A two-month saga ended today in Fort Worth, Texas when a hospital deactivated the ventilator that was keeping a brain-dead pregnant woman alive. Officials at John Peter Smith Hopsital did so on the order of a judge, who sided with the woman's family.

Marlise Munoz had been attached to a ventilator that was keeping her heart and lungs working since late November, when her husband found her unconscious in their kitchen. Doctors declared Munoz brain-dead and her family insisted that she did not wish to be kept alive artificially, but Texas law stated that the hospital had to keep her body working because she was carrying a fetus.

The fetus, at 14 weeks, was not viable. But Texas' draconian laws and views regarding how to handle pregnancies meant that Munoz and her family had to endure a situation they had no interest in being a part of. "May Marlise Munoz finally rest in peace, and her family find the strength to complete what has been an unbearably long and arduous journey," said the family's lawyers in a statement.

On a related note, Wendy Davis — the Texas state senator who filibustered an insane abortion bill for 13 straight hours in June — is narrowing the gap between her and leading GOP candidate Greg Abbott in the race for governor.

[image via KENS5]

Many elite colleges and universities make a real effort to recruit (some) students from low income backgrounds who went to relatively poor high schools. New data shows that's not enough to remedy the damage that bad high schools do.

State universities recruiting more disadvantaged students? Great! But common sense—along with this new study from the NBER—tells you that you can't fix the problems in our education system by targeting kids after they've already had 12 years of inadequate public education. The study found that the quality of a student's high school is "a key predictor" of their grades in college, meaning that without a serious dose of remedial studies, kids from disadvantaged high schools are doomed to be at a disadvantage themselves in good colleges full of kids who attended better high schools. From Inside Higher Ed:

Over all, measures of high school quality explain 20 percent of the variation in high school grades, and that variation is not substantially reduced in the years that follow, the report says. (Measures of high schools include both socioeconomic statistics such as percentage of students from low-income backgrounds, which historically correlates with limited resources at high schools, and the percentage of students taking college admissions or Advanced Placement tests.)

The findings showed that for kids who came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, the quality of their high school is what predicted how they did in college.

From this we may draw the reasonable conclusion: If you want to fix higher education for disadvantaged students, first fix their high schools. And before that fix their middle schools and elementary schools. And before that, get that Universal Pre-K going.

[Photo: AP]

A West Virginia man faces two counts of murder for killing a pair of men from a distance with a rifle after he wrongly assumed they were on his land. The victims, it turns out, were his new neighbors, checking out their property for the first time.

Rodney Bruce Black, 62, was arrested in his home in Barboursville Sunday after shooting Garrick Hopkins, 60, his brother Carl Hopkins Jr., 61, according to WSAZ-TV:

Deputies say he admitted to shooting the two men because he thought they were trespassing on his property.

Sheriff McComas says the land actually belonged to Garrick Hopkins. He had just purchased it and was showing his brother where he and his family were planning to build their new home in the coming weeks...

Investigators said [Black] told dispatchers the two men were breaking into his shed, but sheriff's officials said the shed wasn't his.

"These two men had every legal right to be where they were," said McComas.

After arresting the crack-shot Black, "deputies seized many weapons and ammunition" from his house.

[Photo credit: Darren Whittingham/Shutterstock]

Last week, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara charged the conservative firebrand Dinesh D’Souza with steering his own money to a candidate (later identified as his Dartmouth classmate Wendy Long) under the names of others—a serious violation of federal campaign finance laws. Campaign records reviewed by Gawker suggest D’Souza may have employed the names of his former mistress, his mistress’s husband, and his own personal assistant to cover his tracks.

D’Souza’s mistress, a conservative blogger named Denise Odie Joseph II, is the only individual donor who received a peculiar “contribution refund” from Wendy Long’s treasurer several months after Senator Kirsten Gillibrand defeated her in November 2012. The mandatory July 12 report where the refund is documented coincides with the beginning of the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into D’Souza. According to the Department of Justice, “a routine review by the FBI”—not an anonymous tip—led to charges against the Obama’s America filmmaker, who told The Hollywood Reporter that he first learned of an investigation in the middle of 2013.

D’Souza’s unusually brief indictment does not detail the evidence by which Bharara and the Federal Bureau of Investigation charged him with fraud. (Compare it with the indictment against disgraced lobbyist Paul J. Magliocchetti.) But the charges describe a timeline that certainly seems to implicate a particular cast of characters. Specifically, Bharara indicates that “in or about August 2012” and through July 2013, D’Souza “reimbursed others with whom he was associated and who he had directed to contribute a total of $20,000 to the campaign.”

So where did the $20,000 figure come from? While Joseph’s “contribution refund” compensated her for a $5,000 donation submitted under her name in October 2012, the rest of the money may have been submitted under the names of Joseph’s husband, Louis, and D’Souza’s personal assistant, Tyler Vawser. Both men, like Joseph, are at the very least “associated” with D’Souza—though it’s not clear why Louis Joseph, a doctor who lives in Michigan, would risk donating an illegal sum of money to an out-of-state candidate publicly supported by the man with whom his wife was cuckholding him.

On August 30, 2012, according to a quarterly report filed two months later, the Long campaign received a $10,000 donation under the name of Joseph’s husband. On the same day, the campaign received another $10,000 donation, under Vawser’s name. Campaign finance law caps individual contributions at $5,000, so both donations were flagged by Long’s treasurer for “reattribution/redesignation.” (By then D’Souza and his wife Dixie had both contributed the maximum amount to Long’s campaign.)

Vawser’s $10,000 donation was never split up or refunded, according to subsequent FEC filings. But on October 22, 2012—a week after D’Souza’s affair with Joseph scandalized the evangelical community and D’Souza resigned his presidency at The King’s College—Long’s treasurer “reattributed” $5,000 of Louis Joseph’s original donation to Denise Joseph, leaving Louis with an identical $5,000 contribution. (It's not clear from the filings why Joseph received a post-election refund for $5,000—a perfectly legal amount of money.)

If Joseph’s refund triggered the U.S. Attorney’s investigation (and Bharara’s timeline suggests it may have done so), it would have been quick work finding her husband’s original $10,000 donation, Vawser’s donation for the same amount (on the same day!), and finally the trio’s lowest common denominator: Dinesh D’Souza.

D’Souza’s lawyer has denied the charges, claiming they arose from “an act of misguided friendship.”

D’Souza, Vawser, and both Josephs all declined repeated requests for comment.

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

[Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, Denise Joseph’s website]

If there's anything the Winklevoss ubermenschen love more than Harvard and revenge, it's Bitcoin, everyone's favorite speculative funny money. They've been investing in Bitcoin-related startups, and it's already going south: one of their CEOs just got arrested at the airport.

Right now the brothers probably look cranky, as seen above in a still from The Social Network. Business Insider reports Charlie Shrem, CEO of Bitinstant, is in federal custody on money laundering charges. The Justice Department says his company Bitinstant, which allowed people to buy and sell Bitcoin, was turning a buck via Silk Road, the notorious online drug bazaar. When news of the Winks' investment first popped up, one of the brothers had nothing but glowing words for Shrem:

"Charlie has been in the space for a very long time, and he has an impeccable reputation among Bitcoiners. He knows everyone in the space and everyone in the space knows him."

A Justice Department press release says the following:

Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said: "As alleged, Robert Faiella and Charlie Shrem schemed to sell over $1 million in Bitcoins to criminals bent on trafficking narcotics on the dark web drug site, Silk Road. Truly innovative business models don't need to resort to old-fashioned law-breaking, and when Bitcoins, like any traditional currency, are laundered and used to fuel criminal activity, law enforcement has no choice but to act. We will aggressively pursue those who would coopt new forms of currency for illicit purposes."

Shrem was also a personal fan of the Silk Road:

SHREM, who personally bought drugs on Silk Road, was fully aware that Silk Road was a drug-trafficking website.

Bitinstant—which the Winklevosses pumped $1.5 million into—is now offline.

h/t Dan Primack

The Nybro Action Team consists of Hjalmar Sveinbjőrnsson and Alex Bejerstrand, two under-employed friends and former Nybro residents now living in northern Sweden. Hjalmar is a student and a chef; Alex helps run his father's talent agency. They will be recapping Season 3 of HBO's Girls.

We sit each in our chairs, divided by 350 miles of Swedish landscape, me in a tiny commune called Orsa, Alex is in Stockholm, brought together with Skype and Drop­box, both ready to press "play" and watch the forth episode of Girls: "Dead Inside."

