On Thursday evening, Rhode Island officially became the 10th state to allow gay marriage.

This is reassuring: the FDA says that, sometime this year, they'll finally get around to properly investigating triclosan, the germ-killing ingredient used in anti-bacterial soaps, mouthwash, toothpaste and toys. But how long has this potentially-harmful chemical been on the market? Only 40 plus years.

The FDA's investigation, which it hopes to complete this year, was spurred by pressure from lawmakers and consumer advocates after several animal tests showed various negative effects of triclosan. One 2009 study showed the chimical lowered testosterone and sperm levels in male rats and triggered early puberty in female rats, and a 2012 study found the chemical might restrict muscle contractions in fish and mice, which in humans could lead to weak heart and skeletal muscles.

"To me it looks like the risks outweigh any benefit associated with these products right now," said Allison Aiello, professor at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health.

Of course, the American Cleaning Institute denies that the chemical causes any harm.

"Triclosan is one of the most reviewed and researched ingredients used in consumer and health care products," says Brian Sansoni, a spokesman for the group, whose members include Colgate-Palmolive and Henkel Consumer Goods Inc., maker of Dial soap.

Among those who think Sansoni and his group are full of shit are 37 Kasier Permanente hospitals, who removed products containing triclosan in 2010, and Johnson and Johnson, who have pledged to remove the chemical from all its products by 2015.

The FDA first published drafts noting the chemical was "not generally recognized as safe and effective” in 1978. But they never finalized their results, so companies that had been using the chemical since 1973 were never forced to remove it from their products.

As it stands now, the FDA's website states that "the agency does not have evidence that triclosan in antibacterial soaps and body washes provides any benefit over washing with regular soap and water."

[CBS/Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email taylor@gawker.com

Either a friend (if you trust CNN) of Kris Kross' Chris Kelly or Kelly's mother (if you trust TMZ) told investigators the rapper had used heroin and cocaine the night before he was found dead in his Atlanta home.

Following a daylong adventure of dubious legality, World’s Most Complicated Human Lindsay Lohan has finally careened into a rehab facility. After initially planning to undergo a court-ordered 90 days of treatment in her home state of New York, she switched last minute (without the court's permission) to a facility in California so she could smoke. While her lawyer Mark Heller told a judge yesterday that Lohan was "ensconced in the bosom" of Morningside Rehab in Newport Beach, it was later revealed that the actress' SUV had merely pulled up to the facility; she never checked in. She did, however, visit an electronics store. Now she's at the Betty Ford Center (where she can also smoke).

The Betty Ford Center development appears to have been the handiwork of miracle-worker attorney Shawn Holley, who represented Lohan for several years before the actress abruptly fired her (and then immediately tried to rehire her) earlier this year. The L.A. Times reports that Holley is now back on Lohan's legal team, which is great news for Lindsay Lohan but terrible news for people who earn a living providing Lindsay Lohan-related gossip content for weblogs.

For those keeping score at home, in 2010 an employee of the Betty Ford Center sued Lohan, saying the actress assaulted her one night after the employee caught her breaking curfew. According to the employee, Lohan grabbed and twisted her wrist when she tried to administer a breathalyzer test. The employee was fired. The case was later settled out of court.

[Image via AP]

To contact the author of this post, email caity@gawker.com.

The latest terrible fake food scandal from China resulted in more than 900 arrests after criminal meat processors sold the chemical-soaked flesh of rats and foxes as "lamb meat." As more Chinese demand a daily supply of dead farm animals as food, crafty criminals are butchering and processing anything that moves.

Mink, fox, rat and chicken claws have been discovered in food packaged as cow meat or mutton. Health officials have just completed a nationwide three-month crackdown on "meat related offenses," according to Xinhua.

Some of the meat crimes are hardly different from general U.S. slaughterhouse and meat-processing practices, such as injecting poultry with water to increase the weight and price, or soaking the flesh of diseased animals with chemicals.

China's growing wealth and demand for food made from animals has created a massive market for cheaply produced meat and dairy often created from industrial supplies, slaughterhouse waste and vermin.

Police admit China has "deep-seated food safety problems."

As a followup to yesterday's terrific arrest footage of proud American citizen Reese Witherspoon, TMZ has posted more footage from that fateful night. In this one, you can hear her say the immortal (albeit previously imprecisely quoted) words, "My name is Reese Witherspoon. It will be in the national news, I just wanna let you know." She was correct, and how — almost two weeks later, this thing just keeps coming up. On yesterday's Good Morning America, she called this outburst "crazy." Indeed. Like a fox.

