Last month, the National Labor Relations Board charged Wal-Mart with illegally retaliating against workers trying to organize. Wal-Mart says those workers' activities don't deserve legal protection. This seems like a good time to hear from some actual Wal-Mart workers.

The current NLRB case, as the Wall Street Journal notes, is somewhat of a test case (although union busting is nothing new to America's wealthiest family). Wal-Mart claims that it was within its right to discipline workers because, rather than engaging in a traditional union-organized strike, they were participating in "intermittent" actions like temporary walkouts and protests, which are "hard to distinguish from absenteeism."

Many Wal-Mart workers have willingly taken a very real risk of losing their jobs in order to participate in the recent protests and walkouts. Why? Here are four stories that were sent to us in the past several months by current and former Wal-Mart employees.

"Go chill out"

I had worked for Wal-Mart once before and quit due to a manager that constantly gave me shit. But I needed a job and figured if I worked for the Wal-Mart on the other side of my city it would be fine. I was hired for maintenance orginally. It was hard but I worked on my own so I didn't mind. It was overnight so there weren't even reallly any customers. Then the stockers needed help one night and they pulled me in. Again, I didn't mind. Work was work.

Well I was so quick and helpful they asked me to stock full time with a 25 cent raise. I said yes. That was when shit went down. They didn't train me at all. I'm a slender female with knee problems and they had me lifting boxes that were 50 or more pounds. I asked, ASKED, for training to do my job correctly and safely. I had never had a job like this so I was just lifting things however. They said they would train me and never did.

Then one night, lifting a heavy box, I twisted wrong and tore the tendons in my knee. They sent me home. No hospital. The next day I tried to call in so I could go to the doctor. My knee cap was the size of a baseball. They insisted on me coming in and filling out forms and them taking me. The only reason I went is because they said they would pay me for it. I was allowed to go to work but had to be sitting or using my crutches. They insisted I come in so I did. I asked my manager what I was supposed to do and his response was, " I don't know, go chill out somewhere."

I was a little unsure but said ok and went to sit in the break room so if he thought of something I could do I would be close by and easy to find. A little more than halfway through my shift, two other managers came to find me and asked what I was doing. I told them what the other manager had said and they took me to his office. He called me a liar, said he told me to go fix the clothing displays, and fired me. He also blacklisted me so I can never work for the company again. Oh and that last paycheck for the two weeks of work I put in before getting hurt and what they promised to pay me if I let them take me to the doctor? I never got a dime.

Making Wal-Mart work for you

I started out when I was 18 as a cashier and quickly realized it was a terrible job because I never got to sit down and all I heard was complaints from customers. The cash register is the dumping ground for any and all complaints the Wal-Mart shopper has about their shopping experience or anything else. You are held hostage by the register, you can't just wander off or tell the person you have to 'do something else...over there' and walk away. So I quickly requested to move to the Lawn and Garden Dept. It has an outdoor area where you can pretend to be busy or hide where customers and managers can't find you or bother you. I would often ride around on the forklift moving stuff around and pretending to work and no one could bother me.

I quickly realized that the Wal-Mart I worked at was such a huge place with so many people working there it was easy to disappear and be anonymous. I would often show up to work 1-2 hours late, take hour or more long lunches when I was only allowed 30 minutes and no one ever said anything to me about any of it. I could pretend to do work outside and not be bothered, most of the time if I just looked busy and avoided eye contact customers didn't bother me. I can't count the number of times I saw people stealing things and did nothing. Once I was working as a cashier and a person came up with a trash can to purchase. The lid on the can accidentally fell off and I noticed there was a bunch of stuff in the can, jewelry, clothing, shoes etc. The guy quickly put the lid on the can and looked at me and I didn't say anything. I rang up the trash can and on his merry way he went. I didn't really care enough about Wal-Mart to try to stop theft and I figured Wal-Mart stole wages from people through denying to pay people over time and had taken out life insurance policies on employees and cashed them in so what does it matter if people steal from Wal-Mart, it evens out.

