On Wednesday, a grand jury indicted Goldman Sachs banker Jason Lee on one count of first degree rape and two counts of misdemeanor assault and sexual misconduct. Lee was arrested last week after a 20-year-old woman accused him of raping her at a rental house in East Hampton.

She's a gold-medal-winning up-and-comer in the world of bodybuilding and can bench several times her own weight — but Georgina McConnell still gets bullied for being a "freak."

Since she started lifting weights at age 14, McConnell knew she had found her calling.

"Originally like most girls I wanted to be thin and toned so a lot of the things I did in the gym revolved around cardio and very light weights," she writes in her Anabolic Designs bio. "After going to the gym for a while I started to see a lot of changes within myself and realised that I had the ability to gain muscle and change my body."

At 17, McConnell officially decided to become a professional bodybuilder, and soon found herself garnering acclaim from her peers and taking home medals.

But the British teen's choices were not without their detractors.

"I get a lot of compliments for my physique, but I get a lot of insults too," the 5' 7" McConnell, who recently turned 19, told The Daily Mail. "Quite a few people have said nasty things about me in the past."

Indeed, the volume of attacks became so severe that McConnell was forced to take to her own Facebook fan page earlier this month to slam the shit-slingers:

Not that all men are mean to McConnell, though.

"I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment, but I don’t think my unusual hobby will put all boys off," she said. "Yes, some are a bit intimidated by my muscles, but others like them - I think it’s an acquired taste."

[photos via Facebook]

As it turns out, eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, stripping off your clothes, and walking your dog through a quiet Florida neighborhood is a good way to attract police attention. Such was the lesson Robin Campbell, 20, learned early Sunday evening.

Police were called to a Maitland, Florida neighborhood at 5 p.m. Sunday after neighbors spotted a completely nude Campbell walking his dog. When officers asked where his clothing was, Campbell allegedly replied, multiple times, “This is God's house.”

Maitland Police Officer Nickolas Lawrence asked Campbell if he'd been drinking. Campbell was initially defiant. “You have had some alcohol,” he responded, before admitting that he had eaten mushrooms and adding, “If you don't get out of my way, I'm going to kill you.”

At that point, Lawrence and his partner attempted to arrest Campbell, who resisted. Lawrence shot Campbell in the chest with his Taser gun, stunning him briefly before Campbell charged again. Lawrence again shot him with the Taser gun, but that didn't stop Campbell either; instead the 20-year-old lunged for the Taser gun.

Police eventually managed to handcuff Campbell, but not before he scratched one of the officer's hands, drawing blood, while kicking Lawrence. A third Taser shot finally fell Campbell, and police were able to take him to a nearby hospital for evaluation.

Campbell was later booked into the Orange County Jail on two counts of battery of a law enforcement officer, resisting an officer with violence, resisting an officer without violence, and exposure of sexual organs.

[Orlando Sentinel/NY Daily News]

An extremely cool Minnesota teen was startled over the weekend to discover a wolf attempting to eat him alive (starting with his brain), while he was just doing his own thing on a chill, romantic camping trip with his girlfriend.

The Bemidji Pioneer reported that Noah Graham, who digs camping, chicks, and not being consumed head-first by a wolf—in that order—was lying in a tent near the banks of Lake Winnibigoshish talking to his girlfriend around 4:00 a.m. (cool time for a “rap session,” kids, haha, OK, be safe) when—what’s this!—a wolf appeared out of nowhere and commenced eating his head.

Graham said the wolf crept up silently and didn’t make a sound until it was on top of him.

A representative for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources told the Duluth News Tribune that Graham’s first indication the wolf had clamped its jaws down on his head came when when the wolf clamped its jaws down on his head.

“His first indication was when he had its jaws clamped down on his head.”

Graham’s girlfriend fled to her Jeep at the moment of the attack, leaving her boyfriend to fight off a wolf with his bare hands. He did that—“I had to reach behind me and jerk my head out of its mouth," said Graham—and then screamed and kicked at it until it ran away, probably into its own, smaller Jeep. Two of Graham's friends who were also on the trip but had set up shop a little ways away “slept through” the entire bloody ordeal.

While the encounter does not appear to have affected Graham’s ability to transform from a human into a wolf (that ability remains: lacking), one thing it did give him was a 4.3 inch gash to the head that required 17 staples to close. He also suffered puncture wounds on the left and right sides of his face.

Wolf attacks on humans are a rare occurrence. According to the Tribune, there have only been two wolf-attack fatalities in the last decade in North America, a fact ABC News illustrated with this stunning image:

A wolf matching the description of the one that attacked Graham (“A WOLF”) was killed at the campground on Monday by Wildlife Services. That wolf was found to have a deformed jaw (ugly face), which officials believe may have made it difficult for the animal to hunt prey larger than the head of an extremely cool local teen.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Amid widespread calls for his resignation, Yellowstone County District Judge G. Todd Baugh apologized Wednesday for saying a 14-year-old rape victim was “older than her chronological age” and was “as much in control of the situation” as her attacker.

"I don't know how to pass that off," Baugh told NBC News. "I'm saying I'm sorry, and it's not who I am. I deserve to be chastised. I apologize for that."

