Jonah Hill was so desperate to work with Martin Scorsese on The Wolf of Wall Street, he apparently agreed to work for SAG minimums. In a film with a rumored budget of over $100 million, the Oscar-nominated Hill revealed on Tuesday that he earned only $60,000.

While on The Howard Stern Show, Hill shared the details of his discount rate:

"They gave me the lowest amount of money possible, that was their offer," he told Stern. "I said, 'I will sign the paper tonight. Fax me the papers tonight.' I want to sign them tonight before they change their mind. I said I want to sign them before I go to sleep tonight so they legally can't change their mind."

According to Hill, SAG minimum for the 7-month shoot was "something like $60,000 before commissions and taxes." But in no way does Hill regret the pay cut: "I would sell my house and give him all my money to work for [Scorsese] . . . I would have done anything in the world. I would do it again in a second."

Of course, Hill is in a privileged position in that he was able to afford such a small sum, but it's nice to hear about someone young in Hollywood genuinely privileging work over cash. "It's not about money for me. None of this shit is about money," he said. "I got to fucking be in a Martin Scorsese movie."

The censors will be ready for Hill when he hosts SNL for the third time this weekend:

[Image via AP]

Harry's, the Warby Parker of the shaving industry, aims to disrupt the Big Razor companies with technology, "value-oriented" prices, and style. One problem: no razor is really worth more than a buck.

Harry's, you see, does not aim to be the dirt-cheap Dollar General of shaving; it aims to be the Warby Parker of shaving. It does not aim to simply cut the price of razors to the bare minimum; it aims to be a cooler brand of razor than Gillette, at a similar price. Dealbook says that "The company calls itself value-oriented, with a shaving set of razor, two replacement blades and a tube of cream for $15, compared with roughly $12 for a Gillette Fusion razor with two blade heads."

Have you, the savvy consumer, picked up on the two important flaws in this new Business Model That Will Disrupt Everything? I will enumerate them forthwith:

1) $15 is actually not less than $12.

2) That doesn't even matter, because you shouldn't be paying more than a buck for a razor anyhow.

Expensive razors are much like expensive watches, in that they are fetish objects that correlate very strongly (Disclaimer: but not completely, so please stop writing that email) with assholeness. In fact, expensive razors are an even more egregious item to waste money on, because they do not even offer up the typical benefits of conspicuous consumption. Nobody knows you shave with a whalebone-handled straight razor except for you. (And the people you tell, thereby revealing yourself as an asshole).

You can buy ten perfectly good disposable razors for five bucks. At a price of fifty cents each, these razors will do a perfectly good job of removing hair from your face. If you buy a $35 Harry's "Engraved Winston" razor instead, you will have paid 70 times more for an improvement in shaving closeness that will be measured in the millionths of an inch.

You will also have to explain to your girlfriend why you felt it necessary to purchase a razor with your initials engraved in the handle. And there is no adequate answer to that question.

No matter what that men's magazine tells you, neither expensive watch nor expensive razor nor expensive shoes will Make You a Real Man. A real man knows the value of things.

[Pic via]

Call of the Wildman, Animal Planet's blockbuster chronicle of a wildlife trapper, is one helluva romp. It's also a drama-staging, zebra-drugging, wallaby-kidnapping, raccoon- and bat-killing crock of shit, according to a disturbing new in-depth investigation by Mother Jones.

The investigation, led by producer James West and summed up by him in the video above, exposed "evidence of a culture that tolerated legally and ethically dubious activities, including: using an animal that had been drugged with sedatives in violation of federal rules; directing trappers to procure wild animals, which were then "caught" again as part of a script; and wrongly filling out legal documents detailing the crew's wildlife activities".

Mother Jones' story begins with a reconstruction of a scripted scene in which Wildman's star, simple redneck Ernie Brown Jr. (Also known as "Turtleman"), seeks out a nasty critter in a house that turns out to be a distressed pregnant raccoon.

Except, according to the wildlife expert who took the raccoon family in after the segment, "the 'mother raccoon' was actually a male." And the newborns had all been grabbed days before for the shot, left without neo-natal treatment, so that by the time they were dumped at an animal hospital after shooting, the three emaciated orphaned raccoons needed incubation, intubation, fluid drips, antibiotics, and plasma transfusions. According to the rescuing veterinarian, who tearily curses Animal Planet and Turtleman: "The fact that we saved two was a miracle."