Pretty much everything you've heard about Wal-Mart is true, it was widely known that female employees were paid less than male employees, they showed anti-union videos and gave trainings, I was outraged by these things but there wasn't much I could do but get what I could from Wal-Mart and move on. It was a crappy place to work and I would never go back to it but during that time in my life I made it work for me.

Happy Thanksgiving

I have a family member who has worked for Wal-Mart for 8 years. Yesterday she was let go after just having worked 4pm to midnight for them on Thanksgiving. She has built her pay to over $12/hr. The reason they let her go is because for the third time in a year she forgot to take a lunch during a 6 1/2 hour shift in which you have to. She thought it was a 6 hr shift in which you do not have to take one. In there great mercy and forgiveness, they will allow her to reapply in 6 months, but her pay will go back to minimum wage. SHAME ON YOU WALMART!!!!!!!!!!!!!! As of today I'm done shopping there.

My fault

I am one of the past Walmart employees .. I worked 30 to 40 hr weeks , payed only a part time wage. I was told many times that I would not be lifting anything over 20lbs because of back issues, but ended up lugging 100lb or more flats of water without the assistance of a machine on a regular flat roller. I was told to clock out at lunch so I didn't get paid and that if I did overtime it would be off the clock. I was flirted with by managers and the straw that broke the camels back was when I passed out, hit my head on the floor and was told that I had to be at work the next day. They let me off work, but offered no health care for me as I was "part time" and no one rendered medical aid when I passed out. I was told not to talk about what happened at work and that it was my fault.

One can see how Wal-Mart employees—and Wal-Mart itself—could benefit from a little organized labor.

[If you're a Wal-Mart employee who'd like to share your story, email Hamilton@Gawker.com. Photo: Getty.]

The boy king of NASDAQ has earned $3.4 billion dollars for himself this year alone, Bloomberg, reports, owing mostly to Facebook buoyant stock prices.. It's barely February.

Not only is that "a lot of money," Zuck is pulling it in at an incredible rate:

He's gained $3.4 billion since the start of the year—nearly all of it materializing on Jan. 30, when Facebook reported its quarterly earnings, which showed more than half of revenue coming from mobile devices for the first time.

None of the planet's other billionaires have gained even half this amount.

He's getting richer at twice the speed of any other billionaire on the planet.

Photo: Getty

A ten-year-old child in Maryland was impaled this morning in a terrible sledding accident.

According to the Baltimore Sun, the child was impaled by a piece of rebar while sledding in Monday's snow in Harford County. Rich Gardiner, spokesperson for Harford Fire and EMS, said the child was extricated around noon. From the Sun:

The Maryland Shock Trauma Center's Go Team, called to emergency scenes which might require some advanced medical support, was requested, but later canceled, Gardiner said.

[Image via Shutterstock]

[Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, arrive at federal court for a motions hearing in Richmond, Virginia, on Monday. Lawyers for McDonnell and his wife are expected to ask a judge to clarify who the former first couple can speak with prior to their July trial on corruption charges. Image via Steve Helber/AP.]

In the past week, Goldman Sachs has been credited with bringing down the government of Denmark and saving the government of Libya. Seems like a good system.

You think you know how to play Jeopardy!, don't you? Answer in the form of a question, study your butt off, capitalize on anything that feels trendy, and press the buzzer when Trebek stops yapping, not before. It's worked for hundreds of people. But a new champion is showing that there's a better way, using game theory to get an edge on the other folks playing against him. People hate it.

So far Arthur Chu's won three episodes of the long-running game show, which doesn't exactly put him in Ken Jennings territory. But it's not just about him winning, according to The Wire. It's Chu's method for beating other contestants that has audiences rooting against him. He relentlessly hunts for the Daily Double clues in each round, clearing out the bottom three rows of the board so that he can get to them before anyone else. Once he gets a Daily Double, he either bets really big or really small. The point is to keep the game-changing opportunity out of opponents' hands. This, of course, undercuts the tension of the game.

