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​The Way to Reheat Pizza Is in a Skillet

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​The Way to Reheat Pizza Is in a Skillet

Some people already know this; this is for the people who do not. I had been eating leftover pizza for decades before it occurred to me.

Specifically, I was home by myself and procrastinating about putting a cold slice in the toaster oven to make it become a warm and floppy slice, when the solution revealed itself: Use a skillet.

A quick Google consultation showed that the insight was by no means original. Our sibling Lifehacker site had mentioned it a few years earlier, albeit with some complicated business about tenting the whole thing with aluminum foil. Cord Jefferson recalls seeing it in an episode of the old television program Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. But plenty of other people I checked with, like me, had had no idea.

Whatever. I am not claiming to be the Charles Darwin of putting pizza in a skillet, nor the Alfred Russel Wallace. I wish only to be a Thomas Henry Huxley, doing my part to promote a discovery that is true and which has the power to reshape our understanding of the fundamentals of life:

Pizza is best reheated in a skillet.

If you are not already convinced of this, try this thought experiment. Picture a sandwich of cheese between two slices of soft bread. Mentally, butter that bread on the outside and put it in a skillet over medium-ish heat. What happens to the bottom slice of bread, in a few minutes' time? It becomes crispy. What happens to the cheese in the middle? It melts. If you can believe in grilled cheese sandwiches, you are capable of believing in skillet-reheated pizza.

Just put a slice or two of pizza in the skillet, turn on the burner, and wait. How will you know when it's done? Get this: The cheese will start to melt. That's it. Crisp, hot, leftover pizza.

[Image by Jim Cooke]


"Vinyl record sales have risen to 6 million in 2013, a sixfold increase from 2007 sales."

Wanted: Unretouched Pics from Lena Dunham's Vogue Shoot, Will Pay $10k

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Wanted: Unretouched Pics from Lena Dunham's Vogue Shoot, Will Pay $10k

Our sister site Jezebel, which has a grand history of documenting precisely how grotesquely fashion magazines digitally carve up their cover subjects into impossible avatars of manufactured beauty, is offering a $10,000 bounty for original, unphotoshopped images from Lena Dunham's recent Vogue shoot. Hopefully Dunham will hand them over and collect.

Phone Thieves Accidentally Send Terrible Homemade Porn to Victim

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Phone Thieves Accidentally Send Terrible Homemade Porn to Victim

A woman whose phone was recently pickpocketed found a surprise when she checked her online storage account a week later: Uploaded to the account, apparently directly from her phone, were a series of nude selfies and a pornographic video of the couple the woman believes stole her phone.

Victoria Brodsky's phone went missing this past August, when she and some friends went to a street fair in Brooklyn. Hours later, she realized her phone and wallet were gone and she quickly contacted police.

Then, one week later, a series of photographs of a nude couple began popping up in her Dropbox account, which automatically uploads photos from her phone. By the end of day, a video of the couple having sex showed up, too. Not that she found the pictures appealing:

"Sex looks very boring in their house," she told the New York Daily News, who she turned to for help in catching the porn loving culprits.

Phone Thieves Accidentally Send Terrible Homemade Porn to Victim

Inspired by our coverage of correct pizza-reheating technique, Bon Appetit has assembled a slideshow

Yep, Investors Were Full of Shit About $370 Million Instagram Ripoff

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Yep, Investors Were Full of Shit About $370 Million Instagram Ripoff

Tech investors said Viddy, an Instagram clone with video, was worth $370 million. The tech press parroted the "Instagram for video" line until their lips chapped, assuming it was true—since when is app hype wrong? Turns out it was! The startup just sold itself for an itty bitty percentage of that figure, because no one used it.

Close your eyes and travel with me back to 2012. The Next Web had Bieber fever and a mild Viddy rash:

One of the biggest celebrities on Twitter, Justin Bieber, has joined another hot service: Viddy.

Whether you're a Bieber fan or not, you have to respect the fact that someone with the size and type of following that he has is a huge grab for a service like Viddy

It also did a Viddy backer the favor of quoting him in this breathless headline: "Viddy investor: "it's growing so fast, I have to keep refreshing to get myself up to date"

Yowza!

"Viddy Co-Founder Says He Isn't Worried About Vine," reported Mashable.

TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis mumbled about the mega-veluation:

Someone wise once said "If Instagram for video were to happen it would look nothing like Instagram" but, because it was on Twitter, I briefly saw that tweet before it got lost in the ether and now I can't find it, dammit. But whoever said this is right (please reach out if it was you, I want to give you credit) and also didn't tell Viddy, which for the most part looks exactly like Instagram for video. Fine.

TC thought Viddy had a chance:

With the skyrocketing popularity and billion-dollar sale of Instagram, there's an ongoing race to apply Instagram's wildly successful photo sharing model to mobile video. There are a number of startups vying to claim the "Instagram for Video" title, with Socialcam, Viddy, Klip, Mobli, and even the infamous Color all in the running. Yet, today brings evidence that Viddy may now be the one to beat.

Nope. It turns out, the $370 million figure looked crazy and inflated because it was. Recode reports the video startup is now the Instagram of nothing, having pawned itself off for a tiny sliver of that once hefty valuation. Recode's Peter Kafka says "my hunch is that it's in the $15 million range." That would put Viddy's bullshit-excluded value at around 4 percent of what venture capital shamans claimed. There's a lesson here, somewhere, I suppose.

This Woman Claims To Enjoy Sniffing and Chewing Piss-Soaked Diapers

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This Woman Claims To Enjoy Sniffing and Chewing Piss-Soaked Diapers

Even for a My Strange Addiction enthusiast like myself, this segment was hard to swallow (I just don't buy the dirty diapers that this woman is selling, nor would I ever!). But I'm glad Jezebel covered it because it cracked me up in the same way, I suppose, professional wrestling energizes its more aware enthusiasts. Quite possibly the most absurd thing I've ever seen on television.