It gets worse from there. Virtually every scenario on the show is staged with animals that have been previously bought "from farms or trappers" and dropped in the situations from which Turtleman extricates them. That includes a bunch of supposedly dangerous snakes that were "found" in a public pool and a family of bats that was dumped, possibly illegally, for "rescuing" from the attic of a hair salon. (After the show left that location, it still needed two visits from bat catchers; several of the creatures ultimately died.)

Then there was the time someone pumped a zebra full of tranquilizers so that Turtleman could wrestle it, neck-first, to the ground. You know, to "rescue" it.

"We would basically pitch the entire script that was sent to Animal Planet weeks ahead of time with the exact animal, and location," one insider tells West. "They knew." Show "producers even go so far as to make fake animal droppings using Nutella, Snickers bars, and rice."

When confronted with all these allegations, Animal Planet brought in "a top Manhattan crisis manager who has worked with celebrities like Justin Bieber" to talk to West. Through that spin doctor, Animal Planet said it would keep re-running and selling the episodes in question. With 1.6 million viewers, it was, after all, their highest-rated episode yet.

A teenager in Philadelphia claims he required emergency surgery after police ruptured one of his testicles during a search earlier this month. Police later arrested the 16-year-old and charged him with three misdemeanors.

Darrin Manning, a straight-A student, was reportedly on his way to play basketball with a group of friends on January 7 when one of his friends "caught the attention" of a group of police officers, as the principal of Manning's school put it. When the officers approached, the group took off running. A police wagon soon pulled up on the scene, according to surveillance video from a street camera.

From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Since the surveillance footage was taken from a street camera that switches angles every 10 seconds, it is difficult to tell exactly what happened during Manning's arrest.

But one segment of the video shows Manning walking around the side of the wagon, where an officer appears to push him up against the vehicle.

Later, Manning can be seen on the ground in what Ramsey called a struggle with officers. Several police cars, lights flashing, idle nearby. In another segment, he is standing, surrounded by officers.

According to Lewis Small, Manning's attorney, a female officer violently pulled on Manning's testicles during the search, causing one to rupture.

"It's horrible. It's sexual assault, as far as I'm concerned," Small said.

Manning underwent emergency surgery the next day and might be sterile as a result, according to Small.

The Phildelpiha Police Department, who charged the 16-year-old with misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment of another person, simple assault, and resisting arrest, are taking the incident "very seriously," according to Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey.

"We want to piece together what happened," Ramsey said at a press conference, adding that the department's Internal Affairs division had launched an investigation. Small, however, refuses to cooperate until all charges against Manning are dropped.

"I'm not going to allow my client to sit down and give a written statement. That's in effect malpractice by any attorney while criminal charges are outstanding," he said.

Here you will find photographs of Jean-Michel Basquiat's balls.

On Monday, New York Times book critic Janet Maslin issued an inexplicably hostile takedown of Gabriel Sherman’s new biography of Fox News boss Roger Ailes, declaring the book “tepid” and “disingenuous” while suggesting its author is a liar. The paper’s coverage, which had until that point been quite positive, immediately earned fresh attention from conservative figures like Lou Dobbs and Matt Drudge. Omitted from Maslin’s review, however, was an important disclosure: The critic has maintained a 30-year friendship with Fox News’s editor-at-large, Peter J. Boyer, who plays a prominent role in one of the book’s chapters, and who was personally recruited to the channel in 2012 by Ailes.

“Janet Maslin has been friends with Peter Boyer since the 1980’s when they worked together at The Times,” Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy told Gawker on Tuesday. “Her review of Gabe Sherman’s book was written independent of that fact.”

This is a very odd detail to leave out of Maslin’s review, since the book discusses at some length how her friend Boyer, apparently smitten by Ailes’ genius, defanged his long January 2011 New Yorker report about the Fox News chief’s purchase of the Putnam County News & Recorder, a weekly newspaper in upstate New York that Ailes transformed into a Republican mouthpiece.