Couple Chu's unorthodox style with incessant buzzer pressing and an odd set of quirks and you've got Jeopardy!-holics trashing him for ruining their favorite answer-with-a-question pastime. But if he winds up racking up a hot streak for the ages, chances are we'll see a lot more players trying out this model on the air.

[The Wire via Twitter]

In light of the abuse allegations leveled against Woody Allen by his daughter Dylan Farrow in the New York Times, the Hollywood press immediately began showing sympathy for the those who have the most to lose in this awful situation: Cate Blanchett and Blue Jasmine's Oscar chances.

The Hollywood Reporter's Scott Feinberg addressed the importance of the abuse allegations in his article "Dylan Farrow's Op-Ed Targets Woody Allen But Could Hurt Cate Blanchett More":

Is Cate Blanchett's best actress Oscar for her performance in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine as assured as most people believe? Probably — but being called out on the New York Times' website for associating with an alleged child molester certainly won't help her cause.

No, those allegations generally don't help many causes. But, if you're Feinberg, the most important cause at hand is Cate Blanchett. And asking questions like, why would a young woman ever want to admit alleged abuse unless she wanted to ruin a movie starring Cate Blanchett?

The question of the minds of many is why Farrow, who has heretofore maintained a low public profile, would choose to publicly discuss her history with Allen now? The timing and focus of her piece certainly suggest, to me, that she would like to derail any chance that Allen or those associated with him on his latest film, Blue Jasmine, have of receiving additional awards recognition at the Oscars on March 2.

These questions, of course, completely gloss over the fact the allegations were first made public in 1993 and again last year in a Vanity Fair profile and are in no way new or now. Or that if ruining Oscars was her thing, Farrow could have a field day with 2011's Midnight in Paris. But those facts don't matter because what about Blanchett? We can't forget about Blanchett.

Only Farrow herself can say what her objective was in writing this piece when and how she did. But, whether intended or not, the byproduct of her actions may well be that some Academy members will think twice before supporting Allen or those who have chosen to associate with him on Blue Jasmine when they fill out their Oscar ballots. And while that won't matter much for Allen and Hawkins' prospects — they were both considered to be long shots well before this brouhaha — it could, conceivably, make the road to victory for Blanchett, who is a heavy favorite — having already won best actress Critics' Choice, Golden Globe and SAG, New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association and National Society of Film Critics awards — a little bumpier.

Only in Hollywood—the land where everyone hates priests but loves Michael Jackson and Roman Polanski—are conversations about alleged sexual abuse characterized as bumpy "brouhahas." The Wrap's Steve Pond at least had the decency to admit that asking questions about Blanchett's chances is an "uncomfortable" act.

On Saturday night, Blanchett herself responded to questions about Farrow's statement, and managed to do so without mentioning awards season, presumably because she has a functional brain. "I mean, it's obviously been a long and painful situation for the family, and I hope they find some sort of resolution and peace," she said.

Alec Baldwin, who was also called out in Farrow's statement for his association with Allen, took to Twitter on Sunday with his own compelling stance on the controversy: "What the f&@% is wrong w u that u think we all need to b commenting on this family's personal struggle?" he tweeted. "So you know who's guilty? Who's lying? You, personally, know that?" he continued, adding: "You are mistaken if you think there is a place for me, or any outsider, in this family's issue." He later deleted his responses.

No one knows where the truth lies in this situation, but the knee-jerk responses to defend Allen, call out "liars," and worry about how allegations—allegations for which he cannot be charged—will impact a stupid award is ridiculous. Those in Hollywood who are framing the situation as a premeditated awards-season attack on Allen shows just how far the industry will go to avoid uncomfortable conversations and defend their gods.

[Image via AP]

The NYPD reportedly found 70 bags of heroin labeled "Ace of Spades" or "Ace of Heart" in the apartment of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was discovered dead of a drug overdose yesterday morning. Police have launched a citywide hunt for Hoffman's drug dealer.

"An internal email went out to all supervisors asking if anyone has had any experience with those brand names of drugs," a law enforcement source told The New York Post. "They're going to try to find the source."

