Daddy blogger Doyin Richards spends most of his days recounting the joys of fatherhood on his website, Daddy Doin' Work: Adventures of a First-Time Father Raising His Daughters.

Last October, Doyin (pronounced doe-WEEN), 39, took a month off from his day job to "baby bond" with his newborn.

It was during this time that he snapped this adorable photo of himself styling his three-year-old's hair while the baby rests comfortably in a BabyBjörn.

Doyin says he took the photo because his wife, Mariko, refused to believe he could do his daughter's hair, and he wanted to show her that he could.

"After 15 minutes of multitasking, the final result was a nice, tight ponytail for big sister and a happily sleeping baby in the carrier. Mission accomplished," he wrote in the blog post. "I emailed the photo to her with the caption 'Boom.' and we both got a good laugh out of it."

So far so innocent, but when the photo was reposted late last month on social networking sites it quickly went viral, and that's when all Hell broke loose.

Doyin was inundated with racist comments calling his devotion into question and suggesting his daughters couldn't be his because they didn't share the same exact skin color (Mariko is half-white and half-Japanese).

"I would bet anything that you're a deadbeat," said one commenter. "OK buddy, cute picture. Now why don't you hand the children back to their mom so you can go back to selling drugs or your bootleg rap CDs?" said another.

"He probably rented those kids," said a third. "They don't even look like him."

And the vile kept coming: "Look at this Uncle Tom. No chance he would be doing this if his kids were black," read one particularly unacceptable remark. "So do you do this for all of your illegitimate kids?"

Responding to his haters with signature levelheadedness, Doyin decided not to stoop to their negativity, and instead turn their sorry behavior into a teachable moment, daddy-style.

"Why don't you put big boy shorts on and get in on the revolution of good fathers?" Doyin inquired of his detractors, rhetorically. "It's not a good look to tear down dads for doing the work your wives wished you were man enough to do on your own. If you don't believe me, just ask your spouses. They'll tell you. But don't worry. I'll still be here whenever you're ready to step your game up and join #TeamGrownAssMan."

In a lengthy response post since reposted by The Good Men Project, Doyin invokes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and says he dreams of a day when "people will view a picture like this and not think it's a big deal."

[photos via Daddy Doin Work]

"America has always been a nation where hard work and creativity pay off, where upward mobility was the aspired goal," Michele Bachmann blogged Wednesday, appealing "to lift more people out of poverty." Fuck that noise. You know where it's at? The servant-owning leisure class of English lords and ladies, bitches!

Not long after the Republican soon-to-be-ex-congresswoman from Minnesota wrote her tea party-infused blog plaint lamenting the failure of the Great Society and praising private enterprise as the engine of American class mobility, she tweeted this family portrait:

Can you tell what our favorite show is? http://t.co/t6VfIV8ajo pic.twitter.com/kEki0rPIcA

— Michele Bachmann (@MicheleBachmann) January 9, 2014

The photo—which first surfaced on Bachmann daughter Sophia's Facebook page—is a reference to the upper-crust Tory twits of Downton Abbey, because nothing amplifies the American Dream of moving up the socioeconomic ladder like a gaggle of English blue-bloods who live in the lovely rose-tinged mansion-keeping age of muscular Christianity, patriarchy, pointless wars, wealth inequality, family-financed welfare, and stoic suck-it-upness.

Come to think of it, there's a lot of convergence with the Bachmanns' family values there. But if they're going for Downton veritè, I've a few beefs with their family photo:

• Where are all of Bachmann's servants?
• Nothing says "old money" like Nubuck sofas from the Pottery Barn catalog.
• Did the Brits even have duckface in 1912?
• None of the posh poots from Downton has a beard like Marcus Bachmann, um, has a beard.

This stodgy stiff-upper-lip Old Money game doesn't really seem like it's in Bachmann Abbey's wheelhouse. They should probably stick to color-coordinated lap-sitting. Now this is an American family, right here:

Peter Gould is the most important man in television who many people have still never heard of. As executive producer of Breaking Bad, he wrote and directed some of that series' best known episodes. Now Gould is moving to showrunner status as a co-creator—with Breaking Bad lead Vince Gilligan—of the spinoff Better Call Saul, to be centered on Bob Odenkirk's shady attorney character, Saul Goodman.

I met Gould 10 years ago when he was hired to adapt a book I co-wrote about the Iraq war. We lost touch a couple years later, until I heard he was working on a new show called Breaking Bad, which at that time I'd never seen. I've since watched the show and, like millions of other people, fallen in love with it.

I caught up with Gould on the eve of the Golden Globes, where Breaking Bad will vie for the title of best drama series. Any further accolades for Breaking Bad will be nice, of course, but Gould has already begun preparations for his first shot as a showrunner. I spoke with him about his ascent to Breaking Bad, what to expect from Better Call Saul, and the future of television in general.

Ray Lemoine: When we met, you were the go-to political writer for HBO. How did you go from there to Breaking Bad?

Peter Gould: Well, back then I felt very lucky to be working. When we met I had been an instructor at USC for a while. You know, kind of barely making ends meet. Having a great time teaching but not really making enough money to support a family. I was so excited when I started getting the jobs to write.

They were putting you on all the George Bush projects and post-Clinton stuff. You were the guy that everyone said was capable of writing politics.

Well, I wrote a spec script that people really liked, a political serial based on Jeffrey's Toobin's A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. It was the first thing I had ever written with any political subject matter in it. They had me research, and it just kind of clicked. It helped me find my voice. I was lucky enough that HBO kept hiring me. Doing a nonfiction book about the Clinton impeachment was—I still think—such a great project. It's one of those things that's perennially run up the flagpole. And it was done, I think, in a really unusual way.

A lot of the things that we're seeing in the media—some of them are great, some of the movies that we're seeing are great—but they rely a lot on impersonations of familiar media figures. The approach we had to that was about the people who were behind the scenes who were really making things happen, as opposed to the people you would see on C-Span or on CNN. It was much more of a backstage kind of story than I think that most of the ones we're seeing.

I was really excited to work on those projects, but one of the problems was they weren't getting made, frankly. I was working with great people. It was very creatively fulfilling, but things weren't actually going into production. I think of myself more as a filmmaker or as a film person than as strictly just a writer. I don't come out of playwriting or anything like that. It was very important for me to get things made. I had the opportunity when I read Vince 's pilot for Breaking Bad.

What year was that?

This would have been 2007, I believe.

So right after our project died.

That's right. And I also wrote, around the same time, a pilot that I'm really so proud of. It's never been made. I wrote it for HBO. It's called Everybody's Guilty and, it's a story, kind of a twisted procedural, about the Internal Revenue Service.

Oh, awesome! The IRS rules.

