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Gunmen Botch Robbery at Mall in Kenya, Killing At Least 20

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Gunmen Botch Robbery at Mall in Kenya, Killing At Least 20

A group of gunmen charged into a mall in Nairobi on Saturday, firing indiscriminately and killing at least 20, according to CNN.

The gunmen have taken multiple shoppers hostage in the high-end mall, after reportedly attempting to rob a single shop. The BBC reports that at least seven people are being held hostage.

The attack began around midday Saturday, when the robbers threw grenades into the shopping mall. The Westgate Mall is popular with wealthy Kenyans and expatriates living in the Kenyan capital.

"I could hear the gunfire moving towards the main entrance of the shopping mall, so some people ran out of our cafe in a kind of panic, and quite a number just fell down as flat as possible on the ground," Arjen Westra, who escaped the attack, told the BBC.

Gunmen Botch Robbery at Mall in Kenya, Killing At Least 20

The stand-off continues this afternoon as police have surrounded the mall and are attempting to free shoppers who have taken cover, and shoppers who are now being held hostage.

Gunmen Botch Robbery at Mall in Kenya, Killing At Least 20

The BBC received the following emails from a shopper taking cover in the mall:

11:33: Am hiding in a store, my next person (is) an Indian shot. Severe shooting going on within the premises. I left (a) parcel in my car mid of the road, praying.

12:28: Thugs inside, we don't know when the police will rescue us, all over TVs and radio, we are warned not to move, am in a dark store, more police coming.

12:38: I don't even know if I stopped engine of car. Nobody is going out, only police. Praying they ditch thugs out. It is a big shopping mall, now knowing where thugs are is hard. Getting out of here is a mystery. My next person (is) an Indian shot and bleeding.

We'll continue to update throughout the day.

[Associated Press]


A Nuclear Bomb Almost Exploded in North Carolina

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A Nuclear Bomb Almost Exploded in North Carolina

A newly released document, obtained by journalist Eric Schlosser, details that a nuclear bomb 260 times as powerful as the one that destroyed Hiroshima almost detonated in North Carolina, when a B-52 bomber crashed in 1961.

Two 4 megaton bombs, model Mark 39, broke off from the bomber as it went into a tailspin and crashed. One bomb landed safely, with all four safety mechanisms intact. The other bomb however, experience three separate failures of its safety mechanisms, with only a single low-voltage switch saving the East Coast from disaster. The bomb landed twelve miles outside of Goldsboro, North Carolina. For years the government had denied that single switch saved the lives of millions.

A 1969 government document outlines exactly how close the U.S. was to the third nuclear explosion in a populated area. The document, which was obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request, concludes that "one simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch stood between the United States and a major catastrophe." The explosion would have spread fatal amounts of fallout all the way up to New York City.

Apparently, when the bomb hit the ground, the firing mechanism was activated, however, that final safety mechanism held, saving millions of lives. Still, the report details just how unsafe the transport of nuclear weapons was (and remains to be). Schlosser has just released a book detailing the at least 700 "significant" accidents that involved thousands of nuclear weapons between 1950 and 1968.

"The US government has consistently tried to withhold information from the American people in order to prevent questions being asked about our nuclear weapons policy," Schlosser told the Guardian. "We were told there was no possibility of these weapons accidentally detonating, yet here's one that very nearly did."

Only three days after Kennedy's inaugural address, the U.S. was just one switch away from calamity.

Kenyan Mall Shooting Now a Suspected Terrorist Attack

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The Guardian is reporting that the attack this morning at a mall in Nairobi was not a "botched robbery" but rather a suspected terrorist attack. The gunmen reportedly told Muslims to leave, and then began firing on non-Muslims.

Just Wait Til You See My Deck, Whisper Wealthy Home Sellers

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Just Wait Til You See My Deck,  Whisper Wealthy Home Sellers

Today, the New York Times Real Estate section fills us in on "whisper listings" — listings so rare, so expensive, so downright sexy, that they are only whispered about. Wealthy sellers don't even bother to list their apartment, instead just relying on a shadowy network of "well-connected" agents to find a buyer through word-of-mouth.

The very apparent subtext in this piece is that there is something so very sexy about the idea of an apartment listing that can only be received orally.

“Sellers feel cocky. Sellers feel like they have the ball,” Brian K. Lewis, a real estate broker told the New York Times. "In an improving economy with no inventory, they have the asset people want.”

“We as brokers know everything is always for sale at a price," said broker Shaun Osher. With whisper listings apparently, everything is on the table.

“I said I would do it as long as they gave me everything I wanted,” Pamela Liebman, the chief executive of Corcoran, said of selling her Miami home through the whisper network.

Without the weird, sexy subtext, the article is mostly about how the super-wealthy don't even need to go through the hassle of listings and can instead rely on the very un-sexy network of other middle-aged wealthy people to spread the word. Kinda sexy in an Eyes Wide Shut way, I guess.