Using something called a "nitro dump," police hope to narrow down the dealer's location. From the Post:

"Basically what that is, is any time we make a narcotics arrest we include the brand name on the arrest report and store it in our system so our investigators can see where those brands are being sold," the source explained.

Once they determine a location, they can zero in on the dealer or dealers selling that particular brand.

[Image via AP]

What's the best way to challenge campus patriarchy and critique male fantasies of sorority initiations? By getting nekkid with the sisters and making out in the stacks, baby.

A coven of Ivy and Seven Sisters alumnae got together in Columbia University's Butler Library late one Saturday night last November with a mission: to explore "the rituals of American Ivy League secret societies, to the point of hysteria, highlighting our culture's perception of female desire."

The result was the NSFW video above, "Initiatiøn," a wild three-minute romp involving a riding crop, milk, ground twerking, a blue chicken carcass, broken eggs, and lots of boobies, set to creepy choral music that gives the film a feel reminiscent of "the season finale of American Horror Story," according to one Gawker colleague.

The film is the work of Slutever blogger and Vogue contributor Karley Sciortino and Coco Young, a Columbia undergrad who lists Roman Polanski among her inspirations. Young told IvyGate Blog that the film was an intense meditation:

While Young has "never experienced a sorority or fraternity," she is intrigued by them, and this video is a projection of that fascination. Moreover, of course, it is a feminist statement, meant to "showcase the ultimate hysteria state," and speak to the stigmatization and fetishization of women.

This fetishization is particularly prevalent at Columbia, Young explained. "You know—as a girl—there's definitely a weird gender tension," she told me.

A weird gender tension, okay; but "Initiatiøn" is a weirdly conventional reaction to that tension. It's not the first attempt to play with sex rites in an Ivy League school's stacks. And its imagery is familiar to anyone who's ever seen Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, or the photographs of Francesca Woodman, or Carolee Schneeman's 1964 art film "Meat Joy":

Is it possible to critique a fetish while indulging in it? Sure. But in the execution, "Initiatiøn" seems a little too... too. It's no vaginal knitting, that's for sure.

Friday night we hosted a party in celebration of the publication of Robyn Doolittle's book Crazy Town: The Rob Ford Story.

See the rest of our guests with a faux crack-pipe in their hands here.

NOTE: No drugs were done during the shooting of these portraits.

Just like Christmas Day and Thanksgiving, porn viewership was down significantly during the Super Bowl, especially in Denver and Seattle, where the number of viewers on PornHub dropped 51% and 61%. Across the country, porn watching was down about 32% during the game.

The excitement leading up to the Super Bowl also led to a noticeable drop, with 11% and 18% decreases in Denver and Seattle and a six percent drop across the country. That's a lot less porn!

Post-game, the numbers went back up everywhere except Seattle and Washington, where—because everyone was out celebrating instead of masturbating—the numbers were 17.2% and 11.3 percent lower than usual.

Sad residents of Denver and Colorado as a whole took solace in their porn, though, cranking their numbers up 10.8% and 7.6% over average. Post-game porn watching was up about four percent country-wide.

In 2012, there were an estimated 14 million new cases of cancer worldwide. Man, that's nothing.

The latest annual cancer report from the World Health Organization says that the number of new cancer cases each year is expected to rise by more than 50%, to 22 million, in the next 20 years. Furthermore:

Over the same period, cancer deaths are predicted to rise from an estimated 8.2 million annually to 13 million per year. Globally, in 2012 the most common cancers diagnosed were those of the lung (1.8 million cases, 13.0% of the total), breast (1.7 million, 11.9%), and large bowel (1.4 million, 9. 7%). The most common causes of cancer death were cancers of the lung (1.6 million, 19.4% of the total) , liver (0.8 million, 9.1%), and stomach (0.7 million, 8.8%)

The majority of new cancer cases and cancer deaths come in the developing world. The WHO says that "about half of all cancers could be avoided if current knowledge was adequately implemented"—which would save more than $500 billion in treatment costs.

Let's do that.