I still think that's one of the best things I've ever written.

David Foster Wallace would be happy.

That's one that Vince read, and I think that's what got me the job of working on Breaking Bad the first season.

How excited are you to be moving into the role of a showrunner from executive producer?

It's crazy. I have to say I try as much as I can to focus just on the work.. I say to myself, "What's the great story that we want to tell. Who are the characters that I want to see?" And I try to really focus on what we're actually trying to accomplish rather than what my position is or anything like that. Having said that, obviously it's a huge step for me, and is very exciting.

How old are you right now? Early 40s, right?

Lets say that, yeah. [Laughs] If you want to say early 40s, that'd be good for me.

People say Breaking Bad is one of the more complex pieces of not just television, but media ever created. What's the psychology of the writers, who are writing about murder, death, and evil.

I think a lot of it has to do with Vince's leadership. Just the way he approaches the work. Also, he has a bullshit filter that works really, really well. And most of it ends up being a group of people—sometimes as few as three, sometimes as many as seven—around a table, literally saying, you know, what happens next. Where's Walt's head at?

Describe that room.

For Breaking Bad our offices were in the ugliest building in Burbank, California. Which, if you know Burbank, is really saying something. We were in this little—people would walk into the office and think that it was a telephone sex office. It was not really impressive at all. We were in this terrible office, but when you sat down around the table, it didn't feel like you were in this lousy office around a table. It felt like you were watching the show. And that's the essence of it. You're telling the story to each other.

So there are laptops out, or are you guys just working off the paper?

Oh no. Vince's methodology is adapted from his experience on X-Files. There's a great advantage to doing things by hand as opposed to electronically. I know not all show runners or all rooms run this way, but we're all sitting there. Some of us are doodling or doing crafts, but the thing that we're focused on is a corkboard which has three-by-five cards pinned to it. You can actually see pictures of this on the internet. There are a few that I think I've shared on my Twitter stream. It's divided into acts, and these cards are somewhat laborious to write so there's a certain commitment that you make as you put each final card up. It's a pain in the ass to change them, and I think that one of the things you really look for is to talk about it as much as you possibly can, and then you commit. You say, "OK, this is what the scene is."

When you guys know you've hit an idea, when those moments happen, does everyone kind of sit back like "Oh, right on," and high five?

Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! The one I remember the best—and this is a pretty good example of collaboration—was in season two. There was a scene where we knew we were going to kill Tortuga, and Vince said he just had this image that Hank looks through his binoculars and he sees just the top of this guy's head moving through the grass. Then someone else said, "What if he's moving through the grass because his head is on top of a turtle?" Then somebody else said, "What if when they find this decapitated head on top of the turtle it blows up because there's a grenade inside?" So each person is adding to the story, and you're watching as somebody tells you this great story. And you tell it over and over and over again until everybody feels rock solid with it.

You're now considered the best who've ever done that. How do you top that?

You don't think that way. You don't think, Whoah, I'm soooo good at this. You think, This is impossible. I'm never going to be able to do this. This is way too challenging.

Can I ask you a stupid question about the last season of Breaking Bad? How can people with automatic weapons shooting close range at each other not kill each other? Everyone should have died in the battle at the end of To'hajiilee.

You know, it's remarkable if you really look at the use of armaments and how many bullets are shot in battle. It's amazing how many—and I don't have the statistics in front of me—its amazing how many shots are fired versus the number that land. This is true in any gunfight. It seems like people should be picking each other off, but the truth is that—this is in my episode—the truth is that there's a lot of rounds going off in a real gunfight, especially with automatic weapons.

Having said that, I'll also reveal that our original concept for the end of that episode was to literally go out on Hank who was shooting his first shot. The first shot of that gunfight. That was the original concept. But George Mastras, who wrote it and produced it, and Michelle MacLaren, who produced it and directed it, had such a vivid concept for how to continue that, that you saw a little more of the gunfight than I think we had originally imagined. I think it's great.

What are the different elements that you're going to throw into Better Call Saul to separate it from Breaking Bad?

Well, that's an interesting problem. This is one of the things that we-Vince and I especially—spend a lot of time talking about. How do you build a show around a character like Saul Goodman? I think we've come up with some ideas.

Saul Goodman is your creation, right?

I originated Saul. He appeared first in an episode that I wrote, but I always hesitate saying that he's my creation because everyone in the writer's room throws in. We all like to think about the romantic ideal of the lone creator.

Do you guys wake up in the middle of the night and text each other ideas?

Sometimes. Sometimes email. But you know, when you spend eight hours a day, five or six days a week around a table, you really get to know each other quite well. There's plenty of time for pretty much any kind of conversation you could think of.

What can you tell me about the new show?

You know, there's really not much to say except we're very excited to be working with Bob. I think he's a tremendous actor and is very funny. When you ask how it's going to be different from Breaking Bad, it's because the character of Saul Goodman is so very different from Walter White. The thing that is similar between the two shows is that they grow out of the DNA of who the main character is.

Will you use the same production qualities?

Nothing's been settled. It's all still up in the air. The truth is that we had a great, great team on Breaking Bad, and a great group of collaborators, and obviously we'd love to work with as many of those people as possible. But the other truth is that everyone is very, very successful. It's not necessarily that easy to get the band back together.

What's the per-episode cost for this?

I'm hoping, well, I have no idea.

Do you have any intentions to do feature films or anything like that?

I'm so focused on the show that I'm not really thinking too far beyond it. Obviously I'd love to do features. I'd love to do more television. For me the difference really is that I don't know what the difference is. The main thing that I'm interested in is telling stories that are exciting to me, and that hopefully connect with an audience.

Do you believe the chatter around television that says TV has now superseded the feature world?

I don't know, because they are such different forms in a lot of ways. In some ways, they're exactly the same. In some ways, they're completely different. I think … one of the reasons people are excited about it is that there is something a little bit new about an intensely serialized visual drama. And the great thing about that is that we haven't figured out the rules. There aren't these tomes after tomes telling you how to write your serialized TV show because we're still figuring it out. I think that's one of the reasons its exciting.

When you watch a feature, frequently, especially ones that are more formulaic, you can kind of sense what's going to happen next. You see something. I think the audience is very, very smart. You can always sense what's being set up—I'm talking about features, especially—because something happens at the beginning and you can be pretty sure it's going to get tied up at the end in a certain way, if it's a well-written piece. But in serialized television we don't have those rhythms. They're not as familiar yet. That's one of the things that's very exciting about it. By having a serialized show, you can spend an episode delving into one character or one situation that you just don't have time for in a feature.

You guy made David Simon look like a pussy.

Oh, are you kidding! No, The Wire is an amazing show.