This guy, who's addicted to leeches and possibly Abel Ferrara with a Russian accent, was far more believable:

This Woman Claims To Enjoy Sniffing and Chewing Piss-Soaked Diapers

Police Arrest Philadelphia's Infamous Swiss Cheese Masturbator

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Police Arrest Philadelphia's Infamous Swiss Cheese Masturbator

Residents of Philadelphia can finally relax: A man accused of being the city's famed Swiss cheese fucker has reportedly been arrested.

Officers from Philadelphia's Special Victims Unit reportedly arrested Chris Pagano—who was rumored to be the cheese masturbator—on Thursday morning.

Pagano, who allegedly offered a woman money to watch him put swiss cheese on his dick, faces charges of indecent exposure, stalking, and harassment.

And this isn't Pagano's first brush with the law over his love of holed dairy. From PhillyMag.com, who have really owned the Swiss Cheese Masturbator beat since the story broke last week:

Court documents revealed that Pagano was arrested in 2009 after he allegedly "removed a large block of cheese from his pocket" and offered a woman on the street "$20 to rub the Swiss cheese on his penis." Pagano pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, and a solicitation charge against him was dismissed.

[Image via]


Jonah Hill Tells the Most Tragic Airplane Romance Story of All Time

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Sorry, that's "two-time Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill tells the most tragic airplane romance story of all time."

Hill was on the most recent episode of The Graham Norton Show, where he was goaded by the host into telling the audience (and fellow guests Carey Mulligan, Robert De Niro, and Sylvester Stallone) all about the time he "tried to have sexytime on a plane" (skip to the 1-minute mark).

The Wolf of Wall Street star insisted he did not try to have sexytime on a plane, but did go on to tell Norton a truly tragic tale about the time he fell in love with a girl on a plane but things went horribly, horribly awry before he had a chance to seal the deal.

Not to spoil any part of this amazing anecdote, but let's just say, get ready to call him "three-time Academy Award nominee Jonah Hill."

[H/T: Reddit]

Rich New Jersey Crybaby Warns of People Like Him Leaving NYC. OK, Bye!

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Rich New Jersey Crybaby Warns of People Like Him Leaving NYC. OK, Bye!Scott Sipprelle is a venture capitalist and a former New Jersey Republican congressional candidate. He would like to share some barely-concealed class war rhetoric with the haughty poors of New York City, for some reason!

One interesting fact about Scott Sipprelle is that, when he ran for Congress in 2010 in New Jersey, he was a client of the political consultant Ken Kurson. Ken Kurson is now the editor of the New York Observer, and—miracle of miracles—Scott Sipprelle has found a home in the pages of the once-great Observer for his exasperated dramatic ruminations on how New York City (where Sipprelle used to live, presumably when he was less of a bore) is all set to go straight to hell thanks to Bill De Blasio and his outrageous anti-rich-person policies, which exist most fully in the imagination of Scott Sipprelle. "The Day New York Died," is how his column refers to the fateful day when De Blasio was inaugurated—"a challenge to... the very idea of New York," he warns. What terrors lay in store for our fair city under Comrade De Blasio?

The highly priced lawyers and accountants and service firms that support the finance industry are like the sea birds that follow a fishing boat back to the pier after a successful day on the water. You won't have one without the other. Similarly, the jobs in construction, real estate, retail stores, restaurants and entertainment venues depend critically on the fortunes of their most well-heeled customers. But New York is more than Wall Street. It is also the place where the world's wealthy come to mingle, work and live and where millions of tourists visit to bask and marvel at the enormity of it all.

1. Corporate lawyers are like sea birds because... you won't have fishing boats, without the birds that follow them? Well, Scott Sipprelle is businessman, damn it, not some fancy writer.

2. New York City is more than just Wall Street— it's also "where the world's wealthy come to mingle." Scott Sipprelle's New York runs the entire spectrum, from Wall Streeters to wealthy people.

At this point—with no real justification for why we might do such a thing—Scott Sipprelle asks us to imagine a New York City without all of the rich people.

You have a place that looks a lot like Philadelphia—a large eastern city on the water with interesting history and fiscal imbalances that seem to defy solutions. Philadelphia is mostly a Tale of One City. Lacking New York's high taxes on large numbers of high wage earners, the city is able to budget $3.6 billion in spending to support its 1.5 million residents. New York City's government, by contrast, is able to spend three-and-a-half times as much per capita, $70 billion on its 8.3 million citizens. New York is a place where trickle-down economics (supplemented by high taxes on high incomes) is a highly effective model for channeling resources to benefit its most disadvantaged.

If I read this correctly, Scott Sipprelle is saying that "high taxes on high incomes" here in New York is a "highly effective model." In other words, Scott Sipprelle here is voicing his support for the basic economic pillar of the plan that Bill de Blasio has advocated. His support comes embedded in a column that is raising panicky alarm about the plan that Bill de Blasio has advocated. It's almost as if Scott Sipprellle is just voicing a standard set of Republican platitudes with little intellectual coherence. He concludes:

Southern Connecticut, Texas and London all have compelling lifestyle and economic attractions for this new wave of financiers who operate in a brave new world that is digitally hyper-linked. This trickle-out trend of wealth leaving New York is already underway. The question is whether it becomes a flood.

You already live in New Jersey, Scott. I assure you that the people of New York City will not give a shit if you decide to move to London. (Or Texas!) We have plenty of entitled rich assholes of our own.

[Photo: AP]

"A condemned Ohio inmate appeared to gasp several times and took more than 15 minutes to die Thursda

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"A condemned Ohio inmate appeared to gasp several times and took more than 15 minutes to die Thursday as he was executed with a combination of drugs never before tried in the U.S." Dennis McGuire's attorney called the execution "a failed, agonizing experiment by the state of Ohio."

