Shia LaBeouf, the plagiarizing "artist" who is no longer famous, is finally ready to take the stage and share his Metamodernist Manifesto with Los Angeles. And he wants to wear a special mask while he does it.

We received a tip from someone at a Los Angeles art gallery that LaBeouf contacted them earlier this week with a very important request: he wanted a gallery so he could "repent in the way of the Middle Ages. For 7 days." According to the tipster, LaBeouf is sending messages to "every" gallery in LA, desperate for space.

On Tuesday, LaBeouf wrote to the gallery:

I am in need of a performance space in Los Angeles I'm looking to put on a show. Your gallery is perfect. My plan is to repent in the way of the Middle Ages. For 7 days.

I am promoting it at the Berlin film festival. By wearing a mask I've made for the show, To the red carpet of the NYMPHOMANIC premier. The date for this action is the 9th I'd like to start my show on the 10th. The show works in conjunction with an online action- @thecampaignbook

Manifesto

http://t.co/X0S0kjp8RB

The gallery quickly responded:

9th and 10th of what month?

LaBeouf:

February

The gallery informed LaBeouf they were booked but asked for clarification on the show:

There is a show scheduled for the gallery then, Is the performance simply you - can you elaborate on it to give me an idea of what it would take?

LaBeouf quickly gave up:

If your booked up I understand

Thank you

We can only hope that LaBeouf's performance will be a live-action medieval torture show featuring heavy audience involvement.

We've reached out to LaBeouf to a) confirm that this is indeed him and to b) ask for a picture of the mask. We will update if we hear back.

[Image via AP]

After building an entire career atop posting stolen naked images of women across the country, internet villain Hunter Moore and alleged hacker partner Charlie Evans are in FBI custody.

The pair, who'd created multiple online porn properties over the years, was arrested this morning after an investigation into allegations that they'd illegally pried into private web accounts for fun and profit:

Hunter Moore, 27, of Woodland, who operated isanyoneup.com, and Charles Evens, 25, of Studio City, were arrested without incident by special agents with the FBI.

Both men are expected to make initial court appearances this afternoon – Moore in federal court in Sacramento, and Evens in United States District Court in Los Angeles.

Moore and Evens are charged in a 15-count indictment unsealed after they were arrested this morning. The indictment charges both men with conspiracy, seven counts of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information and seven counts of aggravated identity theft.

Emphasis added. Although plenty of fawning fans send Moore naked selfies, the FBI says his empire was founded through outright hacking:

The pictures were submitted without the victim's permission for purposes of revenge. However, to obtain more photos to populate the site, Moore allegedly instructed Evens to gain unauthorized access to – in other words, to hack into – victims' e-mail accounts. Moore sent payments to Evens in exchange for nude photos obtained unlawfully from the victims' accounts. Moore then posted the illegally obtained photos on his website, without the victims' consent. The indictment alleges that Evens hacked into email accounts belonging to hundreds of victims.

Emphasis added. When Moore's victims complained, those messages (and personal information) was made public, creating a perpetual sadism machine that drew huge audiences online—impunity was just as much Moore's calling card as naked people.

When you combine this serious indictment (which can be read in full below) with his self-confessed lifestyle of aggressively, gleefully violating personal privacy rights and doing a bunch of blow, this will be no easy case for the defense.

h/t Camille Dodero

Photo by Jessica Lehrman

Take a moment to feel a tidal wave of gratitude wash over you as you reflect upon the fact that modern polling technology and statistical analysis techniques now allow us to pinpoint precisely how much People Don't Respect People Now Like They Did When I Was a Kid.

Whereas, in the past, humans were forced to rely upon anecdotal evidence that We Never Talked to People Like That In My Day, we now have a Harris Interactive poll of thousands of Americans to put a quantifiable number on the exact amount of respect that The Kids have lost for The Teachers and The Teachers have lost for The Kids and The Parents have lost for The Teachers and Things Just Aren't What They Used to Be. The bracing findings:

Only half of Americans believe parents respect teachers today (49%, down 42 points [from when respondents were students]).

Only three in ten believe today's K-12 students respect teachers (31%, making for a drop of 48 points).

Just under two-thirds of Americans believe that teachers respect parents today (64%, down 27 percentage points when compared to the percentage who believe teachers respected parents during their own K-12 schooling).

Roughly six in ten each believe that teachers today respect students (61%, down 25 points) and that the administration respects teachers (58%, down 30 points).