Yeah I'm kidding, but I do hate cops.

I don't think you can compare them because we're trying for different things. In fact The Wire is an incredible show, an incredible work. [Laughs] I'm not going to accept your pussy comment on this one.

Fine. What's the biggest change in your life in the last 10 years?

I think the biggest difference in my life is just getting to come to work with a bunch of other creative people. I spent a lot of time on my own in a room figuring out things by myself. I love the collaboration. Not just with other writers, but also with actors, with DPs, and editors. It's a much more social activity, and I guess in a lot of ways the biggest change.

A judge dropped drunk driving charges against an Asian man last week in part because "different ethnic groups react differently to alcohol intake."

The 63-year-old Swedish man, who is of Asian origin, was charged with drunk driving after a gas station attendant thought he was acting intoxicated while filling his car. Police tracked the man to his home and found that he had a BAC of 0.164, more than eight times over Sweden's absurdly low limit of 0.02.

In addition to noting the differences in alcohol processing by ethnicity, the judge admitted that he could not prove the man didn't become drunk while he was home before police arrived, during which time a friend testified that he had seen the man drink one shot of whiskey.

'I read on the internet that [alcohol processing] differs between different kinds of people," the judge told Swedish paper Nerikies Allehanda. "Native Americans and Asians have a completely different metabolism and way of processing alcohol than western Europeans."

[Image via Shutterstock]

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio found himself on the defensive today following revelations that he eats pizza with a knife and fork. "I've been in Italy a lot," he argued, claiming that he started using (a knife and fork) in his "ancestral homeland."

Anonymous is at it again—and this time it's personal. The Daily Dot reports that on Wednesday night, the group leaked FBI search warrants related to the government's investigation of hacker group Lulzsec—and revealed that there were more agency moles in the gang than previously thought.

Lulzsec staged a series of high-profile attacks in the summer of 2011, striking everyone from Sony to the CIA. Eventually authorities arrested a Lulzsec ringleader who went by the handle "Sabu" in August 2011. After another arrest seven months later, it was revealed that after pleading guilty to charges the first time, Sabu became an informant.

Until now, many believed he was the sole link between the FBI and Lulzsec. But the new documents refer to two more confidential witnesses, dubbed CW-1 and CW-2. One of the witnesses, after their June 29, 2011 arrest, unmasked another Lulzsec leader who was also instrumental in a hack of this very site a year prior.

The information in the warrants does not seem to match anything related to Sabu. In fact, around the time of the arrests there was suspicion among Lulzsec members that a member of their ranks who went by "M_nerva" was a double agent.

Anonymous allegedly timed this week's new releases to coincide with the birthday of Jeremy Hammond, who has been sentenced to ten years in prison for hacking into the servers of an intelligence firm.

[image via AP]

The New Jersey State Legislature just dumped hundreds of new documents gathered in the investigation of a Fort Lee traffic jam allegedly engineered by close aides of Chris Christie. Have fun.

Sad news for fans of garbage movies: Shia LaBeouf says he is retiring from "public life." From the actor's Twitter:

In light of the recent attacks against my artistic integrity, I am retiring from all public life.

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) January 10, 2014

My love goes out to those who have supported me.

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) January 10, 2014

#stopcreating

— Shia LaBeouf (@thecampaignbook) January 10, 2014

At least he wasn't a pretentious shithead about it!

The news comes after weeks and weeks of plagiarism accusations against LaBeouf, who managed to make the situation worse by then feuding with Lena Dunham and Patton Oswalt, and stealing an apology from Kanye West.

RIP Shia.

[Image via AP]

A peculiar thing about New Jersey governor Chris Christie's marathon bridge-scandal press conference yesterday was that the longer his performance sprawled on, the smaller it got. The governor apologized and said he took the blame for the fact that his underlings had—without his knowledge—intentionally clogged traffic in Fort Lee. But he put his greatest effort into litigating the minutiae of the case.

So Christie made sure the press was aware that David Wildstein, the Port Authority official who made the traffic stoppage happen, was not "my childhood friend... David and I were not friends in high school... I was the class president and athlete, I don't know what David was doin' during that period of time." He repeatedly held out the possibility that the traffic study that was the excuse for the closure may have been, on some level, genuinely studying traffic—"I don't know what makes a legitimate traffic study. It's not my area of expertise." He made a careful inventory of his emotional reaction to the scandal: "heartbroken" and "disappointed," but "I don't think I've gotten to the angry stage yet"—except at the tone of his staffers' emails plotting the conspiracy, when he'd read them in the Bergen Record. "That's the one bit of anger I felt."

There was something Anthony Weiner-ish about it, the defiant pushback over fractions of inches of irrelevant ground, the desire to score points in what was supposed to be a performance of contrition. He couldn't make himself lay off his enemies, even when he was trying to declare that he had no enmity for them. The Fort Lee mayor, Mark Sokolich—whom the traffic mess was supposed to have been meant to punish—was too insignificant to have troubled the governor. "Mayor Sokolich was never on my radar screen," Christie said. He said: "Until I saw his picture last night on television, I wouldn't have been able to pick him out of a lineup." (Cf.: "I probably wouldn't know a traffic study if I tripped over it.")

"I never saw this as political retribution because I didn't think he did anything to us," Christie said, momentarily adopting the first-person plural, a lapse from his self-portrait as a big-picture executive floating above the schemes of his untrustworthy staff.

Was Christie telling the truth? Last night, Rachel Maddow floated the theory that he had been, or at least that he had been telling a micro-truth. The bridge episode, Maddow noted, had coincided not with any known friction between Christie and the mayor, but with a blowup between Christie and the state senate's Democrats, whose leader, Loretta Weinberg, represents Fort Lee. (Christie had previously told the media to "take the bat to" Weinberg.)

Opinions differ sharply about whether Maddow's theory of motive makes more sense or less than the original theory that Christie had been retaliating for Sokolich's refusal to endorse him. But the debate itself reflects the condition in which Christie left the story, as a tangle of loose ends to be tugged at. Beyond his central do-or-die claim of personal and official ignorance, how many of the facts that the governor insisted on could be true, without changing the contours of the scandal?

"I had no knowledge or involvement in this issue, in its planning or its execution," Christie said, "and I am stunned by the abject stupidity that was shown here." The latter half of the sentence rang true, no matter how skeptically you looked at the first part. Whether Christie's traffic saboteurs were carrying out his wishes or only presuming to do so, the comically villainous email chain they created was genuinely stunning: "Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee." "Got it."

You can believe Christie is guilty or innocent, enraged or tranquil, old friends or not old friends with his Port Authority guy. What's hard to believe—but indisputably true—is that any version of Christie hired such schmucks.