We start off with Hanna rushing into the offices of her editor, Millstreet Press, stumbling in front of the reception and accidentally spilling out the contents of her purse, while picking up the ex­-contents of her purse she tells the receptionist that she has a meeting with David Presser­-Going, she replies "he is not in yet," Hanna goes "ohh, I thought I was late" and the receptionist replies "you are, he is just not in yet."

Hanna proclaims she is just going to have a seat it a reception area, couple of seconds go by until people start running back and forth in the hallway behind the waiting room glass wall, only to exchange worried "grunts" in hearing range of Hanna. She then stands up and asks the receptionist if it's safe to be on this floor, she gets ignored, a women by the name "shesi" walks past the front desk and bids good morning and asks the receptionist if she is "alright." The obviously worried receptionist tells her that "David is dead." Next shot shows Hannah's "worried" face, motionless like always, that's why I'm going to hire a actor when we do our TV series, Alex will of course play himself.

The intro song starts, 15 seconds of some hip-­hop song with Marnie working out, running, doing pull ups, running down a packed street of people, running down some stairs and then anger punch-­flailing into the air, a new age cardio-­exercise, we recommend it as a simple effective way to burn couple of the calories while at work, just stand up from your office chair and punch­-flail into the air for a least a minute, the staff of Gawker have been doing it for years.

We are in Hannah's apartment. Jessa and her are sitting in the couch while she tells Jessa about the events of today, mainly focusing on the point that know one could tell her what she was suppose to do with her e-book while Jessa replies, "It happens, like jury duty and floods." Hannah says she hopes she dies without knowing what happened, then like five minutes later being all "what the fuck happened?"

Jessa says she can't wait to die because basically time is not linear and everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is happening right now, we just make up this delusion of the linear measurement of time…. I hate New Age people, they are basically creationists, taking scientific or philosophical theories and sprinkling them with glitter of stupidity. Let's carry on.

Adam enters the room all psyched that he found an old picture of Tom Hanks as a "leather-egg-ball" player, that is what we choose to call "American football" because no one over the Great Sea calls what you guys are doing "soccer." Adam and Jessa exchange some friendly insults that ends up him offering her to "have his penis on her shoulder," Hanna tells Adam that David is dead, he gets upsets and tries to nurse Hannah's grief-stricken soul but it's okay because Hanna seems to be unable to feel. She says "and no one even began to tell her what was next for her e-book," "whhhattt" in the way we said "whhhattt" to her answer, Hannah's answer is "I know." Adam is shocked over how emotionless she is.

We cut to Marnie making some kind of health shake, listening to some audio help book, personal improvement is what is going on, we cut back to Hannah and Adam while she sits in bed reading the news, she tells Adam they found the body flooding face down in the Hudson river and goes on saying "and Gawker is reporting that they wont be releasing the toxicologist report." His response is "Gawker? You are getting your news from Gawker?" Her response is, "Yes, they report on media news and I am a media­ist, so ... its where I got to get my news." Adam: "So how would you like that when you die bunch of judgmental creeps, snarkily reported on every detail on your decomposing body?" Hanna: "Well that is not what is happening here, this is a very very nice eulogy, listen: Going Going Gone, publicizing most flamboyance publicist makes a waterlogged exit worthy of bread eastern character." Adam: "That is fucked Hanna, those are bunch of jealous people who make a living of appealing to our basic desire to see people kicked while they are down."

Hannah: "I don't agree, it's a web portal that celebrates the written word, and their sister site Jezebel is a place feminists can go to support one of another, that is what we need in this world of slut shaming." Either that is a fantastic ad for Gawker or we just got burned, but she does point out how important the comment board is for her, we always read over all the comments we get to our articles and try to answer as many as we can, normally I stay away from comments because they are often idiotic and racist, but our commentators and fans seam to be fantastic people, also our boss told us to do it, cut again to Shoshanna and Jessa hanging together, the hopefully made-up character Dumdum tells Jessa that her favorite possession is probably her bandana collection, free spirit Jessa has no answer for that because hers would be "heroin," what a freethinker she is. Instead she asks her if she ever had a friend that died, Dumdum says she did but it was okay because the friend-group was never meant to be a six-some but rather a five-some. Jessa tells the tale of her friend that choked on vomit, she misses her so much, funny and just her favorite friend. Dumdum says she is supposed to visit her mother or her grave, pay some respect.

We are back at Hannah and Adam's bedroom, she leaves and is heading out to take an extra shift at Ray's. They have a short conversation about that Adam is scared because he is worried that she won't have any feelings about if he died, she says she would be extremely sad, he says he would be so sad that his world would blur, he would not know what a tree was. Hanna says "that was really nice" then explains that she thinks about him dying all the time.

We are the café, she is telling Ray about her editor's death, quoting "Gawker" on that it was probably not "drugs", that was a passive aggressive journalistic insult if anyone is wondering. Hannah tells him that she feels nothing about his death but still would like to go home, Ray comes with one of his best responses: "Hanna don't you place just one crumb of basic human compassion on this fat­-free muffin of sociopathic detachment and see how it tastes." She says he sounds like Adam, he then notes how its odd that he feels worse then her even though this guy threw him across a room onto a table. We cut next to Jessa calling someone from her past and asks about her dead friend's grave but the conversation ends up with a twist that I will tell you later, just imagine what it would take to get rid of Jessa and what lengths people would go to cut themselves out of that friend group.

We are in Hannah's apartment hallway and her weird neighbor Laird is "spiffing" or hanging up some art, all in one cluster on the wall, Hannah tries to milk some "grieving" attention from Laird but he proclaims that everyone he has ever known has died, showing his dead turtle in a bottle (why a bottle?, how?) but anyway. Adam's sister comes running down the stairs, inviting them all out for a walk, we cut to Jessa outside the house of her "ex­-dead" friend, her friend seems to have faked her death, apparently it was the only way because Jessa is an en­abler and when she asked her for help Jessa took her to some spiritual hocus-pocus thing. Her dead­friend's husband comes home and Jessa and her passed friend exchange some words, mostly Jessa saying how her friend's life is never going to work out, couch-surfing your friend group and neighboring methadone clinics is the only way to find your true self and connect to the universe, by the way. We love freethinkers and explorers of the mind, but we HATE New­ Age people and all their magical herbal teas, crystals ,and pyramids, basically Jessa if you are wondering what kind of people.

We are back at Ray's Café, Marnie is cleaning off the table until she hears something familiar, the sound of her "What I Am" music video, she is angry and ends up quitting her job and leaving.

We are back at some general horseplay and joyful expression as Hannah, Adam's sister and Laird run through a graveyard, of course the crazy sister took them to a graveyard, they are lying in the grass talking about life, Hannah is worried that Adam is going to realize who she really is, because he has such depth of feeling, he is going to be bored of a person that does not have his strength of a emotion. She might have invented some really good break up lines right there.

"It's not me, it's you and your depth of feeling that I am not able to match." Keeper?

Adam sister tells Hannah some super-sad story that we don't have space to write about, anyway the story ends up being a lie about Adam and some terminal niece he had. We cut to some weird shot of Jessa walking down the street and showing some mixed facial expressions while contemplating about her radical lifestyle choice, cut again to Adam and Hannah's building. Adam is sitting on the stairs outside, he is saddened. Hanna tries to squeeze out some tears while she explains how long it takes her to understand her emotions, she gives up and ends up using the made-up story Adam's sister used on her some hours earlier and tells Adam about her terminally ill niece that had the only wish of going to the prom before she died, of course in both stories her wish was granted.

The end.

[Illustrations by Alex Bejerstrand]

One of the actors who played the Marlboro Man died earlier this month from a smoking-related illness. Eric Lawson, who portrayed the iconic cowboy from 1978 to 1981, is the fifth former Marlboro Man to die from smoking.

Lawson died on January 10 at the age of 72. According to his wife, Susan, he suffered respiratory failure caused by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. He'd smoked since age 14.

"He knew the cigarettes had a hold on him," his wife said. "He knew, yet he still couldn't stop."

In addition to his role as the Marlboro Man, Lawso had small parts in TV shows like Baretta and Charlie's Angels before his film and TV career ended after an injury.

He's survived by his wife, six children, 18 grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren.

David Millar, who played the Marlboro Man in the 1950s, died of emphysema in 1987. In 1992, Wayne McLaren died at 51 after a battle with lung cancer. And both Davie McLean and Richard Hammer, who also played Marlboro Men in the 1970s, died from lung cancer in the mid 1990s.

[Image via AP]

Of the five primary performers during the Grammys gay-marriage extravaganza last night, three—Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and Madonna—count as gay allies. (They're all more or less openly heterosexual.) One—Mary Lambert—is an actual, open homosexual. And the last—Queen Latifah—is... well, we all know what she is. She just won't say it.

