A sous-vide circulator, a popular french press, and discounted bread makers kick off Tuesday’s best deals.

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Top Deals

Travelpro makes your favorite rolling carry-on bag, and nearly their entire Crew 10 line is on sale for all-time low prices today on Amazon. I have the 21" spinner, and while it doesn’t have GPS location tracking, it’s basically perfect in every other way.

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Ready to experience meat in a whole new way? Amazon’s currently offering the Bluetooth model of Anova’s excellent Sous Vide immersion circulator for $129. That’s an all-time low by $10, and $30 less than the its most recent typical price. Sous Vide was already the easiest way to cook food perfectly, and this model makes it even simpler by putting every recipe you need on a mobile app.

Update: Sold out on Amazon, but still available for the same price from Anova directly.

Lifehacker has a great explainer on Sous-Vide cooking for you to check out, but the basic idea is that you seal the food in plastic bags, and then cook it in precisely heated water over a longer period of time. Here are some advantages to this process from Lifehacker’s guide:

http://lifehacker.com/5868685/sous-v...

• Cooking sous-vide results in evenly-cooked meat and fish.
• Cooking sous-vide gives you specific control over the final temperature of the meat, avoiding overdone, dried-out food.
• You can hold foods cooked sous-vide at their specified temperature for long periods of time without damaging the texture or quality of the dish, making it an ideal cooking method for holiday dinners or meals with multiple components and side-dishes.
• Bacterial or other contamination is largely not an issue with sous-vide cooking. While you may be cooking up to minimum safe temperatures, the length of time you’re holding the food at its safe temperature will pasteurize your meat and ensure the safety of your food, meaning “safe” meat doesn’t have to equal “dry” or “not pink” meat any longer. Still, keep your meat thermometer handy, and test before serving. Remember, sous-vide lets you hold food at temp for long periods without diminishing the quality of the food, so if it’s undercooked, you can seal the bag and put it back in.
• Sous-vide cooking is by nature a repeatable process. Set the temperature, set the timer, and walk away. You will wind up with perfectly cooked food every time you do it.

Every time we post this, we get some snark about the Bluetooth, so just know that it’s optional. If you connect your phone, you can find a recipe via Anova’s app, and automatically program the cooker with one tap, but you certainly don’t need to use it.

The newer Bluetooth+Wi-Fi model is still on sale for $169, an all-time low, but the only difference there is the ability to control it away from home.

Anker’s kevlar-wrapped PowerLine Lightning cables are some of the most popular we’ve ever posted, and the standard 3' model is marked down to $8 today on Amazon, matching an all-time low.

http://bestsellers.kinja.com/bestsellers-an...

I’ve collected several of these cables over the last few months, and while I haven’t used them long enough to know if they’re actually more durable, they definitely feel weighty and premium. Note that this deal is available on space grey, blue, and red.

http://www.amazon.com/Anker-PowerLin...

I know some of you rail against the Bluetoothization of everything, but this smart carry-on bag has some really clever features.

• TSA-approved Electronic lock that automatically locks when your phone is out of range
• Built-in GPS location tracking, if your bag ever gets lost
• USB battery pack to charge your phone
• Built-in scale

Today’s $319 price tag is a lot of money, but it’s $80 less than usual, and an all-time low. If you travel frequently, it could be worth the investment.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00X5OUC1U/...

Update: The price seems to be fluctuating now. As of this writing, it’s $18.

A few years ago, Call of Duty: Ghosts had a special edition that included a 1080p action camera, and they must not have sold many of them, because you can get the camera alone now for just $13. Is it a great action cam? No. But as you can see in this video, it’s not bad for $13.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...

If you can’t start your day without a morning cup of coffee, but you’re still using an electric drip coffee maker, or even a Keurig, you might want to try out a flavor-extracting french press. This 4.4 star-rated Bodum Chambord is one of the most popular models on the market, and it’s down to an all-time low price today on Amazon.

If you’re not convinced, know that french press took the #1 spot in Lifehacker’s coffee-making Hive Five, and many coffee aficionados swear by it. And with no disposable filters to buy (not to mention K-Cups), this $22 machine should pay for itself over time.

http://lifehacker.com/most-popular-c...

Today’s Amazon deal is the cheapest we’ve ever seen this model, but note that it’s a Gold Box deal, meaning this price is only available today, or until sold out.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00008XEWG

Today only, Amazon’s offering big savings on select womens’ grooming gear, including hair straighteners, epilators, hairdryers, and a lot more. Even if you don’t need any of these for yourself, perhaps you’ll find a last minute mother’s day gift.

Own any amiibo? There’s no excuse not to show them off in this green pipe stand for just $3. Don’t worry, it’s not a warp pipe.

Nobody really needs a bread maker, but making your own bread from scratch is rewarding in the same way that making any food yourself is rewarding, and these discounted Panasonics make it easy.

You’ve got two options in today’s Amazon Gold Box. This basic model is available for $90, or about $50 less than usual, and can bake a 2.5 pound loaf. It even includes an 11 hour delay option and a yeast dispenser to add the yeast automatically at the optimal time.

http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-SD-Y...

If you want more flexibility, here’s another option down to $220, or about $80 less than usual. That price premium gets you a nut and raisin dispenser and a gluten-free mode, among other bells and whistles. Just note that like all Gold Box deals, these prices are only available today, or until sold out.

http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-SD-Y...

If you’ve come home after work to one too many destroyed pillows or overturned trashcans, this ingenious little gadget can help you keep an eye on your pets from anywhere.

Petcube is a Wi-Fi camera, intercom system, and laser toy all wrapped into one sleek package, and Amazon is selling it today for $149, or $50 off its usual price. The video above does a better job of explaining this thing than I ever could, and if you own a pet and spend a lot of time away from home, it certainly seems like it could be a great investment.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JGWN8O8/...

If you don’t have the time or inclination to use a french press, your favorite automatic coffee maker is down to an all-time low $95 today on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005YQZT92/...

http://co-op.kinja.com/your-favorite-...

Techmatte’s excellent, minimalist, universal magnetic smartphone vent mount is back down to $5 today with code C3LLYQ2H.

http://www.amazon.com/TechMatte-Magn...

These ridiculously cheap mounts are among the most popular products we’ve ever listed, and carry both Lifehacker Editorial and Lifehacker Hive Five recommendations.

http://bestsellers.kinja.com/the-15-most-po...

http://lifehacker.com/the-aukey-magn...

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Love yours? Tell us why and we’ll include your story in future posts about the product!

Everyone should own a large USB battery pack for long plane rides and power outages, and you’ve got three solid options to choose from today.

The KMASHI is the smallest of the bunch, but the best deal in terms of price-per-mAh. It’s also one of our top sellers. The Jackery and the Aukey have nearly identical capacities, but the Jackery costs a few dollars more due to its premium aluminum exterior.

http://bestsellers.kinja.com/bestsellers-km...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JP8MZGK?...

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The new DJI Phantom 4 sure looks impressive, but for $1000 less, you can pick up the still-completely-amazing Phantom 3 Standard today. You’ll lose out on features like the (finnicky) accident avoidance, indoor positioning, and 4K video, but the camera still boasts an impressive 2.7K resolution, and it’ll last over 20 minutes on a single charge. At $400, it probably won’t even eat up your entire tax refund.

http://gizmodo.com/the-new-phanto...

If you still have any TVs without a Chromecast attached, Staples will sell you one at a $5 discount today. Plus, Google will throw in 90 days of unlimited music for free.

http://gizmodo.com/chromecast-201...

http://reviews.gizmodo.com/chromecast-aud...