The most satisfying thing about all of this is that it proves that at least one celebrity is just as self-satirically self-entitled as we assume all celebrities are. Also in the new video, you can hear Witherspoon's husband Jim Toth gently reprimand her for not staying in the car during his arrest and "turning it into national news." He says she "turned it really bad." He too is correct like a fox.

Have you heard of the twitter trend #followateen that everyone is talking about? No? Congratulations. Life is good. Turn off the computer now and go outside and enjoy your perfect life. Still there? Well, if you insist on biting into this poisonous knowledge fruit, read on. Learn of the Great Teen-Adult Twitter War of 2013.

Twitter users are constantly trying to devise new and more unsettling ways to waste time on Twitter. One twitter user, the writer David Thorpe (@arr) decided a good way to do this would be to follow a random teen. In 2011 he tweeted:

Today, everyone find a normal-ass teen to follow and report back on their boring exploits. #followateen

— Lucrative Trillion (@Arr) December 29, 2011

A few days ago ago he re-launched the #followateen concept:

By request of @katienotopoulos, let's bring back #followateen for 2013. Here's how it works: find a teen, follow it, and report on its life.

— Lucrative Trillion (@Arr) April 12, 2013

Adult Twitter users began reporting bemusedly on teens' lives:

My teen can't dance to bob marley #followateen

— Eric (@NotreDameEric) May 3, 2013

My teen hates school because you have to wear pants there. I love my teen. #followateen

— Choire Sicha (@Choire) April 12, 2013

My teen has been watching Gossip Girl for the last several hours and finds tumblr to be an acceptable boyfriend substitute #followateen

— Dub Step Dad (@DubStepDad) December 29, 2011

#followateen my teen is so upset that its dad double dips chips

— dendycrew (@dendycrew) April 28, 2013

My teen asks you to retweet if you see a slut on your timeline. #FollowATeen

— J. Mapes (@jmapes) May 1, 2013

#followateen continuted to gain steam, helped greatly by people like Slate economics blogger Matthew Yglesias being confused and/or concerned by it:

Not sure I understand the #followateen hashtag. Are people really following random teens? How do you find one to follow?

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) April 30, 2013

As someone who has long followed teens (for work, I swear!), I knew trouble was brewing. Teens may seem naive, but they are not stupid. And if anything, they know when people are talking about them. Inevitably, the teens found out about #followateen:

Am I someone's #FollowATeen ?

— Jax (@Jaxy_O) May 3, 2013

And the teens were mad. The counteroffensive was led by the Queen of Teens herself, 17-year-old Rookie Magazine founder Tavi Gevinson. Someone came up with the amusing hashtag #followanadult, spoofing #followateen, and Tavi and Rookie took up the mantle:

my adult is making yet another hilarious joke about google vs bing #followanadult

— Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 3, 2013

my adult is offended by alleged misuse of the word "literally" #followanadult

— Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) May 3, 2013

Growns who think teen tweets are dumb (#followateen) should see their fellow adults'. Today we dare to #followanadult. Join us won't you?

— Rookie (@RookieMag) May 3, 2013

My adult relates to #Girls #FollowAnAdult

— Jazmin Martinez(@jazminbobby) May 3, 2013

But then the mean adults co-opted the tag:

my adult only retweets rick warren #followanadult

— Rembert Browne (@rembert) May 3, 2013

my inner teenager doesn't want to work today and would prefer to take the day off and go ride a bike #followanadult

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) May 3, 2013

The teens did not like that. They thought perhaps the adults did not understand that the teens were mocking them:

burn RT @rookiemag: It's cute when olds try to act "cool" by taking part in a thing that is essentially mocking them #followanadult

— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) May 3, 2013

Which brings us to now. The age-old war between teens and adults has moved into cyberspace. Pretty soon cadres of teens might start hacking into adults' computers accounts and stealing their trade secrets. All of this will be adapted into a summer blockbuster. Adults v. Teens. Whoever wins: We all lose.

[image via Shutterstock]

A beauty queen from Thailand who was among the 20 finalists in this year's local Miss Maxim competition has been disqualified by the publication after a video emerged showing her teaching a five-year-old boy how to snort a substance believed to be Ketamine.

Kwanjai Khempradub took to her Facebook page shortly after the video began making the rounds to deny that the powder being inhaled by the boy in the video is Special K (known locally as K or Ya K).

Kwanjai agreed that she behaved inappropriately, but insisted the substance was merely harmless baby powder — a claim Thai netizens quickly dismissed.

Her relations to the child remains unclear.

Irrespective of the powder's true nature, Kwanjai still faces a charge of violating the country's Computer Crime Act, which prohibits the production of videos that could teach others how to use drugs.