On Monday, Baugh sentenced admitted rapist Stacey Rambold to 15 years, then suspended all but 31 days of the sentence. In 2008, Rambold, a former high school teacher, pleaded guilty to one charge of sexual intercourse without consent with his then 14-year-old student. The victim, Cherice Morales, committed suicide two years later, just before her 17th birthday.

Baugh's comments and lenient sentence sparked outrage and protests on Wednesday. A petition demanding Baugh's resignation has been signed over 17,000 times, and protests are planned for outside of the Yellowstone County courthouse on Thursday.

"I'm glad he apologized, but he should have known better as a judge," Sheena Rice, the protest's organizer, told The Associated Press. "The fact that he said it makes me think he still believes it."

Despite the outrage, Baugh stands by the short jail term he gave Rambold and only expressed regret for his statements about Morales.

[Image via AP]

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

The giant hellfire burning through Yosemite National Park continues to spread; by Wednesday morning the Rim Fire had grown to 187,500 acres, roughly the size of New York City. The fire is devastating, of course, but as the above video shows, it's also sort of beautiful, at least when captured with time-lapse photography.

The fire is already the seventh largest in California's history, and so far 111 structures have been destroyed with another 4,000 in harm's way. Over 4,200 firefighters are battling the fire, which is only 23 percent contained after nearly two weeks. Officials, however, are optimistic.

"It's looking better every day," Glen Stratton, a spokesman for one incident team, told NBC station KCRA of Sacramento. "So far, everything is holding."

Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said cooler weather, higher humidity and lighter winds have helped firefighters slow the fire's spread. "That's given us a greater opportunity to get in there and strengthen our containment lines,” he told the Los Angeles Times, adding that he expects full containment of the blaze by September 10.

Since Google Glass launched to our awe and horror, the company's co-founder, Sergey Brin, hasn't been spotted without a pair. He's placed himself atop the project, publicly, and inside Google's secret labs. Maybe it's because he's fucking the Glass marketing manager, Amanda Rosenberg.

According to a startling report by AllThingsD's Liz Gannes and Kara Swisher, Brin and his wife of six years, Anne Wojcicki, are no more, now that he's found himself a girlfriend at Google. AllThingsD also reported this girlfriend was recently attached to another (totally coincidentally departing) top Googler, Hugo Barra, to make Brin's relationship with the recent San Francisco transplant behind the backs of his wife and children all that much worse.

Here she is.

Sleeping around with your 26-year-old face computer underling is a quick exit out of even a high profile relationship—and even if she's the one who coined the cloying "OK, Glass!" command phrase. Rosenberg is an avid user of Google Plus (they exist!), but almost all mentions of Barra have been scrubbed from her account—accessible only via website caches.

The last public photo of the former couple dates back to last summer:

Since then, Brin (far right) and Rosenberg (seen below in yellow) have been spotted promoting Google Glass together around the world, and across the pages of stylish mags:

All the while, his marriage seemed intact. We're told the extent to which Rosenberg and Wojcicki overlapped is a matter of dispute between the separated philanthropists—but even if they can split amicably, knowing that one of the most vital, powerful men at the company has been using Google's most ambitious product as a dating pool won't be smooth news for the rest of the team. And of course, the odds of grotesquely 21st century sex tape existing are now very high.

Brin once crazily called for the existence of a private, separate world for technologists, an island of amorality and experimentation:

I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society.

You're not on the island yet, Sergey.

Hard to believe this plan went awry: In an misguided attempt to smuggle drugs inside, a Washington man fired an arrow wrapped with a bag of weed and an unidentified substance at the second floor screen of the Whatcom County jail's recreation area on Tuesday morning. The man, of course, missed his target, and the arrow landed on the prison's roof, where it was quickly discovered.

After receiving a tip from a witness, Whatcom County Sheriff's deputies arrived at David Wayne Jordan's home, where they found the bow used to launch the contraband still inside his truck.

When confronted by deputies, Jordan admitted shooting the arrow but claimed he'd been hunting a squirrel. "He had no explanation as to why squirrel hunting requires attaching marijuana to an arrow," Whatcom County Sheriff Bil Elfo told the Bellingham Herald, adding that Jordan would have had to have fired the arrow at a “perfect angle” to get it inside the prison's screen.

Deputies arrested Jordan, who had just been released from the same prison last Friday. Tuesday evening, officials at the jail rebooked Jordan on charges of introducing contraband to a corrections facility in the third degree, resisting arrest and obstructing law enforcement.

[via Daily Intelligencer]

A New Jersey court ruled yesterday that a person knowingly texting a driver could be held legally responsible should the driver end up being involved in a crash.

The ruling stems from a case involving a teenage girl who texted her boyfriend moments before the latter struck a motorcycle, seriously injuring its two riders.

Linda and David Kubert had previously settled their case against driver Kyle Best, but a Morris County Superior Court determined that texter Shannon Colonna did not share in the responsibility for his actions.

The Kuberts took their case to the Superior Court's appellate division, which yesterday upheld the earlier decision, saying it believed Colonna didn't know Best was driving at the time of the crash.

However, the three-judge panel did find that an individual knowingly texting a driver could be held responsible in the event of an accident.