Gosselin Kid Strikes Back at Her Mom With a Silent, Riveting Interview

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Gosselin Kid Strikes Back at Her Mom With a Silent, Riveting Interview

Thursday morning on the Today show, 13-year-old recovering reality star Cara Gosselin established herself as the most powerfully silent teen on television. Behold:

Cara, her twin sister Mady, and her mother Kate (all of ...Plus 8 fame) were on Today promoting a where-are-they-now interview in the January 20 issue of People, in which Mady proudly declares that she and her siblings are not "damaged"—a "dope" thing for a non-damaged 13-year-old girl to promise a national magazine.

(In the same interview, she calls her mother "annoying." Veteran viewers of Jon & Kate Plus 8 will recall that Mady was always a bit of a bad girl.)

Throughout the Today chitchat, led by anchor Savannah Guthrie, Kate Gosselin appeared quietly furious. Her daughters, by contrast, appeared even more quietly furious.

Or maybe just paralyzingly shy. Or maybe just 13, symptoms of which include being quietly furious and paralyzingly shy.

Things got off to a bumpy start when Guthrie asked Mady what she would want to tell the world about how she and her family are doing.

Mady (very pleasantly!) responded "Umm." (Cara, who remained silent, looked miserable.)

In the hour-long four second pause that followed Guthrie's question, Kate Gosselin grew nervous. She leaned forward, as if to catch her daughter's eye. She clapped her hands two times.

"Mady." Clap clap. "Your words." (Cara, who remained silent, looked miserable.)

"Well," said Guthrie. "It's hard. It's a hard question." These words were drowned out by the ones Kate Gosselin said at the same time, while gesturing brightly toward the camera: "It's your chance. Spit it out."

Mady whispered something unintelligible to her mother. (Cara, who remained silent, looked miserable.)

Gosselin Kid Strikes Back at Her Mom With a Silent, Riveting Interview

"What about you, Cara?" asked Guthrie.

Cara, who remained silent, looked miserable.

"I don't want to speak for them," spoke Kate, for them, "but, Mady, go ahead. Sort of the things that you said in the magazine, that years later they're good, they're fine. Go for it, Mad. It's your chance."

Mady whipped her head around to face her mother.

"No, you just said it."

(Cara, who remained silent, looked miserable.)

Savannah asked Cara if she thought people had the wrong impression of the Gosselin family.

Cara, who remained silent, looked miserable.

This time, however, Cara's silence was allowed to ride. It stretched out, gloriously, for more 10 seconds, punctuated only by Mady's nervous laughter, Kate's whispered "My gosh!" and barked "Yes or no!" and the abrupt hush of a 38-year-old Pennsylvania woman's heart suddenly ceasing to beat.

Ten seconds doesn't sound like a long time when you consider that the universe is 13.8 billion years old. And yet: perform an experiment right now. Remain silent for a full ten seconds. Don't focus on anything but the silence. Feels like a lot of silence, right? And it's only been 5 seconds.

At no point during The Great Quiet did Cara appear to be even considering speaking.

When asked if she thought TV and magazine interviews might do more harm than good to the girls, Kate explained "I can't get them to do, at this age—at 13, anything they don't wanna do." Both girls frowned at the ground.

Finally, four minutes and thirteen seconds into the interview, when Guthrie wondered if the girls would like to participate in another TV show, Cara smiled and spoke her first and only word of the segment:

"Uh-huh."

As California Burns, Hot Dry Weather Predicted For Entirety of "Winter"

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As California Burns, Hot Dry Weather Predicted For Entirety of "Winter"

Here's some terrible news to mark the beginning of permanent fire season in California: It's going to stay like this, hot and dry, until May. The Climate Prediction Center says winter will come and go without the usual winter storms that provide the snowpack that provides all the water people use. Fire conditions will be awful until summer, when they will continue being awful until next winter, if winter ever shows up again.

With 2013 already on record as the driest year in recorded California history, the exact last thing we need is another winter without rain and snow. But that's what 2014 is forecast to be, at least through the crucial January-May rainy season.

The seasons are more subtle here, with the only real weather drama coming from a dozen or so winter storms responsible for all the Sierra Nevada snow and most of the state's rainfall. But after so many dry years, the whole state looks parched and yellowed, the scrub brush hills and parched mountains already burning again in a fire season that has lasted all of this century so far.

Wildfires have raged up and down the state in these first weeks of the new year, because the brush and the weeds and trees are dried out, the humidity low, the temperatures high and the rainfall nonexistent. With large fires already scarring the San Gabriel Mountains, the Sacramento Delta and even in the alleged rainy forests of Humboldt County, 2014 is already looking very bad.

Suburbs are the dominant "built environment" in California, as they are in all of the Southwest United States. Each new ring of low-density development eats up open space and pushes as far as economically possible against the hills or mountains beyond the distant urban core. Hills and mountains have the most trees and brush, so the outlying suburbs are always first to burn when the hot winds suck columns of fire down the slopes and canyons. The invasive weeds that have covered the foothills and deserts in the past 30 years put an end to the natural fire suppression of the past, when widely spaced desert plants limited the reach of fires in the driest regions.

The ongoing drought—described by climate scientists as a "megadrought"—is already 13 years old in the American West. There are visible and permanent changes in the mountains, where the annual snowpack has been a small fraction of what was normal in the 20th Century. The forests have been hit hard by parasites like the pine beetle, which feasts on trees weakened by years of drought. Dry and dead trees are the first to catch fire, and as the forested slopes erode there is only desert brush and invasive weeds to grow in the scorched sandy ground that remains.