Police have asked Kwanjai to come forward and submit herself to a criminal investigation.

"If she doesn't come on her own, we will issue a summons. If she does not respond, she will face an arrest warrant," said Technology Crime Suppression Division chief Maj-General Pisit Pao-in.

If convicted of a drug crime, Kwanjai could spend up to five years behind bars.

A police spokesman added that sharing the video online is itself a jailable offense.

[H/T: Coconuts Bangkok, top image via handout, middle image via Maxim Thailand]

In a world that often seems like one big penis party, the clit is a many-splendored thing—and a marginalized one, too. This locus of female pleasure has more nerve endings than any other human body part, but it still doesn't enjoy the cultural currency of your average wang. Maybe Clitoris Week will change that.

Clitoraid, an anti-female-mutilation group, is sponsoring something it calls International Clitoris Week. Kicking off next Monday with a series of events in its homebase of Las Vegas, it aims to encourage more women to openly explore their sexual identities through "educational lectures, art exhibits, songs and dance, or a 'girl's night' of sharing," says Clitoraid spokeswoman Nadine Gary.

Think of it as a vagina dialogue that shoots higher. It's admittedly gimmicky, she tells HuffPo:

Gary has experience doing offbeat awareness campaigns like Go Topless Day, which protests laws that prevent a woman from going topless and "Swastika Rehabilitation Day," which was designed to remove the Nazi stigma from the ancient symbol.

"We found that whenever something has an 'awareness day,' it makes it more comfortable to talk about," she said.

Future International Clitoris Awareness Weeks will be held the first full week of May, which just happens to be National Masturbation Month.

Well, we all know how Gawker feels about masturbation. We're equally fond of women taking ownership of their sexual feelings. And who knows? Maybe a little awareness could rub off on those poor simple guys who fancy themselves clit commanders, too.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Almost one year to the day of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch's May 4 passing, Yauch's friends, family, and fans gathered in Brooklyn this morning to officially rechristen Palmetto Playground as Adam Yauch Park.

Yauch, who died of cancer at the age of 47, had spent much of his childhood at Palmetto Playground, so it seemed only fitting to rename the tenth-of-an-acre plot on Columbia Place in Brooklyn Heights after him.

Yauch's band mate, Adam Horovitz (aka Ad-Rock), spoke at the ceremony, as did his mother, who said, "Adam made us so proud of him, and I'm proud to have this park in his name."

[Image via Mike Bloomberg on Twitter]

Tionna Smalls will star in MTV's Girl, Get Your Mind Right!, starting May 20. This is her second reality show. Don't say Gawker never gave you anything.

This massive plume of gray-white smoke from the wildfires raging through Southern California's transverse mountain ranges is being pushed over the Pacific Ocean by the notorious Santa Ana winds. A weather satellite operated by NOAA captured this image late Thursday—you can see five of the narrow Channel Islands between Santa Barbara and San Diego County beneath the thick smoke.

More than a thousand firefighters are battling the blaze from the Point Mugu naval-air base in Ventura County to the luxury homes of celebrities and industrialists in Malibu. Thousands have been evacuated from schools, homes and campgrounds as 30mph winds push the fire up steep canyons filled with dry brush.

Another major wildfire is still burning in the San Bernardino Mountains near Banning, an hour east of Los Angeles, but the blaze moving up the canyons and coastline of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is producing the smoke plume seen over the ocean.

[Photo via NOAA.]

Celebrities endorsing products in weird, non-sensical combinations isn't anything new. Ozzy Osbourne, for instance, hocked I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, and Kiss wanted you to rest for eternity in your very own Kiss Kasket. But those were the dark ages. The dawn of the smartphone gave celebs an even easier, more intimate way to make sure we never forget who they are and that they're still famous, so help us god.

Yes, the mobile app—with its many possible forms, purposes, and lacks thereof—has given today's celebs a bit too much freedom in all their self-promoting glory. Here are some of the more absurd incarnations to have come from these ever-unholy unions.