In the span of only a single generation, Common Respect and Decency For People has plummeted by almost half. At this rate, the next generation of kids Won't Have No Respect For Anybody At All.

[Photo: Shutterstock]

Matt Yglesias, Slate's robot-like numberblogger, is reportedly joining the new media startup venture led by Ezra Klein, the robot-like former Washington Post numberblogger. Mmm. Yes. They're all together now. That will do nicely. Juicebox Mafia: Unite!

Chris Pratt's performance as Andy Dwyer is consistently one of the best parts of one of the best shows on TV, Parks and Recreation. And Dwyer is at his best when he's singing, like in this clip where he's serenading a group of children with the tale of Van Damme in the hockey-action classic, Sudden Death.

[h/t Warming Glow]

Former Gawker fellow Robert Kessler was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a type of cancer, in December. He'll be writing dispatches about his experience of the disease and its treatments for Gawker on his personal Kinja page, Cancer? I Hardly Knew Her.

Cancer is, among many other things, an exercise in accepting chaos.

Of course it's a lot of other things, but since my diagnosis in early December, nearly everything I thought I knew about my illness has changed. Stage II became stage IV. Follicular lymphoma became diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. One prescribed chemotherapy regimen became another.

As I type these very words, I am on the sixth day of a planned five-day stay in the hospital.

In some ways, the uncertainty has been the hardest part of having cancer so far. Nothing is really certain, and doctors, careful not to give you false hope or create undue alarm, tread lightly around you: There's a 40 percent chance of X. It seems unlikely that Y. In a world without promises, when something is a certainty, you cling to it. It's this that made the past week in the hospital so difficult.

I checked into the hospital last week for my very first chemotherapy treatment, an aggressive cocktail of drugs called, without any irony whatsoever, EPOCH. The first treatment is done inpatient, due to concerns about some pretty serious side effects from the drugs, but overall the process seemed simple: Go lie in a bed for a couple days while nurses pump you full of drugs designed to shrink tumors. What I wasn't anticipating is how things could veer so wildly off course.

Shortly into my stay at the hospital, doctors discovered that I was bleeding internally. While it was probably due to one of the tumors in my intestinal wall breaking down, there was no way to know for sure, and my doctors opted to take action. This meant inserting an IV line into my left arm (in addition to the permanent PICC line I now have in my right arm), and starting another medication intended to lower the acid levels in my stomach. When that didn't work, I had to receive two blood transfusions and was put on a clear-liquids-only diet. (A later endoscopy was inconclusive, but it looks like the bleeding has stopped for now.)

Throughout, my concern remained the same: Will I have to stop chemo? Fortunately, I did not. I was able to complete my first course.

The logical mind reels during cancer treatment. Here is a world where cause and effect have no value. What caused my cancer? What effect will it have on my body? These questions have no answers. To be honest, there is no real value in asking. At this point, the only thing that matters is getting well.

I don't really know what is coming now. My hair could begin to fall out soon. I feel well right now, but that all could change at a moment's notice. The chemo has left me with a severely compromised immune system and even a slight fever could put me in the ICU. The outside world becomes a real bitch now, especially in the city of subway coughers and grimy handrails. There are other side effects that I could face: nausea, chills, cramping, mouth sores, bleeding, constipation, anemia, fatigue and changes to my appetite. I may feel all or none of these during what is called the "nadir period," which is 5-7 days following the end of each chemo treatment. But for now I'm thankful to be feeling as well as I am, and I'm learning to embrace cancer's chaos theory.

A plastic-surgery clinic in Gangnam has been ordered to stop displaying some 2,000 bone fragments from reshaped jawlines, stacked in a tower. The Chosun Ilbo reports that the fine for improper medical waste disposal was 3 million won; each jawline procedure costs 3.5 million won.

For centuries, we Americans have sought easier ways to kill our convicts. Lethal injection had been the gold standard for sending toughs to oblivion. But amid a sudden spate of botched shots and poison shortages, what are we to do? Let's go back to guns, gas and zap juice!

Lethal injection's luster has faded rapidly of late. The usual cocktail of deadly drugs that 32 states rely upon has dried up in recent years, as panty-waisted Eurosocialist pharmaceutical suppliers have grown reluctant to contribute to Free Enterprise and our robust death-industrial complex. American ingenuity being what it is, some states have filled this poison gap with animal euthanasia solutions, or new brews of risky compound drugs.