In Boyer’s New Yorker portrait, the PCN&R’s 25-year-old editor-in-chief Joe Lindsley was a loyal acolyte, a “younger version of Ailes,” who had practically been adopted by Roger and his wife. That was true for a while, but what’s fascinating is that while Boyer was reporting his story, that relationship had curdled into paranoia and resentment. Indeed, before Boyer’s account was even published, Lindsley had abruptly left the paper. Gawker reported in April 2011 that Ailes, suspicious of disloyalty, had directed News Corp security agents to spy on Lindsley and two other staffers, all of whom eventually fled town.

Boyer missed that episode entirely. “Ailes was pleased” with Boyer’s finished piece, Sherman notes in the book. But “townsfolk had a dimmer view. They felt Boyer got spun.” Ailes liked the article so much that he persuaded Boyer to join Fox News, which Sherman drily presents as a parable about how Ailes consolidates power—collect people who can be managed.

Boyer and Sherman had a testy relationship prior to the book’s publication, too. According to the book’s end notes, Boyer sent Sherman a nasty email when the author invited him to address local criticism of his New Yorker report. Boyer told him: “It’s beginning to sound like you’ve decided on what you want to write, whatever the facts [...] C’mon, Gabe. Be a journalist. It’s an honorable calling.”

Maslin’s decades-long friendship with Boyer, and Boyer’s hostility to Sherman, certainly make her bizarrely antagonistic review more comprehensible, if less forgivable. One of the most puzzling aspects of Maslin’s take is her assertion, without any evidence or logic, that Sherman’s on-the-record account of Ailes offering a subordinate money in exchange for sex is “negligently” false, simply because it differs in tone from another account in which Ailes was nice to an actress in a show he produced:

But Mr. Sherman also has a story from a woman named Randi Harrison, also on the record, who claims Mr. Ailes offered her a $400-a-week job at NBC, saying: ‘If you agree to have sex with me whenever I want, I will add an extra hundred dollars a week.’

These don't sound like the voices of the same man. More negligently, they don't cast any light on the man whose television network makes such profitable use of the beautiful blond fembots who set it apart from all other news and political channels....

In her haste to carry water for her friend, Maslin also committed a few unforced errors. For example, when discussing Sherman’s account of a prickly encounter between himself and Ailes, she accuses Sherman of “[leaving] out part of this story”—that “he had recently written quite a nasty May 2011 article about Mr. Ailes and Fox News in New York Magazine.”

But Sherman didn’t leave out that part of the story. He specifically refers to the article in the middle of recounting his Ailes encounter. (If you have a copy, it’s on the bottom of page 403.) Maslin’s editors have already corrected a different, but related, error—her assertion that Sherman had effectively been warned by Fox News personalities on Twitter to stay away from Ailes. (The Twitter backlash came after Sherman approached Ailes.)

It’s worth noting here that Maslin has a reputation for printing embarrassing errors in her most negative book reviews—like mistaking an author’s satirical novel for an auto-biography, or mixing up a novel’s key characters, or confusing a space shuttle that exploded in 1986 with one that exploded in 2003—in a review of a book about the latter.

“The fact that Janet is a friend of someone who works at Fox News was of no consequence and completely irrelevant to her review of Gabe Sherman’s book about Roger Ailes,” Eileen Murphy, the spokeswoman, told Gawker. “She discussed the situation with her editor prior to publication. It was decided there was no potential conflict so no need to make a reference.”

She added: “You do realize that this was hardly the only negative review of the book? Is it your contention that anyone that reviewed the book less than favorably must be carrying water for Fox News? Ridiculous.”

Peter J. Boyer declined repeated requests for comment.

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

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

Science has solved the eternal mystery of why many dogs like to romp in the snow: Experts in canine psychology and behavior report that it's because the dogs find it "fun and exciting."

This account of an affair between two men who played together on the Washington Redskins in the late '60s/early '70s is heartbreaking. It comes from the NFL Network's episode of A Football Life profiling player Jerry Smith, who remained publicly closeted for his entire life (Smith died of AIDS in 1986).

As his one-time lover and teammate David Kopay explains, "I thought this was really good. At least I was sharing something of myself with someone who's close and understood all that I had been through and understood so much of what we hoped for would come. And that's where we left it." Kopay came out post-retirement as a result of a after a Washington Star piece anonymously chronicling Smith's hardship as a secretly gay NFL player.