LG’s ChromeBase is basically a garden variety Chromebook, but packed into an all-in-one desktop PC with a 22" 1080p display. If that sounds like something you need, today’s price on Amazon is an all-time low, and over $70 less than usual.

http://www.amazon.com/LG-ChromeBase-...

Today in dumb things that I kind of want anyway, we’ve got the clever Polaroid Snap instant digital camera marked down to $100 with a pack of film, or $113 with film and a pouch.

Don’t be fooled by the image; this isn’t an instant film camera as you know it. It’s a digital camera that can store 10MP images on a microSD card, that can optionally also print 2"x3" photos at the push of a button. Does anyone need it? No way, but I can see the appeal.

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This highly rated Tiger rice cooker includes multiple settings for different types of rice, and can even be used as a slow cooker or steamer to prepare your main dishes as well. Today’s $48 price tag is a match for an all-time low.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KDNKTJG/...

I can’t think of a better protagonist for a series of childrens’ books than Darth Vader, and you can pick up four different titles today for just $2 each on Kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00V9G41KY/...

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No, it’s not a prop from 50 Shades of Grey; it’s an outdoor hammock chair, and it can be yours for $30.

Life’s too short to vacuum every other day, but luckily, you can pawn that tedious chore off to a Roomba, and the excellent 770 model is marked down to $380 today on Amazon, within $5 of an all-time low.

I recently got this exact model, and I absolutely love it. While it does require a bit of babysitting from time to time, I haven’t vacuumed my house manually in over a month, and yet the floors always feel clean, even with two pets.

http://www.amazon.com/iRobot-Roomba-...

The Roomba 650 is also marked down to $300, but you’ll lose out on one of the virtual walls and true HEPA filters.

http://www.amazon.com/iRobot-Roomba-...

In spite of all the snark when it first launched, the Amazon Echo is actually really great (and only getting better over time), and you can save $20 on yours if you buy it from Staples today.

http://gizmodo.com/amazon-echo-re...

In addition to being a pretty solid Bluetooth speaker, the Echo can check the weather, turn on your lights, read you the news, trigger custom IFTTT recipes, and even order food. Amazon ran a one-day sale a few weeks ago for $6 less, but if you missed out, or you’ve become so hooked that you want to order another, this is still a solid deal.

http://gizmodo.com/amazon-echo-is...

Amazon’s top-selling outdoor deck light requires absolutely zero wiring, and includes an ambient light and motion sensor to illuminate your porch or deck when it’s needed most. If you’ve ever struggled to unlock your door at night, this is absolutely worth $12.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00XJJV1FM/...

Most measuring cups are bundled together with a chain or metal ring to keep them organized, but that means when you want to use one, the rest will dangle there like an unwanted appendage. These ingenious OXO measuring cups though use magnets in the handles to stay together while stored, while remaining easily separable while you’re cooking.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L9WJZW2/...

Full disclosure, I don’t know if TENS (Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) massagers actually do anything useful. I use one occasionally after exercising, and I think it helps reduce muscle pain. At the very least, it feels cool.

In any event, this is not a medical endorsement, simply a deal post, and this is about as cheap as you’ll ever see one of these things.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013FVRBJI?...

http://deals.kinja.com/full-disclosur...

Today on Amazon, three popular Razer gaming mice are on sale today, including the beloved DeathAdder Chroma.

http://co-op.kinja.com/most-popular-g...

All three of these prices are all-time lows, so pick the one that suits your gaming style, and lock in your order before they sell out.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MYTSDU4/...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01798WKTY/...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013HSWF40/...

Tech

Storage

• SanDisk Extreme 32GB microSDHC UHS-1 Card with Adapter | $13 | Amazon
• SanDisk Pixtor 64GB SDXC Class 10 UHS-1 Memory Card | $30 | Best Buy

Power

• Panasonic BK-3MCCA4BA Eneloop AA 2100 Cycle Ni-MH Pre-Charged Rechargeable Batteries (Pack 4) | $11 | Amazon
• XTAR VC4 Li-ion/Ni-MH Battery Charger Premium USB LCD Display | $22 | Amazon
• KMASHI 15000mAh External Battery Power Bank, Portable Charger with Powerful Dual USB Output and 2A Input | $13 | Amazon | Use code KMAS1991
• Jackery Titan 20100 mAh Portable Battery Charger | $28 | Amazon
• Aukey N15 20000mAh Portable Charger External Battery Power Bank with AiPower Tech | $25 | Amazon
• AUKEY QC 2.0 Dual-Port USB Wall Charger with Micro USB Cable | $13 | Amazon | Use code XWSIQPT3
• KMASHI Qi Fast Wireless Charger | $12 | Amazon | Use code X7GQGWVE

Audio

• AUDEZE LCD-2 High-Performance Planar Magnetic Headphones, Aluminum, Lambskin | $700 | Adorama
• Mpow Muze Touch Foldable Wireless Bluetooth 4.0 Stereo Headphones with Swipe Touch Control | $56 | amazon | Use code CD75N49N

Home Theater

• Samsung UN65KU6300 65-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV (2016 Model) | $1460 | Amazon
• Refurb VIZIO 58-Inch 4K Ultra HD 2160p 120Hz LED Smart HDTV | $600 | Walmart
• Samsung 32 Inch LED 1080p TV w/ $75 Gift Card | $200 | Dell
• Google Chromecast Gen 2 | $30 | Staples
• Seneo Wireless Touchpad Keyboard | $16 | Amazon | Use code MLM8ZAZF
• JBL SUB 560P HT Subwoofer | $290 | JBL | Use code 290SUB560

Computers & Accessories

• ASUS 15.6-inch Full-HD Laptop (Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) with Windows 10 | $549 | Amazon
• LG ChromeBase 22CV241-W 22-Inch All-in-One Cloud Desktop | $226 | Amazon
• Adjustable Dual Monitor Stand For Up To 27-Inch LCD/LEDs | $30 | Amazon
• Perfect Pixel CROSSOVER UHD 28-Inch 3840x2160 60Hz HDMI2.0 DP 4K LED Monitor | $270 | eBay
• Acer 23.6" Full HD LED Monitor | $93 | eBay
• Microsoft Wedge Touch Mouse | $18 | Amazon

PC Parts

• Intel Boxed Core I7-6700K 4.00 GHz 8M Processor | $310 | eBay
• Mushkin Enhanced ECO2 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC Internal SSD | $63 | Newegg

Mobile Devices

• Samsung Galaxy S6 SM-G920i Unlocked Phone | $350 | Monoprice

Photography

• DJI Phantom 3 Standard with 2.7K Camera and 3-Axis Gimbal | $399 | eBay
• 3DR Solo Drone Quadcopter w/ Gimbal and Backpack | $999 | Amazon
• Canon EOS Rebel T5i 18.0MP DSLR Camera with 18-55mm Lens, Extra 75-300mm Lens & 16GB Memory Card | $650 | Best Buy
• Polaroid Snap Instant Digital Camera with Photo Paper | $100 | Amazon
• 10" Digital Photo Frame | $45 | Best Buy
• Neewer Large Size SLR DSLR Camera Bag | $5 | eBay
  
• Sekonic Corporation 401-479 LITEMASTER PRO L-478DR Photographic Light Meter W/Case | $325 | Amazon

Home

• Bluesmart Bluetooth Smart Carry-On Spinner Suitcase | $319 | Amazon
• Home Solutions 7" Touchless Soap Dispenser | $9 | eBay
• Newhouse Lighting 3W Energy-Efficient LED Clamp Lamp Light | $16 | Amazon
• Petcube Interactive Wi-Fi Pet Camera | $149 | Amazon
• VicTsing Aromatherapy Wood Grain Humidifier with 7 Color LED Lights | $24 | Amazon | Use code G8237AUG
• MIU PET 10ft Safety Retractable Dog Leash with Comfortable Handle | $11 | Amazon | Use code MP4URPET