Latifah's public profile exists somewhere between gay ally and actual gay. The rapper, singer, and talk show host officiated 33 marriages, gay and straight, during the awards ceremony, standing alongside Macklemore, Lewis, and Lambert (who performed their pro-equality anthem "Same Love" with Mary Lambert), and Madonna (who serenaded the just-married couples with her "Open Your Heart").

Latifah's public relationship with her sexuality is fascinating. She lives right on the precipice of coming out. When asked about her sexuality and her relationships, her syntax is specific and her statements carefully chosen. But her actions tell a different story: She played a butch lesbian in 1996's Set It Off. She has been photographed embracing presumed girlfriend Jeanette Jenkins (the obscured nature of their relationship is giggle fodder for Latifah's celebrity peers). She headlined the Long Beach Lesbian & Gay Pride Festival in 2012, where she reportedly told the crowd that she was proud to be "among her people" and that she had been "waiting to do this for a long time."

A few days later, she made explicit that her words did not signal a coming out. She told Entertainment Weekly, "I've never dealt with the question of my personal life in public. It's just not gonna happen."

Latifah speaks in that kind of code when discussing her sexuality, which there would be no issue with discussing were she straight. She is emphatically hiding something. This makes her, effectively, openly closeted. She tells us time and time again that she's not going to tell us anything about her "personal life."

"I don't feel the need to discuss my private life on this show or any other show," she told The Hollywood Reporter in advance of the premiere of her current talk show. "There's the part of my life that the public and I share together. And there's the part that's mine to keep for myself. And that's mine. For me."

"I don't have a problem discussing the topic of somebody being gay, but I do have a problem discussing my personal life," the The Advocate quoted her as telling the New York Times.

"I know what I'm comfortable with and what I'm not. It's what I feel is private to me and my family and my friends. It's what I share with the public. That's been something I decided a long time ago. It's not a new thing," she told USA Today.

In 2003, Wendy Williams filmed a short run of specials for VH1 called Wendy Williams is on Fire. Williams being Williams prodded Latifah on her sexuality to the point where Latifah said something along the lines of, "You're not going to get me to admit I'm gay on TV."

Which is to say that Latifah generally stays on the side of withholding the truth rather than misrepresenting it. (She did, though, on the first episode of her show, talk about how Willow Smith's "Summer Fling" reminded Latifah of a summer fling she had when she was 12 with a boy, which certainly counts as discussing her personal life.) In advance of the Grammys' equal marriage spectacular, many assumed that Latifah would take the opportunity to come out. She didn't. Again.

Is it her responsibility to do so? Probably—becoming a public figure (especially one as high profile as Latifah) means giving up a great degree of your privacy.

But would Latifah's coming out 1) help or 2) surprise anyone? Is there anyone who doesn't know that she's gay, who can't read between the lines that she regularly sets out? It's not easy being black, it's not easy being a woman, it's not easy being gay, and it's not easy being a celebrity. That's a lot of representation to consider, and from the earliest days of her hip-hop career, Latifah made clear that she is a smart, considerate human being. I empathize with Latifah, and I wonder, too, if stubbornness isn't keeping her closeted (the same sort of stubbornness that kept Whitney Houston with Bobby Brown for 14 years, each one of them plagued with speculation about them not being able to last).

Maybe one day Latifah will come out and we can all say, "Good for her," and go on with our lives, very much in the way she has been. Until then, we know the score. At least with gestures such as the one she made at the Grammys, she's helping the community, even at a remove.

[Image via Getty]

Chesley Sullenberger? Fuck that amateur. He ain't shit.

Oh, you say you fly jets for the Air Force? Yeah, that's cool. Say, didja ever have the cockpit lights and most of your instruments go out on your aging MiG in the middle of a pitch-black night and have to land with a flashlight in your teeth? Then, three months later, did you glide another fighter to the ground—from the backseat—after a bird struck its only engine and flamed the sucker out?

No? Then sit the hell down and let Indian Air Force Wing Commander Aditya Prakash Singh show you how it's done:

On April 30, 2013, he was flying a practice diversion sortie by night on a MiG-21 Bison aircraft to Halwara when the battery heavy discharge light came on along with the master blinker indicating a failure of the electrical system of the aircraft. All the cockpit lights slowly faded away, making it impossible for him to read the instruments which are required for safe operation of the aircraft. Singh lowered the undercarriage and flaps to take off position as that would not be possible once the electrical system failed completely. "At this stage, disregarding his personal safety, he took a decision to take off his mask and hold the torch in his mouth to illuminate the instruments," the air force said.

In three months, Singh again exhibited impressive flying skills. On the night of July 29, 2013, as the captain of MiG-21 trainer, he was on the rear seat of the jet. The aircraft experienced total loss of engine power after a bird hit during the landing phase.

Long story short, Singh glided the plane down without any damage. India decided to award him something called the Shaurya Chakra, also known as a "braveheart" medal, for "his ability to maintain his composure in a grave emergency situation, courage, creative thinking and professionalism." Hey, it's cheaper than buying newer fighter jets, I guess.

In any case, if you fear imminent death on airplanes, you should probably fly with Singh. If, on the other hand, you fear mind-dulling boredom on airplanes, you should fly with Singh, too!

[Photo credit: AP]

Last Sunday, Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz assured viewers that he and his business partner, Lauren Ashburn, would discuss “a biography of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes by a New York Magazine reporter” on next’s week show because “it been getting plenty of media attention.”

The MediaBuzz anchor was referring to The Loudest Voice in the Room by Gabriel Sherman. And, a week later, he chickened out.

As Variety columnist Brian Lowry noted on Sunday, Kurtz made no mention of the very book he promised to discuss—a book that supplies a deep though often unflattering portrayal of his head boss, Roger Ailes, who was driven crazy by the fact that someone he did not control was writing about him. But Ailes controls Kurtz, whose flailing career Ailes rescued in 2013. And coercing his newest anchor to renege on an on-air promise is an elegant way of demonstrating who owns whom.

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

The Guardian has obtained top secret documents from Edward Snowden that show that both the NSA and GCHQ (its UK equivalent) have been developing the ability to siphon personal information from "leaky" smartphone apps such as Google Maps and Angry Birds. In one document, the agency lays out the "perfect scenario" of the type of info it can obtain when a photo taken with a smartphone is uploaded to a social media site.

Yes, your selfie habit comes with a price.

The classified documents show that data from the latest generation of iPhone and Android apps isn't limited to age, gender, and location. According to the Guardian, the agency might even be able to figure out if you're a swinger:

One slide from a May 2010 NSA presentation on getting data from smartphones – breathlessly titled "Golden Nugget!" – sets out the agency's "perfect scenario": "Target uploading photo to a social media site taken with a mobile device. What can we get?"

The question is answered in the notes to the slide: from that event alone, the agency said it could obtain a "possible image", email selector, phone, buddy lists, and "a host of other social working data as well as location".

In practice, most major social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, strip photos of identifying location metadata (known as EXIF data) before publication. However, depending on when this is done during upload, such data may still, briefly, be available for collection by the agencies as it travels across the networks.

Depending on what profile information a user had supplied, the documents suggested, the agency would be able to collect almost every key detail of a user's life: including home country, current location (through geolocation), age, gender, zip code, martial status – options included "single", "married", "divorced", "swinger" and more – income, ethnicity, sexual orientation, education level, and number of children.

It's all part of the NSA's dragnet approach. Rather than hack into one person's handset, the agency uses mass surveillance tools, "such as cable taps, or from international mobile networks," to "collect large quantities of mobile phone data," from apps. And the more obsessed you get with the computer in your pocket, the more data the NSA gets.

The agencies also made use of their mobile interception capabilities to collect location information in bulk, from Google and other mapping apps. One basic effort by GCHQ and the NSA was to build a database geolocating every mobile phone mast in the world – meaning that just by taking tower ID from a handset, location information could be gleaned.

A more sophisticated effort, though, relied on intercepting Google Maps queries made on smartphones, and using them to collect large volumes of location information.

So successful was this effort that one 2008 document noted that "[i]t effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system."

App developers or the companies that deliver an app's advertisements decide what information is generated. The Guardian says potentially sensitive details "would likely qualify as content, rather than metadata."

President Obama's recent speech about reforming the NSA focused on the collection of metadata and did not mention the information collected from smartphone apps. As with other recent revelations, the NSA says its not using its spy tools on Americans, but rather "valid foreign intelligence targets".

Just like the shadowy data brokers that sell information you put on Facebook to marketers, here the middlemen are the ad platforms:

One mobile ad platform, Millennial Media, appeared to offer particularly rich information. Millennial Media's website states it has partnered with Rovio on a special edition of Angry Birds; with Farmville maker Zynga; with Call of Duty developer Activision, and many other major franchises.