Also included in the video above are reflections of more of Smith's teammates on whether they knew about his sexuality, a general survey of homophobia in the NFL way back then, and an account of Redskins head coach Vince Lombardi's outspoken intolerance for homophobia. The whole special, which you can watch parts of here, was fascinating. It's particularly relevant in light of Aaron Rodgers' recent scandal, Chris Kluwe's allegations that homophobia led to his firing, and that to this day, there is no out NFL player. You can be damn sure there are gay ones, though.

This clip of Calvin Hill, another former teammate of Smith's, from a post-show roundtable explains how important and helpful it would be for someone in the NFL to come out.

For nearly two weeks, authorities have scurried to deal with the toxic spill of a coal-cleaning chemical that's left 300,000 West Virginians without tap water. But the company running the spill site shocked officials yesterday by disclosing that the spill included a second, little-known chemical.

Freedom Industries—the regulation-violating chemical company that poisoned drinking-water supplies with the 5,000-gallon spill of "Crude Methylcyclohexane Methanol" on Jan. 9, then filed for bankruptcy protection on Jan. 17—told regulators Tuesday that the spill also included 300 gallons of PPH, a chemical solvent, according to the Charleston Gazette.

It's unclear why Freedom never flagged that chemical for FEMA, the CDC or other agencies involved in the toxic cleanup effort before, but the company may have been trying to protect its special formula:

Richard Denison, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund, noted that Freedom Industries withheld the specific chemical identify of the "PPH, stripped." The MSDS provided by the company lists the key "chemical abstract service" identification number as "proprietary."

"All this means yet more questions and more uncertainty for West Virginia residents," Denison wrote on his group's blog.

One form of PPH, produced by Dow Chemical, is listed by that company as useful in "solvent for textile dyes," "paint removers," and as a "coalescent for latex adhesives." According to its Material Safety Data Sheet, PPH can cause "corneal injury" if it makes eye contact, and it can generally cause injury only if swallowed in large amounts. But the safety sheet also alerts physicians to the fact that there is "no specific antidote" in cases of overdose.

The safety sheet also carries this warning: "Prevent from entering into soil, ditches, sewers, waterways and/or groundwater."

[Photo credit: AP]

Economists estimate that the Great Recession cost America between $6 trillion and $14 trillion, all while economic inequality is growing worse. As food stamps and unemployment benefits are cut back, it is useful to reflect on why austerity may be a bad idea.

It wasn't even a well-executed story about a golf club. Most people agree now, broadly, about Grantland's failings toward transgender people in its telling of—and creation of—the tragic story of the golf-club inventor Essay Anne Vanderbilt. Bill Simmons, the founder and editor-in-chief of the prestige-sportswriting website, signed off on that agreement Monday with a long note of apology.

Imprinted on that agreement, though, was the outline of a different, quickly abandoned agreement. As Simmons wrote, about the initial publication of Caleb Hannan's story:

People loved it. People were enthralled by it. People shared it. People tweeted it and retweeted it. A steady stream of respected writers and journalists passed along their praise. ...

The piece had been up for 56 solid hours before the backlash began. The narrative shifted abruptly, and by Friday night, early high-profile supporters were backtracking from their initial praise.

This was what one magazine veteran called "Longform Altamont"—the moment when a self-satisfied subculture's idea of good times spun out of control into horror, national disgrace, and death. Why did the journalism enthusiasts celebrate what the broader public would recognize as a debacle?

Callousness toward trans issues was part of it. But the callousness was wrapped up in something larger. In the best-realized part of the Grantland piece, where Hannan explained the business of golf equipment and the psychology behind it, he described the process of "positive contagion," in which people who have been cued to believe a golf club is used by a professional will experience it as being easier to use.

Something related is at work in feature writing: If you cue nonfiction-writing fans to expect a great story, they will read it as a great story.

Thus the lead on Hannan's piece:

Strange stories can find you at strange times. Like when you're battling insomnia and looking for tips on your short game.