[Image by Jim Cooke, photos via Getty]

Imagine opening a bag of Scrabble letters and scattering them across the ground. You look down, and "Z-E-N" is spelled out at your feet. Your face remains expressionless. In your hand is an empanada. But it's not time to eat.

The koan: "A Smile in His Lifetime"

Mokugen was never known to smile until his last day on earth. When his time came to pass away he said to his faithful ones: "You have studied under me for more than ten years. Show me your real interpretation of Zen. Whoever expresses this most clearly shall be my successor and receive my robe and bowl."

Everyone watched Mokugen's severe face, but no one answered.

Encho, a disciple who had been with his teacher for a long time, moved near the bedside. He pushed forward the medicine cup a few inches. That was his answer to the command.

The teacher's face became even more severe. "Is that all you understand?" he asked.

Encho reached out and moved the cup back again.

A beautiful smile broke over the features of Mokugen. "You rascal," he told Encho. "You worked with me ten years and have not yet seen my whole body. Take the robe and bowl. They belong to you."

The enlightenment: A nonsense teacher teaches nonsense.

This has been "Zen Koans Explained." If it has.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

Are you an aspiring PhD in English seeking a coveted tenure-track job? Chances are you'll be in Chicago this weekend for the annual Modern Language Association convention, and you'll be stressed. Why not "indulge in a little stress-relief fantasy role-play" with a successful libidinous leader in your field?

Each year, university English departments interview candidates for their job openings at MLA. It's a scary experience. But "MLA interviews, fraught with tension, can also be thick with eroticism," according to an unnamed "assistant professor at a research university with a real degree of success in my field," who's seeking a "mock-interview make-out session" on Craigslist Chicago's "casual encounters" section. He's headed to MLA for some interviews, too, and he would like to practice with you. Or on you. Or under you:

I propose to play interviewee to your interviewer:

I will arrive at your MLA hotel room, in my interview suit, ready to discuss my research, my place in my field, my theoretical approaches, my teaching methods, etc.

You ask me the appropriate questions and listen, interrupt, challenge, acting as a typical faculty member of a hiring committee. (You explain that your colleagues are respectively ill in bed and unable to attend because of personal obligations but, yes, you are authorized to advance my candidacy.)

Over the course of the interview we begin to cast flirtatious sidelong glances, adopt inviting body language and inch toward one other. At the right moment one of us makes the bold move of an innocent touch on the shoulder, followed by leaning in for a kiss. We both know it's wrong, but we're too titillated to stop.

The final outcome is something we can discuss in advance, or figure out on the fly.

I am also amenable to flipping the script...

At which point he rewrites the entire preceding passage with the names reversed, because, hey, he's a professor, and no one ever knocks academic writing for being overwritten. Or goshdarn hotmaking sexy sexy with the interview suits and the theoretical approaches and oh, god. Oh god.

This is brilliant, really. It negates the need for face-to-face pickup lines. Which, let's admit it, English professor pickups stink out loud:

• My name? It doesn't matter, honey. Just call me Big Other.
• You and me, we could write another volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality.
• I want Derrida all night long.
• Take down my pants and see my différance.
• I think heteronormativity is overrated. Have you tried heterokinkativity?

The unnamed Craigslist professor, who is "in a committed relationship at home but (by agreement) not beholden to monogamy when on the road, especially at conferences," tells the Chronicle of Higher Ed that he got maybe 20 responses, some of them promising. (Pre-internet, he'd admitted to acquiring a sheepskin, ahem, at two of seven previous conferences.)

But, after reflecting on some of the less positive responses, and remembering that he's an English professor, the guy realized that he was maybe taking the Hegelian master-slave dialectic a little too far, imposing his phallogocentrism on an already-fraught interviewing process for young academics. He appended his Craigslist post with a mea culpa:

The debate has drawn my attention to the fact that the post can be seen to perpetuate two power structures within the academy: those of gender and academic rank. The fact that this was inadvertent is irrelevant; I understand now I have done a disservice to all scholars who are victim of these structures, and all those who will be victims of it in the future. I am sorry.

That's one reaction. Another is WWJD: What Would Jacques (Lacan) Do? He'd get nasssty in the sheets and ask you about his mother while papercutting himself on the eyeball with the title page of your dissertation. Or maybe that's Bataille. I dunno, I'm not post-coursework yet, I don't have to know that stuff.

But mock-interview man has already inspired copycats, like this Craigslist poster from today:

I'm a professor looking for a break from the MLA lunacy and hoping to meet a sexy literary critic to share some postmodern discourse about sexual fantasies over the phone. If the thought of exploring digitally mediated eroticism on your mobile piques your interest, drop me a line. The conference is of course a zoo, but I'll bet we can find a common hour or two in our schedules when we can put out the Do Not Disturb sign, slip beneath the sheets, and whisper into each others ears.

What do you mean, "the conference is a zoo"? That's a problematic linguistic othering of your colleagues that would seem to exoticize them while leaving you in a position of AHHHHHH GOD, GOD, so good, never let it stop. MLA CHICAGO, YOU ARE THE SEXIEST.

[Photo credit: jwblinn/Shutterstock]

This is a polar bear cub taking his first steps at the Toronto Zoo. Good job, bear. Also, this video definitively proves that baby polar bears are better at walking than baby panda bears. For the best bear stories from 2013, click here.

This afternoon, the Columbia Journalism School sent out a mass email to hundreds of media members inviting them and their organizations to register for an upcoming career fair.

Dear Recruiter,

We are pleased to announce the 2014 Columbia Journalism School Career Expo, Sat., March 29, NYC.

Registration is now open for this year's Expo. Please join more than 275 editors, producers and recruiters who help make this event the biggest journalism job fair in the country.

Some companies that regularly attend our Expo include ABC News, Agence France Presse, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Mashable, NBC, The New York Times, NPR, Time Inc., and The Washington Post.

Our Career Expo provides you a chance to spend the day with our 300-plus Master of Science and Master of Arts students – a multilingual, multinational group with diverse life experiences and journalistic interests and skills. You'll meet our Knight-Bagehot Fellows in Business Journalism and students in the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. Looking for specialists? Our M.A. students are concentrating on business/financial journalism, arts/culture, science/health and politics. You will also meet students in our Computer Science + Journalism program who are on the cutting edge of data-driven and computational journalism.

For a school as steeped in tradition as Columbia, we're happy to tell you that the curriculum has adapted nimbly to the needs of the digital journalism marketplace. In addition to receiving a solid foundation in writing, reporting and ethics, our students are trained in multiplatform reporting, and many specialize in news website design and navigation, social media and SEO, data analysis, data visualization, multimedia production and programming.