[Photo: AP]

Chairman Sandberg's Great Lean Forward isn't about advancing women, it's about advancing the right women—those who want to advance corporate America in turn. Maybe this is why the ostensibly feminist foundation chose to highlight Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen?

Ros-Lehtinen, who gave the Spanish language GOP rebuttal to last week's State of the Union address, is quoted and lauded on the official Lean In Tumbr:

Ros-Lehtinen entered the race for the Florida House of Representatives in 1982. "There were about 13 or 14 candidates for the spot and I told them all, 'I'm going to run and I'm going to win, because you will not out-work me," she said. She won — and won again in her race for the Florida Senate in 1986. She was the first Hispanic woman to serve in either body.

[...]

"To think that a Cuban refugee could come to the United States not knowing a word of English and is now a member of Congress…is this a great country or what?"

And, hey, it's an inspiring story. But as The New Republic points out, it's not the kind of story you'd expect to get a Sheryl Sandberg cosign:

The problem is that in elected office Ros-Lehtinen has consistently opposed women's rights.

[...]

She voted for the deceptively titled Working Families Flexibility Act, which opponents—including nearly all House Democrats, President Obama, unions, and worker advocacy groups—believe would enable employers to cheapen federal overtime requirements and to encourage employees to spend more time at home rather than earning more money at work.

Most starkly, she voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which gave women the practical ability to sue over alleged equal-pay violations.

This is puzzling. What could Lean In be getting out of boosting Ros-Lehtinen, who voted against equal pay protection for women? Coincidentally, the congresswoman has been a strong proponent of the exact same strain of immigration reform favored by Sandberg's friend and coworker Mark Zuckerberg, his FWD.us pet project, and other powerful Silicon Valley interests: she's voted twice for the STEM Jobs Act of 2012. Ros-Lehtinen is useful to Sandberg and company. It's also smart for Sandberg to make nice with both sides of the aisle ahead of her inevitable career change—maybe one of the little things she learned from her boss.

By all accounts—except maybe Vladimir Putin's—the small Russian resort town of Sochi isn't ready for the Olympics. In fact, coverage of the preparations has taken on a downright panic-stricken tone. Can Sochi pull it out of the flames? The answer is yes—but at a steep cost.

Last week, we posted images of Sochi's half-finished Olympic Village and trash-filled streets. Since then, more information has emerged: Only six of nine media hotels are finished, and work is still underway at the Olympic Village and many of the venue sites. The International Olympic Committee is making daily visits to check up on progress, and reportedly using a helicopter to monitor the building work. Illegal landfills are popping up around the town with devastating environmental effects. The Games are more than $40 billion over budget, a record by many billions, and the IOC says much of that has been embezzled.

A worker in front of a Sochi hotel. Three of nine media hotels remain unfinished. Image: AP Photo/Gero Breloer.

Of course, if you look back at Olympic Games from the past two decades, you'll find that delays and budget issues have plagues just about every other host city. But Sochi's problems seem to be on a scale of their own.

So, How Did This Happen?

First and foremost: corruption. The seeds of Sochi's lack of preparation were sown years ago, when the contracts for the construction work in Sochi were awarded to Putin cronies and other oligarchs who saw a rich opportunity to profit. One International Olympic Committee member recently reported that as much as a third of Sochi's budget has been siphoned off in shady dealings.

Other deals seemed to verge on blackmail. "Participating in Sochi is a kind of tax for the oligarchs," former Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told Der Spiegel. "If you want to continue doing business in Russia, then you have to help Putin." For example, the massive state-run oil company Gazprom is responsible for $3 billion worth of construction, from the cross-country skiing and biathlon center, to a third of the Olympic Village, to a massive power plant outside of Sochi.

The Gazprom-built Olympic Village. Via Gazprom.

In fact, there's even a neat little map called Champions of the Corruption Race that catalogues the political backstory at each Olympic construction site. Perhaps not surprisingly, the state-run companies and billionaires who were handed these lucrative contracts have had trouble delivering. In many cases they simply don't have the experience to complete massive, fast-tracked venues in a small resort town.