Smize Yourself by Tyra Banks: Let Tyra teach you to smize (or smile with your eyes) as she cheers you on and turns you into something resembling an anime character with its chin in a vise. You're beautiful now. $1/iOS

WWE Presents: Rockpocalypse by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson: Eat pie, get tattoos, and fight your way through the virus-infected zombies plaguing The Rock's latest movie set because, just in case you forgot, he's in movies. Go see his movies. Free/iOS, Android

It's Britney! by Britney Spears: Get as close to Britney as you can without a restraining order. Insert her into your photos; scroll through galleries of vintage, modern, and deconstructionist Britney; and shake your phone to hear those three little words for which we all ache: "It's Britney, Bitch." $2/iOS

iSamJackson by Samuel L. Jackson: Customize your own absurdly elaborate, studio-recorded Sam Jackson soundboard to advise, encourage, and verbally berate you at your every whim. $1/iOS

Be Like Lil' Wayne by Lil' Wayne: Step into Weezy's shoes and cover your favorite selfies with all the tattoos and bling you can bare. Because a photo of your baby is fun, but a photo of your baby covered in gang signs is timeless. $2/iSO

Ask The Hoff by David Hasselhoff: Knight Rider himself recorded exclusive audio for the app so you can have his sage advice every time you shake your phone. And if you're spending $2 on this, you'll want all the help you can get. $2/Android

ICP by Insane Clown Posse: Get all the latest ICP info, and set your location to discover and chat with ready and willing Juggalo(ette)s in your area. Because the Faygo can't love us back. $2/iOS, Android

Shatoetry by William Shatner: Not gifted with a pen? Let Captain Kirk be your muse. He'll recite the words, and you'll choose which get that extra emphasis. Your crappy poetry never sounded so good/over-acted. $1/iOS

Top Image: Shutterstock/Svitlana Kataieva

Last time we checked in with Jesse Thomas, founder of the interactive agency JESS3, he was posting drunken dick pics of his friend Matt Monahan taken during a "Geeks on a Plane" jaunt to India, organized by Dave McClure's 500Startups and sponsored by the likes of Google, PayPal, QualComm and more.

Since then, Thomas has been hyperactively posting on social media as if nothing could put a damper on his jet-set lifestyle. He recently checked in at the National Republican Congressional Committee, the offices of Spotify, the GAP, and even NASDAQ. He was in New York City for TechCrunch Disrupt this week, noting Marissa Mayer's "great smile" and marveling at the sight of "a grown man wearing 3d printed stiletto heals ..[sic]"

He should have been more concerned with what was going on at his company.

"As far as I know there is one employee left at JESS3, the namesake of the company," a source told Valleywag. A former employee concurred: "Everyone else has walked out except for JESS3's CPA, who has given notice but is still on board for the interm."

The timeline of events are hard to pin down. But some time in March, a cohort of executives resigned, including JESS3's creative director, VP of strategy, VP of accounts, and VP of operations. Last week, four other staffers in leadership roles resigned, including the director of client strategy and director of tech & operations.

"The next day everyone else was laid off except four lower-level employees, plus Jesse, Flo [Florencio Zavala], and the CPA," said the former employee, who estimated that about nine people were laid off, including contractors. Earlier this week, Zavala supposedly resigned as well.

Thomas has yet to return our request for comment. But based on interviews with former employees, it seems that the initial batch of execs who left in March were concerned about integrity issues related to the incident in India.

Monahan is the CEO of AlphaBoost, one of JESS3's clients. Not content with posting the images of Monahan blackout drunk and naked to his personal social media accounts, Thomas then uploaded them to the official JESS3 company accounts. In one video featuring an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, you can hear Thomas shouting in the background, "If you’re gonna get naked, you gotta have a big ass dick, what’s going on?"

Thomas, who made Inc. magazine's 30 Under 30 list along with his business partner and then girlfriend Leslie Bradshaw, was once responsible for high-profile campaigns like Facebook Stories, and counted Google and Microsoft as clients. But in February, "we lost most major clients over the India incident," said one former employee.

The more recent employee resignations were related to concerns about the company's ability to make payroll and the agency's financial health, especially with the loss of clients. According to a former employee:

The problem is that Jesse is fiscally irresponsible. He enjoyed squandering money on promoting the company — t-shirts, stickers (it's really graffiti... search Statigram for 'JESS3') sponsoring random events, taking trips like Geeks on a Plane that didn't result in new business for the company, etc. Cost was never an issue to him. He erroneously believed he was a rockstar and lived accordingly.

(On the registration site, Geeks on a Plane estimates the cost of registration and travel at $7,000 to $10,000. General admission to TechCrunch Disrupt is around $3,000.)

The other factor in the company spiraling out of control was due to the departure of Bradshaw, who resigned at the end of November.

Leslie ran the day-to-day operations, ensured clients and employees were happy, signed new business, and otherwise kept the lights on. Because they were also in a relationship, Leslie could exert control over him, at least enough to prevent him from draining the company's bank account.

Once JESS3 started hemorrhaging clients in February, it was unclear to those that remained how long savings or loans could sustain the company. A former employee who initially thought JESS3 would not be able to make payroll said checks were sent late by mail, rather than direct deposit for the pay period through April 30th.