The Career Expo is heavily underwritten by The Journalism School to keep the price of attending low once again. The cost to register is $125 per news organization for the first two recruiters plus $25 for each additional recruiter. The registration fee covers all costs including a booth, meals, snacks and a resume book.

Early bird registration ends on Monday, March 10 at 5 p.m.

Registration will be open until Sunday, March 16 at 5 p.m.

Please note: If this link takes you to a website security page, please authorize and continue to the survey. We assure you that the site is secure and safe.

If you have questions, please call Expo Coordinator Izabela Rutkowski at [redacted]
If you're no longer involved in your company's recruiting efforts, please let us know.

Sincerely,

Julie Hartenstein
Assistant Dean, Career Services

All fine, right? Thirty-two minutes later, the CEO of Berkshire Publishing replied:

Please remove from list.

For some reason, any email to the Columbia address that sent the original letter went to everyone on the list. This was about the point where you could see the car wreck coming, and there was nothing to do but pray others could see it too. But then, another email, from a research editor at Vogue.

Please remove me from your mailing list. Thank you.

It was on.

Inadvertent reply all meltdowns ALWAYS follow the same sequence. Wave No. 1 is a rush of people asking to be taken off the list. Wave No. 2 is people pointing out that every reply is going to everyone, as if we didn't already know that, and as if that tip didn't clutter things up further. Wave No. 3 is the trolls.

For more than an hour and well upwards of 100 emails, the listserv was a disaster area of all that and more. If you'd like to see the entire main chain with names and jobs everything (it broke off into multiple smaller chains as well), that's here. Below, some selected replies in rough chronological order.

Please remove me from your mailing list. Thank you.

I have received at least 4 if not 5 emails one after the other on this. Please get the problem under control.

I'd like to be removed as well

please remove me from this list, thanks!

OK [This was a producer at Vice trolling]

Hey guys, what's up? Anyone have any good stories to tell? Share them and definitely hit reply all. [This was me trolling.]

Please explain why I'm getting all these emails. I don't have you on a mailing list and have never emailed you.

ME TOO!

THIS IS OBVIOUSLY A VIRUS. CAN PEOPLE PLEASE REFRAIN FROM ASKING TO BE REMOVED? YOUR REQUESTS ARE GOING OUT TO EVERYONE. JUST STOP AND THE PROBLEM WILL BE SOLVED.

I have received at least 8 emails on this along with the others asking to be removed from your mailing. Please correct the problem ASAP!!!!!!

1. Replying "please remove me" won't remove you from the mailing list.
2. It will actively make this whole thing worse.
3. I'm going to be publishing this whole chain later on, so if you
don't want to look dumb, consider this your warning.

You won't listen, though.

[This was me again]

Hi,
I'm getting lots of email asking to be removed from the mailing list.

Since these emails don't seem to be abating any time soon, why don't you remove all of us and next time use MailChimp or some other service where getting yourself taken off a mailing list doesn't require disturbing everybody else on the list every single time.
EPIC FAIL!!!

Can you ask people to stop replying all with their unsubscribe notices, please?

Can we be notified how to get off this list without spamming everyone else
on it?

Stop replying people!!!!!!!!!

This has stopped being annoying and is actually kind of funny now. I speak for myself, obviously.

Please add me to the list.

Just kidding.

Please take me off this listserv. 30 emails in 20 minutes

Help. I'm getting emails from everyone on your list.

TO REPLY ALL, CLICK HERE: http://bit.ly/1ckeIbA [Me again. Bitly says 473 people clicked on it]

May I humbly suggest that everyone stop sending individual "Please remove me" emails until the folks at Columbia realize that many of us want to be removed and provide us instructions on how to do so? It appears none of us want to be here but we're creating the problem for ourselves.

I'm only responding so I can show my friends I made Deadspin.

Please don't ever remove me, I'm thoroughly entertained by this.

unsubscribe

There is a problem here. I'm getting everybody's response to this email, which is a bit of a nuisance :-)

Looks like there was an error somewhere, as I'm sure there are some folks that are not happy about seeing my personal response to this blast email.

You guys are all replying to an email LISTSERV, which means it's going out to everyone and their mother on said list. If my phone buzzes one more time I'm going to flush it down the toilet. And I bet that will make my boss really mad.

So, if you want off the email chain, I believe the person to contact — DIRECTLY — is Julie Hartenstein. She has been CC'd to this email.

And please remove me as well, Ms. Hartenstein.

how do I stop receiving all these emails?

[Wall of gifs of people shaking their head/eating popcorn]

I think many of us are getting these emails and can't figure out why.

Please remove me from list serve.

Make it stop!

This has to stop.
Right.
Now.
My inbox cannot handle any more of this

I believe I'm receiving these messages in error. Please remove me from
the contact list.

This better than Reality TV!! Keep 'em coming folks ...

Christie could be A1 if the documents indicate he had some knowledge of the dirty tricks. [Someone at The Ledger who thought he was on a different listserv.]

What list are you referring to? I work in the editorial department for U.S. Catholic and not sure if I am the person that you should be sending this to.

Please advise so that I can forward your request to the correct person.

Please make this stop I'm getting scores of emails

PEOPLE — FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP REPLYING TO THIS EMAIL

OK [Me.]

Since we're all catching up, how y'all doing?

Hope there's Oren's Coffee at the Expo...

Can anyone tell me how to register for the J-School Career Expo?

One hour and 18 minutes after the original email was sent out, Columbia set the list to require moderation—no more emails. But we all made a bunch of new friends, and when you really think about it, isn't that what the J-School Career Expo is really all about?

Operation Smile has sent us a statement about their rather insane job interview process, which we have appended to our earlier post. "[Planning] and delivering a fun, social activity, including dinner...helps identify the applicant's strengths and/or weaknesses in communicating, problem-solving skills and teamwork."

There's a ton of ambition on display in this year's science fiction and fantasy books. Bestselling authors are stretching out of their comfort zones, and our favorite authors are pushing the boundaries. Plus David Cronenberg has written a book about sex and weird diseases. Here's the ultimate guide to this year's can't-miss books.

Want even more? Check out our guide to January's books.

JANUARY

Shovel Ready by Adam Sternbergh (Crown)

A novel about a hitman in a dystopian near future, in which the rich all escape into virtual reality and everybody else is screwed.

On Such a Full Sea: A Novel by Chang-rae Lee (Riverhead)

A future dystopia that's more like Clockwork Orange than Hunger Games, as ecological collapse takes its toll on the last surviving power, New China.

Dreams of the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn (Tor Books)

The sequel to Vaughn's After the Golden Age, which skips forward in time and follows the daughter of the original novel's protagonist, who wants to be a superhero like her grandpa.