"We hold that the sender of a text message can potentially be liable if an accident is caused by texting, but only if the sender knew or had special reason to know that the recipient would view the text while driving and thus be distracted," stated Judge Victor Ashrafi in his opinion.

The court compared the "electronic presence" of the texter to a person holding a piece of paper in front of the driver, thereby distracting him.

"When the sender knows that the text will reach the driver while operating a vehicle, the sender has a relationship to the public who use the roadways similar to that of a passenger physically present in the vehicle," said Ashrafi. "As we have stated, a passenger must avoid distracting the driver. The remote sender of a text who knows the recipient is then driving must do the same."

[photo via Shuttstock]

Lots of people are pissed at Miley Cyrus for her VMA performance, and each person seems to have their own special reason. But one of these people, Steve Chmelar, has a reason that may be the most special of all.

You see, back in 1971, when Chmelar was 16 years old, he invented the foam finger.

Fast forward four decades, and Chmelar's beloved invention is being used by Miley to faux-masturbate in front of thousands of shrieking teens at MTV's Video Music Awards.

"She took an honorable icon that is seen in sporting venues everywhere and degraded it," Chmelar told Fox Sports.

The now-59-year-old admits he's no fan of Miley in general — "If I had a choice between Julie Andrews singing 'The Sound of Music' and Miley Cyrus doing 'Can't Stop,' I'd go the Julie Andrews route" — but he respects people's right to debauch themselves as they see fit.

And Chmelar assures foam finger and Miley fans alike that all is certainly not lost.

"Fortunately, the foam finger has been around long enough that it will survive this incident," he said. "As for Miley Cyrus, let's hope she can outlive this event and also survive."

[H/T: The Atlantic Wire, photos via Getty]

The white guy was looking up at the TV in a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike. Onscreen, the news was showing John Lewis speaking at the anniversary of the March on Washington. "I am not going to stand by and let the Supreme Court take the right to vote away from us," Lewis said. The white guy in the rest stop glared at the TV, then looked around the dining space. What's he TALKING about? he asked his family or the air, the world around him. He was seething; he wanted to be heard. He HAS the right to vote.

His kids—three of them, dark blond—kept eating their fast food. His female companion said nothing. His angry, stupid, would-be-superior observation hung in the air, useless.

Maybe it made the white guy feel better, talking back to the old black man on the television set. Who knows what makes white people feel better, these days? Laura Ingraham, the white radio host, cut off a clip of Lewis' remarks with a gunshot sound effect, after spending the lead-in talking about the problem of black criminality. "Did anyone talk about the horrific crime rate in the black community?" the white radio host asked, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's call for an America in which black and white people could be counted as one community.

White people have to make judgments. Their status as white people depends on making judgments. This is why black criminality is a big topic with them these days. It is how they have decided to resolve the problem of an unarmed teenager having been shot to death while walking home. Statistically, white people say, it makes sense to shoot a teenager if he's black. Or at least it makes sense to be prepared to shoot the black teenager.

It is a perilous world, the world white people inhabit. Murder and rioting are always just around the corner, lurking in the shadows. White people have been killing trees and clearing farmland for decades to get away from that corner, to build streets that don't even have corners. And still the white people are angry and afraid. Still they feel threatened or cheated.

This is 90 years after H.L. Mencken diagnosed the "hereditary cowardice" of Americans who identified as "Anglo-Saxon" and wrote:

The normal American of the "pure-blooded" majority goes to rest every night with an uneasy feeling that there is a burglar under the bed, and he gets up every morning with a sickening fear that his underwear has been stolen.

In the intervening years, the white American race has expanded its boundaries beyond self-styled Anglo-Saxons and Nordics to include such formerly inferior or untrustworthy strains as the Irish, the Italians, or even the Jews. But the fundamentally defective character of white Americans has not changed; if anything, it has gotten worse.

***

Because white people ruin everything, they have spent the past week particularly focused on ruining the legacy of the March on Washington (with a brief interlude to ruin twerking). The March, in white people's recounting, was when Martin Luther King Jr. brought hundreds of thousands of people to Washington D.C. and told them to stop making a big deal about race.

Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen Parker, of the Washington Post, offered the standard white take on history last week, in her column about how black people are prone to rioting and how President Obama was irresponsible to rile them up about the Trayvon Martin case:

How sad, as we approach the 50th anniversary of the march Martin Luther King Jr. led on Washington, that even the president resorts to judging not by the content of one's character but by the color of his skin—the antithesis of the great dream King articulated.

How sad. White people, like Kathleen Parker, are sad that the president should mention skin color. Laura Ingraham likewise invoked King's mention of "character," to launch into her discussion of the crime rates assigned to groups of people classified by their skin color. White people hammer at this over and over, King's "great dream" of a color-blind America, a dream that is only being thwarted now by the people who insist on talking about racial issues.

Here is what King actually said, in this one quote of his that today's white people take as proof he was on their side:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

When white people cite this passage, they tend to replace "my four little children" with something generic—"people," for instance. The specific facts of 1963, of a caste of children born in a society that intentionally excluded them from opportunity, give way to an ahistoric (and therefore pointless) idealism. America is about how everybody is treated the same. Equality is replaced with equivalence.