Compounding the problem is Sochi itself. As a small, post-Soviet town, Sochi doesn't have the infrastructure to support one of the largest construction sites in the world. To make matters worse, its climate isn't exactly alpine. It's one of the few cities in Russia with a subtropical climate, and snow isn't always a certainty. One major reason for the lag in hotel construction—which is deeply, deeply delayed, to the point that many hotel rooms either aren't finished or don't have lightbulbs—is a ten-day period of rain last month, which contributed to massively clogged roads.

A hotel construction site. AP Photo/Gero Breloer.

And so the costs and schedules have exploded. Sochi is now the most expensive Olympics ever, at $51 billion, which is nearly $40 billion more than Russia's original budget for the games. It's also nearly $40 billion more than the cost of the last winter Olympics, in Vancouver. In fact, the entire cost of the Vancouver Olympics wouldn't have paid for the road being built to connect venues in Sochi:

The $8.7 billion road. AP Photo/Alexander Zemlianichenko.

The builder, as it turns out, is Vladimir Yakunin, the head of the national railway and an old friend of Vladimir Putin.

Why It'll Look Just Fine in Time

Despite the grim scenes that've traveled back from Sochi, the odds are that everything will look fine when the Games begin. There are are some 70,000 workers on site, and now that the rain has stopped, crews working around the clock to finish what remains (and tidy the place up). The streets are already being cleared a repaved—just check out the before-and-after photos for proof. Much of the construction in the Olympic Village is prefabricated, which can be assembled in days; the rest is unpacking furniture and installing communal toilets.

In other words, it's a tall order—but Russia has an army of workers (and billions of dollars) to devote to its completion.

A worker outside of one Sochi hotel. AP Photo/Gero Breloer.

The truth is, every recent Olympics has been plagued by delays, and by panic-hyping reports of unpreparedness. Remember when the IOC issued Greece multiple warnings amid huge delays and security concerns before the Athens Olympics, which The Guardian described as "a theater of the absurd?" Or when multiple construction workers died building venues leading up to Beijing? Didn't think so.

Construction continues behind the main stadium at the Extreme Park on February 2. Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images.

The world loves schadenfreude: "[Inset Olympic Host City] is doomed" stories are ubiquitous, and they make the Games themselves all the more exciting. After all, our love affair with the actual competition has dimmed over the past decade of doping and cheating scandals. These days, the triumph (or failure) of the host cities themselves are almost more compelling.

The Hidden Cost

So the question isn't whether Sochi will finish in time—it will—it's at what cost.

First, there's the environmental impact: Despite the fact that Russia claimed the Games would be "zero waste," the impact on Sochi, a protected wildlife area, has been dramatic. Sections of the National Park have been destroyed. A massive quarry has caused wells to dry up and dust to coat entire villages. Contractors are accused of creating secret, illegal landfills to deal with the construction refuse.

In fact, it's our old friend Vladimir Yakunin—builder of that $8.7 billion road—who created this illegal dump, which is accused of contaminating drinking water with toxic runoff:

The Associated Press found that Russia's state-owned rail monopoly is dumping tons of construction waste into an illegal landfill, raising concerns of possible contamination in the water that directly supplies Sochi. AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky.

And then there are the underpaid (or unpaid) migrant workers who are actually doing the work. Sochi has been flooded with workers from Central Asia over the past four years, and Human Rights Watch has documented millions in unpaid wages, horrific working conditions, and violent abuse.

Meanwhile, Serbian and Bosnian workers have been arrested and expelled without explanation. Workers who have spoken out have been brutally abused.

A worksite where migrant abuse has been foregrounded. AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky

So, no, you shouldn't look for Sochi to be delayed because of these problems. In all likelihood, the Olympics will go off without a (visible) hitch, and we won't hear much about it again. At least, not until Russia hosts the World Cup in 2018, or until Rio's Olympic lead-up really kicks into gear, when the cycle will begin again.