The new alchemy, it turns out, doesn't work so great. Ohio's strange brew took an estimated 26 minutes last week to kill a man in ghastly, gasping fashion, "like a fish lying along the shore," as his priest put it. The condemned man's family plans to sue the state. That came about a week after an Oklahoma inmate offered these last words on his injection gurney: "I feel my whole body burning." Other states' injections may go on hold while their courts review whether the process is cruel and unusual.

This crisis is an opportunity for soul-searching across America. And throughout this great land of freedom and justice, lawmakers have come to a startling realization: If they wanna kill evildoers—and they do!—they're gonna have to go back to their shooting, zapping, gassing roots:

• A GOP Wyoming legislator has filed a bill to bring back firing squads in that state. Because, you know, balanced budgets: "One of the reasons I chose firing squad, as opposed to any other form of execution, is because frankly, it's one of the cheapest for the state," he says.
• A Missouri Republican wants shooters in his state, too—not to save money, but because he says it's the moral way to destroy a sentient being: "The blunt trauma caused by that many shots — it's an instantaneous death... It's not electrocution where you're cooked inside out, or heads being decapitated by hanging."
• Virginia, on the other hand, loves that home cooking: its House passed a bill yesterday to immolate inmates with electric chair if the state runs out of injection juice.
• Like Virginia, several other states are discussing fallbacks to secondary forms of heartbeat-halting, like Old Sparky and the gas chamber.

To bleeding-heart types, all this talk of vintage extermination methods might arouse fear that our civil culture is sliding backwards. But no, we're marching confidently forward, into a better America where we can boast openly of slow, "cruel and agonizing ways to put people to death," because "there's no pretty way to die... you know, it ain't no tea party, Brooke."

You're welcome, humanity. Happy Throwback Thursday!

[Photo credit: AP]

Hark; the time hath come for "Hey, Science," our intelligence-boosting feature in which we enlist real live scientific experts to answer humanity's most interesting/ idiotic scientific questions. Today: Is there an evolutionary or biological reason for preferring to have sex with people of a certain race?

The question, from reader M.: "Is some humans' sexual preference or sexual propensity for certain other humans of a particular 'race' a biologically determined orientation or a culturally constructed desire or a combination of both?" That is, can evolutionary biology tell us the reason why you're only "into" a certain race of person, for boning? Does the answer lie deep in your DNA? Or are you just a boring racist?

Donald Symons, professor emeritus of anthropology at UCSB and author of The Evolution of Human Sexuality:

This is a much more complicated question than it seems. The best I can do is to suggest a few things to think about.

First, during the vast majority of human evolutionary history our ancestors wouldn't have traveled far from their birthplace and therefore would rarely have encountered individuals who looked very different from themselves or other members of their group—i.e., people of different "races." Thus, it's very unlikely that we evolved any psychological (brain) adaptations, sexual or otherwise, that have to do with "race." That's not to say, of course, that our ancestors didn't detect and act on in-group/out-group differences, just that these weren't "racial" differences.

Second, mate choice was an important adaptive problem facing our ancestors, so we should expect natural selection to have produced specialized psychological mechanisms designed to solve this problem. Mate choice actually comprises many different problems, so we should expect the evolution of many different mechanisms to solve them. Some problems might be solved by mechanisms that requires little input from the environment, and therefore develop in the same way in every environment. E.g., what's the ideal amount of acne or other visible skin diseases in a potential mate? Presumably zero. So a psychological mechanism that follows the "rule": "prefer unblemished skin, all else equal," would have been adaptive everywhere, and would develop in a relatively "innate" manner. But what about, say, skin color? Ancestral human populations lived in a wide variety of environments and consequently evolved very different skin colors to cope with those environments. And there was always some gene flow throughout the range humans lived in, which is why we remained a single species. So one would not expect selection to have favored an "innate" preference for any specific skin color. What would have made adaptive sense is a mechanism that detects skin color in the individuals one sees growing up and specifies a rule "prefer a mate with the average skin color you've seen." And that seems to be more or less what did evolve, with one caveat. Human female skin that is a bit lighter than the local average was a reliable cue of nubility (women's skin in the environments of evolutionary history tended to darken a bit with age and successive pregnancies). All else equal, the best mate was a nubile woman, so the most attractive female skin color in ancestral human environments probably was a bit lighter than the local female average. Although it's been some years since I read the scientific literature on this topic, the evidence I'm aware of supports this prediction.