So we arrive at a color-blind society, one in which if you did look at the people who are poorer, or less educated, or sicker, or more likely to be imprisoned, or more likely to be turned aside from the polls under voting laws passed this very year, you would see that they just happen to be disproportionately nonwhite. But it is wrong to look. Dr. King—the white people's version of Dr. King—told us so.

***

The genuine Martin Luther King Jr., 50 years ago, said this:

When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Here is where white Americans failed themselves and their country. That image of the promissory note was too much for white people's greed and selfishness to accept. White people had defined themselves, as a race, by having the things that other people could not have. So the vaults of opportunity would not be opened, not without white people staging a run on the bank first. If the public schools had to educate black children and white children together, the white people would get out of the schools, declare war on the whole idea of public school. If black people could participate in civic life, white people would clear out of the cities. White people would revolt against paying taxes, against poverty relief, against food stamps, even.

And then, after decades of this, white people would look back at the things white America had abandoned or refused to build, and they would blame black people for living in the ruins. Their character. Their culture. Their music. Their pants.

Yet white people are still afraid: of young men in hoodies; of being blamed for their fear of young men in hoodies. Of reverse racism. Of armies of fake voters, bent on electing white-hating militants. Of sharia law. Of mild ethnic putdowns. Of the New Black Panther Party. Of one tiny and absurd thing after the next.

What white people fear, at bottom, is retribution. This is why discussion of actual injustice is supposed to be off-limits. Despite the glorious principles spelled out 50 years ago on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, they lack a functioning concept of justice. To admit the harms of the past is to invite payback. When Andrew Breitbart raised a race panic over Shirley Sherrod, the real issue was that he and his followers were incapable of understanding Sherrod's story of transcending racial resentment. They were too trapped by rage and paranoia to get the point.

Who wants to be part of this degraded and ignorant culture? Whiteness is a dead end. It's trashing the apartment after receiving the eviction notice. White people are so confused and terrified by regular America and American values, they now openly argue against letting more people vote. They write incoherent passages like this, from the National Review, reflecting on its original opposition to the March on Washington:

Too many conservatives and libertarians, including the editors of this magazine, missed all of this at the time. They worried about the effects of the civil-rights movement on federalism and limited government. Those principles weren’t wrong, exactly; they were tragically misapplied, given the moral and historical context.

Who could put it better that that? White people weren't wrong, exactly, unless you mean that they were wrong in the light of history and morality—in which case, yes, white people were wrong, and remain wrong, and seem bent on staying that way.

Why do so many white people have to be like this? Watch the video of King's speech. Fifty years ago, white people were in the March. But the pathologies of whiteness persisted.

When you say this, if you're white, white people like to call it "white guilt." The implication is that there is something hypocritical and shameful about pointing out the failings of white America, after having profited from its advantages. I step to the curb and raise my arm, and three taxis pull over at once. So I should share in the anger of the white guy at the rest stop.

But the white guy at the rest stop is an asshole. This isn't white guilt; it's white blame. It's infuriating that he expects anyone to agree with him, in his willful ignorance, his disingenuousness amped up to rage. As a white person, I want him to shut up.

[Image by Jim Cooke, source photos via Getty/Shutterstock]

A new leak from former security contractor Edward Snowden, published in the Washington Post, reveals the "black budget"—the money spent on the U.S. government's intelligence-gathering operations—for 2013. And it's colossal: A total of $52.6 billion, covering the CIA, the NSA and lesser-known agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office.

You can read some of the budget here, or check out the Post's incomprehensible shades-of-grey Mondrian data visualization. (The Post, after "consultation with U.S. officials," is withholding some portion of the leaked documents.)

So where's all that money going? The bulk of it to the CIA, which took in a whopping, well-beyond-the-standard-estimate $14.7 billion—well more than the NSA. A great deal of it is focused on computer espionage (in the parlance of the budget, "offensive cyber operations"), including hacking, and possibly sabotaging, the networks of foreign countries, but still one-third of the budget, and one-quarter of intelligence agents, are focused on terrorism.

And where are we spying? Our "priority targets" include China, Russian, Iran, Cuba, Israel, and Pakistan—and North Korea, where the budget reveals the U.S. has "critical" blind spots in its knowledge of the country's weapons program and its leaders intentions.

Cory Booker, the attention-loving Democratic mayor of Newark who is currently running for U.S. Senate, has repeatedly claimed he befriended a drug dealer named “T-Bone” when he first moved to Newark in 1995. Up until 2008, he told this story fairly often, wrenching the hearts of interviewers and audiences. But according to Eliana Johnson at National Review, “T-Bone” is almost certainly not a real person. Rutgers University history professor Clement Price, Johnson writes,

considers himself a mentor and friend to Booker and says Booker conceded to him in 2008 that T-Bone was a “composite” of several people he’d met while living in Newark. The professor describes a “tough conversation” in which he told Booker “that I disapproved of his inventing such a person.” “If you’re going to create a composite of a man along High Street,” he says he asked Booker, “why don’t you make it W. E. B. DuBois?” From Booker, he says, “There was no pushback. He agreed that was a mistake.” Since then, references to T-Bone have been conspicuously absent from Booker’s speeches.