Kitchen

• Anova WiFi Precision Cooker | $129 | Amazon
• 13 Inch Magnetic Knife Bar, Aluminum Magnetic Knife Holder | $11 | Amazon | Use code promotion code for 13 inch: CXEBKWGG, for 15 inch : SAXV4AAI
• Bonavita BV1800 8-Cup Coffee Maker with Glass Carafe | $95 | Amazon
• Bodum Chambord 8 cup French Press Coffee Maker, 34 oz. | $22 | Amazon
• Chicago Cutlery DesignPro 13-Piece Knife Block Set | $55 | Woot
• KitchenAid KSM1JA Juicer or Juice Extractor/Sauce Attachment for Stand Mixer | $88 | eBay
• Garlic Press ONME Stainless Steel Professional Ginger Garlic Press | $7 | Amazon | Use code C5PMFTGU
• Spiral Slicer -4-Blade Vegetable Spiral Slicer | $10 | Amazon | Use code OS27RWN7
• Panasonic SD-YD250 Automatic Bread Maker with Yeast Dispenser | $90 | Amazon
• Tiger Corporation JBV-A10U-W 5.5-Cup Micom Rice Cooker with Food Steamer and Slow Cooker, White | $48 | Amazon

Tools & Auto

• Refurb Escort Passport Radar & Laser Detector | $115 | Woot
• Etekcity 360° Car Universal Holder Mount | $6 | Amazon | Use code NN9KWN47

Lifestyle

Apparel

• Crocs Hilo Unisex Flip Flop | $15 | eBay
• Columbia Men’s Peakfreak Enduro Hiking Shoe | $45 | Dicks Sporting Goods
• Cordillera Athena Down Sweater - Women’s | $110 | REI

Beauty & Grooming

• Hair Dryers, Flat Irons, Nail Care, and Other Beatuy Appliances are On Sale | Amazon
• 10pc Cosmetic Brush Set | $13 | eBay
• HSI Professional Ceramic Tourmaline Ionic Flat Iron | $36 | Amazon
• Walmart Beauty Box | $5 | Walmart

Camping & Outdoors

• Wicked Gear Duffle Bag | $20 | eBay
• GoSports Slammo Game Set | $33 | Amazon
• Cycling Clothing and Accessories On Sale | Amazon

Fitness

• Runtastic Orbit Bluetooth Activity Tracker | $30 | Dell
• Weider Olympic Hammertone 210 lb Weight Set | $162 | Sears

Media

Movies & TV

• The Revenant | $15 | Amazon
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind | $6 | Amazon
• The Fifth Element (Remastered) | $6 | Amazon
• November Man, The | $8 | Amazon
• Evil Dead 2 [25th Anniversary Edition] | $5 | Target
• The Darkest Hour [3D] | $5 | Amazon
• Cloud Atlas | $6 | Amazon
• Dark Shadows | $5 | Target
• Cast Away | $5 | Target
• Blade Trilogy | $13 | Amazon
• Mr. & Mrs. Smith | $5 | Target

Books

• Darth Vader and Friends | $2 | Amazon
• Goodnight Darth Vader | $2 | Amazon
• Vader’s Little Princess | $2 | Amazon
• Darth Vader and Son | $2 | Amazon
• The Choice | $3 | Amazon
• The Crossover Audiobook | $1 | Audible

Apps

• FREE $5 Amazon credit when you download a select app through Amazon Underground | Android
• FREE Running for Weight Loss PRO | iOS | Normally $2
• FREE Flowpaper | iOS | Normally $1
• Out There: Ω Edition | $4 | iOS | Normally $5

Gaming

PC

• Steam Weeklong Sale Includes Binding of Isaac, Magicka Collection, Cave Story+ and More | Steam
• Guardians of Middle-earth | $5 | Steam
• Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void | $30 | Amazon

PlayStation 4

• Preorder Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - Standard Edition | $48 | Amazon | Prime only, discount shown at checkout.
• Preorder Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - Legacy Edition | $64 | Amazon | Prime only, discount shown at checkout.
• Final Fantasy X | X-2 | $20 | Walmart
• Arslan: The Warriors of Legend | $22 | Amazon
• Final Fantasy Type-0 HD | $20 | Best Buy
• Just Dance 2015 | $12 | Amazon
• Republique | $14 | Amazon

Xbox One

• Preorder Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - Standard Edition | $48 | Amazon | Prime only, discount shown at checkout.
• Preorder Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - Legacy Edition | $64 | Amazon | Prime only, discount shown at checkout.
• Final Fantasy Type-0 HD | $20 | Best Buy

PS3

• Capcom Vs SNK 2: Mark Of The Millennium | $4 | Amazon

Xbox 360

• Skylanders SuperChargers Dark Edition Starter Pack | $30 | Amazon

Vita

• Preorder Superdimension Neptune VS Sega Hard Girls | $40 | Amazon

Toys

• Monster High Dolls are On Sale Starting Under $5 Each | Amazon
• Spin Master Games - Star Wars Death Star Perplexus | $29 | Amazon
• ThinkGeek’s May the 4th Be With You Sale is On Now | Thinkgeek

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For Bobby Knight, an ornery old basketball coach who gets to go on TV because he backed a racist orange horse at the right time, there is just one issue at play this election: Benghazi.

Knight, who endorsed Donald Trump last week leading into the Indiana primary, indicated on April 27 that his support was tied, at least in part, to a conclusion that “Benghazi” would never occur under a Donald Trump administration.

A bold statement, and one CNN thoughtfully provided airtime for him to discuss today.

“You know, I’ll tell you one thing about Donald Trump. There will never be a Benghazi in a Donald Trump administration. I’m not sure in my lifetime I’ve seen anything where our government failed to do something for people overseas that were in trouble. That won’t happen with Donald Trump,” Knight said this morning on CNN. “Those are the things I’m concerned with.”

Incredibly, he continued: “You know, that doesn’t make any difference, whether he has been in the military or not. He has a great understanding about the value of our military, and how it would be used, and Donald Trump would have made sure that those four people that died in Benghazi, nothing would have happened to him to them with a Donald Trump administration.”

And there you have it.

“With Donald Trump as the GOP front-runner,” Andrew Sullivan wrote on Facebook on April 1, “it seems to me a civic duty to get engaged with this election.” Fifteen months after the seemingly inexhaustible commentator announced one of his periodic retreats from blogging—“to decompress and get healthy for a while”—he declared he was getting back into the opinion-having business, this time to do “long-form journalism,” for New York magazine.

This week, Sullivan delivered the first work of his new, more thoughtful era, under the headline package “Democracies end / when they are too democratic. / And right now, America is a breeding ground for tyranny.” Or, in the URL, “america-tyranny-donald-trump.html.”

It runs more than 7,500 words, of which “Plato’s Republic” and “first read it in graduate school” are among the first, and “Trump is an extinction-level event” are among the last. In between, Sullivan explains that the rise of Donald Trump is a phenomenon of “late-stage democracy”: The old sources of meaning and authority have collapsed under the weight of “maximal freedom and equality,” allowing one member of the corrupt ruling elite to cynically rouse the masses against the very system that has empowered those masses.

Discussing Donald Trump’s success as a matter of political philosophy and human nature is simultaneously canny and shameless, in Sullivan’s signature intellectual style. If we think of 21st-century America as the timeless polis, its problems foreseen by Plato, we don’t have to think of it as a product of late 20th century America, whose problems might have been foreseen, if not fostered, by Andrew Sullivan.

In our Platonic late-stage democracy, Sullivan writes, the masses have good reason to hate the elite. The elite class has presided over an assault on the dignity of the common folk. It has “disdain” for the white working class, Sullivan writes—a working class whose members “now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome.”