Obviously the environments of modern industrialized societies differ in many important ways from those of our ancestral past, so there are lots of evolutionary novelties to consider, including: individual variation in physical appearance is far greater in industrialized societies than it was under ancestral conditions; in industrialized societies different people are exposed to different local samples of their population; people are exposed almost from birth to media images; and even mirrors, which provide a clear, stable image of oneself, constitute an evolutionarily-novel input into our visual system that may affect the development of the brain mechanisms that underpin our perceptions of physical attractiveness.

These ideas are developed in much greater (and probably more coherent) detail in my chapter, "Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder," in the book Sexual Nature/Sexual Culture, edited by Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton, and in a little book by Catherine Salmon and me, Warrior Lovers.

Pierre Van Den Bergh, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Washington and author of many books on race, sexuality, and human evolution:

I believe the "natural" sexual preference is for partners who are broadly similar to oneself, in good physical condition, and in control of good resources, especially for women. Men tend to be more open to any mating opportunity, and to be less choosy. Any narrow preference for a particular type of sexual object, I tend to view as a form of culturally conditioned fetishism brought about by prior experiences, whether it be blond hair, red shoes or rubber gloves.

Brendan Zietsch, research fellow at the University of Queensland School of Psychology, studying human sexuality:

The question is an interesting one. The short answer is: probably yes [it is determined by evolution] but we don't know for sure. We do know that virtually all psychological characteristics that have been studies are to some extent heritable. In fact, my own research shows that, compared with genetically nonidentical twins, genetically identical twins have more similar sexual and romantic partner preferences, which indicates that genes play a role in those preferences. No one has looked specifically for genetic influences on sexual preferences for different races, but I see no reason why this would not be to some extent heritable as well. It is important to note that 'to some extent heritable' does not mean that these preferences are 'biologically determined', only that genes play some role along with environmental influences which could include upbringing and cultural prejudices.

The verdict: Though this is far from a settled question with a definitive answer, the consensus seems to be that evolution and genetics do likely play some role in humans' sexual preferences—quite possibly including racial preferences, although the exact nature of what goes into forming such preferences is unclear.

We can say definitively that there is not enough evidence for anyone to be able to say, "I only date [race] [women, men, or both] because that's in my genes." Open your minds, people. And your legs!

Previously

The full archive of "Hey, Science," America's only popular source of scientific education, can be found here. Do you have a question for "Hey, Science?" Email it to Hamilton@Gawker.com at once.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Hey, remember this guy? Among critics of Silicon Valley's virulent arrogance, you wouldn't expect Steve Case, whose own hubris ran alongside the implosion of AOL-Time Warner. But here we are in 2014, and the former CEO is a clarion voice of reason.

In an interview with the Silicon Valley Business Journal, AOL's co-founder proves an unexpected antidote to his peers.

Steve Case thinks tech needs an ego check:

"Some statements that people have made, suggesting that Silicon Valley is the center of the universe and governments don't matter, are neither accurate nor appropriate nor helpful."

"We can't come off looking like we think technology is the answer to every question. Technology is part of the answer but people are obviously part of the answer, as well."

Steve Case thinks regulation is not the enemy:

"Not all policies are great. There are obviously a lot of bad policies. But they are usually put in place for good reasons.

"There are reasons why we have quality control in restaurants to make sure people don't eat food that is going to make them sick or kill them.

"There are rules around taxis because they want to make sure people have some capability of being able to drive people around.

Nor is the federal government:

"Being respectful of policy will become more important. Government is going to play a role. It is a regulator and a principle buyer of services. To thumb your nose at the government is unwise when you are trying to disrupt key aspects of our economy that have a key connection with the government."

Wow! A prominent industry figure who isn't saying WordPress should replace the Department of Education, or advocating for secession. Someone should give this guy a shot at running an enormous, influential tech company.

A billionaire Hong Kong real estate developer has doubled his "marriage bounty" for the man who successfully seduces and marries his lesbian daughter. The offer now stands at $120 million.

In 2012, Cecil Chao announced a $65 million reward after his daugher, Gigi Chao, married her longtime girlfriend. Chao said more then 20,000 suitors responded, but his daughter—who had dated her wife for seven years before marrying her—was unimpressed. However, his daughter did say that she was a "lucky girl to have such a loving daddy" after the reward was announced.