[Shutterstock]

A Letter in Reply: Dear Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai, and Marlon

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A Letter in Reply: Dear Mychal, Darnell, Kiese, Kai, and Marlon

I've read the previous essays you've written for Gawker's True Stories series and I just read your collective piece, “Echo” in Kiese’s new book, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. I heard, and really felt, the sinew of pain and joy in your autobiographical offerings and would like to respond with my own.

I was born over 40 years ago in a small African village located in an eastern city on the Atlantic coast of North America called the Bronx. I can’t say that my childhood was idyllic but it certainly didn’t resemble the “bleak childhood fantasy” Baldwin experienced. And I would certainly relive it again. For a child growing up in the 1970s, the Boogie Down was a dangerously magical place. Life was structured around stoops and bodegas, play and penny candies, stickball, basketball, and games like Ringolevio and Hot Beans and Butter.

There was always one Black person whom you played with and whom you just knew was Black like you (of the Negrus americanus variety) and then one day you heard his mom call him in a language you didn’t know—Puerto Rican or Dominican Spanish—and then he would look at you like he was a part of a spy ring and his cover had just been blown, and you would look at him with that look that said without actually saying the Richard Pryor line: “ What kinda n*gga is you?” Eventually there would be some other dude the two of you played ball with and his mother would call him too, but in language that sounded eerily like English but usually was accompanied with some elegant phrase like “Bumboclot.” This had you and your Puerto Rican or Dominican friend (of the Negrus latinus americanus variety) looking at him with that same, “What kinda n*gga is you?” look.

We played often and sometimes we fought. Everyone thought they could scrap until the Jamaicans (we called them West Indians) changed the game with a strange new weapon—the headbutt. In the world of knuckle-up street fighting, the headbutt was the equivalent of the atomic bomb. Needless to say, there weren’t many fights with the Jamaican dudes. Part of still believes that they were the reason guns became the weapon of choice in the South Bronx because once a n*gga headbutted you, you really had few actionable comeback options.

I’m joking of course. Kinda.

My father had a tight grip on the bottle and loose hands when it came to my mom, so she left him for good when I was seven. I never saw him after that. Never really missed him. It is a loss that had a tumultuous and giving beauty. He gave me a five-speed Schwinn, and I am told I have his dimples and charisma, so there is that.

Like most hoods, mine had categories of poverty, there was poor, there was po’, and there was P (pronounced Puh) for all those folks like my family who were so poor they couldn’t even afford the two "o's" and the "r."

I have lived on both coasts. My mom heard Gladys Knight and when she said, "L.A. proved too much for the man," my mom figured she was a woman and what was too much for the man, would be just enough for her, a strong woman.

So we moved to Los Angeles—South Central, Los Angeles, to be precise. When you are from the bottom and you change cities or states, most often you don’t really change your dire circumstances; you simply rearrange them into different categories of despair, which you hope will be more manageable. South Central was also a dangerously magical place, too, but that experience was given motive force.

Literally.

The automobile introduced a new concept into my ghetto lexicon: drive-bys. I survived the killing streets. Many of my friends did not—including some who are still on top of the ground.

I wouldn't say that I was ever "thugged out" but you won't find me sipping tea with my pinky poked out, either. I would say I am a combination of two types of educational systems—the 'hood and the good. I believe that what defines a person is not what knocks them down, but what they get up from. There is nothing really all that exceptional or outstanding about me. I am not the kind of cat that is going to turn heads, but my being—the way I exist in the world, my sense of style, humor and personality—has opened many doors over the years, and I have tried to hold the door open long enough for another sister or brother to walk through. The echo each of you created in your letters opened a door for me.

Mychal Denzel Smith: As I read your letter, I smiled because I saw in you a wonderful example of the giving beauty of loss. You are 26, the same age as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X when they stepped onto the national stage. In your story where you saw Kryptonite, I saw the making of Superman. The Martins and Malcolms of our world are hewn out of the bedrock of hurt, self-doubt, loss, and self-discovery. They are not born. Every brother in our society has what I call a Walter Lee moment. As you recall, Walter Lee Young is the character played by Sidney Portier in the film adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s generous play A Raisin in the Sun.

There is a moment in which Walter Lee has lost the money they inherited from their fathers life insurance policy. The family is worried about being able to move into the all-white Chicago suburb of Clybourne Park after the neighbor “welcoming committee” has offered to buy them out to prevent them from integrating the neighborhood. At first he agrees to sell out. He'd been broken (or so he thinks). He feels the weight of responsibility and it’s crushing him. And when the moment of truth arrives, he looks at his son, his wife, his sister, and his mother and he finds the strength to stand up and shoulder the weight of manhood. He rejects the offer and tells Mister Charlie, aka Mark Lindner, that he and his family are moving in after all. That’s the Walter Lee moment. Each of us has a Walter Lee moment where we must decide to stand up, shoulder the weight or buckle under it. Manhood is a process that ends in products, though the process never ends.

Try not to give too much energy to arriving at manhood on time; it is far better to be in time. As an elder told me once in my rush to arrive, "All time is real and understanding that is power."