A Highly Unlikely Scenario by Rachel Cantor (Melville House)

A strange near-future novel of competing pizza chains and someone who claims to be Marco Polo, returned from Cathay in the 13th century.

Breach Zone by Myke Cole (Ace)

Scylla's inhuman forces invade New York in the final book of Cole's trilogy about the Superhuman Operations Corps.

Leaving the Sea: Stories by Ben Marcus (Knopf)

The author of The Flame Alphabet returns with a brace of seriously messed up tales.

FEBRUARY

Tin Star by Cecil Castellucci (Roaring Brook)

A girl on her way to join a space colony gets beaten by the colony's leader, and marooned on a space station, where an alien takes care of her. But then three mysterious humans show up. Read the first five chapters for free.

Strange Bodies by Marcel Theroux (FSG)

Theroux, a National Book Award finalist, writes a jarring tale of a man in a mental hospital who insists he's a long-dead Samuel Johnson scholar — and the truth has to do with the Soviet Union's mysterious Malevin Procedure.

Influx by Daniel Suarez (Dutton)

In this thriller, already optioned as a movie by Fox, it turns out the reason we don't have flying cars, immortality and A.I. is because a few people have been hoarding these advances for themselves, and locking up geniuses in a high-tech prison.

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (FSG)

The first book of the Southern Reach trilogy, the other two parts of which are also coming this year. VanderMeer tells the story of the twelfth expedition to the mysterious Area X, which has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak (Knopf)

These weird stories include a tale of the first artificial intelligence, plus a newly dead man who arrives in Heaven and struggles with keeping a promise to visit his grandmother.

The Flight of the Silvers by Daniel Price (Blue Rider Press)

Hannah and Amanda survive the destruction of their world, and find themselves on a strange other world, with flying restaurants and appliances that adjust the flow of time — and they have superpowers!

Dreamwalker by C.S. Friedman (Daw)

The author of the Coldfire Trilogy is back, with a story of a girl who has strange dreams of other worlds, that turn out to be more significant than she knows.

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith (Dutton)

Austin and his best friend Robby have accidentally unleashed an army of six-foot-tall praying mantises that devour everything. Oops?

MARCH

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun (Hogarth)

A post-apocalyptic novel in which a plague of insomnia has struck the human race, which has gotten early praise from Charles Yu.

The Pilgrims by Will Elliott (Tor)

A slacker would-be journalist in London goes through a portal into a strange world of dragons and giants, where the evil Lord Vous is close to becoming immortal.

Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson (Tor)

The saga that began with the Way of Kings continues, as the war with the Parshendi heats up and Dalinar leads an army into the Shattered Plains in an attempt to end it.

Death Sworn by Leah Cypress (Green Willow)

An exiled sorceress is forced to teach magic to a clan of assassins. Yeah, that'll turn out well.

The Burning Dark by Adam Christopher (Tor)

Once, Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland saved an entire planet from a rampaging machine intelligence, but now he's stuck in a backwater space station — but he's got a surprising friend.

Lockstep by Karl Schroeder (Tor)

Toby sleeps for 14,000 years in deep space, never expecting to wake up — and then he discovers that the Lockstep Empire has been founded on long cryo-sleep voyages, and its ruling family is his own.

The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan (Tor)

The eagerly awaited sequel to Brennan's Natural History of Dragons, in which Lady Trent narrates the next episode in her career: a journey to the war-torn continent of Eriga.

APRIL

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Broadway)

On a sunless planet, there are myths that once light came from the sky and people traveled through it in ships — but only one person dares to break the laws and venture out into the dark. This book already won the Clarke Award in the U.K.

Deadroads by Robin Riopelle (Night Shade Books)

This debut novel follows the Sarrazins, a family of mystics on the Bayou who are driven apart by feuds and brought back together by a surprising tragedy.

The Inventor's Secret by Andrea Cremer (Philomel)

Cremer isn't just the author of the bestselling Nightshade novels — she's also a history professor. And here she writes an alternate history in which the British won the Revolutionary War.

Peacemaker by Marianne de Pierres (Angry Robot)

The author of the Sentients of Orion series is back, with the story of Virgin Jackson, the senior ranger in the world's last natural landscape, who's shocked when an imaginary animal from her childhood turns up — and then people start dying all around her.

Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor (Hodder & Stoughton)

At long last, a new novel from the author of Who Fears Death. In the future, Lagos is the world's biggest megacity, and three strangers are brought together by a visitor from the stars, and sent on a race to save the world.

Afterparty by Daryl Gregory (Tor)

In a future where you can 3D-print mind-altering drugs without leaving your house, one woman struggles with the guilt of having invented Numinous, a drug that lets you see God.

Steles of the Sky by Elizabeth Bear (Tor)

The final volume of Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy — Re Temur races to defeat his usurping uncle, but can he triumph before the whole world catches fire?

The Here and Now by Ann Brashares (RHCB)

Prenna is a refugee from the future, a time when a mosquito-borne pandemic wiped out most of the human race. She can never reveal her origins to anyone — but then she falls in love.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North (Redhook)

Every time Harry dies, he's reborn in the same time and place, with memories of all his previous lives. But as he dies for the eleventh time, he's given a warning: the world is ending.

The Revolutions by Felix Gilman (Tor)

The author of the Half-Made World duology is back with a standalone Victorian tale of esoteric science, including equations that drive you mad and dueling magical societies.

Valour and Vanity by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)Another one of Kowal's delightful novels about Regency magic — but this one is a heist novel!

MAY

The Man With The Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi, Translated by Darryl Sterk(Pantheon Books)

In this ultra-weird novel from Taiwan, a woman's home is destroyed when an island of trash collides with it, and on the trash island she meets a native from a mythical land who was sacrificed to the Sea God.

The Oversight by Charlie Fletcher (Orbit)

There used to be hundreds of members of the Oversight, the organization that guards the boundaries between the mundane and the magic — but now they are just five. Is a strange girl their salvation, or their destruction?

My Real Children by Jo Walton (Tor)

Walton's first novel since the multi-award-winning Among Others — it's 2015, and the elderly Patricia Cowan remembers two pasts: one in which Kennedy died in a bomb blast in 1963, and one in which Kennedy chose not to run for reelection in 1964 after a nuclear disaster.

The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell (Tor)

In the sequel to London Falling, Detective Inspector James Quill and his supernatural police squad investigate an invisible murderer, encounter a rat king, and go to Hell.

While We Run by Karen Healey (Little Brown)

In this companion volume to Healey's When We Wake, it's 2127, and Tegan has been dead for 100 years — except that she was frozen and brought back to life.

Queen of the Dark Things by C. Robert Cargill (Harper Voyager)

In the sequel to Dreams and Shadows, the wizard Colby has saved Austin from an army of fairies — but now everybody knows who he is, and a lot of people want something from him. Mostly payback.