Outside the realm of symbol and abstraction, it’s an open question whether Trump is driven by working-class support at all. His supporters so far remain richer than those of Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton.

But Sullivan is invested in the idea of Trump’s supporters, a story that can be told about them. This political insurgency, he writes, should be understood as a result of “what Trump has masterfully signaled as ‘political correctness’ run amok...the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.”

By some lucky coincidence, as Sullivan’s account has it, the unprecedented American political crisis of Trumpism is the fault of the people Andrew Sullivan has been criticizing for decades. Trumpism is the work of the left—“the newly energized left,” the “Black Lives Matter left,” “the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown.”

The naive reader might wonder if it’s also possible, or even more plausible, to locate the origins of Trump’s right-wing populism in right-wing politics. Consider Sullivan’s brief historical and sociological recap of how the working class fell into crisis and despair:

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization—the church, the union hall, the VFW—have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

Andrew Sullivan, in 2016, is troubled by the loss of solidarity and meaning that the working class once found in the union hall. Here is Andrew Sullivan in 2013, describing the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, the politician who defined his own worldview:

[T]he massively powerful trade union movement worked every day to ensure that mediocrity was protected, individual achievement erased, and that all decisions were made collectively, i.e. with their veto....

[F]ew doubt she altered her country permanently, re-establishing the core basics of a free society and a free economy that Britain had intellectually bequeathed to the world and yet somehow lost in its own class-ridden, envy-choked socialist detour to immiseration.

I was a teenage Thatcherite, an uber-politics nerd who loved her for her utter lack of apology for who she was. I sensed in her, as others did, a final rebuke to the collectivist, egalitarian oppression of the individual produced by socialism and the stultifying privileges and caste identities of the class system.

And when it came to the brutal forces of globalization, the elites in the 1990s weren’t just failing to ask the American worker’s opinion. They were supplying their own opinions—for instance, on the cover of the October 11, 1993, edition of the New Republic, edited by Andrew Sullivan, where an editorial warned that a vote against the North American Free Trade Agreement would mark “an America looking inward rather than outward, governed by fear rather than reason.”

The centrist enthusiasm for NAFTA, and the New Republic’s editorial in particular, provoked Pat Buchanan—whose nativist 1992 candidacy was the prototype for Trump’s campaign—to respond in the Washington Post:

Our corporate elite is desperate for the investment guarantees Carlos Salinas has agreed to provide, so they can move factories and jobs south, with security, and to hell with the devastation caused to the communities left behind. “Merchants have no country,” wrote Jefferson, “the very ground they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.”

When Sullivan speaks broadly about how Trumpism arose from the fact that “many of us elites” were disastrously indifferent to the fate of the working class, what he means is “I, Andrew Sullivan, specifically.”

This doesn’t mean that Sullivan paid no mind to the proles at all. His politics may have disparaged their economic concerns, but it was finely attuned to their cultural resentments, or to what he imagined their cultural resentments to be. His magazine stood ready to warn white people that reverse racism was blocking them from opportunity, that lazy moochers were stealing welfare money from taxpayers, and that political correctness was stifling important truths, such as the possibility that black people might be genetically inferior to white people.

This was the outlook of a magazine ostensibly supporting the Democrats but terrorized by the popularity of Ronald Reagan, gripped by fear that the social changes of the ’60s and ’70s had pushed the silent majority too far. Sullivan rode that current to a position of fame and influence, a self-identified conservative doing business with self-identified liberal contrarians. It’s not entirely convincing for the editor of the leading hippie-punching journal to be shocked when people start punching hippies in real life.

Sullivan’s reading of the history goes the other way. “T]he great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout,” Sullivan writes now.

But who has routed whom? On gay marriage and marijuana legalization, the two social issues closest to Sullivan’s heart, the liberal side has triumphed or seems to be getting there. Abortion, meanwhile, is less and less available; affirmative action is ever more tightly constrained; benefits for the poor are so fully stigmatized that politicians feel free to attack food stamps. The appropriations budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is, adjusted for inflation, about half of what it was at its early ’90s peak. The same morning that Sullivan’s essay on excessive democracy hit the newsstands, the New York Times had yet another front-page story about the ever-expanding Republican effort to make voting more difficult.

The culture wars are defined by which battles their leaders choose to fight. Sullivan, stepping up to do his long-form civic duty, warns that if the Democrats are going to stop Donald Trump, the supporters of “the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders,” must soften their attacks on Hillary Clinton, while Clinton must steer away from “identity politics” and “address much more directly the anxieties of the white working class.”

One problem with “long-form” writing is that it has a lot of words in it, and it’s hard to keep track of all of them. If Andrew Sullivan truly considers Bernie Sanders a “demagogue,” then why did he spend so much time and effort warning about the singular menace of Donald Trump? Meanwhile the word “white,” in that passage, seems to have stuck itself right in between “anxieties of the” and “working class.” What is it doing there? Maybe Andrew Sullivan could pause for another 15 or 16 months and try to figure it out.

Now that Donald Trump is officially the presumptive Republican nominee, the question is, who will he run with? This morning, he promised to choose someone with the skill set needed to be president.

Trump spoke about his VP requirements while making the media rounds this morning, in interviews with Morning Joe, Good Morning America and Fox and Friends.

“I probably will go the political route,” he said on Morning Joe. “Somebody who can help me with legislation... Somebody who can help me get things passed and somebody who is friends with the senators and the congressmen.”

That person will A) definitely be a Republican, will B) “most likely” be an elected official and will C) “probably” be a person with political experience, he confirmed on Good Morning America. Which, sadly, rules out Ivanka for VP. Unless it doesn’t—who are you to try to pin Donald Trump down?

On Tuesday, the entire population of Fort McMurray, Alberta, was ordered to evacuate as an enormous wildfire swept into the Canadian oil-sands city. High winds fed the fire, the Canadian Press reports, which grew rapidly and gave residents little time to prepare to leave.

Traffic on the highways slowed to a standstill as smoke billowed over the city. “It was absolutely horrifying when we were sitting there in traffic,” one evacuee, Carol Christian, told the Press. “You look up and then you watch all the trees candle-topping…up the hills where you live and you’re thinking, ‘Oh my God. We got out just in time.”

About 17,000 residents fled the city to the north, where evacuees are currently being housed in oil sands projects. Another 35,000 people fled south, towards Edmonton. From the CBC:

Fire chief Darby Allen said the entire neighbourhood of Beacon Hill “appears to have been lost” and the fire burned many homes in other parts of the city.

No buildings were lost in the city’s downtown area, Allen said. Despite the devastation, there were no reports of deaths or serious injuries.

As of 10:30 p.m. MT, officials reported the neighbourhoods of Abasand, Wood Buffalo, Dickensfield, and Waterways saw only some damage.

No estimates were available on the number of homes and businesses that were destroyed.

Fort McMurray is situated in the Athabasca Oil Sands, which contains approximately 174 trillion barrels of bitumen, a key ingredient in the production of synthetic crude oil. According to the Washington Post, it is the single largest oil deposit in the world.

After a crushing defeat in Indiana, the soggiest senator Ted Cruz announced that he would end his presidential campaign. The decision was no doubt a blow to the small pocket of Christian conservatives who had, above all odds, held out hope that this snarling bespawler would somehow trounce Donald Trump. But it was not as devastating to them, or to anyone, as it was to Carly Fiorina, who had—literally days before—dragged her ass out of bed to return to the campaign trail as Cruz’s vice president.