Darnell Moore: I don’t know what its like to be a gay man. Word on the street is that I was trying to holla at the honeys in the nursery on the day I arrived—but I do know what it’s like not be loved fully by those whose purpose should be to love you fully. When I was younger I was one of those dudes that thought that to be gay and a man were antonyms. I was certainly a part of that riptide that pulled a lot of brothers down just trying to keep my head above water.

I am sorry. Truly.

As I got older saw more of the world and saw more of the world in me, I came to understand that what I was pushing back on was the ways in which gay men’s assertion of manhood disturbed my own notions of manhood. Much in the same way that Black agency forces white folks to recalibrate their sense of identity, so too does gay men’s agency force us "straight" Black men to rethink our notions of manhood and gender. I believe the term you used to describe this was "heteronormativity." My dexterity with complex concepts sometimes get the better of me. I hope I didn’t do violence to what you meant.

Let me just say, the loss of the acceptance of ones humanity can be powerfully disabling, if we allow it to be. As I continue to grow up, I have learned from our gay brothers and lesbian sisters that a part of growing into adulthood is about finding the world that welcomes you, all of you—or if you cant find it, having the courage and vision to create it. That, to me, is revolution.

Kiese Laymon: I'm down for you like four flat tires. Thank you for your honesty. Much of our bravado, swagger, and virulent sexism that informs the unstable elements of manhood are as much the result of whom we imagine women to be as they are about whom men actually are. Thank you for reminding me.

Like white supremacy, patriarchal identity is built upon a shared lie, in which we, and many of our sisters, are complicit. You are right when you say to “give up the game” is to tell on ourselves. We protect sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy not just to protect other men, but to protect that part of this shared lie that our own identities rest so unsteadily upon. This palimpsest of manhood needs to be erased in order to rediscover a kind of manhood that is constructed from a sense of personhood rooted in women and men in contact and conversation with the values that animate our best spiritual selves.

I am reaching, I know, but to dream is free. It is the failure to dream that is exorbitantly expensive. Only a fool imagines himself a writer with pen but no ink. And I thank you for reminding me that it is the fool who thinks that only men create and shape other men. We have been quite foolish.

Kai Green: When Kiese asked me to participate in the conversation and to reply to all the letters, I thought “I got this. How hard can it be to respond to brothers talking and thinking about a spectrum of manhood?”—and then I read your letter. A woman who becomes a “transman” and who loves women and men is a book, not a letter. I wanted to know more about what unique insights you might have about men, about women, about life as a transgender person, as a person of African ancestry. I want to know how these multivalent perspectives informed your thinking, being, and doing as a transman.

Reading your letter put me in mind of the work by Lorand Matory’s Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion and Ifi Amadiume’s Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Both examine the intricate ways in which Africans have thought of, conceptualized, understood and inhabited gender and identity within specific cultural context. Stay with me: I also wonder to what extent our investment in Western worldview delimits our ability to understand gender and identity as spiritual realities that have material manifestations.

Is it possible that one could be born with a woman spirit in a man’s form and vice versa? I don’t know. What I do know is that African societies have wrestled with these questions in the past, relying on worldviews that accommodate much more expansive operational notions of gender and identity. Of course, by now you must also be thinking but what about the anti-LGBT sentiments on the continent? I would note the impact of colonialism but also that all societies have their range of complexities and contradictions and that we must examine all of it in the hopes of constructing a more harmonious world, a world that welcomes all of us, or as I said before, the courage to create a new one.

I was educated within a tradition that taught me that the goal of thinkers and scholars is not to produce answers but to ask better questions. Perhaps your courage will yield better questions. I hope you maintain the courage and curiosity to pursue them openly.

Marlon Peterson: Kierkegaard wrote that we live life forward and understand it backwards. I suppose there is a quality of truth in that statement. Looking back offers us the opportunity for reflection that helps us understand our current location. It’s horrible situation to feel like one is in prison whether incarcerated or not. Like you, I have been incarcerated. Twice, actually. Unlike you, I have never been in what you call, “Mister Gilmore’s house.”

I have always been blessed with good women in my life, but I wasn’t always good to them. In fact, I was quite mean at times. I have never raised my hands to a woman, but I wont front and say that its something I never considered. And while I am proud of that I have never physically abused a woman, I know that I have been emotionally abusive. I see infidelity as a form of emotional abuse.

It wasn’t until I decided to confront my own hurt that I began to change and move closer to the man I wanted to be. And brother, confronting that kind of hurt is like ripping duct tape off of a gaping wound and pouring rubbing alcohol on it.

I don’t have to tell you how repressed anger and hurt eat away at the body and soul. I think there is giving wisdom in your suggestion that we not suffocate our spirits by holding in love. My hope for you is the same as my hope for myself that: that we find a good partner and love that partner like s/he is as essential to your life as oxygen. No matter the question, for Black people, literally and figuratively incarcerated, Black Love is always the answer.

Always.

***

Brothers, in looking over my letter I realize that I have violated the most basic rule of an epistolary relationship: brevity.