Defenders by Will McIntosh (Orbit)

The author of Love Minus Eighty tells a story of the aftermath of an invasion of telepathic aliens — and what do you do with all the supersoldiers you created to defeat the alien threat?

The Bees: A Novel by Laline Paull (Ecco)

In an ancient hive society, only the queen may breed — until one worker bee discovers stirrings within herself that threaten the whole fabric of society.

Skin Game by Jim Butcher (Roc)

It's bad enough that Harry Dresden is stuck being the Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness — but now she's traded his skills to some of the worst villains, who want him to help break into a magical vault.

JUNE

The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey (Orbit)

Mike Carey is back! In this story, it's a post-apocalyptic future, and a group of gifted children are being kept underground and taught in a very special school. Except that sometimes, one of them is taken away and experimented on, never to be seen again. Read a preview.

California Bones by Greg van Eekhout (Tor)

The son of a powerful magician is now a petty thief — until he's hired to undertake a heist, stealing from the magical society that killed his dad.

Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey (Orbit)

The newly opened gates have created a gold rush, as people stream out to claim thousands of habitable planets — but what happened to the vast intergalactic civilization that created the gates in the first place?

The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross (Ace)

In the latest Laundry Files novel, a junior manager discovers the rise of an alarming virus, and then uncovers a startling conspiracy between humans and monsters.

The Thorn of Emberlain by Scott Lynch (Gollancz)

The fourth Gentlemen Bastards novel, in which it's half a year later and Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen try to get back on their feet by pulling a new con.

The Long Mars by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter (Harper)

The third novel in the Long Earth series, set in 2040-2045, in which U.S. Naval Commander Maggie Kauffman leads an expedition to the farthest reaches of the Long Earth.

Dark Metropolis by Jaclyn Dolamore (Disney-Hyperion)

Sixteen-year-old Thea is forced to provide for herself and her mother, who's been cursed with a spell of madness — but the city is full of supernatural dangers.

JULY

Half a King by Joe Abercrombie (Del Rey)

The disabled Prince Yarvi was all set to become a Minister instead of a prince, but then his father and brother are killed, and he has to try and become a king instead. Check out an excerpt!

Path to Power by Karen Miller (Orbit)

We loved Miller's Godspeaker trilogy, and now she's back with the first book in a new series about a kingdom divided by two brothers' long-ago treachery, and the infighting that might tear it apart again.

The Angel of Losses by Stephanie Feldman (Ecco)

A graduate student in literature discovers a story written by her grandfather, and then discovers the secret truth about Jewish myths.

The Young World by Chris Weitz (Little Brown)

The debut novel from thedirector of About a Boy, plus the ill-fated Golden Compass movie and one of the Twilight films. A plague has wiped out most of humanity and the survivors live in small tribes — until one tribe gets a clue to a cure.

The Outsorcer's Apprentice by Tom Holt (Orbit)

Love this title. Basically, the Wizard has come up with an incredibly profitable business model involving a limitless workforce and endless parallel worlds — but now a young man who doesn't really understand what's going on threatens to ruin everything. And yes, that means everything.

AUGUST

The Broken Eye by Brent Weeks (Orbit)

The next Lightbringer novel, in which the old gods are awakening and the Chromeria races to find its lost Prism — but he's imprisoned on a pirate galley, with amnesia.

The Widow's House by Daniel Abraham (Orbit)

The follow-up to The Dragon's Path and The Tyrant's Law, in which we learn the truth about the links between the war and the fall of the dragons thousands of years earlier.

The Magician's Land by Lev Grossman (Viking)

The conclusion to the Magicians trilogy. Quentin Coldwater has been cast out of the magical land of Fillory, so he goes back where it all started: the school of Brakebills.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)

In a world that has suffered from frequent, repeated extinction-level events, over millions of years, magic and life itself have adapted to having a mass extinction every few hundred years. But this time might be different.

Lock In by John Scalzi (Tor)

The Old Man's War author shifts gears and writes a near-future thriller, about a disease that makes people stay in one place.

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente (Tor)

Valente's next ambitious book takes place in an alternate universe, where a film-maker travels around the Solar System documenting the other inhabited planets.

The Ripper Affair by Lilith Saintcrow (Orbit)

The latest Bannon and Clare novel features a serial killer slashing women in the steam tunnels of Londinium.

Fish Tails by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Voyager)

A third book in the series that began with The Plague of Angels and The Waters Rising.

Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray (Little Brown)

A follow-up to The Diviners — Evie O'Neill has been "outed" as a Diviner and has become a celebrity, America's Sweetheart Seer. But there's a downside to fame, and meanwhile, a mysterious sleeping sickness is killing people.

The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord (Del Rey)

A new standalone novel in the same universe as Lord's Best of All Possible Worlds. Rafi, the son of a cruel telepath, is persecuted by the government for his abilities — so he flees to a world where telepathy is common. But then he discovers a threat to the entire galaxy.

Your Face in Mine by Jess Row (Riverhead)

This one is sure to be controversial — a novel about "racial reassignment surgery," in which a Jewish man becomes African American because he feels more comfortable in a darker skin.

The Dark Defiles by Richard K. Morgan (Gollancz)

The third book in the Steel Remains and Cold Commands series, in which we finally get to discover the fate of Ringgil in his post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Including a war with the dragon-folk!

SEPTEMBER

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett (Broadway)

This novel already has a lot of buzz, and apparently it's a spy novel set in a world where gods once existed but were killed in a global coup — and now the remains of those gods are the equivalent of WMDs.

Belzhar by Meg Wolitzer (Dutton)

Wolitzer's The Interestings was widely acclaimed as one of 2013's best books. And now she's publishing a young-adult fantasy novel that owes a debt to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. Cannot. Wait.

Consumed: A Novel by David Cronenberg (Scribner)

Yes, it's the debut novel by the director of Scanners and so many other movies you love. And it sounds every bit as weird as you'd expect — one of the main characters, Nathan, contracts a rare sexually transmitted disease called Roiphe's Disease. (Presumably after Katie Roiphe.) There's weird sex, 3-D printing, organ-harvesting, and a serial killer who consumes parts of his victims.

OCTOBER

Young Elites Book One by Marie Lu (Putnam)

The author of the Legend series stars a new book series about a group of superpowered teens in a Renaissance-esque alternate world.

Girl at the Bottom of the Sea by Michelle Tea (McSweeney's)

The author of Valencia published her first young-adult novel last May, and this is the followup, in which Sophie Swankowski struggles to live up to her heroic potential.