The Washington Post reports that at seven days, her VP candidacy is the shortest in modern history—11 days shorter than the previous record holder Thomas Eagleton (George McGovern’s short-lived VP who dropped out due Democratic leadership pressure after it learned he had been hospitalized for depression and had thrice undergone electroshock therapy). Fiorina’s run was cut short by no fault of her own (probably), but instead by an overzealous candidate who declared a VP with basically no shot of winning the nomination. But boy, was it a humiliating run. Let’s reminisce:

(Times are approximate.)

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

4:00 p.m. - Cruz declares Fiorina his running-mate

Cruz announced his pick at a rally in an Indianapolis, the day after he lost five states to Trump, calling her “brilliant and capable,” and a businesswoman who has “shattered glass ceilings.”

Like 4:15 p.m. - Fiorina accepts, sings

Like 4:20 p.m. - This horrible thing happens

6:30 p.m. - Fiorina appears on MSNBC, takes back all the bad shit she’s said about Cruz

“One of the things I’ve heard you say on the campaign trail,” asked NBC News’ Hallie Jackson, “is that Ted Cruz is like any other politician... Today you said he is who he says he is. So were you wrong?”

“Yeah,” Fiorina responded, “and that’s why I voted for him in the voting booth.”

9 p.m. - Fiorina calls for Kasich to drop out, reneging on one-time Kasich-Cruz alliance

“There is somebody in this race who oughtta get out—his name is John Kasich,” she said.

Thursday, April 28, 2016

12:47 p.m. - This gear is advertised

Fiorina has 1,000 Cruz-Fiorina water bottles in the trunk of her Subaru if you want one.

3:32 p.m. - This ad is released

The gang is gearing up.

8:00 p.m. - Fiorina and Cruz appear at a rally in South Bend, Indiana

“I have never seen this man rattled, and running for president is high pressure,” she said of Cruz. “I have never seen this man lose his temper. I have never seen this man waiver from the fight that he has in front of him or from his convictions.”

Friday, April 29, 2016

10:30 a.m. - Fiorina appears on a podcast

10:54 a.m. - Fiorina criticizes Trump for bragging about Tyson endorsement

“Sorry, I don’t consider a convicted rapist a tough guy,” Fiorina said, according to Politico. “And I think it says a lot about Donald Trump’s campaign and his character that he is standing up and cheering for an endorsement by Mike Tyson.”

Later - She appears on a radio show

9:31 p.m. - This exchange happens

10 p.m. - Cruz and Fiorina appear on Hannity on Fox News

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Evening - Fiorina speaks at the California Republican Party convention, asks, “Why did I run?”

“I suspended my presidential campaign because there was no path to victory,” she said, and then mentioned that she was startled when she saw her name on the presidential ballot in Virginia. “But then I thought, why did I run?”

“I ran because we need a fighter. I ran because we needed a constitutional conservative, and I checked the box for Ted Cruz.”

At the same dinner, she condemned protections for the vulnerable Delta smelt (a fish) as products of the “tyranny of the left, the tyranny of environmentalists.”

11:45 p.m. - Fiorina says Trump is prematurely declaring victory

“The 30-yard-line ain’t a touchdown.”

Sunday, May 1, 2016

Sometime in the afternoon - Fiorina calls Cruz the next president of the United States, immediately falls off a stage

Cruz does not respond.

Evening - Fiorina and Heidi Cruz visit Almost Home Restaurant and Swizzle Stick Bar

At the event, she repeats the line about Tyson, which she has already said multiple times in the past day.

Monday, May 2, 2016

1:50 p.m. - Cruz spoxx confirms Fiorina is uninjured from fall

5:00 p.m. - Trump brings up Fiorina’s fall

At a rally in Carmel, Indiana, Trump rubbed salt in Fiorina’s perpetual wound: “Carly’s perfectly nice,” he said, according to Politico. “By the way, she fell off the stage the other day. Did anybody see that? And Cruz didn’t do anything. Even I would have helped her, OK?”

“They just showed it to me coming in,” he continued. “I said, ‘Wow, that’s really cruel.’ She fell off—she just went down. She went down a long way, right?”

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

12:08 p.m. - A poll finds that Fiorina’s addition to the ticket has done nothing to help Cruz

3:45 p.m. - Fiorina tweets out some mobile uploads

8:30 p.m. - Ted Cruz drops out, Fiorina’s VP campaign is quite obviously over

And that’s all there was.

Image via Getty.

According to reports, John Kasich is officially dropping out of the presidential race today.

The official announcement should surprise no one, least of all Kasich, who declined to give a speech last night after the Indiana primary, also canceled a press conference this morning. He’s reportedly scheduled to deliver a statement announcing the end of his campaign at 5 p.m. in Ohio.

Still, for such an obvious outcome, Kasich still seemed to struggle with it, asking for donations in an email this morning and preparing to continue fundraising efforts in DC this afternoon:

Now the candidate reportedly hopes to spend to spend more time with his sandwiches (when he’s not being a dick to Ohio.)

http://gawker.com/reminder-john-...

Fox News this week said its senior White House correspondent Ed Henry has been taken off the air for the foreseeable future, after a report in In Touch Weekly alleging that the married journalist conducted a “secret affair” with a Las Vegas hostess.

The In Touch report was published online Wednesday morning. It alleges that Henry, who married his wife, NPR’s deputy Washington editor Shirley Hung, in a 2010 Las Vegas ceremony, began a 10-month affair with a Las Vegas hostess named Natalia Lima last spring.

In Touch’s investigation goes in-depth inside Ed’s secret double life, including images of the steamy text message exchanges with Natalia, photos of their secret rendezvous and all the details inside their secret affair.

“Whenever he was in town, we would pretty much just have sex. He has a really high sex drive,” Natalia reveals in an exclusive interview, explaining that she met the 44-year-old broadcaster, who’s been crisscrossing the country covering the U.S. presidential campaign, five years ago through social media and they turned their friendship into a sexual relationship in the spring of 2015.

Henry, who was also a White House correspondent for CNN and served as president of the White House Correspondents Association in 2012, started working for Fox News in 2011. The network implies his abrupt departure is tied to the In Touch report, though it’s unclear Henry had any say in the decision.

“We recently became aware of Ed’s personal issues and he’s taking some time off to work things out,” a Fox News spokesperson told POLITICO in a statement. Fox’s PR head, Irena Briganti, did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this week, the National Enquirer published a groundbreaking investigation that would prove fatal to the Ted Cruz campaign: TED CRUZ FATHER LINKED TO JFK ASSASSINATION. But is any of it true? After an exhaustive investigation of our own, Gawker has concluded that, sure, why not!

The trouble really started yesterday when Donald Trump referenced the burgeoning conspiracy theory on Fox News. During an interview, the host brought up Rafael Cruz’s supposed influence over the evangelical community. Trump, a noted lover of both Philippians, countered with his own Christian credentials (read: Jerry Falwell Jr.). And then he said this:

And you know, his father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald being... you know—shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this? And nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about it. And that was reported, and nobody talks about it.

... I mean, what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.

The National Enquirer may have made the theory huge, but Rafael Cruz’s supposed intermingling with JFK assassin (and CIA pawn) Lee Harvey Oswald has been murmured about on the exciting parts of the internet for some time. And in classic conspiracy style, they’ve been building quite a case.

Exhibit A: Oswald was a Cuba-loving communist.

Fidel Castro never really got over the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco, nor the fact that John F. Kennedy supposedly kept trying to have him killed, and he viewed JFK as his mortal enemy because of it. And according to a made-for-(German-)tv documentary back in 2006, when the KGB discovered Lee Harvey Oswald’s anti-American inclinations, they knew exactly who to send him to. (Castro. They sent him to Castro.)

As a former Cuban agent explained on film, “You ask why we took Oswald? Oswald was a dissident: he hated his country. He possessed certain characteristics. There wasn’t anyone else. You take what you can get. . . Oswald volunteered to kill Kennedy.” In addition to being an incredibly rude thing to say, this also makes sense.