Here, it announces, is a story about a story. Something similar happens in Simmons's editor's note, where in the first paragraph, he offers his "condolences to Dr. V's friends and family." This comes across as a sort of crude overcorrection—in addition to posthumously granting Vanderbilt her gender identity, he's signing off on her bogus academic credentials. Whatever you people say! But also: "Dr. V" is not a person; "Dr. V" is a character in a narrative.

It's a narrative in which crazy and surprising things happen, as its early admirers noted—things that are marked as being serious. Only marked as such, however: Vanderbilt's death apparently registered not as a terrible fact that had happened in the real world, but as one more twist in the narrative that the reporter had gotten. Similarly, the initial outing of Vanderbilt as transgender person was taken as a stunning surprise turned up by a curious reporter—the narrative pivot of the story—not as a malicious remark delivered by a source known to be hostile to her.

This blindness didn't just apply to the moral implications of the narrative, but to the narrative itself. As a piece of reported nonfiction, it didn't really hold together. It visibly contained the bones of at least three separate stories, wired clumsily together. And none of those stories was really ready to publish.

First, there was the sports-technology story of Vanderbilt's Oracle GX1 putter, which may have been a revolutionary golf club. But Hannan never figured out whether it was revolutionary or not. Then there was the story of the mysterious and troubled inventor, with false credentials and a confusing history, who might have been anything from a true genius to a con artist. But she stopped cooperating with Hannan before he could persuade her to give an account of herself.

Finally there was the story that brought most readers up short: the story of a reporter whose source, after being upset by his questioning, had killed herself. But Hannan—and Grantland—got nowhere, or went nowhere, in exploring what role the article's reporting played in her death.

Simmons's editor's note was fairly open about some of the shortcomings. When Vanderbilt was alive but refusing to cooperate, he wrote, "[t]he story had no ending....We never seriously considered running his piece, at least in that version's form."

In other words, it was the news of Vanderbilt's suicide that led to a rewrite—although a peculiarly limited one:

When anyone criticizes the Dr. V feature for lacking empathy in the final few paragraphs, they're right. Had we pushed Caleb to include a deeper perspective about his own feelings, and his own fears of culpability, that would have softened those criticisms. Then again, Caleb had spent the piece presenting himself as a curious reporter, nothing more. Had he shoehorned his own perspective/feelings/emotions into the ending, it could have been perceived as unnecessarily contrived. And that's not a good outcome, either.

One solution would have been to make the suicide something more than a tacked-on ending—to tear the story apart entirely and make the death the point of it, from the very beginning. That would have required more reporting, and a difficult and painful kind of reporting.

"Not only did we feel terrible about what happened to Dr. V," Simmons writes, "we could never really know why it happened. Nor was there any way to find out." Perhaps that's true in a philosophical sense, about the nature of suicide. Hannan's story ends on a similar note of helplessness:

The only person who can provide this strange story with its proper ending is the person who started it....[I]t's hard to argue with Dr. V's conclusions. "Nobody knows my life but me," she said. "You don't know what the truth is."

Yet Vanderbilt's girlfriend and business partner, Gerri Jordan, had survived her, and had participated in the earlier reporting process firsthand, until the reporter-subject relationship turned openly hostile. Hearing Jordan's account—agonizing though it would have been for both sides involved—would surely have added something to everyone's understanding of the case.

Meditations on the unknowable usually mark the spot where a fatally botched reporting job lies down to die. This is not about Grantland's or Hannan's relative lack of experience with major features (note: I edited Hannan once, for Deadspin). Everyone is capable of it. In the New Yorker last year, Mark Singer spent 9,700 words setting up the mystery of how a suspicious marathoner had posted improbable-unto-impossible race times, without running afoul of all the cheating-detection procedures, only to wave his hands and admit ignorance on the central question of his story:

Like the most dazzling of magicians or the most artful of art forgers, by withholding the secret of how the illusion worked he retained a power uniquely his own.

Rather than sending Singer back to work until he had solved the problem, the editors at the New Yorker let him dump his failure onto the magazine's readers. The story was well received anyway. The connoisseurs of long writing don't care if it gets anywhere.

So who cares if the golf club really works? When Hannan thought Vanderbilt was an aerospace expert, he wrote, he played better with the club:

As soon as I learned she had simply been a struggling mechanic, the magic was lost. Today, Dr. V's Oracle is collecting dust in my garage.

