for scraps of the Oral History, making calls to those who claimed to have more, and asking questions along the way about the nature of biography and what motivates a person to write. In the end, she doesn’t get much closer than Mitchell did to finding the history of Joe Gould’s life, but while her predecessor claimed definitively that the world’s longest book doesn’t exist, Lepore recognizes that the real truth of any story is rarely that simple.

J.K. Trotter

“Ina Garten Does It Herself” by Choire Sicha at Eater Even if you’ve never watched the Food Network’s cooking show Barefoot Contessa, reading Choire Sicha’s profile of its creator and star, the enormously successful cookbook author Ina Garten, is mesmerizing: A meditation on Garten’s rejection of domesticity sits comfortably next to a mini-profile of Garten’s husband, Jeffrey, who may or may not be a former C.I.A. spook. It’s probably true that Barefoot Contessa viewers will appreciate this essay in ways that non-viewers such as myself cannot. But that goes both ways: I found this piece entrancing precisely because I had no idea who Ina Garten was.

Memorandum Decision and Order for Animal Legal Defense Fund, et al. vs. Otter, et al. by Chief Judge B. Lynn Winmill for the U.S. District Court of Idaho In this decision, Judge Winmill struck down a thoroughly unconstitutional Idado statue that prohibited “interference with agricultural production”—an entirely new criminal category which outlawed, among other things, any kind of undercover investigative journalism targeting the state’s private agricultural companies, who helped pass the law in the first place. In siding with activists who exposed the hideous conditions of those companies’ livestock, Winmill delivers an uncommonly spirited defense of the First Amendment, and demonstrates why proponents of free speech so often frame the principle in maximalist terms: Because speech can, and does, change the world.

“How to Win Tinder” by Alicia Eler and Eve Peyser at The New Inquiry What, exactly, is Tinder? In their essay about the dominant mobile dating app, Alicia Eler and Eve Peyser explore the values, pitfalls, and invisible ideologies of a platform designed to streamline the weird process human beings refer to as “dating.” It’s a perceptive piece in itself, but it’s also a valuable rejoinder to another Tinder essay published 2015, the takedown published by Nancy Jo Sales in Vanity Fair. By approaching the app from several different standpoints—Tinder as software, Tinder as labor, Tinder as video game, and so on—Eler and Peyser manage to comprehend not just Tinder, but the accelerating changes of the conditions under which it, and its users, exist.

“Seeing Through Police” by Mark Greif in n+1 What is the place of the cop in a democratic society? In the course of exploring this question in his unsettling essay about police and police reform, Mark Greif argues that the social status and legal authority of police have vastly outgrown their historical role, under which they functioned less like a paramilitary force and more like a boring municipal agency or a small office within the judiciary. Today’s police, by contrast, occupy a position with multiple and therefore ambiguous duties, ranging from routing traffic, to chasing speeding cars, to touching, pushing, detaining, and maiming a great number of racial minorities. Anyone grappling with these realities, which conspire to place the very existence of police above question or comment, will benefit greatly from Greif’s essay.

Jordan Sargent

“How Crazy Am I to Think I Know Where MH370 Is?” by Jeff Wise in New York I’m ready at a moment’s notice to read thousands of words on the great mystery of my lifetime, and this amateur investigation achieved such a good balance of realism and “but what if...” that I closed the tab thinking, “You know, maybe the plane really is in Kazakhstan.”

“Five Hostages” by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker This New Yorker tome by Scientology gnat Lawrence Wright about five families with children captured in the Middle East who were forced to band together to navigate the murky world of hostage-taking is in equal measures a class in modern geopolitics and a nimbly told look at excruciating human tragedy.

“Where Would the Kardashians Be Without Kris Jenner?” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner in the New York Times Magazine This year featured no better match of writer and subject.