In medieval times, a thousand years ago, megadroughts lasting up to three decades affected the entire continental United States. Entire civilizations vanished, like the Hohokam society that once sprawled over hundreds of square miles where Arizona's biggest city sits today. But there have been longer droughts in America, too. Climate scientists studying tree rings have evidence of megadroughts lasting a century or more. One of those would be enough to end modern American civilization, if something else doesn't do it first.

These past megadroughts were obviously not caused by industrial society. But the conditions of man-made climate change—particularly the higher temperatures, drilling the water table dry, and clearing of forests and open space—will make a lengthy megadrought especially hard on our form of civilization.

And in California, strict water rationing is next.

The Central Valley agricultural industry is already getting 95% less water than it would in good years. And in Northern California, rationing means that marijuana farmers will be struggling. For people who still have lawns around their single-family houses, it will be dust and brown dead grass. It is easy to forget just how unpleasant a long California drought can be, and people in their 20s or 30s may have no memory at all of life without being able to flush the toilet if there's "only" urine in the bowl.

Ken Layne writes Gawker's American Almanac and American Journal. Chart via the NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.

Would-be Burglar Thwarted by Pulling on "Push" Door

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Would-be Burglar Thwarted by Pulling on "Push" Door

A thief in Chicago managed to break halfway into a bar before he was stopped by his own stupidity: Instead of pushing, as the door's sign instructed, he spent several minutes pulling, eventually giving up and fleeing the scene.

"It's much funnier on the video, but the still shots show him pulling on the door. He could have pushed it," Joe Lin, the bar's owner, told DNA Info in Chicago.

"The gall of him breaking in in broad daylight. It's light out, people are jogging by. I want to let other businesses know," Lin added.

Police are investigating several other attempted break-ins in the area. No word if those were also spoiled by illiteracy.

Russell Johnson, the actor who played Professor Roy Hinkley in Gilligan's Island, has died of natura

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Russell Johnson, the actor who played Professor Roy Hinkley in Gilligan's Island, has died of natural causes at the age of 89. Co-star Dawn Wells posted on Facebook that her "heart is broken…Russell was a true gentleman, a good father, a great friend, and 'the rest'."


Looking? Mmmmm, Maybe Another Time

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Looking? Mmmmm, Maybe Another Time

It's not easy being a TV show about gay men in 2014. Thanks in part to the power of the internet as a platform for activism and outrage, the responsibilities of representation have never seemed more urgent, or more complicated. To appeal to your gay audience—built-in and notoriously loyal—you need to be realistic. To appeal to everyone else—whose patronage will ultimately make or break—you can't be too gay. The ideal is something satisfying without the ick factor, something like, and about as likely as, a spontaneous orgasm.

(You could always, of course, settle for the noble getting-by of being niche, but gays are notorious overachievers.)

And, of course, above all else, a piece of gay pop culture*, in these United States, in 2014, has the challenge of arguing that gays are people too—that we're more than sex maniacs and objects of amusement.

So, given these constraints, HBO's new series Looking (premiering Sunday) does an adequate job. It compromises and humanizes. It's polite but firm, its characters so normal that they're barely remarkable. They have jobs and like to hang out. Maybe every five minutes, someone will say something funny, maybe not. Whatever! They're just dudes in their late 20s and 30s living in San Francisco, looking for love, or something.

They're also very boring. Looking gets that right, if nothing else: For a lot of young gay men—for a lot of everyone—life is boring. I watched (in some cases rewatched) the first three episodes feeling like I was wading through waist-deep mud. I couldn't care less what happened from scene to scene from this nice enough, low-energy, rarely clever group of friends. Things pick up a bit later in the season, which is to say: It gets better. But for the first handful of episodes, I couldn't figure out why we were following these people, why I should care about any of them or their gentle journeys through life—except for the fact that they're all gay.

That said, I have more in common with these gay guys than any I've seen on TV before. They smoke pot; they get along with their platonic gay friends without bitchy backstabbing; they hook up casually on Grindr; they frequently exhibit an apprehensiveness and/or amusement over greater gay culture that they are supposed to relate to but for whatever reason don't; they say things like, "God I'm such a cliché...thinking that sex will make me feel better. I mean it does but still..." And yet, I'd much rather spend time with the queens on RuPaul's Drag Race. I don't think I'm having some sort of narcissism-of-small-differences reaction to LookingI like pop culture I can relate to, whether I can actually see myself in it or just recognize its essential truth. Girls, which runs before Looking on HBO, is a show in the latter category for me. But while the snappy and fast-paced Girls feels like a trip to an amusement park, Looking is like paging through a magazine in a dentist's office.

Maybe it's this: Time has proved that we gays are resilient, able to assemble a patchwork of influences and cues from the scraps that pop culture gives us. (I'm not saying that's right, I'm just saying that's the way it's been.) Thus, I don't feel a particular yearning to see my specific life experiences coming from screens. I read Bret Easton Ellis' Out essay last year and wondered why a 49-year-old man was moaning about not seeing himself—his "type"—accurately represented onscreen. He's made it through half a century without such a compass. Why would he need it now?

The question, more or less, is answered reasonably in the 1995 documentary The Celluloid Closet by the academic/writer Richard Dyer:

Your ideas about who you are don't just come from inside you, they come from the culture and in this culture, they come especially from the movies. So we learn from the movies what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to have sexuality.

That makes sense to me. As Teena Marie didn't say, sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one. What might be right for you may not be right for some, and vice versa. I can see how it could be helpful for some people to see Dom (played by Murray Bartlett), nearing 40 and struggling with his waning appeal, on Looking. I understand that the opening relationship of boyfriends Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez) and Frank (O. T. Fagbenle) might make people who have similar allergies to strict monogamy feel less alone. There are web series like The Outs that cover a similar weed-paced, friend-valuing, sexually-active-but-not-methy, gay way of existing. But Looking is on HBO, which means more exposure and that's great and monumental and everyone can feel fulfilled because their lives, or something that looks like their lives if they squint, are on their TV screen. Cool, I hope this works for you.