I apologize.

My hope is that as we build, share, think and live with the kind of humility that acknowledges we not only have a lot of questions, but that we are also willing to live and work our way openly and courageously to the answers. Thank you for your letters. Thank you for your work.

In life, love and liberation,

Ádìsá

Àdisà Àjàmú is the Executive Director of the Atunwa Collective, a community development think tank in Los Angeles, California. He is the co-author, along with Thomas Parham and Joseph White, of the fourth edition of The Psychology of Blacks: Centering our perspectives in the African consciousness (2010). Currently, he is completing two books, a collection of short stories and a collection of essays on African (American) life and culture.

In a project overseen by contributing editor Kiese Laymon, Gawker is running a personal essay every weekend. Please send suggestions to saturdays@gawker.com.

[Photo via Getty]

In Oregon, a woman yelled "Gun!"

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In Oregon, a woman yelled "Gun!" in a crowded movie theater while witnessing a confrontation between a 70-year-old man and a father of a 14-year-old boy whom the older gentleman had just urinated on. The movie theater was evacuated, but no gun was ever found.

How To Make A Reuben Sandwich And Embrace Entropy

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How To Make A Reuben Sandwich And Embrace Entropy

It's good to live a tidy, orderly life. Clean shirt, clean face, sensibly organized underwear drawer (I subcategorize alphabetically by superhero!), and so on. People like tidiness; they trust it. It makes things easier. Food, too, can be tidy: the neat, clean geometry of sushi; the artful towers of nouvelle cuisine; the perfect 180-degree turn you execute when you see Guy's American Kitchen and Bar in front of you. Tidy. Neat. Clean.

The problem with the tidy, orderly life, as anyone can see, is that it doesn't leave much room for a Reuben sandwich—which, factually, is as neat and clean as the average tropical storm. All that wet sauerkraut and gloopy Russian dressing; the melty, runny cheese and the greasy meat: The Reuben is the freight-train-derailing-into-a-fireworks-factory of sandwiches. The enemy of the kempt. The scourge of the tidy. The bane of the shirtfront.

This is particularly true if, as any right-thinking morally upstanding individual inarguably must, you insist upon eating a Reuben with your hands because you are not a goddamn fascist. Just you try and get that fucker to your face without some rogue cheese-strand or a wayward dab of Russian dressing or a kamikaze beef-slice leaping free to apply itself to your breast pocket, or to the crotch of your pants, or, somehow, to creep behind you, where it will write SLOB across the back of your shirt in permanent grease stains.

And that is a problem, because the other scientific fact about the Reuben, in addition to its thermonuclear capacity for mess-making, is that it is the best goddamn sandwich in the world. As we shall see. Let's make one.


The first step is to acquire corned beef. If, for you, this means brining an entire beef brisket for two friggin' weeks, then braising it for a few hours and slicing it thin across the grain, good for you. On the other hand, if it means resting your elbow on a glass deli counter, raising a jaunty finger, and saying, "A pound of corned beef, my good man, and slice it thin if you please," that is also good. Having corned beef is good. Knowing how to make corned beef is good. Talking like Clarence the Guardian Angel is kinda weird, and probably not as sexy as you're hoping—but, saving yourself the hassle of brining a beef brisket for half a month is definitely good.

Now, preheat your oven to 400 degrees, because you are going to cook your Reuben in it. That's right, dammit! You're gonna roast your goddamn Reuben like some kind of madman!

Lookit. If you worked at your basic crappy-yet-delicious lunch-counter joint and somebody came in and ordered a Reuben, you would of course high-five that person because that right there is a person with good taste in sandwiches—but also, you would cook their Reuben on the griddle, because that's a quick way to achieve toasty bread and a hot sandwich. The corned beef would be lukewarm and the cheese only semi-melted and the sauerkraut distractingly cool, but, hell, the Reuben would still taste OK, because it would still be a Reuben.

Likewise, if you worked in a wiener-y post-Starbucks middlebrow chain bread-boutique with a bunch of random accent symbols over all the vowels in its unidentifiably Euro-flavored name and Norah Jones music playing on the speakers 24 hours a day, and someone came in and ordered the annoying gluten-free macrobiotic "Reubenti" with alfalfa sprouts in place of sauerkraut and pages from a Michael Cunningham novel in place of corned beef, you would smash it in a hot panini press, because that, too, is a quick way to accomplish a toasted sandwich. And the sandwich would be 85 percent bread (horrifying gluten-free "bread"), because that is the only way to fit it in the panini press without squeezing all the fillings out, but it would still taste OK—or, well, no, it wouldn't, but no one would care, because when people go to those places the food is just a garnish for bourgeois self-congratulation.

The point, here, is that while the flattop griddle and panini press are more familiar tools for preparing a Reuben, you should not make the mistake of thinking of them as the correct tools. You, courageous home cook, have an advantage over the sandwich-counter guy and the chain bread-boutique grad student: You have the time to deploy a Reuben-preparation technique that will produce uniform heat throughout your sandwich, and all the exquisitely melty cheese and gloriously runny dressing this entails. So. Preheat your fucking oven, and quit with the backtalk.