“The Browns Way” by Joe Posnanski on NBC Sports Joe Posnanski is a preeminent sportswriter who can fall victim to the same wide-eyed, weepy tales of inspiration that entrap so many preeminent sportswriters. But he also has a rare gift for writing about sports incompetence, so it made perfect sense that he spent the fall writing about each game involving his hometown Cleveland Browns, the most incompetent sports franchise of a generation. This entry recounting the Browns’ heartbreaking and improbable loss to the Baltimore Ravens is so awesomely dry and emotionless.

The Twitter account of Vince Staples at @vincestaples Funniest person on the internet.

Allie Jones

Barbara the Slut and Other People by Lauren Holmes (Riverhead) A tight little collection of stories that I love. You could even read it in one sitting, if that’s the way you like to read.

http://www.amazon.com/Barbara-Other-...

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town by Jon Krakauer (Doubleday) Krakauer’s methodical investigation into how the University of Montana recently dealt with several rape accusations against members of its football team was so much better than anything else written on the beat this year.

http://www.amazon.com/Missoula-Rape-...

“My Push Present” by Kim Kardashian on KimKardashianWest.com. The only blogger I’m looking forward to reading in 2016 is Kim Kardashian.

Alex Pareene

The things that tended to stick with me this year were largely Twitter-sized morsels. “There were many hilarious things under his hat, including doge” will bounce around in my head for some time, I suspect. Jessica Misener’s delightful lampoon of second-generation Choire Sicha-via-Today In Tabs voice had a pitch-perfect opening: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This was probably a very bad idea!” This gem from Mark E. Smith, to Shane McGowan, in 1988: “You don’t know fuck all about Nietzsche, pal!” And the Dril-like poetry of: “That’s it! I’m, Voting for Sarah...”

I also enjoyed:

Bare-Faced Messiah: The True Story of L. Ron Hubbard by Russell Miller One of the books I belatedly got around to this year was Going Clear. It was great, which was no surprise, considering the author and the subject. It also led me to a lesser-known but possibly even more entertaining read on the history of Scientology. Russell Miller’s exhaustive biography of L. Ron Hubbard, Bare-faced Messiah was originally published in 1987, but the Church of Scientology more or less successfully suppressed it with a deluge of lawsuits against its publisher. While it was available online since the 1990s, it was finally properly reprinted in 2014. Wright’s book is the more complete history of the church, but Miller, who had incredible access to Hubbard’s unpublished writings, including a journal he kept as a teenager, wrote what will likely remain the definitive biography of its incredible founder. Two highlights: Those aforementioned journal excerpts, which show young Hubbard elaborating on and embellishing his own legend in real time, and the book’s account of his dismal war service. Hubbard’s lengthy battle against wholly imaginary Japanese submarines off the coast of Oregon is high comedy.

http://www.amazon.com/Bare-Faced-Mes...

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie A corker.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Murder-Rog...

“This Cartoon Does A Bad Job Of Explaining What Privilege Is” by Clickhole It’s 100 words and a bad drawing. It’s perfect.

What’s the best thing you read in 2015? Tell us in the comments below.

A few minutes after 2:30 p.m. this afternoon, Bill Cosby showed up to a magistrate’s office in Elkins Park, Penn. for arraignment on three charges of sexual assault that were filed by the Montgomery County district attorney this morning. Waiting for him was the press, which produced the surreal scene of Cosby’s first real public reckoning with his alleged crimes.

In true Cosby fashion, he sported a particularly striking “young kids nowadays need to pull up their pants” face:

His bail has been set at $1 million.

[top image via AP]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

At a campaign rally in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina today, the leading Republican candidate for president—Donald Trump—claimed to know words. “I know words, I have the best words,” he said to the crowd. Alright, if you say so.

Trump made the claim while discussing the State Department’s efforts to bring peace to Syria—a complicated topic that seemed to confuse and/or bore his South Carolinian supporters. Luckily, he was able to cut to the heart of the matter by simply calling the Department “stupid.” Trump explained his use of the word this way:

I’m telling you, I used to use the word incompetent. Now I just call them stupid. I went to an Ivy League school. I’m very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words...but there is no better word than stupid. Right?