(The Outs is much wittier than Looking, by the way.)

I don't really get, though, how anyone in the know could find the milquetoast and adorkable principal character of Patrick (Jonathan Groff) anything but irritating, but he's so clueless that he seems less of a model/cautionary tale for gay men than a liaison for those who aren't so familiar with gay-male culture, an avatar for curious straights. (For the record: We're just like you! We don't know what any of this shit means either!) "My friends think I'm this boy from Colorado that's just fresh of the bus, but I'm not that guy! I have had sex before! I can do it! I will do it! I can do it right now in the toilet!" he exclaims at a club at one point. Simmer down, Shoshanna.

Patrick is fucking clueless, the kind of person who introduces himself to his anonymous trick as they start to hook up in a wooded area of a San Francisco park (the scene the series opens on). He's the kind of person who gets thrown into a tizzy when he realizes that the dick of Richie (Raúl Castillo), the Latino guy he has scheduled a date with, might be uncircumcised. After an extremely awkward exchange in bed with Richie, Richie cuts their hook-up short and then Patrick frets on the phone: "Everything was going fine until I acted like all I wanted to do was suck on his uncut cock, which it turns out he doesn't actually have. I think I may be a racist as well." (That's when you're supposed to laugh.)

Front and center of Looking is this physically unthreatening white guy with eyes so blue they're complimented by Richie on first meeting, but the powers that be (among them, creator Michael Lannan and executive producer Andrew Haigh, who wrote and directed 2011's excellent Weekend) know better than to repeat the mistakes of Girls and run an all-honkies-all-the-time production. So Agustín is Cuban, Frank is black, and Richie is Mexican (and everybody on the internet can shut the fuck up because there's your diversity, you're welcome).

(Dom, for the record, is also white.)

But the show's Hollywood homogeneity—i.e., the only people worth listening to have perfect bodies and a handsome faces—aligns a little too well with the no fats/no fems ideals of online hookup culture. (Looking's guys also could be described as "non-scene.") No matter how deep Looking wants to be—and I get the sense that it wants to be very deep—no matter how many different races and facial hairstyles it represents, it shares a terrible superficiality with the most alienating aspects of gay culture.

It's a shitty reminder of one of the shittier aspects of being gay. Even worse, though, is its seeming squeamishness about sex, which it routinely cuts away from as soon as the action starts heating up. Early in the first episode, we hear Agustín and Frank doing… something through Patrick's room (when the series opens Agustín and Patrick are roommates). When we cut to the couple, they're discussing stopping their session (Agustín has to go to work). And then they stop. Later, they start to engage in a threeway with a guy Agustín is working with. After they both kiss their third, the scene cuts, never to return (though the threeway dictates the course of their relationship for at least the next three episodes). The most nudity you see during a brief trip to the notoriously filthy Folsom Street Fair are a woman's breasts. I'm talking XY flesh! Dom gets cruised in a steam room and as he's pursuing the much younger guy, you guessed it, the scene cuts.

That's a particularly disappointing scene, because just before, a guy (played by, weirdly enough, Scott Bakula) who'd been chatting him up encourages him to pursue the supple, young thing—and then, on Dom's way out of the steam room, still agrees to meet with Dom for lunch sometime. That coolness when it comes to sex, the implicit camaraderie in accepting that the dude you want to do wants to go do someone else and refusing to judge him or even reject him as a result of it, is, in my experience, really particular to gay men and a wonderful moment of nuance for the series. (And then, Dom goes off to, for all we know, rub his Ken doll-smooth crotch up against the younger guy's hole-less butt.)

Whether it's HBO's censorship or Looking's creators being very careful, it sucks that this supposedly forward-thinking, and self-evidently important series is deferring to straight society's repulsion at the idea of two men having sex. Consider how prudish Looking is in the scheme of HBO programming. If Girls is a Borat bathing suit, Looking is one of those calf-to-elbow old timey men's bathing suits. If Game of Thrones is porn, Looking is Elmer Fudd kissing Bugs Bunny in drag. (Game of Thrones' gay sex scenes, incidentally, are more graphic than those in Looking. At least in those, you see actual man ass.) Looking is reluctant to show the gayest part of being gay. I understand why, but I don't like it. I like my gay things with balls.

And so as I watch this show, I yell transcend! at the screen. Transcend, as all non-heterosexual things must do to succeed in a homophobic world. I'm not asking for hardcore porn (there's plenty of that already and I know where to find it), but the closest thing you get to nudity in the first four Looking episodes are some glimpses of shirtlessness and the side of Dom's ass as he fucks a Grindr trick from behind for about 10 seconds. That's as racy as it gets and it's still less graphic than Girls' tamest sex scene. The U.S. version of Queer as Folk's anal-virginity-losing scene during its premiere was way more explicit than anything in Looking's first four episodes by a large margin, and that aired over 13 years ago. It feels like we're regressing.

Above all else, Looking is a reminder of how very normative gay culture skews now. While the show's title evokes hook-up-app-speak ("Looking?" is shorthand for, "Wanna hook-up?"), the tagline is, "Find something real." Maybe that's just marketing, but with the way the plot progresses in the first four episodes, it seems like that might be the show's ethos. Yeah, if that's what you want, go ahead and do it, find something real—but don't let a show or society dictate to you what you should be doing or looking for. Don't let a show tell you that normalcy is a long hunt for a "real" mate. Don't let a show tell you that promiscuity has one ultimate goal. That's so standard. That's so traditional. These story lines are things we've seen a million times before (Patrick has a flirtatious relationship with his ball-busting boss! Dom is intrigued by a man who's older than his usual type! Agustín has eyes for a bad-boy escort, even though he should know better!). In the quest for equality, "normal" has become such an ideal that being gay is the same thing as being straight and lightly dusted with seasoning. Gay people and gay life are not curly fries to straight people's normal fries.