Despite that our most recent paychecks are in the mail, none of my ex-coworkers that I've talked with are optimistic that we'll receive any further payment that we're owed without a fight, if ever. (We were all paid 15 days in arrears too.) From what I've heard, most clients have given him termination notice, so even if there was money there's no chance that anyone would go back to work for him.

In a post on his blog yesterday, Brad Cohen, JESS3's vice president of strategy until mid-March noted the inherently volatile nature of small agencies, where struggles to make payroll are not uncommon. "My teammates at JESS3 were, by and large, some of the most thoughtful, hardest working, and most talented creatives I’ve had the pleasure of working with," Cohen said before noting that "a good team that is ready to disband cannot be held together by a bad leader," along with the following graph:

Signs of Thomas' petulant, insulting, egomaniacal managerial style can be seen in a 2012 email exchange, obtained by Valleywag, between him and Bradshaw. In it, he tells his then-girlfriend and business partner:

Kiss the ring and listen to my billion dollar guidance, or walk away with nothing. Fuck you for defying my authority and managing this company further into debt.

"I did not supply this email exchange and I regret that someone did," Bradshaw told Valleywag by phone today after I sent her the email to verify its authenticity. "That said the reason I am no longer with JESS3 is self-evident to anyone who has read this unfortunate exchange."

"The beautiful thing about our economic system," she added with a nod to Milton Friedman, "is that over time it is the market and not the entrepreneur who determines what is a billion dollar brand."

To contact the author of this post, please email nitasha@gawker.com.

JESS3 Email Exchange

He knew it was risky business, but a 14-year-old from Prospect Heights, Illinois, decided to take advantage of his parents' absence by hiring a prostitute over the Internet.

Unfortunately, just like Risky Business, the teen's adolescent misadventures ended with the aforementioned prostitute robbing him blind.

Sadly, unlike Risky Business, the poor kid didn't even get to have sex with the woman before she stole his stuff.

According to the police report, 22-year-old Dareka Brooks arrived at the boy's home on Wednesday after they arranged the transaction online.

After instructing the teen to remove his pants, Brooks allegedly pepper-sprayed him in the face and then snatched his iPad and piggy bank before taking off.

Police were later able to track Brooks down to a motel in Elk Grove Village by pinging the very same iPad she stole.

Brooks, who is from Milwaukee, was arrested and charged with armed robbery. Her bond was set at $10,000.

[mug shot via WGN, photo via Shutterstock]

One might think that a newspaper called the New York Times, which employs contributors from around the world, in war zones and dictatorships, would be less in awe of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a small patch of concrete just across the East River from its headquarters. And yet this week, the latest Brooklyn joke wasn't so much a joke as it was a 2,000-word New York Times essay about Williamsburg. Get it? Hipsters!

Titled "How I Became a Hipster," the piece follows humorist Henry Alford, a self-professed uninitiated square, as he descends into the aloof coolness that is the few blocks surrounding the Bedford L stop. Alford offers fixed-gear bicycle jokes, beard jokes, flannel jokes—nothing one can't find in the now decade-old Hipster Handbook, or the three-year-old massively popular tumblr, Look at this Fucking Hipster—and yet, like a vintage sport coat hanging at Beacon's Closet, perhaps someone will find them chic and fresh.

Despite his antiquated teasing, Alford ends up deciding at the end of his piece that hipster Brooklyn is alright by him. Special as he may think his assessment is, it's merely the latest in a long line of New York Times dispatches from the dark realm that is Williamsburg, which have become something of a Times hobby in recent years. In 1981 there were just 71 mentions of "Williamsburg" in the New York Times, according to an analysis from the website BKLYNR. Last year, that number jumped to 538.

In the interest of understanding New York and the New York Times' relationship with Williamsburg, and for posterity, here are 35 answers from the Paper of Record to the question, "How is Williamsburg?" Read them all and you can essentially watch the rise and fall of a locus of cool. If only we'd had this in time for Alford before he dared venture out onto Bedford Avenue; maybe he could have saved himself the trouble of having to ride a fixie around those rough and tumble Brooklyn streets.

Perched on an armchair, dressed in black, Marco Ursino, a filmmaker, drew on a cigarette. ''Manhattan is saturated,'' he said. ''Williamsburg is the next big thing.''

-March 5, 2000

Now, a year after the partners bought it, 1 Knickerbocker is worth closer to $500,000, said Fred Rufrano, a broker with Kalmon-Dolgin Affiliates, a real estate firm.

''People are buying and selling, flipping buildings,'' he added. ''East Williamsburg is like Williamsburg five years ago.''