Has there been a more perfect Trump quote? It’s “I have the best of something everyone else has” coupled with “Let me dumb this down for you so much that it no longer makes sense.” Amen.

[Ht Daily Caller]

Photo via Getty. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Though we wish it were not so, America has a two-party political system. Both parties share many of the same bad qualities. But one is unique, in that it is a machine made of fraud.

My purpose here is not to glorify the Democratic party. America is an oligarchy. Both the Democratic and Republican parties operate in response to the demands of the wealthy and powerful. This is not an opinion; it has been amply demonstrated by political scientists. We do not live in a well-functioning democracy, because our system does not represent the needs of the average voter. Our electoral system is infested by monied interests that finance campaigns in exchange for influence, warped by gerrymandering that heavily favors incumbents, and encumbered by a Senate that gives citizens of sparsely populated rural states far more per capita power than everyone else. It is a flawed system, and both major parties actively participate in and reinforce it in many similar ways. There are no saints here.

The Democratic Party—the (very relatively) more liberal of the parties—is guilty of the dreary sins of hypocrisy. The Democrats often fail to live up to their progressive ideals. They often say the right thing, and do the wrong thing. They often sell out morality for political expediency. Their flaws are the basic failings of human nature. They are a classic archetype, old as politics itself.

The Republican Party, though—now there is a fascinating creation. The central sin of the Republican Party is not so mundane. The Republican Party is qualitatively different. The Republican Party is not a typical political party that fails to live up to its stated ideals. It works just fine at what it is constructed to do: draw in the votes of the poor while working to serve the interests of the very wealthy. This is not a flaw; the party is built this way. It is built to be a trick, perpetrated by the very rich at the expense of everyone else. And it has been extremely successful.

The Republican Party is the equivalent of a magician who distracts you with a flourish of his wand while stealing your watch with his other hand. Anyone who thinks about it for a minute will find it odd that one political party caters to both yacht-purchasing heathen Wall Street millionaires and poor Southern churchgoing whites. The only way the Republican Party accomplishes this is by not catering to them both. It caters to the rich. To the rich, it gives the steak. To everyone else, it tosses the bones.

What is the fundamental purpose of the Republican Party? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax bracket—the people whose interests are actually represented by elected officials—politics is an investment. It is no big deal to invest a million dollars in the presidential race if it ends up saving you ten million dollars on your tax bill. Issues that do not directly affect the net worth of the rich are sideshows, in the sense that they are not the core purpose of the party, but rather instrumental tools to be used to advance the core purpose. It is that simple. All of the issues that attract the majority of the Republican Party’s voters—Gay marriage! Bible thumping! American exceptionalism! Tough on crime! Tough on terror! Abortion, babies, rah rah rah!—are not the issues that motivate the people who actually control the party. The rich, after all, are insulated by money from the potential negative impacts of these issues. They care about money, and how to keep as much of it out of the public till and in their own pockets as possible. The way to do that is to manipulate the tax code to their own advantage. In order to do that, they need elected officials working for their interests. In order to get elected officials, they need lots of votes. In order to get lots of votes, they need more than just the rich voting for them. In order to get lots of poor and middle class people voting for a party advocating policies in direct opposition to the economic interests of the vast majority of people, they wave around social issues like a matador waves a cape in front of a bull. The wealthy can watch the culture wars play out from on high, laughing to themselves all the while. All of the fine hardworking Christian culture warriors are the peasants fighting for their king, who urges them to battle for god while being primarily concerned with maintaining a healthy flow of capital. Donald Trump proclaiming “I love the Bible” is just the most cartoonish manifestation of the playbook that all Republican functionaries are working from.

Taxes are boring. Taxes are arcane. Guns and god and babies and terrorism are exciting. But taxes are where the real action is. For the sake of a ten percent plus or minus difference in income tax rates, an entire political party is constructed and funded. Why not? That difference amounts to millions or billions of dollars for those funding the party. The economic logic of investing in politics is overwhelming. Most of the urbane wealthy are willing to tolerate some Bible-thumping in exchange for an extra hundred thousand or hundred million in their accounts at the end of the year. This is what the Republican Party exists to do. And it has done it so well for the past 35 years that the rich have now accumulated more capital than we’ve seen since the Gilded Age, which was not so gilded for all of the non-rich.