So Chao upped the reward, hoping to find a more suitable suitor.

"I only hope for her to have a good marriage and children as well as inherit my business," Cecil said, according to the Star, adding, without any apparent awareness of the irony, that he has no plans to interfere with her personal life.

[h/t Fark/via Hyper Vocal]

Mike Huckabee—former governor, current TV gadfly, lifelong Jim Nabors doppelganger—wants you to know Republicans have no war on women. If anything, it's liberals who hate the foxes, with their free love and free birth control and something called "Uncle Sugar."

At a Republican National Committee luncheon Thursday, an aw-shucks Huck told his compatriots to buck up, chuck:

Republicans don't have a war on women... We're having a war for women. To empower them to be something other than victims of their gender.

If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control, because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it... Let us take that discussion all across America, because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be.

Don't be a victim of your gender, ladies! By which I think Huck means: Don't be slaves to your uteri! Stop all this fornicating and reproducicating. Actually, wait, don't stop reproducicating. Keep punching out the babies on every rare occasion that you have contraception-free manseed-receiving missionary sex with that special God-chosen mate, who can worship you for all that you are, as you nurse and baby-bounce and clean up the messes. You feel that? That's you living up to your potential. Screw Uncle Sugar and his nectary socialism! All you need for self-actualization are Cousin Gospel, Nephew Bassinet, and Grandpa Bathtub Gin. Vote Republican!

[Photo credit: AP]

George Zimmerman hasn't had anything to shoot in a while, so he's still playing with this debt-paying arts-and-crafts thing where he trolls everyone with infantile comments on American justice, oh and also, stencils.

The multiple offender who still, amazingly, has guns and a driver's license and freedom, let his brother unveil this breathtaking masterpiece of his Early Derp Period, titled "Angie." Unveiled Wednesday on Twitter, it's a Shepard Fairey-esque rendering of Jacksonville state attorney Angela Corey, who tried Zimmerman for the death of Trayvon Martin—and whom G-Zimms has taken to calling "Angie Cakes." Ever graceful in victory, you know.

It's captioned: "I have this much respect for the American judicial system," something George presumably fantasizes about Corey saying, although in a Freudian-Lacanian critical sense, given the hot colors, we could certainly imagine a certain amount of phallogocentric desire and projection on Georgie's part.

Formally speaking, his depiction of hands is not so much mannerist as Mommy-'n'-Me fingerpaint, and the use of shadow on Corey suggests her neck is about to be attacked by a ferret. The totality of the painting assaults the viewer's eyeballs. But then, assault is part and parcel of the artist's milieu.

How much will this sell for? Who knows? Zimmerman's last work went for six figures. So far, he's mum on the value of this magnum opus. But he does have some thoughts on God he'd like to share with you now:

So Christ has truly set us free. Now make sure that you stay free, and don’t get tied up again in slavery to the law. (Galatians 5:1 NLT)

— George Zimmerman (@TherealGeorgeZ) January 23, 2014

Well said, freed man. And good luck with the art thing. Though we're not sure you'll ever top your most memorable work.

Scientists using a new form of analysis say that an earthquake south of Los Angeles would cause "stronger-than-expected ground movement" in the city. Since it was already expected that Los Angeles will be totally wiped off the fucking map, we suggest that L.A. residents begin calmly making their way out.

An angry and "betrayed" Quentin Tarantino decided to abandon his latest film, The Hateful Eight, after a script leak earlier this week. According to Tarantino, he only gave the script to "six motherfucking people." But one of those motherfuckers gave it to someone who leaked it online.

Since I first posted this item, a document that appears to be the script has been made public online here. Badass Digest has also posted the first two pages of the same document.

As The Wrap writes, Tarantino planned to film the entire movie using 70-millimeter stock. The first page of the document begins:

"A breathtaking 70MM filmed (as is the whole movie) snow covered mountain range."

They sum up the rest of the script accordingly:

The script is an ensemble Western with obvious parts for Madsen and Dern, as well as Tarantino stalwarts like Samuel L. Jackson and Christoph Waltz. Jackson and Madsen would likely both play bounty hunters returning human plunder to a town called Red Rock in exchange for hefty rewards. Their characters, a former major in the Union army and a man named John Ruth, dominate the first two of the script's five chapters.