-August 2, 2001

''If I want to go out and meet a 24-year-old girl, I can't imagine meeting one in Manhattan,'' said Andrew Bradfield, 35, a real estate developer who lives in TriBeCa. ''They want Mr. Big. They like bankers. They want to be taken shopping at Barneys. But Williamsburg is packed with 21- to 24-year-olds having a great time with no pretense.''

-February 10, 2002

''Williamsburg is a test case of what can happen,'' he said. ''It didn't have row upon row of housing projects, so there was nothing to stop it from spreading. Here people have found little nooks and crannies.''

-October 13, 2002

Williamsburg is hardly over.

and

"Williamsburg is definitely no longer underground," said Larry Tee, who started the Berliniamsburg club in Williamsburg, which is credited with popularizing Electroclash...

and

...Williamsburg is well into the final phase, one in which deep-pocketed developers start pouring money into undeveloped property as if they were spaces on a Monopoly board.

and

''Williamsburg is having an identity crisis,'' Mr. Lanham said. ''It's kind of absurd that these kids who went to fancy schools are dressing like they're construction workers. The struggling artist is a myth. Williamsburg is a pseudo bohemia.''

-July 27, 2003

''Before anybody understood that Williamsburg is the promised land, we knew it,'' said Rabbi David Niederman, the president of the United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg. ''We have stayed here and held onto it.''

-February 15, 2004

...SoHo is over, the meatpacking district is overdone and Williamsburg is, well, in Brooklyn.

-August 29, 2004

[R]esidents of the 11211 ZIP code, like the woman who entered Bedford station last week wearing a ''Stop Gentrification'' T-shirt and a Native American headdress, know that Williamsburg is being redefined.

-December 12, 2004

...Williamsburg is having its avant-garde moment, showing off edgy work and barely advertising it, confident that the in-the-know 20- and 30-somethings will still show up.

-February 6, 2005

Clearly, hip Williamsburg is spreading.

-October 9, 2005

“I just think Long Island City is a great investment for someone who has some time to wait. Long Island City needs another eight years, I’d say. Williamsburg is there.”

-December 21, 2008

Famed for its concentration of heavily subsidized 20-something residents—also nicknamed trust-funders or trustafarians—Williamsburg is showing signs of trouble. Parents whose money helped fuel one of the city’s most radical gentrifications in recent years have stopped buying their children new luxury condos...

-June 8, 2009

Despite its veneer of affordability, Williamsburg is not a neighborhood in which the Frugal Traveler often hangs out.

-October 28, 2009

Williamsburg [Brooklyn] Is the New Williamsburg [Virginia]

-March 16, 2010

The plan had called for a children’s playroom and 60 private roof cabanas. “But there was no interest at all in a playroom because the family market in Williamsburg is still developing,” Mr. Maundrell said. No one was buying cabanas, either.

-August 22, 2010

Families are discovering that Williamsburg is much more than a playground for the postcollege, skinny-jeans set.

-January 23, 2011

"Like, Williamsburg is fun, but Clinton Hill’s got soul, and I like the mixture of people here."

-May 13, 2011

...Williamsburg is becoming "East Village East"...

-October 14, 2011

[Y]oung people from places other than New York ... have poured into the Lower East Side and the South Bronx, Bushwick and Astoria, but Williamsburg is the de facto capital of the infusion.

-November 5, 2011

“Williamsburg is nuts,” he said. “Red Hook is quiet and peaceful.”

-March 18, 2012

Williamsburg is teeming with babies.

-May 29, 2012

Williamsburg is already recognized as a center of artisanal pickle, jam and cheese production.

-June 12, 2012

"Williamsburg is no longer under the complete control of the Zaloynim," Rabbi Moishe Indig, a leader of the Aroynem, said in a statement issued after the primary by the public relations firm George Arzt Communications. "The Aroynem have just as much power and influence."

-July 5, 2012

"...Williamsburg is a blueprint for what will continue to happen in Greenpoint."

-July 22, 2012

Finding a cool bar scene in cities you are unfamiliar with is especially hard, since information can quickly become outdated. (Tourist in New York: “I heard Williamsburg is really up-and-coming!”)

-July 31, 2012

"Yeah, like Lower East Side has moved to Brooklyn—Bed-Stuy! That’s why you gotta go to Bed-Stuy. Williamsburg is like, too…"

-August 10, 2012

"Williamsburg is a specific slice of Brooklyn and caters to a specific kind of Brooklynite," said Mr. Demby. "There’s just a different character of visitor that goes to Dumbo..."

-September 6, 2012

Mathieu Palombino, the owner of Motorino, told The Local, "Williamsburg is to Brooklyn what the East Village is to Manhattan. What works there will work here."