In Looking, gay men get to be boring on TV at last. They get to look for love in barely different ways than straight people. But to me Looking's traditionalism serves more as a reminder of how queer gay pop culture used to be. It's hard to imagine something like the intercut vignettes of alienation seen in Todd Haynes' Poison, or the tangent-prone and fractured Totally Fucked Up (Greg Araki) getting made today. It's hard to believe that something as high-profile and unconventional as Interior. Leather Bar actually exists. It's like gay pop culture shot its wad with the likes of those guys, and John Waters, and Derek Jarman, and Kenneth Anger, and all the other gay men who made movies that didn't function like movies that came before them, that told previously inconceivable stories that often focused on gayness but understood that space for the freedom that it offered. I suppose that in all of these cases, being niche is the rub.

Those artists were pushing back against, and in many cases flat-out rejecting, homophobic society. Looking is made in and for a world that's more accepting of homosexuals than ever. As much as it seeks to shape the culture, this show is also a product of it. Things aren't perfect, but they're getting better—for most of us—and acceptance opens a lane in the middle of the road. Looking's mediocrity is ultimately a reminder of something wonderful: our advancement.

But it's still fucking mediocrity.

*Note: I'm using "gay pop culture" here to talk about pop culture focused on gay men. While pop culture focused on (and/or made by) gay women often has similarities, it diverges just as frequently and is regarded differently (gay men are regarded by homophobic society as threats to masculinity; gay women often are not, or are regarded as threats in different ways). In addition, in terms of relating and recognizing myself in TV shows, I can only really speak to my own experience as a gay man. That said, I'd love to hear more about gay women's experiences with recent pop culture portrayals—obviously The L Word is the big one—especially in comparison to a show like Looking.

Q&A with Betas, Amazon's Show About Startup Life in Silicon Valley

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Q&A with Betas, Amazon's Show About Startup Life in Silicon Valley

Popular culture may have turned its gaze westward, toward the mirage of wunderkind coders, open floor plans studded with perks, and suddenly ubiquitous apps that make their makers insta-millionaires. But the competition to get Silicon Valley right has been flaccid. I was burned by Bravo, bored by Bloomberg, and avoided The Internship like a sticker pack. However Betas, Amazon's original series about social awkward 20-somethings building a social app called "brb," gets some details surprisingly right.

There's an accelerator founder based on Roger McNamee, who harkens back to San Francisco's druggier days. There are valuations that disappear in a flash, a brogrammer who got lucky with a one-hit wonder app, and even a gossip blog call ValleySmash.

Of course, it's a sitcom and one of Amazon's first, so of course you have your goofy slapstick/dude-I-can-tell-this-is-a-sound-stage moments. It's broad, it's formulaic, but if you stick with it a bit, you'll find it's self-aware about prevailing absurdities and disarmingly sympathetic to the intense competition for funding and attention. I talked to the creators Evan Endicott and Josh Stoddard about how they did their homework.

What inspired you to write a show about startups?

Evan: I had worked with Michael London, the producer on Sideways, quite a few years back. He approached Josh and I with this idea loosely-based on reality. A startup had moved into his building here in L.A. They used to be the cool people because they made films, and they were surrounded by tax attorneys, an AT&T store, whatever. And then this startup moved in, it was called InTheMo.com. I don't think it really went anywhere, but it was like a nightlife website. Suddenly there are all these beautiful, hip twenty-somethings in the building. It was like a parody of a startup. They had the ping-pong, and the foosball, they had beer taps. Suddenly all of his interns were going down there and hanging out and coming back a little bit drunk at lunch. He was like, "What is this new culture that's so much cooler than we are, and why am I an old man?" So he thought, "Well that's a funny thing, we should do something about this."

You and Josh were interested in exploring that world as well?

Evan: I think it's so pervasive in everyone's life now. We were a little bit shocked that nobody had done it, really, because apps and all this stuff are part of our daily lives now because of the prevalence of smartphones. So we invented all these characters and this world and the app, all based on that initial conversation. I'd had friends who had left L.A. and moved to San Francisco to work at startups, so I was pretty interested in how that culture was becoming the new desirable thing to do if you were in your twenties, whereas when I graduated it was movies and journalism, stuff like that. Now that's all kind of condensed, even if you're doing that stuff you're doing it for a website.

So your friends who went to work at startups. Can you say which ones they were?

Evan: Yeah, one of my best friends from L.A. is a marketing director at iSkoot. And I don't know much about them, but they sold their platform to like AT&T or something, and it was one of the original ways to push smartphone stuff to non-smartphones. You could, like, use Facebook on old-school handsets. I had seen how he was living up in the Bay and was like, "Wow. You made a smart choice." There's so much ambition in that world, and the people doing it and pursuing it are so young, it just seemed like it was pretty right for a kind of underdog story, and those are just really fun stories to tell.

Josh: The social space is really interesting to us in particular because it was a great entry point for us to get into our characters' heads. We read a lot. The book about Google and how they got started; their kind of obsessive need to engineer things. This idea that there are people out there basically trying to engineer how we interact socially. And trying to maximize algorithms for interactions and things like that, you know? According to a lot of the people at the top of Google, you can engineer this stuff, and it's just a matter of finding the right numbers. We found that really, really compelling. That in the real-world space these engineers—some of them, or a lot of them—probably aren't the most socially active people in the world, they are the ones shaping what it means to be friends today.

I think BRB gets right to the point that the people who are trying to facilitate how we communicate have struggled so mightily with it themselves. In general, what source materials did you go to? Are you reading through TechCrunch? Are you going to the Creamery and trying to overhear conversations?