This is not a big secret among those who have taken the time to look at it. People have been screaming about “class consciousness” since the nineteenth century. Yet here we are—seventy years into a more or less solid decline of top income tax rates. For the sake of that little fluctuating tax rate, cable networks are built, and think tanks are founded, and a thousand and one political candidates are lined up to receive their fundraising checks. I do not know what it will take to impress upon the average voter what is happening here. It is only possible to modestly hope that as people cast their votes for the good party conservative, they come to realize that they are not participating in an honest battle of political beliefs. They are participating in a grand con job. And the joke is on all of us.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

[via Stephanie Farr of the Philadelphia Daily News]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Since the Middle Ages, human beings have purchased various goods—ranging from bare necessities to unimaginable luxuries—using money acquired from wage labor. We routinely report on how the past and present iterations of this system, commonly known as market capitalism, depend on the subjugation of the planet’s most powerless populations and the destruction of the earth’s most fragile ecosystems. We much less routinely acknowledge the fact that we buy stuff ourselves, and that we like a lot of the stuff we buy. Pursuant to our goal of editorial transparency, here’s the best thing each member of Gawker’s staff bought in 2015. If you have your own suggestions, hop in the comments below.

Sam Biddle: Black+Decker BDH2000PL MAX Lithium Pivot Vacuum, 20-volt

This thing is terrific, it’s like a handheld Roomba. Now that I live alone I put it directly on my face to suck tiny hairs off my cheeks after I shave so that they don’t fall on the floor.

Gabrielle Bluestone: Liztek JSS-100 HD Water Resistant Bluetooth 3.0 Shower Speaker

I bought this bad boy off Kinja deals and I’ve never had a boring shower since. Did have to learn the hard way not to dance along though.

Jim Cooke: Simplehuman Butterfly Step Trash Can

I never thought I’d spend $160 on a trash can, but a while back my old shitty one broke and I had a gift card so I bought this one. Now I love my trash can.

Andy Cush: 6” Amazon Kindle

This was technically a gift that I received in 2014, but insofar as the Kindle requires me to buy proprietary Kindle content in order to be useful, I would say the Kindle is the best thing I bought in 2015. It’s compact; it keeps old New Yorkers from piling up; it lets you search through the text when you’re reading a novel by Pynchon and forget who a character is; it encourages you to take chances on books you’re not sure will be worth keeping on your shelf. The Disaster Artist by Greg Sestero, the last thing I finished, was a perfect Kindle purchase. As a fan of The Room, I enjoyed this firsthand account of its completely bonkers production a lot. But I’m not sure I need it in my apartment forever.

Melissa Cronin: Exo-Terra Primate Skull Hideaway

The ‘best’ thing I bought this year, by my own definition of the word, is this skull-shaped hideaway for my brother’s snake, Jafar. Jafar “is not used to it,” according to my brother, and has not yet slithered out of its eye, but we have high hopes for 2016.

Ashley Feinberg: Philips HF3520 Wake-Up Light With Colored Sunrise Simulation

I used to have to set approximately 15 alarms on my phone. I still do out of anxiety and fear but they’re no longer functionally necessary because this thing is fucking incredible.

Allie Jones: Dyson V6 Cordless Vacuum

I use this literally every day, and it is fun each time.

Rich Juzwiak: Harbinger Speed Jump Rope

This jump rope makes me want to throw up (and I’ve accidentally whipped myself with it several times, leaving welts) and I love it.

Hamilton Nolan: Bazzini Unsalted Peanuts

Peanuts—good to eat.