If you believe that Stealth Bomber technology, which Vanderbilt had claimed to have worked on, should help you hit a ball with a stick, you are already a willing participant in a confidence game. Aerospace hokum is deeply integrated into golf culture; this is a sport where the word "Titanium" stamped on a club guarantees as much elemental titanium as the word "martini" guarantees vermouth.

As plenty of people have noted, the true conceptual pivot hidden in the story is not the revelation that Vanderbilt was transgender, but Gerri Jordan's would-be sarcastic complaint to Hannan:

"[W]hat you are telling golfers is that the most scientifically advanced Near Zero MOI putter, and the science of the Inertia Matrix was invented by a lesbian auto mechanic."

In fact, the premise that an auto mechanic could have engineered a superior golf club could have made a perfectly inspiring story, and one a good deal less corny than the premise that a top-secret military airplane designer did. Vanderbilt was not a Ph.D., and she was not one of the genuine Vanderbilts by birth, and she was not a lot of other things. But she was a mechanic, and she did invent a new kind of golf club.

And rather than figuring out if she'd made a real breakthrough, Grantland left the putter in the writer's garage, "collecting dust," its mysteries unresolved. Essay Anne Vanderbilt—as a human who dedicated her life to an invention, not as a narrative character or an emblem of discrimination—deserved an answer.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

There is a truism, often bolstered by pseudoscience, that people in the country are healthier than people in the city. Certainly there are many health problems associated with the metropolis. But it turns out that urbanites are often in better shape and live longer than their rural counterparts.

Most of our data on the health of people in cities comes from public health studies, like the one conducted by County Health Rankings in the United States, that compare the general health of people in various regions. Questions about regional health become more complicated when we look at it in a global perspective — partly due to vast differences in data-gathering practices — so in this article I'm going to focus mostly on studies that have explored U.S. health.

I began by saying that city dwellers are by and large healthier than their non-urban counterparts. But that's not true in every respect.

If you live in a city, you're more likely to develop asthma, allergies and dry eye.

People in cities, especially children, seem to be slightly more prone to allergies and asthma. One study suggests this is possibly because children in low-income urban areas are exposed to more toxins and stress at an early age, or suffer from more untreated respiratory illnesses. A similar pattern, with more asthma in cities, appears in a study of Scottish people. However, at least two U.S. studies suggest that asthma is equally prevalent in both the city and the country but isn't treated as aggressively among kids in the country. So it may appear that there are more asthma cases in cities simply because there are more health resources for parents who want to treat their kids — and thus, more parents report that their kids have asthma.

Also, city kids have more allergies, at least according to one study. This is a difficult claim to analyze, in part because there is so much disagreement over what causes allergies and even whether some conditions should be classified as allergies at all. Nevertheless, one theory behind this statistic is the "hygiene hypothesis," which suggests that people's immune systems don't grow as robust in artificially antiseptic and decontaminated environments. And such super-clean environments are more common in cities than in the country.

So city toxins may be causing asthma, and hyper-cleanliness may be causing the allergies. But dry eye is definitely caused by pollution.

A higher percentage of urbanites will suffer anxiety disorders, mood disorders and maybe even schizophrenia.

One study found that people in U.S. cities do have higher rates of depression than people in rural areas, while another suggested that the prevalence of mood disorders is 21 percent higher in urban areas than rural ones, while the prevalence of anxiety is 39 percent higher. As many as ten studies have found that some cases of schizophrenia may be linked to urban environmental factors.

Why do cities affect people's mental health so negatively? Researchers who published a study in Nature suggested that it's possible humans' brains develop slightly differently in urban areas, predisposing them to stress-related disorders. They found that the amygdala, which processes emotion, was more active in people who were currently living in a city. In addition, the cingulate cortex, which helps regulate the amygdala and processes negative emotion, was more active for people who were raised in cities. The researchers caution that this doesn't mean that cities drive people crazy; it just means that people in cities may be more predisposed to stress-related conditions.

City dwellers have troubled circadian rhythms.