The nickname “T-Bone,” Price tells Johnson, “pandered to a stereotype of inner-city black men. ... [It’s] a southern-inflected name. You would expect to run into something or somebody named T-Bone in Memphis, not Newark.”

Until Price upbraided Booker for inventing him, “T-Bone” frequently popped up in Booker’s speeches and interviews, along with details like his approximate age (about the same as Booker, who was born in 1969) and conversations between Booker and “T-Bone.” In a 2007 speech at Yale, Booker described when “T-Bone” admitted he had multiple warrants out for his arrest: “He bit down hard on his lip and he burst into tears and he started crying and sobbing into my dashboard.” If he’s a composite character, he’s an strikingly detailed one.

(However, it’s not true, as Price suggests, that “T-Bone” would be a completely unlikely name for someone, born in or around 1969, that Booker might have come across in Newark, or a northern city like New Jersey, who ran into trouble with the law due to drugs. A search for New Jersey prisoners who have used the alias “T-Bone” turned up three different prisoners, two of them currently incarcerated, who were born in 1972, 1974, and 1975. Two of those prisoners, Tyrone Campbell and Anthony Ross, were arrested for drug-related offenses.)

Incidentally, this isn’t the only famous anecdote to be questioned during Booker’s showy Senate run. Last year Booker told Du Jour magazine that, in order to escape critics, he patronized a 24-hour salon in order to obtain manicures and pedicures. Today Booker’s Republican opponent, Steve Lonegan, said his campaign staff looked all over Newark for such a 24-hour salon and came up empty. (When asked, a Booker campaign spokesman declined to immediately provide the name of the candidate’s salon to Gawker.)

Meanwhile, Booker’s reluctance to discuss his dating preferences seems to be helping his campaign. The aforementioned Steve Lonegan openly questioned Booker’s masculinity on a Thursday radio show by highlighting Booker’s taste for professional pedicures — “I have a more peculiar fetish. I like a good Scotch and a cigar. That’s my fetish, but we’ll just compare the two.” — prompting several prominent LGBT groups to denounce him. Not that Booker needed the boost: he’s leading Lonegan by 16 points.

[Image credit: Associated Press]

Today, a right wing think tank ran a full page Wall Street Journal ad implying that a rise in the minimum wage would cause fast food workers to be replaced by robots. The prospect of robo-dystopia did not deter the hundreds of chanting protesters who bent the corner of Broadway and Nassau at 11:15 this morning.

Today, the ongoing attempt to organize fast food workers had its biggest day yet, with strikes and protests in 60 cities across the country. One of those cities was New York. At 11 a.m., Nassau Street off Fulton, a narrow block in downtown Manhattan, was quiet, except for the news vans and sullen TV reporters pacing the sidewalk. "I've covered these protest twice already. These are just a fraction of the workers," one hairsprayed reporter said to a bored cameraman. "These jobs are not, to me, full time head of household jobs." The Wendy's across from the Discount Smoke Shop was a graveyard, almost totally empty, with one exit door locked, the manager peering out warily from inside. At 11:15, the echoes of drumbeats reached the restless media crowd. Two blocks down Nassau, a column of marchers— enough to fill a whole horizontal city block, on one sidewalk— streamed forward behind a massive orange "$15 and a Union" banner.

"Hey, Wendy's, you're no good! (Something something)," they chanted. (The acoustics were not the best). Many whistles were blown and signs were waved. A line of police on motor scooters flanked the marchers until they reached the front of the Wendy's, where they launched into a call and response session. "What's disgusting? Union busting! What's outrageous? Poverty wages!"

Nassau Street was cramped even with normal levels of traffic. It was now more cramped. A large black van happened to have parked directly in front of the Wendy's that was being targeted, which had the effect of squeezing the marchers and organizers and cops and reporters and cameramen and photographers all together into one well-packed sausage of protest. A white-shirted cop keeping watch leaned over to one of the organizers and said, "Next time I would pick somewhere with a bigger sidewalk." Across the street, there was a quasi-marching band, courtesy of the remainders of Occupy. Hipster cop, in seersucker pants, was also there, as if to complete the reunion. In the midst of the protest was a lone Drum Guy, tasked with keeping a beat going. Drum Guy was a consistent barrier to one particularly stringent CNN cameraman, who did not care to have Drum Guy in his shot. "Hey! I'm here for you, pal!" the cameraman yelled in stereotypical "mainstream TV outlet camera guy at a protest" fashion. Drum Guy was stoic.

Rynetta Bennett, 23, worked at the Wendy's on Nassau Street. She was scheduled to work today. Instead, she was outside, protesting. She had worked there nearly seven years, but had not yet been promoted to manager. She said she got a ten cent raise about every six months, and no paid vacations. "This is my main income," she said. Many of her fellow workers were supportive of the cause, but decided not to appear with the strikers. "A lot are scared."

Tionnie Cross, 28, worked at a McDonald's in Brooklyn three days a week. Her schedule varies each week, both the days and the times. She and her coworkers all have part time schedules. Some weeks she only brings home about $100. "New York City is pretty tough," she said. "Everything is going up, and the pay is staying." This was her first time coming to a protest. She'd put on lipstick for the occasion, and was carrying a pink purse to offset her striker's t-shirt, and smiling a lot. Her manager had tried to dissuade her coworkers from coming to the march, she said. "I really don't care. I'm fighting for my rights."