Ancillary Sword by Ann Leckie (Orbit)

Ancillary Justice was our favorite book of 2014, so even though no details have been released about the sequel yet, we're already dying to read it.

Centaur Rising by Jane Yolen (Henry Holt and Co.)

A year after a shooting star lands in the fields near Arianne's home, a baby centaur is born — but her family wants to keep it secret.

Armada by Ernest Cline (Crown)

The Ready Player One author is back with another 80s gamer nostalgia novel that's highly reminiscent of Flight of the Navigator and Last Starfighter — turns out that the game he's a master of is a simulation of an alien spacecraft, and now he needs to go with some aliens to help save the world.

Additional reporting by Michael Ann Dobbs and Andrew Liptak.

Ellen Degeneres, or someone close to Degeneres or The Ellen Degeneres Show, broke the number one rule of screener season: only let screeners be borrowed by close friends, their friends, and then maybe their friends, but whatever you do, don't let them get into the hands of strangers who will upload them to the internet.

Thanks to a weak link in the borrowing chain, a pirated copy of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty bearing an "Ellen Degeneres" watermark began showing up on file-sharing sites this week. First reported by the website Waxy on Thursday, the movie's watermark shows that the screener was created on November 26, 2013.

A rep for 20^th Century Fox, the film's distributor, confirmed to Variety that the watermark appears genuine and that the studio created a copy of the film for The Ellen Degeneres Show prior to Ben Stiller's December 4 appearance. The Fox rep also told Variety that the copy is not an Oscar screener as the studio watermarks those copies differently.

While Ellen's executive producers are claiming they're unsure whether the copy was "leaked from the show or not," they are "doing everything [they] can to find out and to make sure it never happens again."

Juliana Huxtable from the House of Ladosha deejayed a set last night at Shock Value—she definitely knows how to get people to move.

You can get away with a lot in the ego-lacquered corridors of tech—but if people think you stole their money, they're going to try to tear you apart. TechCrunch's Ryan Lawler is on the trail of alleged startup crook Jon Mills, who friends say blew tons of cash in Vegas. Their cash.

Jon Mills loves entertaining people. He loves impressing them with gaudy things (drinks!) in gaudy places (Vegas!) paid with gaudy scrip (startup cash!). If the deluded conscience of every single software venture is to change the world for the better, Mills was its id: he wanted to dazzle the world, not perfect it.

Which isn't to say he's a sleaze—or a mere sleaze. As acquaintance told me, "Jon's a really fucking smart guy. He also happens to be a sociopath." It worked for a long while—Jon Mills is the (now ousted) man behind Motionloft, a "realtime analytics" startup that's generally considered a decent idea for a business, in that it helps other businesses and could be a viable corporation. In a pit of pseudo-businesses, Motionloft was a decent anomaly. But as TechCrunch explains, Jon Mills went from guy-with-a-decent-tech-business to desperate grifter:

Mills was a first-time entrepreneur, but he had received backing from high-profile investors like Mark Cuban, and according to the Motionloft website, the company had secured clients like CVS, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Cushman & Wakefield.

[...]

When Mills started asking friends if they wanted to invest in his company, a few of them jumped at the opportunity.

And it all unravels quickly from there:

They say Mills cashed checks that altogether were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, promising them a small percentage of the company. Later, when he told them an acquisition was imminent, they felt confident they had made the right decision.

The problem is that these same friends say the cashed checks didn't go toward funding a business, but toward funding Jon Mills, who already had an outrageous reputation for conspicuous money-melting. With Shah Dickson, his then-girlfriend who worked as a nightclub bottle waitress, Mills spent and spent to keep up an image of silicon plenty—perhaps absorbed via tacky osmosis through a longtime friendship with Sean Parker. One friend told me of a drug-stoked trip to Coachella, where Mills flew in strippers from Spearmint Rhino to entertain his friends. When it was time to throw Dickson a birthday party, he hired talent microbe Mickey Avalon to gyrate and slur in a private room.

As Mills racked up checks from duped friends, his spending kept pace, says TechCrunch:

It all came to a head in late November 2013 when Mills invited about a dozen friends to join him and his then-girlfriend in Las Vegas for a weekend to celebrate her birthday and the acquisition, which Mills said had finally closed.

It was the third such trip that Mills had taken people on over the course of several weeks, and it was the most excessive of the bunch.

This was financed mostly with money friend-and-family investors say was theirs, fueled by bogus promises of imminent riches. The easy money pitch is an easy one to deliver, and during today's software boom times, an easy one to swallow: TechCrunch's Lawler furnished these texts, apparently from Mills to a friend who was totally about to see a return on that investment!

But the bullish act didn't last once Mills' checks started to bounce:

Justin Sullivan is the CEO of Private FLITE, the private jet service Mills used to charter the flights in November. He told me that Mills promised several days in a row he would pay for those flights by wire and later told Sullivan he would FedEx a check. Neither came.

Sullivan's subtle website, JonMillsFraud.com, is an angry catalog of alleged theft, calling Mills a "check-kiting, jet-setting scoundrel," and offering up some evidence of shady dealings:

Large, bounced checks.

Evasive texts from Mills, considered the standard runaround.

Since TechCrunch first started poking around Mills, he's sicced crisis attorney Marty Singer on sources, one of whom retracted their story under what looks like very obvious coercion. These people are, for the most part, probably fucked—since Jon Mills' ejection from Motionloft, investor Mark Cuban has regained control of the company and tells TechCrunch it's back on the straight and narrow. If Mills ripped off his buddies, they might have little recourse. And given the microscopic attention span of Silicon Valley, where failure is encouraged and you can always start over, and over, and over, Jon Mills might already be planning his next Vegas bender.

The Westboro Baptist Church has at last found its medium. The hate group's over-the-top brand of expressing bigotry for basically anyone who isn't them, it turns out, is perfectly suited for the cut-heavy, silliness-fueled, 6-second world of Vining. It's like they've been an avant garde art project this whole time and only now can they fully express it.

Make no mistake, this family-cum-cult does and says awful things. If you are very sensitive, you will not see the humor in this. But oh my god, their timing.

Their sense of absurdity and humor is legitimate.

As a connoisseur of extreme human behavior, the WBC appeals to me on a fundamental level. Their message and methods of broadcasting it are way too extreme to threaten me (I do think that their funeral protests are disgusting, as they prey on people at their most emotionally vulnerable). They're so ridiculous, so over-the-top, that to my mind, they generally qualify as camp, and anti-gay camp is a deliciously oxymoronic concept.

So I challenge you to laugh along with these people that even ardent homophobes are embarrassed to be associated with. They are weirdos to the bone, who have nothing better to do with their time than sit around and devise new ways to say, "God hates fags." And you know what?

They've gotten really good at it.

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