Now, while your oven is preheating, haul out a good-sized bowl and make Russian dressing in it. This is ridiculously straightforward, so we will embellish it somewhat by making fun of food weenies while we work: Whisk together some mayonnaise (but mew mew mew fresh egg yolks mew m'pew pew!), some ketchup (bork bork bork homemade tomato purée bork!), and roughly 72 gallons of the most ferociously piquant jarred horseradish (clucky cluck freshly grated horseradish cluck clucky cluck!) you can find. Go crazy with the horseradish here. Your completed Russian dressing should make you acutely fearful for your life, just like a real Russian person would; if it does not do that, you have not added enough horseradish yet.

If you want to gussy up your Russian dressing with pimentos or chopped chives or a dash of hot sauce or whatever, go for it—but be careful, because too much gussying will leave you with thousand Island dressing instead of Russian, and Reubens are not made with thousand Island dressing, and we are making Reubens here and not some whole other goddamn sandwich. Russian dressing should mostly taste like fiery, angry horseradish. Keep that in mind. Спасибо.

So now your oven is heated and your Russian dressing is prepared and you may start assembling your Reuben. But first! Here is a step that you may freely skip, and not just because this is an internet food column and therefore powerless to stop you. Lightly toast two slices of rye or pumpernickel or marble rye bread. But wait, you are sobbing: Why should I toast my bread if I'm just gonna cook this stupid thing in the oven? That is a fair and reasonable question, buttface. The answer is that there's gonna be a fair amount of Russian dressing going on this bread, and that giving the bread a pre-toasting before it goes in the oven will help protect it against dissolving to bread pudding as it soaks up that dressing. It's fine not to give a shit about that: Your Reuben is going to be a friggin' mess anyway, and maybe you don't want to take any measly half-measures to mitigate that, and that's OK. On the other hand, pre-toasting the bread will help to ensure that you may avoid the terrible, disgraceful scenario of eating a fucking sandwich with a knife and fork, which is something worth considering.

(Note the word "lightly" in the preceding paragraph, though. Don't fully toast your bread. You don't want to have to bite through stone to eat your Reuben—unless you do want that, in which case you are an insane person, or a Goron. Toast the bread juuuuust enough to give it some crispiness, and no more.)

Let's pause to talk about the bread here. Traditionally and typically, a Reuben is made with light rye (or sissel) bread, and that is absolutely the best choice. However, pumpernickel rye is damn tasty, too, and so is splitting the difference and using marble rye. What's not OK is swapping out the rye altogether and using, like, focaccia or ciabatta or brioche, or friggin' challah or a bagel or a croissant or a sliced goddamn cronut or two rafts of fucking ramen noodles, or whatever other cutesy foodie bullshit you're just dying to post to your fucking Instagram, you fuckin' schmuck. Not because it's nontraditional or unorthodox to do so, but because the rye flavor is a core ingredient of the Reuben sandwich, and we are making a Reuben sandwich and not some other sandwich. OK? Rye bread. Rye.

Assemble your Reuben! You have some latitude, here, for how you want to organize things and in what proportions, so long as your Reuben contains the following between its slices of some variety of rye bread: some of that corned beef, some sliced Swiss cheese (preferably the lacy kind, because, fuck it, it's just better), a generous portion of sauerkraut, and a bunch of your Russian dressing.

Typically, delis like to heap 94 pounds of corned beef onto a Reuben and dress it with a thimbleful of the other ingredients, so that unimaginative gluttons can

  • A) be protected from scary, scary stuff like sauerkraut and Russian dressing—y'know, the stuff that gives a Reuben its actual character, for chrissakes;
  • B) feel like they are getting a lotta fuggin' meat for their money.

The problem with this approach is that it yields an unwieldy, unbalanced, chewy, overly salty sandwich that lands like a grand piano in your stomach and makes you feel parched and like you are going to die for the rest of the day. A smarter approach is to aim for a more reasonable ratio of meat-to-other-stuff, so that you can enjoy the Reubeniness of your Reuben, which is after all a Reuben and not a corned beef sandwich. Shoot for, say, a 2:1 or 3:1 meat-to-cheese ratio, and a 1:1 cheese-to-sauerkraut ratio, and a whoa-that-sandwich-is-literally-just-floating-in-a-big-bowl-of-Russian-dressing:1 ratio of Russian dressing to everything else.

The best way to assemble your Reuben is to give each slice of gently toasted bread a hearty schmear of Russian dressing, then top one of the slices with, in order: half of the cheese, then all of the meat, then another schmear of dressing, then sauerkraut, then the remaining half of the cheese, and then the other slice of bread. If the slices of Swiss are so large that there's Swiss cheese hanging over the edge of your sandwich, tear those dangling edges off and stuff them inside the sandwich; the cheese is gonna melt during cooking, and if it's hanging outside of the sandwich when it melts, you're not gonna get to eat it. Some of it is going to escape anyway, and that is just a goddamn tragedy. Let's try to minimize it.