But it's worth pointing out just how bad of an investment these major sporting events are, for nearly everyone involved. Look no further than the perennial coverage of human rights abuses, huge costs, environmental damage, and construction shenanigans that follow each event in host cities across the globe. The Olympics have plenty of value, sure. But there's got to be a better way to pull them off.

Lead image: Migrant workers at a construction site in Sochi. AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky.

The New York Post reports that law enforcement is going to "find the source" of the heroin that allegedly killed Philip Seymour Hoffman. Let's ignore the fact "celebrity overdoses" appear to motivate NYPD, and instead look at how NYPD will try to avenge Hoffman's death...

Heroin use and deaths related to heroin have been on the rise in the greater-New York area over the past few years. The Daily Beast reports that local prosecutors have dubbed the Long Island Expressway the "heroin highway." Heroin is cheap, but "bad" batches of street heroin mixed with fentanyl have been popping up and leading to deaths. Hoffman was allegedly found with packets branded "Ace of Spades."

It's not exactly easy for law enforcement to stop the problem. Just last week, the Drug Enforcement Administration made a major bust in the Bronx. The DEA said the bust netted $8 million dollars worth of product.

But how does that really help? In the Bronx case, police seized 33 pounds of heroin and arrested two people — likely low-level drug runners. They caught one of the guys climbing out of a window... which doesn't suggest that they put their hands on Nino Brown.

In the Hoffman case, police will start with a "nitro dump." When police make an arrest, they log the "brand name" of the drug in their system; the nitro dump involves doing a search of those records in an attempt to find the most likely places that particular brand is sold.

Maybe these tactics will lead NYPD to a source they can claim supplied Hoffman with drugs, but they're unlikely to get at anybody who is a "source" of any consequence. We're talking about multimillion dollar operations whose true bosses never put their hands on any product. Check out how much FBI work it took to get "Dread Pirate Roberts," Ross William Ulbricht, who was allegedly part of Silk Road's internet-based drug ring. You don't catch these guys by staking out their apartment buildings.

That's all a nitro dump is likely to lead to: an apartment police can watch until somebody slips up. Maybe the apartment is a stash house that will reveal many pounds of heroin. But stopping heroin trafficking in New York is not something that NYPD can do, even with a new celebrity victim as a rally point.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, concerned about the one-sidedness of Nicholas Kristof's handling of Dylan Farrow's abuse allegations against Woody Allen, refers readers to an even more one-sided take on the story ("illuminating ... essential context").

The stock market, which will never go down, fell another 326 points today.

Can we get all the-times-they-are-a-changin' for a minute? Vanity Fair's 20th annual Hollywood Issue has a three-panel gatefold cover, as usual, but this year, there are actual black people on the first third, i.e. the part you see on the newsstand. Progress!

In 2010, Vanity Fair had a "Young Hollywood" cover that featured only white actresses. In 2011, the "Hollywood Issue" featured two people of color — Anthony Mackie and Rashida Jones — but they were on the right two-thirds of image. The part that's folded up when you see the magazine.

It was the same story in 2013 and in 2012. In fact, in 2012, we detailed the magazine's long history of pushing people of color off to the side and off of the main cover — it happened in 2008, 2005, 2004, 2002, 1997, 1996 and 1995.

But the main cover for 2014 (photographed, as usual, by Annie Leibovitz) features 12 Years A Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom star Idris Elba alongside Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Black faces next to white faces on the same issue, on the newsstand. Integration!

Other actors of color included in the entire image: Michael B. Jordan (Fruitvale Station), Lupita Nyong'o (12 Years A Slave) , Naomie Harris (Mandela) and Chadwick Boseman (42). Everyone looks spectacular, although a little stiff (and George Clooney's head looks pasted onto his body). It's fantastic. Hopefully newsstand sales will prove robust enough that the editors can't complain about the financial risk associated with featuring people of color. If there's any quibble to made, it's that Lupita Nyong'o didn't make it onto the left-hand side — she's become the fashion darling of awards season, and surely highlighting her would have resulted in plenty of attention and fan-girling. No matter, she's got a bright future ahead of her and someday might get a cover all her own, Kerry Washington-style.