Later, I saw her climbing a light pole to wave a sign. She had the spirit.

After about an hour, the whole crowd regrouped and marched around the corner to a Burger King on Fulton. Someone tried to launch into a rendition of "We Shall Overcome," featuring three singers accompanied by 87 screeching whistles. The crowd spilled off the sidewalk. Lives were preserved only by a line of volunteers in orange vests who stood with their arms outstretched like a human net between the marchers and the trucks passing by with a clearance of a few inches. The chanting continued nonstop. If you waited until no trucks were passing by and stepped back into the street a bit and took in the entire scene, you saw young people and old people and black and white and albino people and little kids and grandmothers and entire Mexican families and sharp-looking middle-aged black men and shifty buzzcut white cops with Yankees logo tattoos on their forearms and plastic Barbie doll-esque reporters and sweaty gutter punks all cocooned in whistling and hollering and sign-waving. It was a god damn tableau of New York City. It felt pretty good.

Near the back of the crowd stood Niquasia LeGrand, a dreadlocked 22 year-old from Canarsie who worked at one KFC in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and another in Queens. To get to work in Brooklyn she takes a bus and three trains. She's paid $7.70 per hour. She gets about 18 hours a week. I asked her about the people, like the TV reporter I saw today, who think that fast food jobs are mostly second jobs and part-time gigs for teens, making the idea of a union and a double-digit wage seem faintly ridiculous. She grew upset, for the first time. "Do people see that the economy is really bad?" she asked. She swept her arm across the entire scene. "Half the people out here got degrees. They have to settle."

Recently, she said, her store had had an electrical fire that caused it to shut down for a month. That was a month in which every employee got zero hours. "There was single mothers and fathers who didn't have a second job," she said. That's what got her thinking about the benefits of a union. And her she was.

"We break our backs every day for that store," she said. "We treat it like a five star store, but it's one star money."

Two kittens, living out an urban/feline version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, took a Subway Adventure earlier today and caused the MTA to halt subways on the B and Q lines for an hour.

We will repeat that. No B/Q service between DeKalb and Brighton Beach on account of kitten.

— Ted Mann (@TMannWSJ) August 29, 2013

According to witnesses, many people on the train wanted to help capture these tiny urban voyagers. The MTA wouldn't allow passengers to assist for safety reasons and because how many goddamn New Yorkers does it take to catch two cats?

NBC reports that "workers in reflective vests tried to corral the felines," which, again, took them one hour. Power was shut off while these reflective vest-wearing kitten catchers attempted to coax the baby cats into carrying cases.

[image via New York City Transit; Lane V. Erickson, Shutterstock]

Today in news of North Korea's pathologically murderous legacy, South Korean daily Chosun Ilbo is reporting that a firing squad executed Hyon Song-wol, a Korean pop star who was widely rumored to be a long-term paramour of man-boy dictator Kim Jong-un.

Hyon Song-wol was the lead singer of Pochonbo Electronic Music Band, a musical propaganda group whose biggest hit was an oppressively chipper jingle "Excellent Horse-Like Lady" (the title also translates to "A Girl In The Saddle Of A Steed"). If you believe the Song-wol-starring video, posted below, the 2005 tune is apparently about how strong women find factory labor awesome and that's not a feminist message because strong women are just like animals you ride. (Or something.)

Song-wol and Jong-un supposedly met more than a decade ago and became involved in whatever peculiarly amorous and perhaps physical way that sons of Korean dictators quietly become involved with their country's most popular young singers. His father, Kim Jong-il, widely documented to be one of the least understanding creatures in modern human history, didn't approve and forced his son to cut ties with Song-wol. Allegedly, Song-wol went off, married a military officer and had a baby. Meanwhile, rumors of her continued involvement with Jong-un persisted, and typing any of this is like speculating about a Martian love story, but that's what we do.

Moving forward: Last summer when Kim Jong-un started appearing publicly with a "mystery woman," there was widespread speculation that his companion was old-flame pop-star Hyon Song-wol. But then weeks later, Korean state TV mentioned briefly that Jong-un was married and that the woman he'd been out with was his wife, Ri Sol-ju, who probably did not enjoy being mistaken for her husband's ex because no one really likes it when your significant other's family slips and calls you "Christine" or whatever her name was, uh, not speaking from experience or anything. Ri Sol-ju has been photographed by Jong-un's side ever since.

That is not to say Ri Sol-ju had any jealous involvement when her husband's erstwhile sweetheart was arrested on August 17—along with Mun Kyong-jin, the head of another musical group called the Unhasu Orchestra and 10 or 11 others—on charges of pornography. That is also not to say that Ri Sol-ju didn't have any involvement: Before she married Kim Jong-un, she too was a member of the Unhasu Orchestra, which makes Mun Kyong-jin her former colleague.

"They were accused of videotaping themselves having sex and selling the videos," reports Chosun Ilbo. A source also tells the paper that on August 20, the group was executed in front of their families, who were then sent to prison camps.* (North Korea actively practices guilt-by-association.)

Despite all this, a few Yahoo users would still like to know: "Do you think Kim Jong Un is hot?"