-September 9, 2012

Williamsburg is pretty much finished as [an art] hunting ground...

-October 25, 2012

"Williamsburg is very hip now, but when I grew up there, I used to hang out in front of a mozzarella store."

-December 16, 2012

...Williamsburg is on its way to college-town mall-store ubiquity.

-March 7, 2013

It has been nearly eight years since nearly 200 blocks in northern Brooklyn were rezoned to make way for residential development, and dozens of new buildings have sprouted up there since. So the deed is done: Williamsburg is transformed.

-March 11, 2013

[Image by Jim Cooke.]

Don't feel too bad for the recently canned Daily Beast pundit: Howard Kurtz still has the Daily Download, the bizarre internet talk show that kept him curiously busy even when he had a day job. And it's more than just some hokey hobby—Kurtz's pet production is under federal contract.

According to federal spending data, Kurtz's co-host Lauren Ashburn was tapped by the Broadcasting Board of Governors "to provide training for international broadcasters on radio, television, internet and multimedia news broadcasting." Although the listing puts the federal "dollars allocated" at $0, government backing of some kind might explain why Kurtz cares so much about the laughably low-budget video series, nearly every single episode of which has fewer views than this video of the Gawker Media pancake machine—by a factor of 100.

If HuffPo's Michael Calderone is correct, and "Kurtz characterized himself [...] as a partner in Daily Download," rather than just an "advisor," his obsession with the piddling web series seems slightly less insane (if a hell of a lot more self-aggrandizing): A startup stake in a fed-supported media property was on the line.

What's still unquestionably insane is the BBG's decision to award the Daily Download anything at all.

Update: A BBG rep wrote in with the following clarification:

The contract that Ms. Ashburn had with the BBG was for a half-day training for our journalists that helped them build interviewing skills. It was completed in 2011.

Nothing much is at stake in Iron Man 3. The explosions only affect the bad guys (all an out-of-iron Tony Stark needs to do to deflect one is hide behind the door of a bag-ice freezer). No one of any real importance to this franchise (or that of the bigger Marvel superheroes franchise that it’s part of) is going to expire.

The timing of Tony Stark/Iron Man/Robert Downey Jr., and his cohorts is as flawless as ever. Iron Man 3 requires not just a suspension of disbelief but an investment of faith in humanity's intrinsic skill and durability. It makes for an experience that is fine, but lacking tension—it's only dazzling during a sequence in which Iron Man jets around the sky to save about a dozen of people that are free falling from a besieged plane. Iron Man likens his devised human chain to a barrel of monkeys. Take a wild guess as to whether or not his showstopping heroics succeed.

As much as the self-conscious weight of the Christopher Nolan style of superhero movie making grates on my nerves for taking itself a little too seriously, the Marvel movie universe that spans all of the Avengers (including the Iron Man, Captain America and Thor franchise offshoots) doesn’t take itself seriously enough to be exciting. We’re asked to roll our eyes with it (“You breathe fire?” Don Cheadle's Stark ally Jim Rhodes asks with incredulity as his villain du jour reveals the extent of his power), not at it, but we’re still rolling our eyes. Its attempts at gravity, whether in distant examinations of the burden of superherodom on one’s self and relationships, or in balls-out action sequences that seem to want to define “high-octane” with moving imagery, come in flashes. Switch gears if you’re so committed and care, or continue rolling your eyes. I choose the latter.

Iron Man 3 is Leathal Weapon writer Shane Black’s take on the series (3 is the first not directed by John Favreau, though he is in it, memorably sporting a bolo tie and Pulp Fiction slickback in a flashback). It is wittier and quicker-paced than the other two and it has the bonkers benefit of Ben Kingsley as comic relief. Despite it bookend voiceovers, in which Stark discusses his self-created demons, it is as frivolous as ever. At least it doesn’t telegraph what’s coming next in the series in the tacky manner of its predecessor (and for that matter Captain America and Thor)—Iron Man 2 was a feature-length commercial for The Avengers, and it felt like it. There is a definitive finality to Iron Man 3—this arm of the Marvel franchise could end here, and it would make sense. It’s not going to happen, but it’s an attractive fantasy and its momentary containment is refreshing. These Marvel movies are the cinematic equivalent of a promiscuous cosmopolitan dating scene, always looking to the next best thing, but never achieving much beyond a superficial good time. The relentless pace, in which they are released makes each one feel less special. The fatigue of familiarity is just around the corner for these movies, especially if they continue treading water, however spectacular their form.