Finally, as if you weren't stressed out enough, cities are likely to affect your circadian rhythms, or your body's internal clock that tracks day and night. Many studies have shown that lights at night confuse this internal clock, as does urban night shift work. There are a number of health consequences when your circadian rhythms get out of whack, including depression, insomnia, inflammatory diseases, diabetes, and even cancer.

But if you leave aside all these problems, city life turns out to be a pretty great deal.

In cities, there's less of a risk that you'll become obese.

This is one of those health statistics that's backed up by a lot of evidence. One study found that 39.6% of people in rural areas were obese, compared to 33.4% in cities. People in cities today tend to be more physically fit and less likely to eat unhealthy foods that can cause obesity. But is this related to something inherent to city life, or is it more of an economic issue like asthma? Most studies suggest that it's the latter. People in rural areas are generally not as wealthy as their urban counterparts, and this means less access to health information about food — and less access to foods like fresh vegetables and fruit, which are far more expensive than dinner at McDonalds.

You're less likely to die of an accident in a city. And your risk of suicide is a lot lower, too.

Your risk of injury-related death, whether that's a car accident or falling off a roof, is 20% lower if you're in a city. Some researchers have suggested this is partly because emergency medical services are not as robust in rural regions as they are in cities. So somebody in a car accident in a remote area is more likely to die than in a city, simply because help won't arrive in time.

You're also at far less of a risk for committing suicide in a city. Indeed, one study found that men in rural areas were 54% more likely to commit suicide than men in cities. There has been such a huge spike in rural suicides among (mostly white) men that some sociologists have dubbed it a "culture of suicide." Likely this is related to widespread unemployment in these regions, as well as the rural spirit of hyper-individualism, where people are not encouraged to seek help for personal problems.

Your old age will be more pleasant and healthy.

People over the age of 65 reported a better quality of life in cities. Researchers believe that this may be because seniors in rural areas are more isolated and have less social connections than a city allows. It's also possible that you'll live longer in a city, though evidence for this claim is in dispute — mostly because better access to health care in a city can bias the evidence.

What isn't in dispute is that cities do offer more opportunities for seniors to socialize, which contributes greatly to happiness. And there are more health services for older people as well, which can help extend life.

You likely have better TB resistance, and probably can eat cheese, ice cream and other milk products without gut pain.

A vast number of people on the planet today can eat milk products as part of their daily diet, all thanks to a recent genetic mutation that spread like wildfire through cities starting about 12,000 years ago. People who don't have this mutation are called lactose intolerant, and they experience very unpleasant gastric distress when they try to digest dairy.

Many scientists believe this odd, dairy-friendly mutation spread so rapidly because it conferred an incredible survival advantage on people who had left the nomadic life behind to settle in cities. One of the main sources of food in these cities would have been from farming, and dairy would have been a key source of nutrition. People who couldn't get nutrients from milk products would not have coped well with urban life. As cities spread, so too did this urban mutation, until nearly everyone in the western world was chomping on cheese and cream.

It's also likely that humans packed together in cities evolved greater resistance to tuberculosis than their country brethren. So cities were making us healthier even thousands of years ago (though today cheese might be counted on the "unhealthy" side of the ledger).

So which is better for humanity? A world of cities or a world that's gone back to nature? Ultimately, says the CDC, it's probably neither. One statistic that emerges from all these studies is that the healthiest people of all tend to live in suburbs — especially wealthy ones. People in those areas can afford the very best medical care, and thus they're healthier. What truly matters, no matter where you live, is a good healthcare system with lots of social support. Once you have that, you're going to be healthier — even if you're living on the Moon.

Annalee Newitz is editor-in-chief of io9. She is also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.

Additional reporting on this story by Joseph Bennington-Castro.

Deadspin OSU Student With Lisa Ann GameDay Sign Attends Porn Awards With Her | Gizmodo How to Survive a Skyscraper Fire | io9 Here's how city life is actually affecting your health | Lifehacker Which Online Dating Service is Right For Me? | Valleywag Sheryl Sandberg Is a New Billionaire | Kinja Popular Posts

Last night one of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store's $450,000 thirty-two foot glass panels made contact with a snow plow and shattered into a million pieces just like your iPhone the last time you dropped it, except Apple's warranty will probably cover this.