Evan: We're based in L.A., so unfortunately, in the initial going, it was all kind of research-based. And especially when we were first writing the pilot and before Amazon got involved, there was kind of a different version of the pilot that was more broad and more a satire of the culture and maybe less sort of inside of it. That's when we were reading the Google book and Steve Jobs bio. Once Amazon came onboard, we went and we pitched them, the characters, the world, a potential pilot, all that kind of stuff. They were a huge asset because they come from that world. And they were able to set us up with phone calls and interviews with people, a lot of venture capitalists, angel investors, CEOs of startups, so we were able to start really hearing it from the primary sources. What was interesting was, a lot of the stuff we had made up, thinking, "Well, I hope this is right," then was completely echoed, sometimes almost identically by people in the world. And that was kind of creepy but it made us feel like, "Okay, we're on to something." Even stuff that we probably made broad and ridiculous, like some of the elements of Murch's character, once you read about Larry Ellison, or we would talk to people who are like, "My boss did X, Y, and Z, you can't use that in the show." And I was like, "Uh, we kind of already wrote that."

I met you guys through DMing Ken Cheng [a writer for Betas] and—even using the word "DMing," it's so embarrassing unless you're immersed in this stuff. Anyways, I wanted to ask him if the writer for "ValleySmash" was based on someone in real life, he said no. The obvious parallel for Ed Begley Jr.'s character George Murchison, who runs an accelerator, would be Paul Graham and Y Combinator.

Evan: He was even more based on… Do you remember that guy's name, Josh, with the TED Talk? About the future of the web and… He's a big investor, but he's very—sort of slovenly looking and he plays in a Dead cover band. And he plays guitar. Roger...something.

Josh: McNamee. Roger McNamee [from Elevation Partners]!

Evan: I just watch a lot of TED Talks because I'm a dork. I had just seen that one and I was like, it struck me because in the time I spent in San Francisco I was always marveling at how there could be a billionaire next to you and you wouldn't know. Because they don't dress to look apart, for the most part. And this guy's giving a TED Talk who's obviously made a mint investing in tech, but he's wearing, like, sweatpants—

Josh: Flip-flops, yeah.

Evan: It's just a different world than the glamour of L.A. or the super-ridiculous Wall Street kind of money. I have friends who are in that world, too. And there's this interesting element to S.F. where it's, like, bohemian but there's still all that wealth. A guy who loves the Dead, but loves making money. Like, what is that?

You said originally it was a satire. Was it not told through the perspective of the founders themselves? Was it somebody on the outside looking in?

Evan: In the initial version we had a straight-man character who was coming into that world and was new. So it was a little more in that Arrested Development kind of style where you've got the Jason Bateman character and then the crazies swirling around him. And it was actually a really good suggestion, early on when we met with Amazon they said, "You don't need him. Make the founder the main character," basically.

That's one thing that impressed me, I feel like there's a real, visceral sense of fear about getting a good valuation or running out of money. Even within the trade press, there's so much froth and hyperbole and bated breath that you sort of do lose sight. There's a lot at stake here. You mentioned VCs and angels, did you talk to young startup founders, too?

Josh: Once we started down this road we went up there to San Francisco and went to accelerators and we met young entrepreneurs who had ideas that were anywhere from just a hair above the napkin sketch all the way to fully running, monetized things. It was really enlightening and heartening in that I felt like every other founder we talked to, we were talking to another Trey [the main character in Betas]. You've got your [founder] who believes with 100% of their being that they have the next billion-dollar idea and that this is what they were born to do, you know, and they're so in it. They're so ensconced in it and just wrapped in it, it's all they eat, breathe, sleep, do. And it's easy to take two steps back and laugh at that, because it's kind of ridiculous when you see it all the time around here in L.A., but we wanted to get close to it, we wanted to get inside of it, because there is something heroic about it. And there is something, you know, when everybody tells you no, you're nuts, and this guy charges ahead without anything to believe in other than his ability to make it so. No reason these guys should believe this, but they do. And you know what? They probably will be successful.

What audience did you have in mind? Did you want this show to be watched by people who are in it now and have their life reflected back at them? Or do you ever think if the whole thing implodes, I want people to look back at the show and see there was a chance it was going to collapse?

Evan: We want people to watch it and feel like their life is being reflected. There's satirical elements and we try to have a lot of fun on the show and we have ridiculous characters, and that gives you all kinds of room for comedy. But I just love being thrown in a world. Whether it's biker gangs or Baltimore drug corners. Or internet startups.

A lot of it is filmed in L.A., though?

Josh: Yeah, a lot of it is filmed in L.A. We have the accelerator, the bar, Mitchell's apartment, those are all sets that we'd actually shoot on here in L.A. And then we'd shoot occasionally outside in restaurants and things down here, but then we banged a couple of weeks that we could go up in San Francisco and shoot scenes from each episode, try to make it feel real.

Amazon shrewdly offered a free month of Prime, which is how I started watching the show. But it seems like people are discovering it in stages. Is that what you're seeing with the viewer numbers?

Evan: We aren't privy to any of the numbers, that's all internal at Amazon. But I do feel like there's a real exciting opportunity once all the episodes are up to have more viewers even discover it and binge watch it.

Josh: There are jokes and there are things that run through the entire show. Little runners that go all the way through that are best appreciated in a binge, because you'll actually see how it all strings together rather than have to wait week to week.

Right. Like every time Jon Daly's ex-wide gives out the bat signal for sex by playing Words with Friends.

Evan: Yeah, I broke up with a girl once and we kept playing Words with Friends for about three weeks, and it was my first realization of how terrible technology can be. Toxic post-breakup environment.

When you got started, no one else was exploring this in a fictional way. But now there's the Mike Judge show that's coming out. I have friends who are writing scripts about people in incubators and startups. Do you think that it will be just like another Wall Street, a cipher, a way to talk about the current moment in time?