Now, wrap that sandwich in a sheet of aluminum foil and cram it in the oven for, oh, 20 minutes or so. Set a timer. In about 10 minutes, your cooking Reuben will begin to emit a beefy, cheesy, sauerkrauty, Russiany aroma that will absolutely vaporize your shirt; try to refrain from diving into the oven after it. Maybe handcuff yourself to something?

So 20 minutes have gone by and your timer has gone off. Extract your Reuben from the oven and unwrap its aluminum foil sleeping bag. It is done. Behold. Cut it in half, pick it up with your goddamn hands, and eat it.


Would you just fucking look at that sloppy piece of shit. It has melted cheese all running down its sides and mixing with the dressing and the liquid from the sauerkraut and the small amount of liquid fat that has rendered out of the corned beef; the steam from the hot liquids makes it look like some dangerous thing that just staggered out of a burning building. Your face. We are talking about your face. That is what the Reuben sandwich has done to your face.

It has also—the salty corned beef and tart sauerkraut, the punchy dressing which is spurting all over your goddamn shirt and the rich, pungent cheese and the slight bitterness of the rye, oh man oh man oh man—made your eyes roll about and your hair stand on end, your cheeks flush and a series of indecent guttural noises erupt from your throat. You can clean your face and your shirt and your kitchen later. For now, embrace the squalor. It's awfully tasty.


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Albert Burneko is an eating enthusiast and father of two. His work can be found destroying everything of value in his crumbling home. Peevishly correct his foolishness at albertburneko@gmail.com, or publicly and succinctly on Twitter @albertburneko. You can find lots more Foodspin at foodspin.deadspin.com.

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"I'm the Level 3 Sex Offender All Of You Have Been Talking About"

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"I'm the Level 3 Sex Offender All Of You Have Been Talking About"

Thursday night, a sex offender stepped in front of a microphone and tried to explain himself to his new community of Belmont, Massachusetts. "My name is Carl Peterson. 'I'm the level 3 sex offender all of you have been talking about," the 48-year-old told his neighbors in the high school auditorium.

In an extraordinary piece of writing, Belmont Patch editor Franklin Tucker describes what happened next.

Tucker writes:

The problem is all you know, all you get to know about my problem is what you read ... which says I'm the most dangerous and the most likely to reoffend of all sex offenders. It also says my offense was the rape against a child," said Peterson, as state officials, law enforcement and Belmont Police who spoke earlier stood behind him. Speaking in a calm, slightly high-pitched flat voice, Peterson described in the most general terms a single incident, an assault, he committed on his 14-year-old niece in 2000.

Things soon got heated however,

"I don't want to hear this!" a women cried out from the back of the hall, breaking the tension with the outburst.

"Just go!," said another.

"It happened over the course of a weekend 12 years ago," said Peterson.

"Nobody cares," came another response.

But for the majority in the hall, Peterson's admission was compelling.

"This is important," explained a resident who said she came to the meeting not knowing anything about Peterson or even the issue of a level 3 sex offender living in town.

The town continued to express their unease:

"One of the scariest thing while spending time in prison was wondering ... that it will not happen again," said Peterson, saying that he has been in therapy for the past eight years with Dr. Carol Ball, a licensed psychologist in Arlington and a founder of New England Forensic Associates, "to answer that question."

"At this point, I know that it will never happen again," said Peterson.

"You don't."

Peterson finished his appeal to the community by reminding that he himself was a father of a 14-year-old and that he was not himself immune to the fear of sex offenders living in their community. But again, he assured them he was no threat.

At the end of the meeting, as the audience was leaving, a smartly-dressed man came up to Peterson, shook his hand and said it was a "brave" thing for him to acknowledge what he did and present himself to the town.

Peterson simply nodded and stared straight ahead.

[Shutterstock]


30 People Dead as Terrorists Remain in Nairobi Mall

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30 People Dead as Terrorists Remain in Nairobi Mall

An attack by gunman on an upscale Nairobi mall, initially believed to be a botch robbery, has now been confirmed as a terrorist attack. Al-Shabab, a Somalian terrorist organization, has taken credit for the attacks, which has left 30 people dead and 60 people wounded.

Al-Shahab has stated that the attack was in retaliation for the presence of Kenyan forces inside of Somalia. A series of twitter messages, posted by the New York Times, reads "By land, air and sea, Kenyan forces invaded our Muslim country, killing hundreds of Muslims in the process and displacing thousands more. The Kenyan government, however, turned a deaf ear to our repeated warnings and continued to massacre innocent Muslims in Somalia."

As night fell in Nairobi, the gunman remained in the mall, while police officers continued to surround it in a tense standoff. The mall had been popular with the Kenyan elite and western diplomats. Seven hostages have now been released by the gunman, however an unknown amount of civilians remain unaccounted for inside the mall.