The 15-window display cost Apple $6.7 million to install in 2011. The store is operating as usual.

[via, h/t Gothamist]

Bernie Madoff, apparently in possession of an organ resembling a heart, suffered a cardiac arrest last month. And, according to reports, he also has stage-four kidney cancer.

The 75-year-old emailed CNBC to confirm the diagnosis, telling reporters that he's not currently receiving dialysis.

That diagnosis means the cancer may have spread to nearby organs or lymph nodes, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Madoff is supposed to be serving a 150-year sentence at Butner Federal Correctional Complex, a North Carolina federal prison, but authorities moved him to the Duke University Medical Center after his heart attack.

According to a press release, he has since been moved back to the medium-security prison, located near Raleigh.

Madoff's only living son, Andrew Madoff, has also been receiving chemotherapy for stage-four cancer.

[image via AP]

An Amish family that fled their Ohio home to keep the state from sending their 11-year-old leukemia-sickened daughter to chemotherapy is now seeking an injunction against the government, saying the First Amendment protects the family's right to refuse her treatment.

CNN is “expanding the definition of news” by laying off 40 editorial employees. According to the Financial Times, one of the axed staffers was “a pregnant producer who was two weeks away from giving birth to twins.”

The full report from Justin Bieber's arrest this morning:

This is amazing: A young boy and his grandmother walking in Brazil somehow survived being crushed by a car.

The boy popped up immediately after having his head completely run over. The grandmother is slower to get up but, according to CNN, both escaped with only minor injuries.

[h/t Hypervocal]

A ghost ship filled with cannibal rats is floating somewhere off the coast of Scotland, ready to crash ashore and unleash its disease-ridden cargo of starving rodents. And it's all because Canadian authorities let the Soviet-era nightmare liner loose in the North Atlantic, satisfied that it was no longer a threat to Canada.

The "hundreds" of rats aboard the abandoned cruise ship have surely begun eating each other by now, officials say. It has been nearly a year since the vessel was intentionally lost at sea by Canadian authorities who were happy to let the "biohazard" become another country's problem.

This gruesome gift from Canada is now expected to crash ashore in Ireland or the United Kingdom, dumping the plague ship's living cargo of cannibal rats onto the land.

Named for a popular film actress in Stalin's USSR, the Lyubov Orlova was built by the Soviets in 1976 to treat Russian elites with pleasure cruises to Antarctica and the Arctic Circle.

But it was seized in 2010, by Canadian police acting as debt collectors against the ship's now-private owners, and for years it remained anchored off St. John's, the provincial capital of Newfoundland. Finally sold for scrap in 2012, the massive ship was lost at sea just a day after being towed out. When Canadian authorities finally captured the cruise ship last year, they decided to let it loose in international waters.

In our era of Google satellite maps, GPS and constant government surveillance of the most mundane activities on land, it seems peculiar that a 295-foot-long ocean vessel could disappear in the North Atlantic while still afloat. But maritime officials in Ireland and Scotland say they haven't heard from the Lyubov Orlova since March of last year, when an emergency signal from the ship placed it about 700 miles off the coast of County Kerry, Ireland. The ship itself was spotted by radar operators not long after, but search pilots sent to confirm the location couldn't find it.

Ever since, the rat ship has been missing at sea.

It may still be afloat, the Independent reports today, because its lifeboats are equipped with distress signals that only transmit when they hit water—only two of the lifeboats' transmitters have been heard, probably after those rafts were shaken loose as the Lyubov Orlova is continually tossed by North Atlantic storms. It has already traveled two-thirds of the way to the British Isles.

If the ship is spotted before a big storm slams it against the populated coastline, scrap haulers or the closest Coast Guard crews will have to board the awful vessel.

"There will be a lot of rats and they eat each other," a Belgian scrap sailor told The Sun. "If I get aboard I'll have to lace everywhere with poison."

There may be no chance to get aboard, because the 4,251-ton ship full of rats could suddenly be pushed ashore in a winter storm. Once the rats make landfall, they will be very, very hungry for something besides the raw flesh of their comrades at sea.

Ken Layne writes Gawker's American Almanac and American Journal. Photo of the Lyubov Orlova in 2010 via Wikipedia Commons.