Josh: It's such a prominent part of our culture, and it's such a blooming space that . . . I mean, you can never have too many cop shows. This is like the new office comedy, in some regard. It's funny: Silicon Valley, it's been on our radar for a long time. One of the first places we pitched this show was to HBO, and they liked what we came up with but they said they were doing something similar with Mike Judge. And we've been kind of waiting to find out what that was going to be. And where we shoot, in Culver City at Culver Studios, Mike and his production team moved in one floor below us. Of all the studio spaces in L.A., they were literally right below us. Their trailers, I could look out our window and see their trailers, their offices, we saw their actors walking around all the time, it was hilarious.

Now when you see news break, like a deposition video from the Snapchat lawsuit, do you just think of it as new material for potential B-plots?

Josh: Oh, yeah. It's all material.

Evan: We riffed on Snapchat a bit in episode 10. And I remember we were talking about how much money should be involved in these different buyouts and stuff. We would get in big fights about this. It was always like, your numbers are too high, nobody would offer that much. And then right after we finished shooting there was the big $3 billion cash offer to Snapchat. Which, frankly, is a very simplistic app. And it was like, wow, this is so much crazier than we could even imagine!

Josh: We did actually shoot that Snapchat scene in the house directly next door to the Snapchat house down here in Venice. We asked if we could use their house and they said no, so we were literally were shooting in the house next door with the Snapchat guys looking over the fence, watching us shoot basically a parody of them. It was pretty awesome.

The live Q&A part of this interview is now closed. Thanks so much for participating!

Internet Celebrity Accused of Raping Internet Celebrity Girlfriend

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Internet Celebrity Accused of Raping Internet Celebrity Girlfriend

A popular Internet personality is being accused of sexually assaulting his now-ex-girlfriend — another popular Internet personality — while she slept off a concussion.

Curtis Lepore and Jessi Vasquez (AKA Jessi Smiles) have amassed over 6 million followers between them on the video clip sharing service Vine.

It was thanks to their army of fanatic fans that the two first met and it was in front of that army of fanatic fans that they first professed their love for each other.

But according to TMZ, the two soon called it quits and split up. They remained on good terms, which is why when Jessi sustained a concussion while recording a Vine last August, Lepore offered to help her in her recovery.

It was while at her house, TMZ says, that Lepore allegedly raped Jessi as she slept.

"Be careful of who you trust," Jessi tweeted the next day. "Always be cautious for your safety. Be strong and don't let your guard down."

Curtis was subsequently arrested, but released shortly thereafter on $100,000 bail. He made his initial court appearance on Tuesday to face rape charges.

Lepore's lawyer insists his client is innocent, telling TMZ, "Things are not always as they appear and there are two sides to every story."

Both Curtis and Jessi took to their respective Twitter accounts today following news of the rape allegations to make brief statements.

"I stopped living my life 6 months ago for a very long time and that is NOT going to happen again," Jessi wrote in a since deleted tweet. "This is all I will say. Love you all."

"Wow. TMZ?" retorted Lepore. "It all makes sense now. Let the second publicity stunt begin!"

Naturally, Lepore's fans have also had their say, and, needless to say, they have been less than compassionate toward Jessi:

[H/T: BetaBeat, Heavy, screengrab via Vine]

How Cities Are Eradicating Homelessness Among Veterans

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How Cities Are Eradicating Homelessness Among Veterans

In the past month, two major American cities—Salt Lake City and Phoenix—have both announced that they have ended "chronic homelessness" among military veterans in their town. How?

Both pulled off this legitimately impressive (if temporary) feat by focusing, before anything else, on housing. The New York Times sums up the rationale behind Phoenix's approach:

According to local and national surveys, it is more expensive to cover the costs of emergency room visits or nights in jail for homeless people than it is to give them homes. A 2009 analysis commissioned by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, which handles the largest population of homeless veterans in the country, found that the monthly cost of housing and supportive services for one person was $605, while the public costs of a person living on the streets were roughly $2,900 a month.

Across the country, the strategy is centered on an approach called Housing First, through which a home is not treated as a reward for good behavior.

The logic is simple and economically compelling. By paying something up front to give people a place to live, a city can save a lot of money on social services.

The political difficulty arises when moralizers object that homeless people should not be "rewarded" with subsidies. In fact, society always pays one way or another. Enacting a comprehensive housing program for homeless veterans, who have already made a donation to the public, so to speak, is more palatable. But if no-questions-asked housing works for homeless veterans, it should work for all homeless people. Let's do it.

[Photo: AP]

We're Offering $50 for Unretouched Images of Adam Driver in Vogue

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We're Offering $50 for Unretouched Images of Adam Driver in Vogue

Five months ago, Vogue released a pictorial featuring none other than Adam Driver, one of the stars of Girls. The images were, all in all, quite nice. He wore a live sheep around his shoulders and looked fantastic. As if Vogue would have it any other way.

Adam Driver is a man who trumpets body positivity, I guess. I mean, often when you see him, he's shirtless. He's unabashedly feminist, I guess (again), since he's on Girls. He has said, describing his regular morning breakfast of two whole eggs and four yolk-less eggs, "It's good for you, protein and all that. I used to eat a whole chicken every day, for lunch. I did that for four years. But it got tiring — go to the store, buy it, eat it. It's a mess."

His body is real. He is real. And as lovely as the Vogue pictures are, they're probably not terribly real. Or maybe they are. We're not sure. So Gawker is offering $50 and a bottle of Captain Morgan rum that's been sitting around on John Cook's desk to whoever can get us pre-Photoshop images from Driver's Vogue shoot.

Annie Leibovitz, who shot Driver for the mag, isn't one to shy away from digitally fucking with images, and Vogue has a rich and storied history of distorting women's bodies. Probably men's too, for all we know. Let's find out.

[Image via Vogue]

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