All That Biden Family "Pressure" Led to Caroline ­Biden's Breakdown

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All That Biden Family "Pressure" Led to Caroline ­Biden's Breakdown

It's not the easiest to be the niece of our extremely powerful vice-president, and according to her friends, Caroline Biden just couldn't take all that pressure.

“She would complain about it all the time,” her friend Paul Johnson Calderon, told the New York Post following Caroline's scuffle with the NYPD this week. “She’s surrounded by a lot of people who use her because of who she is. Guys would want to date her because of who her ­uncle is.”

The NYPD were called to the young Biden's Tribeca apartment on Tuesday morning when she got into a fight with her roommate, then took a swing at a female NYPD officer (which, btw, would have resulted in some serious charges for anyone else). She was arrested and booked with the comparatively minor charge of resisting arrest.

While enrolled in Georgetown, Biden underwent treatment for alcohol and Adderall addiction, and Calderon believes Biden was still abusing pills and alcohol.

“The pressure of being Joe Biden’s niece made her totally unravel,” Calderon said. “It’s a desire for attention, a cry for help. She’s a very complicated girl who has a lot of feelings and a lot of issues.” On Wednesday morning, Biden was bizarrely transported out of a police precinct while covered in a blanket.

The vice-president's office, apparently having better things to do, did not return the New York Post's request for comment.

[Andrew Fitzsimons/PatrickMcMulla]

Giant Pacific Ocean typhoon update: Still heading straight at Hong Kong, "with a width of nearly 700

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Giant Pacific Ocean typhoon update: Still heading straight at Hong Kong, "with a width of nearly 700 miles and carrying sustained winds of 139 miles per hour."

The Dark Side of the iPhone Lines

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Not all people waiting in line for iPhones this week were homeless men being exploited. Some people were just... actually, as this video shows, a lot of people were confused why they were living outside for a phone.

Some were doing it to sell it online for thousands of dollars. Others were being paid to do it. Either way, this outstanding short film by Casey Neistat documents the iPhone lines in New York City, filled with Apple enthusiasts, confused foreigners, and a woman sleeping in a sealed garbage bag. Total madness.

Newark Mayor and presumptive Senator Cory Booker appeared in a pitch for a reality show that would h

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Newark Mayor and presumptive Senator Cory Booker appeared in a pitch for a reality show that would have highlighted the rise of Newark real estate developer Tate George. Embarrassingly, the former NBA player George was running a large Ponzi scheme at the time. But this is just what happen when you have a lot of friends.

Lawyers in U.S. Naval Academy Rape Trial Grill Victim, Call Her a 'Ho'

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Lawyers in U.S. Naval Academy Rape Trial Grill Victim, Call Her a 'Ho'

Well, this is completely sickening: the defense lawyers for three former U.S. Naval Academy football players accused of raping their classmate spent roughly thirty hours over the course of several days grilling the victim about her sex habits. The questions — which were asked in a public hearing — were intrusive, victim-blaming, and humiliating. The victim was asked whether she wore underwear to the party at which she was raped, whether she apologized to one of her accused rapists "for being a ho," and how wide she opened her mouth during oral sex. Absolutely, totally vile.

Almost two years ago, the victim awoke with no memory of the previous night. After reading posts on social media, she realized that she'd been raped by three of her classmates, Tra’ves Bush, Eric Graham and Joshua Tate. She was originally hesitant to press charges, and clearly rightfully so. Her rape trial is an Article 32 proceeding, which is a military hearing meant to determine whether or not a case will be sent to court-martial; according to the New York Times, Article 32 hearings "permit questions not allowed in civilian courts and can include cross-examinations of witnesses so intense that legal experts say they frighten many victims from coming forward."

The Times' depiction of the victim's cross-examination by the defense is nauseating:

In the Article 32 cross-examination, defense lawyers repeatedly asked the midshipman about a consensual sexual encounter she said she had the next day. In some of the most widely disseminated testimony, Andrew Weinstein, a lawyer for Mr. Bush, asked the woman whether she wore a bra or other underwear to the party and whether she “felt like a ho” afterward. Lt. Cmdr. Angela Tang, a lawyer for Mr. Graham, also asked the woman repeatedly about her oral sex technique, arguing over objections from the prosecution that oral sex would indicate the “active participation” of the woman and therefore consent.

In a civilian trial, questions about a woman's underwear and how she performs oral sex would not be permitted, for about one thousand obvious reasons.

Says Diane H. Mazur, an emeritus law professor at the University of Florida, "What this case shows is that we think the military justice system can somehow solve the sexual assault problem, but it can’t." Sen. Kirsten E. Gillibrand's bill calling for military sexual assault cases to be removed from the chain of command is up for debate this fall. This horrifically-handled case proves how necessary such legislation is.

In the meantime the lawyer representing the rape survivor has filed a federal lawsuit to strip the Naval Academy's superintendent of authority over the case.

"Intrusive Grilling in Rape Case Raises Alarm on Military Hearings" [NYT]

Mumford & Sons are going on an "indefinite hiatus."