The agencies try to target "weak spots" in the communications infrastructure:

Another slide details weak spots in where data flows from mobile phone network providers to the wider internet, where the agency attempts to intercept communications. These are locations either within a particular network, or international roaming exchanges (known as GRXs), where data from travellers roaming outside their home country is routed.

In a 2010 presentation about the spy agencies big plans for mobile phone interception, GCHQ named their tech tools after various Smurfs:

GCHQ's targeted tools against individual smartphones are named after characters in the TV series The Smurfs. An ability to make the phone's microphone 'hot', to listen in to conversations, is named "Nosey Smurf". High-precision geolocation is called "Tracker Smurf", power management – an ability to stealthily activate an a phone that is apparently turned off – is "Dreamy Smurf", while the spyware's self-hiding capabilities are codenamed "Paranoid Smurf".

To the spy agencies, your privacy looks like dopey old cartoon.

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

[Image via Getty]

"I met her at the Heritage Foundation Christmas party. She was wearing a purple dress and looked hot standing next to Grover Norquist, if only by comparison...Her boyfriend was there, but I don't adhere to UN regulations." L'amour, Beltway millennial righty journalist style!

File this under Terrible Ideas: A man filmed himself as he rode outside a subway car over the Williamsburg Bridge and posted the footage to YouTube.

As you can see, the footage is pretty spectacular. But still: what an awful, terrifying idea. The New York City subway is dangerous enough without climbing outside the cars while over a bridge.

[h/t HyperVocal]

The New York Times has appended a 114-word correction to Janet Maslin’s viciously obtuse review of Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Fox News boss Roger Ailes. It’s almost as if someone else read the book for her.

A vial of holy blood belonging to the dead pope John Paul II was stolen from a tiny church in the mountains east of Rome, and an Italian anti-occult organization says the blood was likely taken for Satanic rituals.

The theft shocked officials at the Vatican, and 50 Carabinieri officers with police dogs are searching the region. What they seek is one of the very few specimens of the former pope's blood, which soaked his white clothing after the attempt on his life in 1981.

These bits of dried blood harvested from the gravely wounded pope are crucial to the church, especially now that John Paul II is about to be named a saint. And an Italian anti-occult organization says a gang of devil worshippers may have taken the blood for unimaginable rituals.

"This sort of sacrilege often take place at this time of the year," said Giovanni Panunzio, head of the anti-occult Osservatorio Antiplagio. According to Panunzio, this is a week when European Satanists do their most wretched work.

Satanism has mostly been forgotten as Catholicism fades from the lives of most Europeans, but in heavily Catholic nations such as Italy there is still widespread fear of it.

The San Pietro Della Lenca church, where Pope John Paul II's blood was stolen.

The burglary occurred at the San Pietro Della Lenca church in the Abruzzo region, where the late pope loved to visit for winter skiing. After his death, John Paul's personal secretary gave the reliquary, an ornate container for a holy person's relics, to the humble church in the mountains.

John Paul II frequently escaped his duties at the Vatican to go snow skiing in these mountains. After his old age kept him from the slopes, he enjoyed long hikes in the region.

The stolen vial is one of only three that contain the real blood of John Paul II, Vatican officials said.

[Top photo, of a nun displaying John Paul II's bloody undershirt in 2011, via Getty Images. Church image via Google Maps.]

In an awkward interview Monday with Matt Lauer on NBC's Today, Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon discussed Fallon's February transition into Leno's Tonight Show slot. The two comedians even managed to make some "jokes" that were "funny," if uncomfortable, forced humor is your thing.

Reiterating his hurt feelings, the twice-fired champion of The Tonight Show reminds viewers that what happened with that whole Conan thing in 2009 was unfair. But don't worry, Leno's cool with it now, ok? Totally cool. Why?

This time I was asked. The last time I was sort of told, "This is what's happening."

Now that NBC is again forcing Leno out (it's cool, he was asked!), reporters have many questions about his relationship with his replacement. When Lauer asked him to describe the nature of his friendship with Fallon, Leno gushed:

I think it's a professional relationship.

As for Fallon, he also holds his relationship with Leno in high regard:

We talk every couple of weeks or something like that.

The awkwardness culminated when Lauer asked Fallon if he expected tension with other late night hosts. Fallon responded, "I don't think for me. I don't think there's ever going to be anything tense." Leno, the hilarious man who was forced to leave and later asked to leave again, hilariously began a faux-coughing / laughing fit. "Ridiculous!" Leno squealed.

Ridiculous, indeed.

Lauer said more of the interview will air next week.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Last night at the Grammy awards, Macklemore beat out Kendrick Lamar for multiple "Best Rap" awards. Afterwards, Macklemore texted Kendrick an apology. Classy? On the contrary.

Let's leave aside the question of whether or not Macklemore "deserved" to win "Best Rap Album" and "Best Rap Song" of 2014. (No.) Let's also leave aside the question of whether or not Kendrick Lamar makes "better" hip hop music than Macklemore. (So obvious as to be undeserving of further explanation.) Let us simply address here Macklemore's actions last night, which were threefold:

1) He decided to attend the Grammys. There he won a bunch of awards. He accepted those awards with pleasure.

2) Later, after it was all over, he sent a text message to Kendrick Lamar, reading: "You got robbed. I wanted you to win. You should have. It's weird and sucks that I robbed you. I was gonna say that during the speech. Then the music started playing during my speech and I froze. Anyway, you know what it is. Congrats on this year and your music. Appreciate you as an artist and as a friend. Much love"

3) Macklemore put a photo of his private text message on Instagram to ensure that everyone saw it.

As to the question, "Is Macklemore a ho bag?" we may now answer, "Yes, he is." Consider the following alternative courses of action that he could have taken, all of which would have been less characteristic of a ho bag:

1) He could have boycotted the Grammy awards, which are for ho bags in general.

2) When called on stage to accept his award, he could have said, "This award belongs to Kendrick Lamar." (There is precedent for such a thing.)

3) He could have walked down from the stage and given his award to Kendrick Lamar.

4) If he was too flustered to do this on stage at the Grammy awards, he could have done it immediately after the Grammy awards.

5) During the performance of his song "Same Love" at the Grammy awards, he could have married Kendrick Lamar, and presented him with a very special ring—made out of the Grammy award for "Best Rap Album."

6) He could have sent Kendrick Lamar an apologetic text message without putting a photo of that text message on Instagram in a transparent ploy to win himself plaudits for his graciousness.

Macklemore did not do any of these things. Instead, he went to the ho bag Grammy awards, basked in the unblinking adulation of the cameras, accepted all of his awards, and then clumsily tried to insulate himself from the conversation about his own suitability for such awards that he knew would ensue, by apologizing for those awards in the most vainglorious possible way. I challenge anyone to construct a chain of events that more readily demonstrates the definition of "self-serving."

Macklemore has not yet given back the award he is very sorry he won.

Macklemore is not the world's greatest villain. Maybe he is a really nice guy. Maybe events are moving too fast for him. Maybe Macklemore is but a bit player caught up in the sweeping cultural drama that is at the intersection of hip hop, race, and pop culture. Then again, Macklemore is not a role model. Macklemore is not some real cool guy. Macklemore is just some guy who makes catchy songs, sells Dr. Pepper, and gives bad apologies.

Don't be like Macklemore.

[Photo: AP]

Ben Affleck arrives for his Playboy Interview beaming after dropping off his kids for their first day of school. For Affleck and wife Jennifer Garner, it is the familiar ordeal of dodging the cameras of 20 paparazzi who have followed every step taken by son Samuel and daughters Violet and Seraphina.

Affleck accepts this as the price of fame and a two-star household. He had it worse when he fell in love with Jennifer Lopez, became half of the tabloid couple Bennifer and watched his career get damaged by the backlash and the ill-timed flop Gigli. A nice guy caught in a media maelstrom, Affleck was left to wonder how things had turned in a career launched after he and writing partner Matt Damon won Oscars for their Good Will Hunting script and the two Boston kids quickly became forces to be reckoned with. Affleck, whose star continued to rise with Armageddon, Shakespeare in Love and Pearl Harbor, never denied playing a part in his undoing by, among other things, appearing in Lopez's music video to rub suntan lotion on her iconic bottom on a yacht. After they split, and with his career faltering, Affleck became determined to rebuild and prove his Good Will Hunting Oscar wasn't a fluke.