Brendan O’Connor: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Legendary Edition for Xbox 360

When asked why Skyrim was the favorite thing he bought in 2015, Brendan O’Connor texted his colleague Keenan Trotter:

Alex Pareene: Casper Mattress, Queen

When asked why the Queen-sized Casper mattress was the favorite thing he bought in 2015, Alex Pareene provided his answer via Slack, from which the (lightly-edited) transcript below was taken:

Keenan Trotter: what’s the best thing you bought in 2015

Alex Pareene: honestly it was probably my casper mattress

Keenan: omg

Alex: very little made my life demonstrably better than that

Keenan: the free one... [Ed. note: For reasons that remain unclear, Casper recently delivered a free twin-sized Casper mattress—retail cost: $500—to Alex Pareene at Gawker’s New York City office.]

​Alex Pareene: lol

Keenan: oh

Alex: no i bought one this summer....

Keenan: you actually have one

Keenan: wow

Alex: before they sent me a free one....

Keenan: man

Keenan: which size - queen?

Alex: yeah

Alex: part of it was just that my prior mattress was a full-size and also a cheap piece of shit

Alex: so almost any nicer queen would have been an upgrade

Alex: but the casper is good and comfortable

Jordan Sargent: Clear Men Scalp Therapy 2 in 1 Shampoo + Conditioner

I was always too lazy to buy dandruff shampoo and then one day I did and my dandruff disappeared. At least I think it did. Nobody tell me otherwise.

Keenan Trotter: Z Gel Infused Dough Memory Foam + Liquid Gel Pillow

I don’t know what “Z Gel” is, nor do I possess the vocabulary to describe how this pillow affects my neck or spine. But I do know is that this is a very firm, comfortable pillow, and that my sleep has greatly improved since I started using it. If you have trouble sleeping but haven’t tried a firmer pillow, you could do a lot worse than this one.

You wanna buy any of this stuff? Here are some auto-generated Amazon affiliate link widgets to facilitate your transaction.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

http://www.amazon.com/Liztek-Resista...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Glare-F...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

http://www.amazon.com/Philips-HF3520...

http://www.amazon.com/Dyson-209472-0...

http://www.amazon.com/Harbinger-Spee...

http://www.amazon.com/Jumbo-Unsalted...

http://www.amazon.com/Elder-Scrolls-...

http://www.amazon.com/Casper-Queen-M...

http://www.amazon.com/Therapy-Shampo...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...

Photo credits: Amazon, Bazzinni, and Casper

Some useful context for the ridiculous feud between former NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly and current NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton over the department’s alleged manipulation of crime statistics: the practice was so bad under Kelly that the city may soon lose $4.6 million over it.

http://gawker.com/ray-kelly-accu...

Just before Christmas, Kelly said in a radio interview that an apparent decline in major crimes in New York this year was the product of massaged numbers. According to the ex-top cop’s theory, Bratton’s NYPD intentionally misrepresented the nature of arrests it made in order to make the city seem safer. This is fairly common practice in big police departments, and it wouldn’t be at all surprising to learn that it’s happening under Bratton. But it’s difficult to take the criticism seriously when it’s coming from Kelly.

Several sources alleged during and after Kelly’s tenure as commissioner that the department routinely mucked with crime reports under his leadership. One of them was Adrian Schoolcraft, a Brooklyn NYPD officer who leaked tapes of high-ranking officers discussing manipulating stats and enforcing arrest quotas to the Village Voice, which published excerpts from the recordings in a series of stories in 2010. After Schoolcraft presented his complaints to NYPD officials, he was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for nearly a week—a stay that he claims happened against his will.

Schoolcraft sued the city, and reached a $600,000 settlement plus benefits and back pay in October, but the payouts may not be finished yet. The New York Daily News reported yesterday that his attorneys are seeking $4.6 million in fees from municipal coffers for the case. (The city is required by law to pay plaintiffs’ legal fees when it settles a suit.)

With Kelly currently braying to anyone who will listen about his successor’s alleged underreporting, the news couldn’t have arrived at a better time. It’s very possible that both men in this dustup are guilty as charged—the Los Angeles Times recently reported on large-scale stat manipulation at the LAPD during a period that includes Bratton’s time as chief of that department—but only one of them is costing NYC taxpayers tons of money because of it.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.