Because Oswald spent about three years living in the Soviet Union, and if he wasn’t before, he was definitely red to the bone by the time he made his way back to he U.S. He was disgruntled, arguably unhinged, and stuck in a capitalist hell—who wouldn’t want to shoot the president under those circumstances?

Exhibit B: Rafael Cruz has lied about his past before.

On the campaign trail, Ted Cruz delighted in regaling audiences with his brave, freedom-fighting father’s tale of escaping from communism into a land of liberty (Canada). Unfortunately for the Cruz clan and also people who want to believe the government’s lies, many of Papa Cruz’s stores don’t quite add up.

For instance, Rafael likes to talk about his experience fighting alongside Cuban revolutionary hero Frank País, who was killed in the battle just hours later. According to The New York Times, though, País actually died seven months later, in a different place, and not in the middle of battle.

What’s more, according to his former friends, teenage Rafael was what’s commonly known as a whiny little bitch. The Times explains that “he was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said — not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.

When Rafael actually did find himself in a physical altercation with soldiers, at the age of 18, it wasn’t because he got caught trying to recruit for the revolution like he says. Nor was it because someone in his group of revolutionaries snitched on him, like he says when people point out that the first story doesn’t actually add up. Rafael Cruz did indeed get beat up, as you can see in the mugshot below.

But as Mario Martínez, a confirmed member of Rafael’s Cuban cohorts, revealed to The Times, “[Martínez] believed that the cause of his old comrade’s detainment was possession of a revolver — one that Mr. Cruz had never used.”

Exhibit C: Rafael Cruz could have been in New Orleans at the same time as Lee Harvey Oswald.

While we do know that Rafael was definitely living in New Orleans by 1967, there’s no definitive record of his location in 1963—so he may very well have been living in New Orleans just months before JFK’s assassination in November of 1963. He’d graduated from the University of Texas at Austin just two years prior, though, and as the Washington Post points out, New Orleans is just a day’s drive from Austin. Also in 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald had just returned to his hometown.

Exhibit D: The Photos

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was an American grassroots group for sympathizers of the Cuban revolution, with Oswald heading up the New Orleans branch. A branch that supposedly only consisted of two people—Oswald himself and a man named A.J. Hidell. Of course, A.J. Hidell was also probably just Lee Harvey Oswald again.

Which means, when it came time for Oswald to start handing out pamphlets in the summer of 1963, he needed to hire some people to get the word out. According to the Warren Commission report, that meant hiring two men (one of them Cuban, just like Rafael) out of the unemployment line for a bit of afternoon flyer work. One of the young men later provided testimony about his brief working relationship with Oswald, the other was never found.

Exhibit E: Rafael and Oswald ran in similar circles.

Even if they really did first meet in the unemployment line, the two men were likely quick comrades. According to noted anti-semite and gay-Obama-truther Wayne Madsen, the same building in New Orleans that acted as home base for a number of pro-Castro Cuban groups also housed a CIA surrogate.

As we all well know, the CIA orchestrated JFK’s assassination as punishment for seeking a truce with the Soviet Union. In the same way that the CIA and/or the Soviets used Oswald as a pawn in their larger plan, Rafael Cruz could have easily fallen into that same trap.

Exhibit F: Rafael may have been in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.

According to records from Ancestry.com, Rafael did live in Dallas briefly in 1962 before moving to New Orleans. Now, here’s a photo from Dealey Plaza on the day of JFK’s assassination.

One of the young men looks alarmingly like a certain crazed former presidential candidate’s father.

Is this Rafael Cruz at the scene of the crime? It’s impossible to know for sure but—yes, probably.

Exhibit F: Rafael Cruz moved (fled?) to Canada after Kennedy’s assassination.

There are two possible timelines here.

The first: John F. Kennedy was shot on November 22, 1963. While the exact date of Rafael Cruz’s move to Canada is unknown, he’s believed to have relocated sometime between 1964 and 1965 to go work for an “oil company.” Which—yeah OK, man.

The second: Cruz was actually in New Orleans until 1967, which is when he registered for the draft. Conveniently and according to Madsen, Rafael seems to have waited to register until he turned 28, which was in fact a criminal offense. Rafael then hightailed it to Calgary with his (second) wife and gave birth to an alleged darling baby “human.”

Exhibit G: Rafael Cruz has been tied to the assassination for years.

Back in 2013, this anonymous comment was left on a blog post summarizing Oswald’s Cuban ties:

Yep, checks out.

Exhibit H: Cruz admitted it.

At a press conference on Monday, alleged human man Ted Cruz went so far as to blatantly admit that, yes, his father killed JFK. Which is perhaps the first honest thing Ted has in years.

Exhibit I: You can’t tell me it’s not him.

As Jeff Morley so eloquently put it:

...While there is no reason to think that the man in the picture is Rafael Cruz, the theoretical possibility cannot be eliminated, thanks to the government’s failure to thoroughly investigate JFK’s assassination. Once again the malfeasance (or incompetence) of the CIA and FBI has empowered a conspiracy theorist whose speculations serve to obscure, not clarify, the historical record.

Except that there is every reason to believe that Ted Cruz’s father played a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And thanks to the massive gaps in our institutional knowledge (and barring some groundbreaking discovery), you can’t definitively tell me otherwise.

In which case: For shame, Rafael. For shame.

I originally leveraged online dating to begin seeing average-sized women. Before moving back to New York a few years ago, I had only dated little women— i.e., women who were born with dwarfism. At bars or parties, my social anxiety, the kind that comes with being a little person myself, made it difficult to gauge an average-sized woman’s interest in me. Talking with women online made it easier to determine whether or not they were comfortable with my achondroplasia.

But the anxious anticipation that comes with texting prior to a date can be a slog, and not always wholly revealing: There’s always the chance that you’ll learn something unexpected about a person once meeting them for the first time. Hopefully that reveal is nothing more than a dimple, a cute personality quirk, or the type of nervous tic that comes out when you’re confronted with the unavoidable awkwardness of a first date.

Even while playing out all the fantasy scenarios that may come, you are probably not expecting your night to end with a person handing you a legal form to sign—a form that reads, “We hope you found your participation in this scenario interesting and thought-provoking.”

The Set-up

It had been months since I had last braved online dating before a close friend from work suggested that I dive back into it. I scrolled Tinder and Bumble, my swiping platforms of choice, with the sort of distant hope that comes with them. (I like Tinder for its ease of use, and Bumble because it requires women to make the first move, which often leads to more engaging conversation.) After a few weeks of staying at it, I matched on Bumble with a woman I’ll call Jess. She was tall, dark-haired, and slender, which is not typically my type, but she looked like someone who didn’t take herself too seriously. That was a big part of my initial attraction to her, to be honest. I value a sense of humor, and Jess was funny and down to joke around. We played a bit of “Would you rather?” back and forth. Would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck? Would you rather have a rich dad who is a porn star or a poor dad who is the school janitor?

By the time we exchanged numbers, we had broken the ice, were casually texting, and seemed to be hitting it off. But I still felt pretty confident that it wouldn’t lead to a meet-up; even a lively conversation rarely does for me. Finally, I made a move by suggesting we grab brunch. She seemed mildly interested, but neither of us followed up to set a date until a few days later, when she took me up on the offer and even did all the planning. When she replied, Jess had already picked a day, place, and time for us to meet: 2 p.m. on a Saturday at Pulperia, a Latin American restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, about 45 minutes from my apartment in Brooklyn. I had already made plans, but she was insistent on that specific time and her desire to meet me, adding that she wasn’t available the following day. It’s not often that I am pursued like this, and naturally I found it flattering. I relented, and we agreed to meet.