He scripted his second act himself, first by co-writing and directing the dark mystery Gone Baby Gone, based on the Dennis Lehane novel. A smaller film, it was an auspicious debut and won favor with critics. The next project on his road to redemption was The Town, another gritty Boston drama, which he directed, co-wrote and starred in. It too impressed critics. But everything came full circle with Argo. With Affleck as producer, director and star, the film won the Oscar for best picture last February. The tabloid follies and the failed movies faded into memory. David Fincher, who directed The Social Network, cast him to play the murder-suspect husband in the upcoming Gone Girl. His comeback was complete.

But then Affleck put himself in the maelstrom again. Surprising everyone, he signed on to play the caped crusader in Batman vs. Superman. It is a role that nearly killed George Clooney's career, and the reaction in the press and on the internet was intense and unfavorable, with many asking if Affleck had just undermined all the career gains he'd carefully made.

Born to a schoolteacher mom and a father whose theater aspirations were undone by the bottle and who tended bar, took bets as a bookie and mopped up as a janitor at Harvard, Affleck caught the acting bug early. Just eight when he met the 10-year-old Damon, the two scored bit parts as kids before Affleck found his footing in indies such as Dazed and Confused and Chasing Amy. Then Good Will Hunting changed everything.

Playboy sent Michael Fleming, who last interviewed Quentin Tarantino, to catch up with Affleck. Reports Fleming: "We met right after his Batman announcement elicited hostility he hadn't seen since the Bennifer days. A more mature Affleck doesn't care. After his career overhaul, who's to doubt him when he says, 'Trust me, I know what I'm doing'?"

PLAYBOY: When Warner Bros. named you Batman, the internet exploded with hostility. After climbing back from career adversity to win the best picture Oscar for Argo, was your initial reaction more "Not again" or "Screw you"?

AFFLECK: It wasn't either, really. I expected that reaction. Warner Bros. told me, "You should know what you're getting into." They showed me the reactions to other folks who had been cast in these roles. They said this is how it tends to play out initially.

PLAYBOY: What convinced you?

AFFLECK: When they asked if I would be Batman, I told them I didn't see myself in the role and I was going to have to beg off. They said I'd fit well into how they were going to approach the character and asked me to look at what the writer-director, Zack Snyder, was doing. The stuff was incredible.

PLAYBOY: Why?

AFFLECK: It was a unique take on Batman that was still consistent with the mythology. It made me excited. All of a sudden I had a reading of the character. When people see it, it will make more sense than it does now or even than it did to me initially.

PLAYBOY: How will your Batman differ from the others, particularly the one played by Christian Bale?

AFFLECK: I don't want to give away too much, but the idea for the new Batman is to redefine him in a way that doesn't compete with the Bale and Chris Nolan Batman but still exists within the Batman canon. It will be an older and wiser version, particularly as he relates to Henry Cavill's Superman character.

PLAYBOY: How much did the hostile fan reaction bother you?

AFFLECK: I understand I'm at a disadvantage with the internet. If I thought the result would be another Daredevil, I'd be out there picketing myself. [laughs] Why would I make the movie if I didn't think it was going to be good and that I could be good in it?

PLAYBOY: How would you have handled this a decade ago, when things weren't going so well?

AFFLECK: I probably would have been more sensitive. I had less perspective than I do now. I've learned it doesn't matter what people think before a movie comes out; what matters is what people think when they see the movie. There's a lot of noise in the world, and the internet magnifies that energy. My focus is on the actual execution of the movie. Would I have had that perspective 10 years ago? I don't know. The world was different then. It seems odd to me to criticize casting if you haven't read the script and don't know the tone or the take. But the casting of high-profile projects seems to generate negative attention; it's fun to give your thumbs-up or thumbs-down. I've had the luxury recently of doing Argo,The Town and The Company Men, films that didn't have a high profile. You have the luxury of waiting until the movie is released before being judged. I've learned to think, I may succeed or fail, but I'm going to do so on the merit of my own instincts. It's a great business in that way. You do a movie that's successful, you get a little victory lap, and then you start at the beginning; you have to prove yourself all over again. I like that because it motivates you to work harder. I was thrilled with the reception Argo got. It was one of the great professional experiences of my life. I'm thrilled I'm working with David Fincher in Gone Girl and that I'll direct Live by Night, this big, sweeping gangster-epic morality story.

PLAYBOY: You turned around a cold streak playing George Reeves in Hollywoodland, a film about how his acting career was destroyed after he was typecast as Superman. Did you learn any lessons to prepare you to play another caped icon?

AFFLECK: When George Reeves was Super-man you had three TV channels, and that show was iconic. Now there are so many more options. You see actors doing everything from YouTube shorts to big-budget movies. Also, television shows hold you hostage for long periods. My wife was on a show for five years. It's the same with Jon Hamm and Mad Men. It's conceivable you could become hostage to one role. In movies? Look at Robert Downey Jr. He's able to be brilliant in Iron Man and The Avengers, but he can also go do Sherlock Holmes.

PLAYBOY: George Clooney kept a photo of himself as Batman on his office wall as a reminder of what can happen when you take a role for money and fame. If you had such a photo in your office, which movie would you go with?

AFFLECK: I'd probably have two or three. [laughs] It'd be tough to choose. The only movie I actually regret is Daredevil. It just kills me. I love that story, that character, and the fact that it got fucked up the way it did stays with me. Maybe that's part of the motivation to do Batman.

PLAYBOY: Describe what holding that Oscar statue meant to you when Argo won for best picture.

AFFLECK: There had been plenty of moments when I didn't know where I was going to end up. I had been kicked around some and maybe left for dead. I'm not a great believer in awards and the idea that some movie is best, because it's subjective. But standing there at the Academy Awards eased some of the pain and frustration I'd been carrying. I loved movies and felt I knew how to make good ones and had something to offer, but there was a time when I wasn't sure I would be invited to try anymore.

PLAYBOY: Contrast that with the night you and your best friend, Matt Damon, won Oscars for best original screenplay for Good Will Hunting.

AFFLECK: The girlfriend I was with at the time was working out of town.

PLAYBOY: Gwyneth Paltrow?

AFFLECK: Yeah, Gwyneth. Matt and I just thought, Let's take our moms. We knew they'd want to go. We go down the red carpet and see all these journalists from TV. We're starstruck. Holy shit, is that Roger Ebert? I see Dustin Hoffman and he says, "You know, I did theater with your father." My father is a great guy, but he drank a lot during my childhood, and when he said he knew Dustin Hoffman, I thought he was bullshitting. And there I am at the Oscars and Hoffman brings it up. "I knew your father." So now I'm reevaluating my whole relationship with my father as we're walking inside. Every star you could ever imagine—there's Jack Nicholson. It was Titanic's year, and there's James Cameron. We sat down, close to the front of the stage. Billy Crystal comes out, starts this song, and it's "Matt and Ben, Ben and Matt." It was like walking through the fourth wall of your television into a weird dream, one where I'm at the Oscars and Billy Crystal is singing to me and…never mind. Then Robin Williams wins and that's exciting. The screenplay award isn't until halfway through the ceremony, so we've got time. I remember turning to James Cameron. I had never seen him before and don't think I've spoken to him since, but I'm overly relaxed and caught up. I go, "Hey, how's it going, Jim?" I remember he kind of looked at me. I say, "Don't you think it would be cool if you knew how many votes each movie got?" He looks at me like, What the fuck is this kid talking about? Why is this kid talking to me?

PLAYBOY: Like he was going to call for security?

AFFLECK: And why is he talking about the vote? I sat down. I'm thinking, Shit, I just made an idiot out of myself with James Cameron. I'll never be in one of his movies. Our category came up, and Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau presented it. Maybe the producer figured they're a famous screen duo and if these guys win that will be nice symmetry. But we'd lost the Writers Guild award to Jim Brooks for As Good As It Gets, and people think if you lose that you'll lose the Oscar. And then they read off our names. I'll never forget the first thought I had—that I hadn't given one second of thought to what I might say. You are an idiot. You come to the Academy Awards and didn't prepare anything, not even secretly in your mind.

PLAYBOY: You spoke first?

AFFLECK: Matt said, "Go ahead, talk first." Only later did I realize his show of graciousness was designed to give him a minute to prepare what he was going to say. I mumbled a bunch of stupid things. I thanked Boston twice. Probably once would have been enough. We'd won the Golden Globe, but I think the only other thing I'd ever won was some Little League trophies when I was 12. I look back on the whole thing ruefully. I had no perspective. I thanked Cuba Gooding Jr.—by now I was just saying stuff. We high-fived everybody. I hugged Denzel Washington as we were coming offstage and he was going on. Why did I hug Denzel Washington? Maybe he didn't want to be hugged by me, a stranger. I felt like such an idiot afterward, but I have to say, we had a lot of fun that night.

