Paris has elected its first-ever female mayor, the Spanish-born Socialist Anne Hidalgo, even as elsewhere in the country more right-wing candidates won their races. Hidalgo received 54.5 per cent of the vote.

Hidalgo promised major investment in housing, transportation, and green spaces, hoping to stay the exodus of middle and working-class families from the city, aiming specifically to create 10,000 new social housing units and 5,000 kindergarten places.

It seems that the rhetoric of the debate around the election hinged largely upon questions of class: Hidalgo's rival, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet comes from what the Telegraph characterizes as a "wealthy establishment family," while Hidalgo grew up in the a working-class suburb of Lyon.

At one point Kosciusko-Morizet referred to the race as a choice "between the star and the caretaker"—a reference that was widely understood to be a snobby reference to the fact that, historically, the concierges of Parisian apartment buildings have been Spanish and Portuguese immigrants.

Kosciusko-Morizet's center-right elitism may have been repudiated in the capital, but the far-right National Front party, an anti-immigrant group, made gains at the local level.

Hidalgo is known to quote the writer Sacha Guitry: "Being a Parisian is not about being born in Paris, it is about being reborn there." And the rest of France?

Actress Kate O'Mara, of Dynasty and Doctor Who fame, died today at a nursing home in Sussex, England. She was 74 years old.

O'Mara played the prim and dastardly Caress Morell in the sixth and seventh seasons of ABC's hit 80s soap opera, Dynasty. To U.K. viewers, O'Mara is perhaps more popularly recognized as the villainous Rani of the Doctor Who franchise, in which O'Mara squared-off against the acclaimed sixth incarnation of The Doctor, played by Colin Baker.

Most recently, O'Mara had been working as a stage actor and author in her native Britain, until she was hospitalized for pneumonia in September 2012.

In October, addressing the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, O'Mara reflected on her role as recurring antagonist:

"If you put a much older woman in Doctor Who, they can identify with it. I think it's quite an interesting concept and if you remember things like Grimm's Fairytales, the older woman is often the villainess, often the terrifying figure - why I do not know, but often she is. I think it's an idea to be exploited."

O'Mara's youngest son, Dickon, was 48 when he hanged himself on New Year's Eve in 2012. Her second son, Christopher Linde, was given up for adoption. O'Mara was twice divorced.

Rolling coffee up into "caffeine sticks" and smoking it is a hot new trend, and it's turning America's teens into "bean-heads," according to one specious local news report.

According to Las Vegas ABC affiliate KTNV and one unnamed, seemingly random old man they interviewed, coffee-smoking is "going viral" with teens, who learn how to do it from websites that apparently popping up like weeds.

Shockingly—shockingly!—some of the top search results for ways to build a makeshift coffee crack pipe are obvious satire.

But teens smoke the darndest things, so it's also not surprising that some of them are actually doing this.

As far its "viral" trendiness and risk to our precious youth, though, that seems to be entirely overblown. It's not new—one redditor tried it as far back as 2011, and there's no way he was the first—and there's also no evidence it's gotten any more popular of late.

However, caffeine overdose—which it's not clear you could achieve from smoking coffee—is serious business, with side effects including breathing trouble, hallucinations, and convulsions.

[H/T: Brobible, Photo Credit: Porkulent]

Will your caramel-colored soda kill you with cancer? It might, if it's one of these brands.

Over the weekend, the Boston Globe published what it calls "the inside story" of MIT's role in the federal prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Title notwithstanding, it misses the real story here entirely: why exactly did the Department of Justice go after Swartz so aggressively?

The Globe story is at best a weak coda because it follows up on a long, detailed, and heavily criticized July 2013 report by MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson. It is unclear what, exactly, the Globe's findings add to the record, beyond compounding the impression that there was a lot of confusion in this case, it eventually blew up into a giant mess, and someone died because of it.

The Globe combed through documents that it says both JSTOR (whose "inside story" is sort of covered here too even though it didn't make the headline) and MIT posted publicly after Swartz's suicide last January, and a number of "e-mails related to the case not available publicly." And what it says it found was that:

... the e-mails underscore the dissonant instincts the university grappled with. There was the eagerness of some MIT employees to help investigators and prosecutors with the case, and then there was, by contrast, the glacial pace of the institution's early reaction to the intruder's provocation.

There are some newish and anecdotally interesting facts here. For example, the Globe explains that MIT knew sometime in mid-October 2010 that the downloads of JSTOR articles at the heart of the case were all emanating from one particular building on campus. Nonetheless, no one at MIT searched that building until January 4, 2011, at which point Swartz's laptop was found almost immediately, the police were called in and the feds got involved.