They run into a Southerner named Chris Mannix on the road, and three of them, along with their driver — a living prisoner and three dead bounties strapped to the roof — arrive at a haberdashery to take shelter from an oncoming blizzard. Yet the proprietors, Minnie, Sweet Dave and her other colleagues, are nowhere to be found. In their place are four men, a Southern general (likely Dern), an alleged hangman, a Frenchman named Bob and a cowboy named Joe Gage.

Mistrust, coffee and violence ensue.

The Wrap also notes that the script is "set almost entirely in two settings – a stagecoach and the haberdashery" and that the story is divided into five chapters: "Last Stage to Red Rock," "Son of A Gun," "Minnie's," 'The Four Pasggengers" and "Black night, White Hell."

For better or worse, the document is 146 pages of pure Tarantino. Enjoy!

[Image via AP]

Last week, two Princeton researchers used an epidemiological model to predict that Facebook will soon lose 80 percent of its peak users base. Slate called the methods "fatally flawed" and everyone forgot about it until Facebook decided to be a total spazz.

In a post oozing with smug sarcasm, Mike Develin, a data scientist at Facebook, uses the same methodology as the researchers to show "that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely."

Like many of you, we were intrigued by a recent article by Princeton researchers predicting the imminent demise of Facebook. Of particular interest was the innovative use of Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends. Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this "Princeton University" - and you won't believe what we found!

Look, Facebook, you are getting older. Studies are going to point that out. Some of those studies will be dumb. Overreacting is not a good look. You're only pwning yourself.

Deadspin A Treasury Of Your Terrifying Poop Stories For Super Bowl Bye Week | Gizmodo How I "Hacked" Kayak and Booked a Cheaper Flight | io9 The 7 Most Intriguing Philosophical Arguments for the Existence of God | Lifehacker Stop Networking and Start Helping | Kinja Popular Posts

GOP hero and Obama’s America director Dinesh D’Souza—remember him?—has embarrassed his party once again.

Today the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the FBI jointly indicted D’Souza for illegally funneling money to conservative Senatorial candidate in 2012 and, later, lying to the Federal Election Commission about it. He faces up to 7 years in prison.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who announced the indictment in a Manhattan federal court on Thursday afternoon, alleges that D’Souza arranged for an unspecified number of individuals to donate to a political campaign under their own names on the condition that D’Souza would reimburse them in full. D’Souza apparently concocted the plot to skirt federal campaign finance laws that limit the amount of money a single individual can donate to a candidate.

While Bharara doesn’t name the candidate to whom D’Souza directed the money, Reuters identified her as Wendy Long, a Republican lawyer who in 2012 ran unsuccessfully against Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat and the junior U.S. Senator of New York State.

D’Souza is scheduled to be arraigned in Manhattan on Friday. He is also scheduled to debate former Weatherman Bill Ayers on January 30 at Dartmouth College about what makes America so great.

[Photo credit: Gage Skidmore]

Today the Pope cleared up the age-old question: God, not Al Gore, invented the internet.

This evening, New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan wondered in her "journal" (blog) whether the Times should have devoted more coverage to the annual "March for Life" in Washington D.C., happening this year for the 41st time. She quotes an email from one "Francis H. Hoffman":

Francis H. Hoffman wrote: "A handful of young people from Seattle who support their fired vice principal merits big coverage, but a massive pro-life march in a winter storm is all but ignored. And the motto of the New York Times is, "All the News That's Fit to Print." I guess pro-life news is not fit to print."

Not many people read both Sullivan's column and the all-too-frequent press-release email blasts from Catholic League president Bill Donohue. To those of us professionally obligated to do so, however, Hoffman's pithy email sounded familiar: It's lifted directly from the last paragraph of Donohue's latest email—the paragraph located directly above an exhortation to email Sullivan. (You can see the email here.)

It's not uncommon for pressure groups to provide form letters for their adherents to send en masse to editorial boards and politicians. Donohue's email, however, was not a form letter. It was a press release—sent from pr@catholicleague.org. Sullivan printed it, verbatim, and attributed it to the sender, and not the original author—a prominent right-wing Catholic ideologue and pundit.

"The lack of staff coverage" of the march, Sullivan concludes, "unfortunately gives fuel to those who accuse The Times of being anti-Catholic, and to those who charge that the paper's news coverage continually reflects a liberal bias." That may be the case. That the paper's public editor is unable to recognize the words from a Catholic League press release won't convince right-wing Catholics that the paper is in touch with their world, either. But in this case I think it'll matter less to them.