On the Saturday morning of our date, I woke up fairly hung over from the night before, and decided that I was in no shape to meet a stranger. When I messaged Jess to reschedule, she wasn’t having it. “A little hair of the dog will make you feel better,” she said. Her pursuit was endearing, and after she agreed to push back our date by an hour so I could get myself together a bit, I was excited enough to grab a cab and make the trek to the Upper East Side.

The Impostor

I arrived to the restaurant first, surprised to learn from the hostess that Jess had already reserved a table for us and that it was ready. She then led me to a setting for two, standing alone in the middle of the restaurant, and seated me with my back to the door. (In retrospect, I remember thinking that it was strange to be seated with my back to the entrance while waiting for a first date.) A few minutes later, a blonde woman in her mid-40s, who who was heavier than the woman whose pictures I had seen on Bumble, sat down and introduced herself as Jess.

“How was your friend’s show?” she asked, referring to my plans from the night before. While I’d like to say that my confusion was a result of the realization that I had been duped, shock was interfering with my normal thought processes. I was unable to come up with a response to her question.

She continued, nonchalantly, to ease the silence. “You’re super hungover, huh? Threw up everywhere?”

The word “No” came out of my mouth like a question, even though it wasn’t one.

“Oh,” she responded. “I threw up everywhere. All over myself.” (Looking back, this must have been an attempt at levity.)

As the initial stun dissipated a bit, I realized that I would have to be the one to address the very obvious cause for the awkwardness between us. Jess was not the woman pictured in her Bumble profile, and I said so. As she laughed nervously, she suggested that the photos of her were merely dated.

“The pictures I have on there are old,” she said apologetically. “I look a little different now.” Blown away by the suggestion that I simply had not recognized her, I pulled out my phone and brought up her profile page.

“I’m sorry, can we just forget about it?” she asked, the embarrassment of her lie now clear in her voice. “Let’s just forget about it. What do you want to drink?” But I wasn’t having it—it was too uncomfortable to me to pretend like I hadn’t been purposefully deceived, and I said as much.

This made her upset.

“So you don’t like me because I’m not as pretty as you thought? Because I’m older? Because I’m heavier?”

I told her I didn’t want to continue our date because she had been dishonest, and given that honesty is the foundation of any meaningful relationship, this was clearly not a good start. After a pause, thick with the tension between us, I took some of the hostility out of my voice. “Look, humor is really important to me, and you’re funny,” I told her. “Be honest next time, and you will find you the right guy. It’s not me.” I told her I was going to leave and got up from the table.

That’s when the cameras came out. In front of them, a shiny-faced man dressed in a suit approached me with an extended microphone. It was John Quiñones, and he told me that I was on ABC’s What Would You Do?

The Hook

What Would You Do?—which will air its new season in June—identifies itself as a journalistic endeavor, and even debuted as a segment during the ABC News program Primetime. When it originally aired in February of 2008, the series was an extension of what was happening in the country that week. John Quiñones and his cast would create scenarios pegged to social issues or ethical dilemmas that were current in the news cycle; the “hard reporting” aspect involved seeing if a different outcome would come with different actors and variables at play. In ABC News release forms for What Would You Do?, the show is described as “an award-winning series [that] depicts and explores the various reactions of bystanders to simulated events happening in front of their eyes.” Ignoring, apparently, what happens when you’re not a “bystander,” and the “simulated events” are happening to you.

The conceit isn’t entirely different from the heavily scripted reality-TV industry, in that it involves the creation of chaos for the sake of voyeurism, but it’s much more complicated because viewers aren’t watching characters or plot-lines grow and evolve. Rather, viewers are given the opportunity to pass judgment on the immediate responses of regular people confronted by something jarring or unexpected. Some of the scenarios are meant to be uplifting and inspiring—watching bar-goers warn a woman whose drink has been drugged, or women at a nail salon help an elderly man as his caretaker takes advantage of his dementia. The show’s stance that it revolves around people doing what is both good and right has given Quiñones a book deal and a semi-regular gig as a motivational speaker.

While precautions are taken for certain outcomes—during the drugged-drink episode mentioned earlier, the show alerted the local police department “about the scenario”—the series doesn’t provide warning to those who come across the scene. That would defeat the point. But when “bystanders” are not really bystanders, i.e. when participants become the scenario’s main character, things change. In these instances, it might be useful to think of the show less aligned with the innocent pranking of Candid Camera, and more along the lines of the pre-staged creepiness of NBC’s To Catch a Predator, where actors would pose as people they were not, in the hopes of finding and catching someone whose actions would propel the show in a specific direction. (Coincidentally, TCAP aired its last episode only two months before WWYD? debuted).

The similarity is best shown in an episode of WWYD that aired last May, wherein an adult man lures a underaged girl to a restaurant by pretending to be a boy during an online interaction. After revealing himself as an adult at the restaurant, he tries to convince her to come back to his apartment. Viewers know that the situation is staged, and the abductor and abductee are actors. The real stars of the show? The people who chose to have lunch at the restaurant that day.

It’s easy to see that WWYD aims to paint its lead characters—the unknowing participants of various “scenarios”—as morally sound or inept based on their instinctive reactions to incidents like the one above. These social experiments aren’t controlled, though, and the participants usually don’t get to tell their stories. Someone who abhors homophobia could have crippling social anxiety; someone who isn’t comfortable with their body might avoid stopping a physical confrontation; someone who has been catfished by an internet date could have a brutal hangover.

Context outside of this staged scene does not matter under the watchful eye of the show or its host, John Quiñones. The people who come across it will be taped and judged based on what they choose to do after they walk into his world. (We attempted to reach Quiñones for comment, and have not yet received a reply.)

The Bait

I don’t remember much of what Quiñones asked me after he approached me, nor do I remember what I said. I was in the middle of a panic attack. I was shaking, and I couldn’t stop cursing. The entire restaurant was silent, eyes on me. Growing up a little person, I’m familiar with unwanted attention from strangers. Twenty-seven years later, and I’m still not comfortable with it. I felt like I was dropped into Sara Goldfarb’s amphetamine-fueled game-show fantasy in Requiem for a Dream. John Quiñones was my Shooter McGavin.

As my thoughts began to solidify through the rush of my pulse and the haze of my anxiety, Quiñones told me that Jess, the woman portrayed in the Bumble profile, the one who I had been speaking to, was also at the restaurant, and that I could still have the date with her, at another table and without cameras. When I met her—the person I had actually chatted with, who had helped set me up for this very public scene—she was as bubbly and carefree as I imagined in our first conversation. She apologized for duping me, but wanted my confirmation that the whole thing was hilarious. I couldn’t tell if she was villainous or ignorant.

Still in shock, I sucked down the free margaritas provided by ABC News, as Jess began to reveal more about why she did what she’d done. She was an aspiring celebrity, you see, and needed a bigger buzz than her YouTube channel was providing. (That evening I found a video on Jess’s page where she prank-calls a strip club and pretends to be a “midget” stripper looking for work. When I called her out on it via text, she said she understood but the video was meant to be a joke. She later apologized—calling it “super gross content”—and took it down.)

At the restaurant, Jess was joined by her friend, a producer on the show, who brought the release forms, and handed me a pen and asked me to sign. When I shared my hesitation with her, she delivered a sales pitch on why I should sign them. I had done such a great job, she said, and told me that I should be proud of my intelligent, thoughtful response to the situation. I told them I had agreed to go on a date, not to participate in a spectacle, and that I still felt physically uncomfortable, the aftereffects of my panic attack lingering. I couldn’t justify signing my rights away in such a state.