[h/t the Telegraph // Kim Jong-un and Ri Sol-ju photo by AP]

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

*Repeat for emphasis: A source also tells the paper that on August 20, the group was executed in front of their families, who were then sent to prison camps. Holy fuck.

At the Restaurant at Meadowood in Napa Valley, "the protein-light tasting [menu, featuring mostly vegetables] for two, plus wine pairings, will exceed $2,000. Is it worth it?" Hmm.

Earlier this week, we ran a post on 12-year-old Lillian Powers, a kid who had the audacity to do something productive over her summer break: She made a series of amazing 6-second short films via Vine. She screamed in public spaces (her "random shoutout" feature), she licked her cat, she deconstructed the modern practice of selfie-taking. From the hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of Facebook shares and Twitter mentions our post This 12-Year-Old Is a Vine Genius received, it was clear that many people had agreed with what probably seemed like a hyperbolic headline.

And then, it all went away.

As of this post, all of the Vines in our original Lillian Powers post are gone. Her videos are no longer in my Vine account's timeline. I worried that she or her mother became overwhelmed by the attention following our post (even though she had about 120,000 followers on Vine before I wrote anything about her) and closed her account. But then, after searching this morning, I discovered that Lillian Powers started a new Vine account, explaining that her old one had been suspended:

And then, an explanation:

"We found out why Vine suspended me: Because they say I'm too young to be on Vine. We're trying to fix it." This jibes with Vine's age rating, which raised from 12 to 17 in February following the explosion of pornography on the mini-movie platform. However, it makes no fucking sense to single out Lillian Powers, as the site is teeming with people who are "too young" to be on it. Lillian Powers is a victim of her own cleverness and popularity and stifling the creativity of someone who uses Vine just about better than anyone else that I've seen is horribly unjust. It's not right. It's not OK. Free Lillian.

In the meantime, Lillian is filling her account with new videos, including one of her being interviewed by Detroit's WWJ Newsradio 950:

She also made her greatest random shoutout yet:

I saved all of these videos and will repost if necessary. Just doing my small part to #FreeLillian. #FREELILLIAN.

I reached out to Vine/Twitter for a comment and so far have not heard back. I will update this post if and when I do. In the meantime, #FreeLillian.

After Earth failed. Lone Ranger flopped. R.I.P.D. fizzled. Studios' cash cow—the effects-laden, foreign-audience-compatible blockbuster—is drying up, and Hollywood is looking around for something new. What if the only thing that can save it… is another floundering industry?

Last week, in the first deal of its kind, 20th Century Fox made headlines by signing Epic, a new online literary platform from journalists Joshuah Bearman and Joshua Davis, to a two-year first-look agreement.

While optioning long magazine articles is nothing new (Bearman and Davis have 20 optioned pieces between them, one of the most famous to date being a Wired article by Bearman that turned into Academy Award-winner Argo), in the past, producers and studios dug in on specific articles, or, more recently, media companies like Condé Nast built out their own entertainment arms.

But no media companies have signed an overall with a major studio. The shift, which comes at a time when expensive effects-heavy summer tentpoles are tanking far more often than they're succeeding (the phrase "destruction fatigue" has been bandied about by one exec), can be seen as a signal that studios are ready to invest in grounded pieces that hinge on emotional engagement as their reliance on action and genre tentpoles with across-the-pond box office appeal wanes

I talked to Bearman and Davis (separately, thought the interview has been combined and lightly edited for clarity) to find out more about what this deal could signal for the future of Hollywood.

What are you looking for when you option articles for Epic?

Bearman: The idea of Epic was to do non-fiction online that has a really strong narrative, page-turner type stories. It's the types of stories we already do, but we gravitate towards narrative pieces pretty heavily: profiles with strong characters and really unusual settings.

Davis: We’re looking for extraordinary true stories. It could be anything. Sometimes, it’s a normal person in extraordinary circumstances. Other times, it’s about an extraordinary person in a wild part of the world. It’s the type of thing you know when you hear it: it gives you goosebumps. At least, that’s how I judge a story.

With Epic geared towards creating content for a Hollywood market, to what degree will Hollywood be sculpting the narrative of the stories being put forth on Epic?

Davis: We’re not geared towards creating content for Hollywood. We aim to tell great stories for everybody. We want to bring readers into interesting worlds and introduce them to fascinating people. The appeal of those kinds of stories is universal. They make great articles, great radio shows, great movies, and great campfire fodder. That’s in fact how I judge a story: Could I tell it around a campfire. A good story appeals to everybody.

Bearman: It's going to be the same as always, it's the same as doing a story for Wired or GQ, whwhatever the demands of the story require. For example, in "The Mercenary" [ed. note: Epic's first article, written by Davis] he does not solve the case. It's the same process as it would be in the magazine, not really anything different about the journalism part of it.

Davis: Part of the problem has been a pipeline issue: national magazines (the types of places that have traditionally published these pieces) only have room in each issue for a few feature stories. One might be a profile, another might be a how-to, or a cover package. That leaves room for only one long narrative piece. But Bearman and I have a ton of stories we’ve come across and want to tell. And a lot of them don’t fit in traditional magazines. There could be a story that’s amazing, but it’s 60 years old. National magazines like time pegs and will often pay less attention if there isn’t one. But we don’t care about that. All we care about is if it’s a great story. So that’s what Epic is focused on: telling gripping true stories.