PLAYBOY: Argo, Zero Dark Thirty and Lincoln were fact-based Oscar nominees that weathered controversies over their historical accuracy. Zero Dark Thirty was sunk when three U.S. senators challenged scenes that indicated waterboarding had yielded info that led to Bin Laden. Argo got heat for giving too much credit to the CIA's Tony Mendez and not enough to the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, who hid the Americans. Jimmy Carter said it wasn't an accurate depiction, and Taylor said some negative stuff. Reportedly your film was censured by the New Zealand parliament over its role in the movie, or lack of one.

AFFLECK: [Laughs] I didn't know. Does that mean I'll be arrested if I go to New Zealand? I can't be in any of the Lord of the Rings movies?

PLAYBOY: How were you able to navigate those potential land mines better than those other films did?

AFFLECK: I don't think we did any better than anybody else. Fact-based stuff leaves you exposed to criticism, and it's difficult in a world where campaigning has metastasized into taking shots at the other movies. People definitely took shots at Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln and particularly at us. Ken Taylor felt he played a greater role in the rescue of the six than we portrayed in the film. He wanted a bigger part, but we explained the movie wasn't about him; it was about Tony. They'd already made a movie about Ken. We liked all the stuff about Tony that wasn't known until it was declassified. The issue over historical fidelity is like the Batman thing, where people are able to vent criticism instantaneously, and small issues can catch fire and become contagious. Even with Good Will Hunting there was a rumor that Ted Tally really wrote the script and then that William Goldman had written it. It's the same as negative campaigning in politics. There are people who want to celebrate their movies, and others, whose faces you never see and names you never read, who push this other stuff. Competition brings out the best and worst in us.

PLAYBOY: You're a decade removed from Gigli, when focus on your romantic relationship with Jennifer Lopez hurt your career. Back then, who helped you figure out how to climb out of the hole?

AFFLECK: That hole was a series of movies that didn't work and one in particular that was widely mocked because it had a funny name and overlapped with the tabloid situation. It became a perfect storm. Then Paycheck was mediocre, Surviving Christmas was bad, and I sunk into a morass. I thought, Okay, I want to get out of this. My wife was definitely around then. Getting to know her, falling in love with her and being connected with her gave me a foundation to reach out and say, Okay, I'm going to do Hollywoodland; I'm going to direct Gone Baby Gone. Those were the steps forward I needed to put positive stuff on the board. She is by leaps and bounds the most important person to me in that respect. Over the past 10 years she has allowed me to have a stable home life while accomplishing my professional goals.

PLAYBOY: She bolstered your confidence?

AFFLECK: I was frustrated. A lot of smart people out there made choices they thought would work on some of these movies. Some of it is luck. Everybody has movies that don't work; I just had a run of them. But I also looked at it and said, "I didn't work hard enough. I wasn't diligent enough. I wasn't dedicated enough." I made that realization. But once I'd made it, the most critical thing was that she said, "If you're going to work 24 hours a day, that's cool. I'm going to be here." That allowed me to think, Okay, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to kill myself over this next period of time.

PLAYBOY: Your relationship with Jennifer Garner came after a very public engagement to Jennifer Lopez. Both your relationships were tabloid fodder.

AFFLECK: The crucible by flashbulb. It was magazines then, and those days are more or less gone. Now it's online, but it's the same thing. At the nadir of that I felt I was being treated worse than Scott Peterson, who at least got the benefit of the word alleged when they talked about him.

PLAYBOY: He's the guy who——

AFFLECK: Murdered his wife and tossed her over the side of a boat. The point is I felt like I was at the bottom. I became the guy people could kick around, even if they hadn't seen the movie, because they saw other people taking shots. I thought it was unfair. But some of those people later wrote nice things about my work. I've learned not to take it personally.

PLAYBOY: But often it is personal.

AFFLECK: Once I saw my way out of it, I said, You know what? I don't even care anymore. I'm going to focus on my job. I don't give a shit. Take my picture. Write what you want to write. At the end of the day, what you write in a gossip column doesn't matter. What matters is how the movie works. I found out it doesn't kill you. But once I thought I had that figured out, I started having kids. And that is when I drew the line.

PLAYBOY: What is the line?

AFFLECK: You can say what you want about me. You can yell at me with a video camera and be TMZ. You can follow me around and take pictures all you want. I don't care. There are a couple of guys outside right now. Terrific. That's part of the deal. But it's wrong and disgusting to follow children around and take their picture and sell it for money. It makes the kids less safe. They used to take pictures of our children coming out of preschool, and so this stalker who had threatened to kill me, my wife and our kids showed up at the school and got arrested. I mean, there are real practical dangers to this.

PLAYBOY: How close did he get?

AFFLECK: He was in the pack of paparazzi. They didn't know he was a guy who was threatening to murder our family. That makes me angry. It's a safety thing, and there's also a sanity thing. My kids aren't celebrities. They never made that bargain. We were offered a lot of money to sell pictures of our kids when they were born. You'll notice there aren't any. I make no judgment about people who decide differently; a lot of them give the money to charity. For me it was a matter of principle. I didn't want someone to be able to come back and say I was complicit, that it wasn't a question of principle as much as price.

PLAYBOY: You didn't want to be a hypocrite.

AFFLECK: As their father it's my job to protect them from that stuff. I try my very best, and sometimes I'm successful. The tragic thing is, people who see those pictures naturally think it's sweet. They don't see the gigantic former gang member with a huge lens standing over a four-year-old and screaming to get the kid's attention. The kids are always looking down because they're freaked out and scared of these people. And so they yell. Which is fine if you're Lindsay Lohan coming out of a club, or me or any adult. With kids it's tasteless at best. A lot of these photographs are being bought by legitimate magazines. In the U.K. they have a good system: If you take a kid's picture, you have to blur out the face. It protects the privacy of children, any child. I wish we would do that here, though I don't expect it. When my wife met with California lawmakers to get legislation passed to establish a certain distance between paparazzi and children and also to prevent the stalking behavior on the part of the paparazzi, she was opposed by the association of magazine and newspaper folks. They said it would have a chilling effect on the way the news was covered. You couldn't chill the internet coverage of celebrities if you tried.

PLAYBOY: But do you understand why the press would worry about infringements on the First Amendment?

AFFLECK: I think the First Amendment and the public's right to know are adequately served by photographers who are at least 100 feet away. They all have 300-millimeter lenses. I'm a photographer myself, and I can tell you with complete confidence that you can get a fine picture. I understand we won't be able to prevent them from taking photos of children or get them to blur the faces, even though I think that would be preferable. But at the very least there should be a bubble of safety. We do that at football games: You can't just come on the field. We do that with politicians: You can't photograph the president from any distance you want.

PLAYBOY: You took a lot of heat for making movies with Jennifer Lopez when you were a couple. Is that why you and your wife don't work together?

AFFLECK: Yes. Well, my wife and I made Pearl Harbor and Daredevil. With our track record, I don't know if anyone's looking for a three-quel.

PLAYBOY: You're not Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn?

AFFLECK: Exactly. I think it doesn't work. It's already hard to get people to suspend disbelief, and then you have married couples in the same movie. People know about the marriage, and they're not willing to acknowledge the couple as anything else. And marriage is boring to people. They say, "I'm married 20 years. I love my wife, but I have that at home." People want to see the kindling of new romance in movies. It's exciting, but not when it's a couple they know has been together for 10 years.

PLAYBOY: You developed a political profile campaigning for presidential candidates Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama. How did that come about?

AFFLECK: I grew up in a house with a mother who was a teacher and a Freedom Rider—very left-wing Democrats living in a heterogeneous working-class neighborhood. I picked up a lot of those values there, and I brought them with me when I showed up in Hollywood. In 2000 the Gore campaign said, "Hey, would you come do this with us?" And I did. I thought I had a responsibility, so I campaigned for Gore. Kerry was a Boston guy, and I felt an organic connection. And then Obama in 2008. Over time I became disillusioned, mostly with the pernicious effect of money in politics. I realized it was about raising $56,000 through a couple of dinners and those bundlers who bring in $1 million or $2 million. Those people are dedicated, and they believe in what they're doing. I believe in why many of them are doing it. What I don't believe in is that we now have the need to do it. And for me personally, it started to feel gross.

PLAYBOY: What part?

AFFLECK: Being used as a prop to schmooze people and try to milk the teat of the donor for money. We'd do it sparingly. Matt and I did a thing for Elizabeth Warren, whom we like and who won. We did a fund-raiser for Cory Booker, whom we also like. People now know me as a Democrat, and that will always be the case to some extent.

PLAYBOY: Does that polarize viewers?

AFFLECK: It does, and you can bifurcate your audience. When I watch a guy I know is a big Republican, part of me thinks, I probably wouldn't like this person if I met him, or we would have different opinions. That shit fogs the mind when you should be paying attention and be swept into the illusion.