The greatest contribution of the Iron Man series its teasing out of Gwyneth Paltrow’s likability at every turn. For someone who so often struggles to display her natural charisma, these movies are vital for proving that she is, in fact, still a human being. The same goes for Robert Downey, Jr., though he’s seemingly never struggled with such expression. He seems to chose roles that allow him to be his off-the-cuff self, or at least, the off-the-cuff self that he and his people want us to believe that he is. He is the anti-Tom Cruise: Cruise chooses empty roles that he then disappears into, while Downey leads with his persona and lets the role fall around him. Iron Man would be far less dynamic of a series without him. Tony Stark’s spoken refrain is Downey’s implicit one: He is Iron Man. But in the end, that’s nice and fun and good for him, but nothing much beyond that.

Microsoft has announced that it is officially killing Hotmail 16 years after launching the service. Say goodbye forever to your first email account/whatever accounts you made to sign up for porn sites.

What comes next after unpaid microcontent? Try 4,700 words about foreskins, at about $3 a word. That, according to a source, is what Sloane Crosley supplied to a new project called Medium, from Twitter co-founder Ev Williams. Williams won’t pay you for a Tweet but, for now at least, he might pay you depending on who you are.

This moment of our disrupted future looks strangely like the vanished past, when "editors" paid "writers" for their "work" with "money." Medium, Williams has said, is “a system for reading and writing. A place where you can find and share knowledge, ideas, and stories—specifically, ones that need more than 140 characters and are not just for your friends.”

How do you get the sharing to start? Medium’s editors have been busy commissioning a bunch of stories, and some name-brand writers have taken them up on it. Felix Salmon recently wrote a piece about bitcoins for Medium, which picked up more than 150,000 page views. A book excerpt from Michael Pollan’s latest cropped up two weeks ago; a former spy is recapping The Americans.

If readers are paying attention to the buzzy stories, the theory goes, the unpaid users will follow the pros to the Medium platform, which has been described to us as a much neater, nicer WordPress. (Opening up a new publishing platform is not unlike the strategy behind Nick Denton's decision to move his professional Gawker Media sites to his newly launched, publicly available Kinja platform.) Medium is still in beta mode now, with logins provided by invitation only, but people who have used it say that the CMS is incredibly easy.

Williams has come up with successful products before: He co-founded Blogger, which he later sold to Google. Twitter is valued at around $10 billion and is expected to go public sometime next year.

Williams' commitment to publishing professional writing through Medium does seem sincere. Two months ago, Medium hired former Wired.com editor Evan Hansen as an editor for the site. Last month, Medium bought the long-form journalism startup Matter. With a staff emerging, and a well-respected publication on its roster, Williams dispatched his editorial director Kate Lee—the former literary agent famous for getting book deals for bloggers-—to go out and find some writers. Earlier this week, she said that Medium is looking to pay you, fellow writer. She wrote:

What we’ve been doing is paying some contributors at competitive freelance rates. As for why: Our goal is to make Medium the best platform possible for everyone to share great ideas or stories. This should certainly include those whose profession is doing so.

Lee is apparently working with a pretty nice editorial budget and the fees we’ve heard about so far are fairly competitive. A few contributors told us that they were getting 50 cents a word: a fairly standard freelance rate among established media outlets. And then there's Crosley's case. The author had written an article about circumcision for Playboy, a magazine-y tour of brises and the mohels who perform at them. Playboy killed it before it went to press, and the story found a home at Medium after Lee, one of Crosley's best friends, picked it up. Medium was delighted to have it.

Well said RT @ev: Probably the best story you'll read this year on circumcision: medium.com/modern-ritual/… by @askanyone

— Kate Lee (@katelaurielee) February 25, 2013

And according to a source, the penis story of the year went for $15,000, a rate worthy of Conde Nast. Great news for the writing business, even if the principals don't want to discuss it. We emailed Crosley and Lee several times about the rate, and they didn’t respond. Gawker editor John Cook asked Crosley about her rate at the PEN Gala at the Museum of Natural History on Tuesday night. “I’m certainly not going to talk about that,” she said, before bolting.

Every year, there’s a new iteration of a new news outfit that can suddenly pay freelancers—The Daily! Gourmet Live!—and here’s the latest, with a good amount of cash on hand. Considering Williams’s fortune, the occasional $15,000 piece should be a drop in the bucket. And it suggests that the model Medium is turning to, at least for now, is a familiar one. It’s the blockbuster model. It’s the Vanity Fair model. A writerly rendering on circumcisions? Buzz! A respected business writer on a timely business topic? Buzz! Tina Brown would be proud.

[Image by Jim Cooke, source image via Shutterstock]