Jess suggested that if I didn’t feel comfortable, I should sign the release form anyway, and could tell them I “changed my mind” after the fact.

(Note: The ABC News release form states that “bystanders” can opt out of having their face shown, but should they not sign the consent forms, the show will “blur or otherwise obscure” their face.)

It’s easy to look back and say that I instinctively made the right decision, but the truth is that I was so mentally disheveled at the time, I wasn’t sure what to do. I called my friend Matéo, the same friend who had suggested that I get back into online dating, and asked for his advice. He asked me how it had made me feel, and when I said that I felt like absolute shit, he told me not to sign. I am eternally grateful for that.

After more discussion over signing the forms, I refused and called an Uber back to Brooklyn. On my ride home, I called my brother, my roommates, anyone who was willing to hear my story. This allowed the shock to settle a bit, but Jess continued to text me. I blocked her shortly after.

Thankfully, a few days prior to my encounter with Jess, I had gone on a great first date with another woman. On our second date, I told her about the incident, and she joked that at least I didn’t have to deal with a flood of unsolicited dick pics from the dudes she matched with on her dating apps.

She and I have been dating for about two months now.

We met on Tinder.

[Ed note: We reached out to ABC News, and a spokesperson told us that the “scenario” described in this story will not be airing. When asked about their casting procedures for What Would You Do?, she said they had no further comments.]

Tom Cush is a Brooklyn-based little person who spends his days selling Grovo. He rarely tweets as @cushtom.

Adequate Man is Deadspin’s lifestyle and self-improvement site. You can reach us at adequateman@deadspin.com

Donald Trump, who claims he “most likely” wants someone with “political experience” to be his running mate, told the New York Times that Dr. Ben Carson might be on the committee that helps him identify a vice-presidential candidate.

http://gawker.com/donald-trump-s...

“I’ll set up a committee, and that I will do soon,” Trump told the Times this morning. “I think on the committee I’ll have Dr. Ben Carson and some other folks.” But Carson himself ran for president earlier this year—maybe he wants the gig?

It wouldn’t be without precedent: Previous vice-presidents who picked themselves after having been tasked with picking a Republican candidate’s partner include Dick Cheney—a quirk of history which allowed Republican elites were able to nominate someone for president who did not actually want to be president, so that they could do the hard work of being president for him.

But Ben Carson is no Dick Cheney, and Trump himself said he’s leaning towards a “political person.” As for the rest: “I have business very much covered,” he told the Times. “I think I’ll be absolutely great on the military and military strategy.”

In any case, we are looking forward to watching this burgeoning friendship between two powerful and charismatic men, struggling to express their feelings for each other, continue to bloom over the coming weeks.

How will Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign be remembered? Predicting history is a fool’s errand but it seems like a safe bet that Cruz will go down as the Republican candidate so openly distasteful that he made Donald Trump seem palatable.

But we will remember Cruz as the candidate who was most thoroughly embarrassed on the campaign trail. Cruz was owned by his fellow candidates, by his running mate, by random faces in the crowd, by his own children and, perhaps most frequently, by himself.

We thank him for his contributions to the democratic process, and he will be missed.

Video by Nicholas Stango

It got a little awkward Monday night when the $13.4 billion dollar man himself (and his mom) reportedly weren’t allowed into the Met Gala after-party at the Manhattan Standard’s Boom Boom Room, and “waited outside in the rain at 1 a.m. but didn’t make it past the velvet rope,” says Page Six.

“Everyone was shouting and trying to help, saying, ‘He’s Elon Musk!’ And they were just like, ‘We don’t care, he’s not on the list,’” said a spy.

The Met Gala annual black tie event—which lets 600 chosen celebrity elites to secure $30,000 tickets and $275,000 tables—benefits the Met’s Costume Institute. This year’s exhibit had a “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” theme and was co-sponsored by Apple, so tech execs like Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Travis Kalanick, Sergey Brin and Elon Musk were allowed to come too.

The Met’s description focuses heavily on the invention of the sewing machine and “the hand/machine conundrum,” but the red carpet menagerie seems to have been told to come dressed as electronic supersonic robot clowns. Fuck a Hyperloop, a SpaceX, and a Tesla. The future is a silver Louis Vuitton crocodile skin print frock, a silver feathered Vera Wang, and a Twitter-responsive light-up LED gown. Elon Musk may have just announced a billion dollar “gym for artificial intelligence” to play Atari at, but he’s not as cool as this guy right here with the shiny arm things.

What I’m really saying is that the celebrities should have come dressed as cars, I don’t get invited to fancy parties, and oh look, shiny.

Remember Jim Gilmore? Neither does the Republican Party.

Gilmore, the sad, sweet man who once governed the state of Virginia, ran for the Republican nomination for president this year, garnering a grand total of 145 votes in Iowa and New Hampshire before suspending his campaign in February. Perhaps as a sort of consolation prize, he had hoped to be named as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, but was shut out after proposing his name in the Virginia state convention this weekend, the Washington Post reports.

The reason had to do with the heated battle over the fate of the nomination, which presumably ended today after Ted Cruz and John Kasich both removed themselves from the running. Cruz supporters were attempting to load the delegate slate with people who would vote for him on a second ballot at the RNC if Trump did not win the full 1,237 delegates. Gilmore isn’t an avowed Trump supporter, but he isn’t a Cruz supporter either, meaning he wasn’t particularly valuable to either side. He told the Post that he had been “informally assured” of his delegate status, but that “strong-arm tactics at the convention” forced him out.

A sad day indeed for Jim Gilmore. If you happen to see him skulking around like a bored teenager with nothing to do in Cleveland this July, now you know why. Give him a hug for me.

Mothers of unwanted newborns can now anonymously leave their babies in one of two padded, climate-controlled “baby boxes” attached to fire stations in northeastern Indiana, the Associated Press reports.

The Indiana state legislature passed the law allowing the use of baby boxes last year. Republican state Rep. Casey Cox told the AP at the time that the book drop for babies was a “natural progression” of safe haven laws that permit parents to give up their newborns at hospitals and police stations without fear of prosecution. But even though there are safe haven laws enacted in all 50 states, thousands of abandoned children slipped through the cracks.

Dawn Geras, president of the Save the Abandoned Babies Foundation in Chicago, said safe haven laws have resulted in more than 2,800 safe surrenders since 1999. But more than 1,400 other children have been found illegally abandoned, nearly two-thirds of whom died.

The Indiana boxes are produced by a company called Safe Haven Baby Boxes, which was founded by Monica Kelsey, a firefighter and paramedic who has been advocating for baby drops for years. (Kelsey’s mother, a rape survivor, abandoned her at the hospital where she was born.) The Knights of Columbus of Indiana have promised to pay for the first 100 boxes to be installed.

But not everyone’s a fan. In December, State Department of Health officials recommended against using incubators. “A team of child health experts,” a department spokeswoman told the Star, “carefully studied available research on newborn safety incubators and determined that there are no standards or protocols that can ensure the safety of children placed in these devices.”

Kelsey says that the box’s design has been improved to accommodate the Health Department’s concerns: It locks automatically when a baby is placed inside, and energy dispatch receives an alert within a minute. Emergency workers would ideally retrieve the baby within five minutes. And importantly, Kelsey says, the boxes guarantee anonymity for desperate mothers.

“This is not criminal,” she told the AP. “This is legal. We don’t want to push women away.”

Carly Fiorina was a candidate for Vice President for six days—a period of time in which she managed to sing a creepy song, fall off of a stage, and fail just one more time in her ongoing quest to attain political office. It was a long 144 hours—just a few hours shy of how long James Franco’s arm got stuck in that rock in that one movie.

Which prompts the question—what events did Carly Fiorina’s Vice Presidential candidacy outlast? Take our quiz and find out.

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