PLAYBOY: Still, won't that happen whether you take positions on candidates or causes?

AFFLECK: I have misgivings about it, counterbalanced with the larger things I care about. I don't blindly do this stuff when it makes it harder to do my own job. And there's an awful lot of gross money-raising going on that has made me want to pull back a bit from pure electoral politics. So I started an organization called the Eastern Congo Initiative after I found what I thought was the worst place in the world. Five million people have died in 15 years. One in six kids doesn't live to see the age of five. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has almost no functioning state security apparatus. There are regions in this country where two out of three women have been raped. It's an incredibly broken, needy part of the world, and nobody was working there. I thought, Okay, I'll take that on. If I'm going to raise money, that's what I'll raise money for. That feels like a good way to spend my time.

PLAYBOY: Will you campaign for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

AFFLECK: I haven't abandoned it, but I look at working in politics again with a more jaundiced eye. Hillary does excite me, in the same way the potent symbolism of the first African American president was what thrilled people about Obama. It's similar with Hillary and gender equality. The idea that 100 years after women got the right to vote, to have a woman president would be exciting.

PLAYBOY: You've been approached to run for office and told you could win. How seriously did you consider it?

AFFLECK: I don't give it serious thought, because it would take me away from what I consider to be the prime of my storytelling career. I feel more in touch with that and what I want to do than I ever have. I wouldn't step away from that for anything. I also know people are probably bullshitting when they tell you that you can win. It turns you into a professional fund-raiser. I don't know what the future holds when I'm 55, 65 or 75. Right now it's about making movies I believe in, that I think will thrill and entertain and be meaningful to audiences.

PLAYBOY: When you played a congressman in State of Play, one of the politicians you patterned your character after was Anthony Weiner.

AFFLECK: Which goes to show you how sharp my dramatic instincts were. I was tuned in.

PLAYBOY: How surprised were you when he was undone the first time, came back and had his Gotham mayoral aspirations dashed when it was exposed he was still sexting, under the moniker Carlos Danger? Are politics more of a shark tank than Hollywood?

AFFLECK: Yeah, D.C. is a little more of a shark tank than Hollywood because I think there's a zero-sum game at play. You have to be out for me to get in, and the harder I hit you, the better it is for me. In Hollywood I'm a great believer in the idea that there is room for many people to succeed. There are a lot of long lives in this business.

PLAYBOY: Let's reminisce about a few of your movies. Tell me what pops into your mind. Dazed and Confused?

AFFLECK: That's where I learned that an actor could contribute to a movie beyond reading lines. Richard Linklater sent a note to all the actors that said, "If this movie is produced as written, it'll be a massive underachievement." We were all 19 and 20 and down in Austin, and all the actors started to write their own ideas and their own little scenes. It demystified the process for me in an important way. And I was in Austin with all those young people that summer, and I was the only person who didn't have sex.

PLAYBOY: Why?

AFFLECK: You tell me. Maybe it was the hairdo.

PLAYBOY: Your character was so loathsome you didn't get laid?

AFFLECK: You know, I can't explain these things.

PLAYBOY: Next: I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three Picture Deal at Disney.

AFFLECK: That was the first thing I directed. I was into directing student-film shorts. My friend Jay Lacopo had written this untitled 12-page screenplay. I gave him a title and he said, "You direct it." I thought, Well, I don't understand screen direction, but sure, I'll direct it. We shot that for a couple of days and——

PLAYBOY: And you've been living it down ever since?

AFFLECK: I don't know. It's pretty good, actually. Some of my best work.

PLAYBOY: Chasing Amy.

AFFLECK: One of the best experiences I've had. We all lived in Kevin Smith's house. We rehearsed it like a play. We shot on 16 millimeter. I got the chance to do the kind of acting I had never done before. Not knowing if anyone would ever see this cheap movie was freeing. It didn't seem like a movie, more like people running around with a video camera.

PLAYBOY: Armageddon.

AFFLECK: My introduction to big-budget Hollywood. I went from Chasing Amy a year before to being in a movie that cost $150 million, or whatever it was. We shot for 100 days with cool indie actors like Billy Bob Thornton, Owen Wilson and Steve Buscemi. We had fun.

PLAYBOY: Is that the first time you really made money? How did you handle it?

AFFLECK: We had sold the Good Will Hunting script for $600,000, and we split it, 300 grand apiece. After taxes, $125,000. And then we each bought cars for $50,000—I bought a Jeep Cherokee—so we were down to $75,000. By the end of the year we were flat broke. So I had experience running through 600,000 bucks. And then on Armageddon I made another $600,000.

PLAYBOY: Pearl Harbor.

AFFLECK: Pearl Harbor was a wonderful experience. I got to know my wife, and there were a lot of people I liked. It was a disappointment because I thought we were making an iconic movie that could have been made before the war, a Titanic kind of movie. It ultimately ended up being like Armageddon in World War II. You can make Armageddon about oil drillers on an asteroid. You can't make Armageddon about the Doolittle Raid because that's history and people take that seriously. You talked about being picky over historical accuracy. Michael Bay, the director, wanted a more commercial tone, and it was commercial, a big hit. People say Pearl Harbor was a bomb. It was absolutely not. It did half a billion dollars, but it became a light piece of entertainment.

PLAYBOY: Changing Lanes.

AFFLECK: Roger Michell taught me casting. He showed me that if you cast every tiny part as if it were the lead, you can create a whole world of people you can live in as an actor. I met Bradley Cooper. I liked working with Sam Jackson a lot. My memory is of Roger taking what could have easily been a 1970s genre action film and turning it into a rumination on anger and morality.

PLAYBOY: You forgot your cast mate Sydney Pollack, also a great director.

AFFLECK: Oh my God. I grilled Sydney about all his movies, and there were so many. I remember him saying, "Of the seven movies.…" I said "Wait a minute. You directed seven movies?" He said, "No, I directed seven movies that star Robert Redford." [laughs] So many amazing stories. His Stanley Kubrick stories.…

PLAYBOY: Can you tell us one?

AFFLECK: Sydney was acting for him in Eyes Wide Shut, and Stanley wanted him to hold a glass in a specific place. Sydney told him, "Stanley, I wouldn't do that. It's not real." And Kubrick said, "Real is good. Interesting is better." He's the reason people are afraid to cast actors who are directors, because after one or two takes he'd be muttering, "Come on, I think we got this. Don't we have it?"

PLAYBOY: The Sum of All Fears.

AFFLECK: I met Morgan Freeman, which was great because I was able to ask him to work for free when we did Gone Baby Gone. We shot The Sum of All Fears in Montreal, and it almost killed me. That town never closes. The food is amazing, the drink is amazing, the girls are gorgeous. It's not a place to focus on your work.

PLAYBOY: Gone Baby Gone.

AFFLECK: I was terrified. Everybody said, "This is going to suck. Ben Affleck is directing. This movie's going to be shit." I was very discouraged by it and didn't have a lot of support from anybody really, except my wife. And Matt.

PLAYBOY: Critics were impressed with your cast. Your star, Ed Harris, is known for not suffering fools.

AFFLECK: No, he does not suffer anything. I've always gotten along with and respect actors. It becomes clear after a minute or two talking to me as the director on a movie that I care about them doing their best work and that I give them all the latitude and time they need and that I understand the story and I'm not going to ask them to do anything that doesn't make sense. That's a lot for an actor to hear.

PLAYBOY: The Town.

AFFLECK: I got confidence from Gone Baby Gone that I could get through a movie, shoot it and have it make sense. The Town was a step up in trying to execute on the genre components. The movie borrowed a lot from Michael Mann's Heat. Look how well they did it in that movie—you can't do it any better. I took that realism and tried to apply it to our action stuff. There were a lot of techniques we used. Some worked, and others we didn't put in the movie. Ultimately it was about making a slightly bigger, slightly more Hollywood movie and wrapping it around a drama that had themes that were meaningful to me. I thought, If I do this right, I will be considered for more stuff. And then Jeff Robinov at Warner Bros. handed me Argo. I read it and immediately knew I had to make it, that it was perfect.

PLAYBOY: How about some movies that were considered flops but might have been memorable milestones for you. Gigli?

AFFLECK: Gigli's where I learned to direct. Martin Brest, the guy who did Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman, is a great director who understands how to help an actor. The love he had for what he was doing, the care he took with the performances and the way he made it about the story and the actors rather than imposing some sort of artifice or style on top of it—all that rubbed off on me when I shot The Town.

PLAYBOY: Daredevil. Can you put your finger on where it went wrong?

AFFLECK: I think it would be impolite to say so.