It's time to get upset about Amy "Tiger Mother" Chua again. Or is it? "I don't want to be controversial," the now-famous Yale Law professor told the New York Times Magazine in a profile published this past weekend. "I just want to be liked."

It was her second straight Sunday in the Times, with her Yale Law-professor husband, Jed Rubenfeld, as the couple does advance publicity for their new book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, which is scheduled for release tomorrow. A week before, Chua and Rubenfeld had taken over the front of the paper's Sunday Review section to explain the book's not-at-all-controversy-seeking thesis: "[C]ertain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall," because those groups "share three traits that, together, propel success."

Those three traits, in the authors' formulation, are: a sense of superiority as a group, leading members to rise above the ordinary; a sense of individual insecurity, driving them to work harder; and the ability to control their impulses. The apparent contradictions—superior but inferior, insecure but secure—are what keep these groups from settling for the flabby dominant American culture of wanting happiness and self-esteem.

It is an easy thesis to misunderstand. The casual or ungenerous reader might think that Chua and Rubenfeld, by focusing on unequal achievement between different ethnic groups, are poking the hot-button issue of racism, the way Chua's previous book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, poked the hot-button issue of parental discipline (in ethnically charged terms).

But that book was misunderstood, too, Chua told the Times Magazine:

"It was supposed to be a kind of tongue-in-cheek book," Chua interjected. At 51, she has a petite frame and a tendency to gesticulate. "The stuff I had to address was so . . . degrading. It was like, 'Did you burn the stuffed animals?' " She seemed incredulous at the memory of it. "That was irony. That was irony!"

Ironies or inconsistencies abound. The Chinese edition of Chua's book about the superiority of Chinese-style parenting was titled "Being a Mom in America." It was almost as if Chua's message were being differently emphasized to fit the prejudices of different audiences. The American rollout, of course, had been that Wall Street Journal excerpt under the headline "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior":

The excerpt and the headline were misleading. People needed to know that the book wasn't a manifesto, and it wasn't a parenting manual, either. Couldn't they see her narrator was unreliable? Couldn't they see how the book was meant to be funny?

About that unreliable narrator... As presented so far in prepublication, The Triple Package is scrupulously not saying what it might appear to be saying. Although Chua and Rubenfeld in the Sunday Review did dismiss "taboo" and "willful blindness to facts," in the classic tones of popular-academic race-baiting, they insist that they are talking about cultural differences only. Superior groups can and do lose their superiority from generation to generation.

Here is a fairly rigorous expert breakdown of what's wrong with writing a book about the differential success rates of different groups in America:

These facts don't make some groups "better" than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life....The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class—rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels....

Most fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time. The fortunes of WASP elites have been declining for decades. In 1960, second-generation Greek-Americans reportedly had the second-highest income of any census-tracked group. Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations.... The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of "model minorities"....

We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous....Needless to say, high-achieving groups don't instill these qualities in all their members....Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning—precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth...

Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts....[I]t would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating: They include slavery, systematic discrimination, schools that fail to teach, employers who won't promote, single motherhood and the fact that roughly a third of young black men in this country are in jail, awaiting trial or on probation or parole....

Of course a person born with the proverbial silver spoon can grow up to be wealthy without hard work, insecurity or discipline (although to the extent a group passes on its wealth that way, it's likely to be headed for decline). In a society with increasing class rigidity, parental wealth obviously contributes to the success of the next generation.

That merciless critique is Chua and Rubenfeld's own self-caveats, collected from their Sunday Review piece. If you do the algebraic cancellations that they are inviting you to do, what's left is basically an affirmation of the concept of "cultural capital," followed by a denial of the concept of cultural capital, via a shapeless exhortation to try to teach children "grit." Whether the professors mean to be maddening or not, they've made a pretty good case that they're not worth getting mad about.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn’s minute-long video segments for the Daily Download are still, somehow, airing on public television. (You can inspect the program’s survey results here.) What would America do without the Daily Download?