Standoff in Kenya: 59 Dead as Hostages Remain Held in Terror Attack

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Standoff in Kenya: 59 Dead as Hostages Remain Held in Terror Attack

In the largest terrorist attack in Kenya since the 1998 bombings of two American embassies, masked gunmen associated with the Somali militant group al-Shabab stormed an upscale mall, killing at least 59 people and taking an unknown amount hostage.

After a tense standoff overnight, with armed forces surrounding the mall, any attempt to engage the terrorists has been placed on hold while authorities try to determine where and how many hostages they have. In a Twitter post, al-Shabab has said there will be no negotiations with the Kenyan government, the New York Times reports.

Standoff in Kenya: 59 Dead as Hostages Remain Held in Terror Attack

At noon Saturday, around 10-15 gunmen burst into the Westgate mall, a popular destination for wealthy Kenyans and foreign visitors. After reportedly instructing all Muslims to leave, the gunmen began firing on civilians, leaving a horrifying scene with shoppers taking cover and wheeling out the wounded in shopping carts. By Saturday night, bodies littered the steps of the monument to Kenya's relative prosperity. French, Chinese, British, Ghanaian and Canadian citizens have been reported as among the dead.

As the attack reached its 24th hour, Kenyan interior minister Joe Lenku stressed that any further operations would have to be "very, very delicate." Kenyan forces will soon attempt to free the hostages being held by the Muslim fighters, who have vowed to fight to the death. Al-Shabab claims that there are 36 hostages in the mall.

Standoff in Kenya: 59 Dead as Hostages Remain Held in Terror Attack

Civilians are still escaping from the mall more than a day after the initial attack. Cecile Ndwiga tells the BBC that she had spent the day hidden under a car in the parking garage, because "the shootout was all over - left, right."

Al-Shabab has claimed that the attack was in retaliation for Kenya's military presence in Somalia. Kenyan armed forces have repeatedly attacked al-Shabab forces close to the Kenyan border, where 4,000 Kenyan troops are stationed in southern Somalia.

Standoff in Kenya: 59 Dead as Hostages Remain Held in Terror Attack

In a speech on Saturday night, Kenyan president told citizens that Kenya would remain “as brave and invincible as the lions on our coat of arms.” He then admitted that he had lost close family members in the attack.

Using methods similar to the 2008 hotel attack in Mumbai, the gunmen quizzed victims on their Muslim beliefs, making them pray and answer questions about the religion. If they failed to answer correctly, they were killed.

[Associated Press]

A Very New York Times Wedding: Jill Abramson's Kid Gets Married

Tina Brown and Huma Abedin Had a Power Lunch in SoHo Together

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Tina Brown and Huma Abedin Had a Power Lunch in SoHo Together

Two women who have not been having a very good year came together for seafood and sushi Friday with a power lunch at Lure Fishbar.

Tina Brown and Huma Abedin were spotted having a "serious business lunch" at the SoHo restaurant.

Brown just left the Daily Beast in a blaze of bad press that intensified last week when reports surfaced that she used her charity, Women in the World, largely to throw parties for herself. In the past, Brown has been both supportive of Abedin and critical of Anthony Weiner. In July, she tweeted a mayoral endorsement for Huma, saying that she "has all the qualities that he doesn't."

What were they talking about? Speculate below.

[image via AP]

Brave Privileged Person Speaks Out Against Anti-Privilege Privilege

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Brave Privileged Person Speaks Out Against Anti-Privilege Privilege

Privilege: you know you have it. But... but why must you feel guilty about it? Is it not a fact that the true monsters are not the privileged people, but the people who make the privileged people feel bad about being privileged? We must defeat Anti-Priv Priv, for the sake of justice!

This is the brave message put forward by one Kate Menendez, privileged person, on Thought Catalog today, in a brave post that is bravely titled, "Being Privileged Is Not a Choice, So Stop Hating Me For It."

Brave? Perhaps. But bravery is required in order for a privileged person to finally raise her voice and declare, bravely: Hey, Poorer People, Get the Fuck Off My Case, Will You, Okay?

I’m sick of feeling self-conscious every time someone brings up the burden of student loans. I dread being asked what I plan to do after graduation about paying them back. Sometimes I lie. Sometimes I make up a line about praying I find a great job or can pay off my loans by working for the government.

But I’m sick of lying. I’m sick of feeling ashamed for being privileged.

The shame. The burden. The existential torment, of not having student loans. It's a feeling to which only the privileged can truly relate. So stop trying to act like you know Kate Menendez' pain—you don't. And frankly, she has had enough of it.

I’m tired of justifying my address and the backlash I receive when I tell people I am a student and live in a high-rise apartment. I’m tired of the looks my doorman gives me when he hands me my package (of work clothes) delivered from J.Crew.

So stop making me feel like I’ve done something wrong.

Maybe your doorman likes Banana Republic better? I dunno.

Priv rights!

[Image via]

Supreme Court opinions are rife with citations to now-dead web pages, including one to what noted SE

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