PLAYBOY: It doesn't sound like you think it was your fault.

AFFLECK: I bear a share of responsibility. You can't divorce yourself and say it was everybody else's fault and not mine. I was there. But by the same token, actors are often afforded too much credit and too much blame. These things are risky by nature, and I have worked as hard on ones that didn't work as I did on Argo. Sometimes it's in the hands of the movie gods. You think something's smart and that it will resonate, you bust your ass, and it just doesn't congeal. That's why I judge directors by their successes. Everybody's capable of missing, but there aren't many who are capable of doing something special.

PLAYBOY: Considering the career adversity you've overcome, should we not be surprised that your memories of failures are more vivid than of hits? Do you dwell on failure?

AFFLECK: No, it's something else. Look at Daredevil. That's where I found my wife. We met on Pearl Harbor, which people hate, but we fell in love on Daredevil. By the way, she won most of the fights in the movie, which was a pretty good predictor of what would happen down the road—my wife, holding swords and beating the living shit out of me.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating is not in direct proportion to how important a life experience a movie was. Surviving Christmas is a one tomato, which means a shitty movie. Again, it should've been better, could've been better. To me, meeting James Gandolfini and getting to know him at such an interesting and important period in both our lives, and the degree to which we bonded and became friends, is something I wouldn't trade for anything. He was a lovely man, and so tough on himself. Most of the good things in my life have come out of movies that didn't work very well. That made that movie a great experience, despite what people said about it. As you point out, like Pearl Harbor, Daredevil and Surviving Christmas. The hit movies I've done did nothing for me personally.

PLAYBOY: You got into some trouble overdoing it when you were young and had Hollywood at your feet for the first time.

AFFLECK: I wasn't married. I showed up in Hollywood, and all of a sudden girls were talking to me. I thought, Wow, what changed? So I had a lot of girlfriends and a lot of fun. I definitely ran around, and I hit the wall a few times and made some mistakes. But that's part of a young man growing up. I think it was the only natural reaction to the situation I found myself in. It's part of what has allowed me to have more perspective now as an older guy.

PLAYBOY: There is an "I'll show them" attitude in how you built your career. Does that go back to dropping out of college after a professor embarrassed you?

AFFLECK: Matt and I were writing Good Will Hunting and living in Eagle Rock. I was going to school at Occidental. I had a creative writing professor who asked us to write 20 pages of anything, free-flowing, no-rules type stuff. I brought in 20 pages of Good Will Hunting. I started to read it and she said, "Stop, stop, stop. That's not an acceptable literary form. Screenplay is not literature." Then she allowed the class to weigh in and make jokes at my expense. I stood there mortified, my face turning red, a classic moment of humiliation. She said she expected something else from me in two days. I walked out and never went back.

PLAYBOY: Why?

AFFLECK: I quit school and never went back for one second more of classes after that. I just said, "Fuck it. This is not helping me. I'm going to do this on my own with Matt." I don't think I'm the only person who has used something like that as motivation.

PLAYBOY: What kind of influence was your father? He did everything from tend bar to write, direct and produce. And he was a bookie.

AFFLECK: Yeah. Not in that order, but yeah.

PLAYBOY: It sounds like his dreams went unfulfilled.

AFFLECK: Yeah. My dad was—is a very gifted writer and thinker. He worked in a theater company in Boston with Dustin Hoffman, with Robert Duvall. He knew Jon Voight and James Woods, all of whom have come up to tell me this subsequently. My dad had ambitions but also a troubled life. He had a lot of tragedy in his family, a lot of pain, and he drank to ease some of that pain. Once you start drinking too much, it's hard to fulfill your ambitions. He became a pretty serious alcoholic. He's sober now. He's been sober for 20 years, and I think it's incredibly admirable. But when he was drinking, he fell apart. My mom kicked him out, and then he was kicking around and living on the street.

PLAYBOY: What does that do to a son who also has creative aspirations?

AFFLECK: That was a formative period for me. It caused me to obsess about success and money, because my dad ran out of money and got kicked out of his house. I obsessed about how important money was. It got wired into my DNA, and that obsession probably caused me to do some movies I shouldn't have.

PLAYBOY: How did your dad's struggle inform your voice as a writer?

AFFLECK: My dad definitely didn't push me into this. He worried, based on how difficult his own experience was, and he was caught between that and not wanting to discourage me. He was working in the theater and then he was a bartender, and that's when he was making book a little bit. He was making a lot of money betting against the Patriots, basically. And that's how we got our first VCR and washer-dryer. My dad used to say, "You can thank [Patriots quarterback] Steve Grogan." He got canned from that job and ended up a janitor at Harvard. That's where the Harvard janitor dynamic in Good Will Hunting comes from.

PLAYBOY: That character was your father?

AFFLECK: Yeah. The tension of the friendship between the Robin Williams character and Stellan Skarsgård's professor character was sort of me and Matt's imagination of my dad and the guys he was in the theater with who went on to become successful. Pick any one of these famous guys. The notion was, Yeah, you've done well, but you're not better than me. You know?

PLAYBOY: Matt Damon has been your friend since you were eight. What's the value in a long-term friendship like that?

AFFLECK: I probably can't overstate the degree to which he's been helpful, even in that it's psychologically good to have somebody you trust, who's going through it too, who can understand what you're going through and whose opinion you respect. Matt just moved down the street from me, so he lives closer to me now than when we were growing up together in Boston. Our kids hang out together; we have barbecues. I was at his place two nights ago. Having a friend you've been connected to since you were a little kid, that's grounding. Matt and my brother Casey are the two people I rely on the most, emotionally and professionally.

PLAYBOY: Isn't there a competitive nature between you? Who wins at poker?

AFFLECK: I'm still the better poker player, probably, though neither of us plays much anymore. Matt was talking about getting a game going in his house. Yeah, we're competitive, but we learned to handle it early on. We would take the train from Boston to New York to audition. We both felt, Look, I want to get the part, but if it's not me, I want it to be you. It was a healthy way of acknowledging you want what you want, but you're also rooting for the other guy.

PLAYBOY: Since you don't play cards anymore, what is your current guilty pleasure?

AFFLECK: A 1966 Chevelle, and the slight guilt comes from its carbon footprint. [laughs] I try to stay away from too much guilty stuff. Between working and then being home and spending time with my kids, I don't have too much time. I still have my motorcycle, which I don't drive too often. You have to have something, some contact with that part of yourself that's not just putting shoes on kids.

This article originally appeared in the January/February issue of Playboy. Read more from our complete archives on iPlayboy.com.

Photos by Lorenzo Agius

[Ice forms as waves crash along the Lake Michigan shore on Monday in Chicago. Below-zero highs have returned to many parts of the Midwest, bringing wind chills ranging from the negative teens to 40s, school cancellations and sighs of resignation from residents who are weary of bundling up. Image via Kiichiro Sato/AP.]

A one-star Army general who serves in the Pentagon's inner circle of decision-makers was lightly reprimanded for joking in emails to colleagues that he had masturbated "3 times over the past 2 hours" after meeting with "smoking hot" tea party Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.).

Amazingly, Brigadier Gen. Martin P. Schweitzer's 2011 crank-yanking fantasy talk only came to light recently after investigators were checking the emails of another general who was facing a court martial for sexual assault. Schweitzer had emailed that general and another one a synopsis of his meeting with Ellmers, according to the Washington Post:

"First — she is smoking hot," Schweit­zer wrote. "Second — briefing went well . . . she was engaging . . . had done her homework. She wants us to know she stands with us and will work/push to get the Fort Bragg family resourced."

That, and what came next, led prosecutors to turn over the e-mail chain to the Army inspector general for a full investigation.

"He sucks :-) still needs to confirm hotness," Sinclair teased in a reply.

More than an hour later, Schweitzer responded with an apology for the delay, saying he had masturbated "3 times over the past 2 hours" after the meeting with the congresswoman.

When the Post first asked to see a copy of the Army report on Schweitzer's behavior, it was hard to see what the big deal was; Ellmers' name, and all the lewd statements, had been redacted to create some bizarre military sexual-harassment Mad Libs:

But the truth won out: "The Post obtained an original, uncensored copy of the e-mails from another source."

Ellmers—a social conservative who was featured in the 2012 "Great American Conservative Women" calendar—called the emails "entirely inappropriate" and told the Post she was "pleased with the corrective actions that are taking place and how [the Army] handled this very difficult situation."

Schweitzer was given a "memorandum of concern" and may not be promoted to major general. It's an easier punishment than the one that likely awaits another general, who is awaiting trial for allegedly assaulting one of his multiple mistresses, according to additional records obtained by the Post.

[Photo credits: U.S. Army; U.S. Congress]