Bearman: Those stories are hard to find - you poke around, pursue a story for a while, and then find out "This isn't quite panning out in the way I want." My next story is a complicated period thing, and I'm not sure it's a movie for Fox, but also it's a good story so it doesn't really matter. Or it could be for them, since Fox has all their different divisions —Fox 2000, New Regency, etc. There is diversity there at Fox and that's why they made sense as a partner.

To that end—how are you hoping to balance the line between producer and journalist? As a feature producer, there's a fair amount of fictionalizing certain story elements for sake of a more engaging film. Do you find that at odds with your role as a journalist?

Davis: Audiences are ready for something new. We aim to bring really cool true stories to readers and then, if possible, to the screen. Our role as producers is to keep the process grounded. I’m actually pretty excited that a big time studio wants journalists closely involved in the filmmaking process. I think it bodes well.

Bearman: Josh and I are already producers on our projects. We already essentially do that and that comes out of us being involved so heavily as producers on the creative side and the dvelopment phase. It stems from the fact that these are true stories, so when it comes time for the writer to come or the network or studio people to say "What can this be?" we often are there as a resource to keep it grounded and provide the real detail that is available for the story and the writer's inspiration. Research can form the basis for story points that may not even have been in the article.

The true story has to be adapated for narrative purpose, but often there's so much more texture, subtley, nuance and shades of character that you saw while reporting it—you know, meeting the real guy, seeing what they talk like, all this atmosphere—so that's how Josh and I both wound up working heavily with the writers and directors. Obviously the needs - it would never have occurred me to in the Argo story to have a chase down the tarmac, but that's why it was great that Chris [Terrio, the screenwriter] did it, because that's what made all the attention at the end. That was a fanciful ending that was earned by the whole rest of the film being so true to the source material - so those things can coexist creatively and effectively I've found.

Do you see this as a way to solve some of the revenue problems journalism has faced in recent years?

Davis: Long form non-fiction has been under threat. You just don’t see that many luxuriously long non-fiction pieces in print. The reasons vary. In the print world, every page printed costs a lot so editors tend to err on the side of cutting words. It’s also expensive to send a writer around the world to dig into someone’s life. At the same time, some argue that attention spans have gone down – that people don’t want to read long pieces anymore. I don’t believe that. I think people have always liked a really interesting, in-depth article. So, with Epic, we’re experimenting with ways of supporting those narratives and feel that there’s maybe some other ways of bringing them to readers. Luckily, the options are proliferating: Medium, Amazon, Apple, Audible, subscription models, donation models, sponsorships, ancillary rights (film/tv), syndication, and even print (i.e. a story could appear both on a digital platform and in a traditional print magazine, like Bearman’s Coronado High article). Hopefully there’s some combination that will support long form narrative non-fiction.

Bearman: I mean that is the hope—on a very small scale, that's the hope. Josh and I have already been doing that on an individual scale. Josh is a little more stable having been on contract with Wired for more than a decade. As a freelancer I don't have that and if it wasn't for movies and ancillary revenue, I woudn't be a magazine editor, I'd have to do something else. Especially to do these stories, since they take three, four, five months. My current GQ story took a solid year, I'd say. No matter what your magazine fee is on that, it's not worth the effort. You couldn't really pay for that time. What we're imagining is we can develop some very modest scale or insitutionalize this in some way, the idea that you can generate revenue from your stories in other places. Historically there's nothing new about this—you would deal with books, publishing. You would write a New Yorker piece and it would open up a book contract—a handsome $300,00 book contract was not atypical—that's how people paid for themselves.

But now that's harder and it's not that easy in the movie business either. The first option of mine was Argo and that was as big a surprise and dramatic for me, but I've optioned only 10 stories and only once have I gotten near the amount of money that I got for Argo. The movie business is under pressure and not freewheeling with money either. Even they want to find the value of stories in other media and everyone is just trying to figure that out and this is a place where we can try and figure it out as well.

What do you think a deal like this says about the future of the studio system and Hollywood? We're in era of big blockbusters and now you have Fox stepping up and asking for these very realistic and grounded ideas. Do you think movies like Argo, or the upcoming Fifth Estate have started to move the needle back towards interesting real-life stories?

Bearman: Well I think that they are realizing that was the lost audience—the serious audience, let's say—and Lincoln did it better than anybody thought. It was basically a procedural about the 13th amendment, a souped up PBS special, but it was deeply compelling. My favorite movie of the year was Bernie, and it was based on a magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth. Now American Hustle, etc.—there's also a demand for it. These movies aren't exactly ordinary people, I don't think Oridnary People is going to come back. You think about the time Last Picture Show was a huge commercial hit and that's probably not coming back exactly, but these true stories that have real humane motion to them that also are big dramatic stories like Argo, and I think there's an audience for them. Argo was heavily marketed around it being a true story, and that got the audience engaged. The same year the Bond franchise broke $1 billion for the first time—which is exciting, I like all the Bond movies—but nobody applauds at the end of a Bond movie. At the end of every screening of Argo, everyone applauded, these were lives of chracters they knew to be real people and that's who they were rooting for.