But the Globe does not give any perspective on what it believes an earlier investigation might have accomplished here. Would it have avoided a federal prosecution? Swartz certainly wouldn't have been able to download as many articles, I guess. But it's hard to say what might have happened

The Globe also cites a number of emails from various staffers at both MIT and JSTOR, many of whom are alternately furious, joking, and sanguine about the situation:

"I might just be irked because I am up dealing with [the downloader] on a Sunday night," a JSTOR employee wrote, "but I am starting to feel like [MIT needs] to get a hold of this situation and right away or we need to offer to send them some help (read FBI)."

That afternoon, someone from the [MIT] IT security department wrote to [Secret Service agent] Pickett, deeming Swartz a "really intelligent kid that just got buried under an avalanche of dumb."

It's hard to say what bearing these emails have on the grand theory of this case, either. They do indicate, as documents obtained in discovery often do, that employees will freely voice their various opinions about an ongoing situation in internal emails never figuring that later they may be quoted in the press (or hell, an indictment). But do they represent the official positions, internal or otherwise, of MIT or JSTOR? That's hard to say.

Things get even trickier in the Globe article when they try to articulate the "dilemma" for MIT and JSTOR directly:

Given the institution's global stature, MIT inevitably drew most of the public focus. But what Swartz did was more of a threat to JSTOR, a small organization in a precarious position. Its business is selling access to journal articles, but it doesn't own those articles. If it can't protect them, the journals could yank their material out of the library and threaten JSTOR's survival.

JSTOR itself seemed to refute this in its own comment to the Globe:

JSTOR was "trying to balance our obligation both to be good stewards of the content for the content owners and publishers, for our own viability, for broad access to information, and then the personal situation, the human situation," Guthrie said.

So JSTOR wasn't necessarily as concerned about the "threat" to its survival as it was about balancing the various interests people have in the service it provides. As for MIT, the Globe admitted that even Abelson's report itself was self-critical about the institution's professed "neutrality" towards prosecutors.

The thing is, neither MIT nor JSTOR are the real crux of the story here. They have been the easier entities to report on, of course, but the real question here is why the U.S. Attorneys in this case—and in particular, Stephen Heymann—pursued Swartz so doggedly for what amounted to excessive photocopying of academic articles. People have written up many pieces explaining what Swartz was like. (I liked Larissa MacFarquhar's, here.) We're still waiting for an explanation on what happened at the DoJ's end.

What's crazy is that people were asking this question almost from the beginning. The day after Swartz committed suicide last January, Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor, posted an anguished testimonial to that on his tumblr:

For the outrageousness in this story is not just Aaron. It is also the absurdity of the prosecutor's behavior. From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The "property" Aaron had "stolen," we were told, was worth "millions of dollars" — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed.

On that front: Swartz's lawyers filed a complaint with the Office of Professional Responsibility last March about Stephen Heymann's conduct during the investigation. Kevin Poulsen, the investigations editor at Wired, after getting a court order, published a cache of heavily redacted documents from the Secret Service detailing the investigation. Politicians including Al Franken, Darryl Issa, and John Cornyn, wrote to the DoJ in January demanding more answers than it has yet provided. Hopefully they'll yield rather more revealing evidence than this Globe investigation did.

[Image via Ragesoss/Flickr]

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

A 22-year-old woman on probation for a drunk driving conviction thought she had fooled investigators when she passed a breathalyzer test after a night of drinking. She probably would have gotten away with it, too, if she hadn't bragged about it on Facebook.

Colleen Cudney took the random breathalyzer on the day after St. Patrick's Day. After miraculously passing, she wrote, "Buzz killer for me, I had to breatalyze this morning and I drank yesterday but I passed thank god lol my dumbass."

Her dumbass, indeed. Westland, Mich. police saw the post and passed it on to the probation office. When they called Cudney to schedule a urine test, she hung up on them, violating the conditions of her probation for a 2012 DUI.

Cudney would have been off probation in a few weeks, but now she faces up to 93 days in jail. She's due in court Tuesday.

[H/T: Uproxx, Photo: ClickOnDetroit]

The Florida driver caught on video getting "instant karma" when he crashed his truck right after tailgating a woman and flipping her the bird has now received regular-speed karma, too. He's been arrested.

After seeing his license plate number in the video, police identified the driver of the truck as 33-year-old Jeffrey White. They booked him for reckless driving, leaving the scene, and failure to wear a seatbelt.

"Honestly, looking back, I feel kind of bad for laughing," the woman who took the video told WTSP. "But at the same time, it's kind of funny."

She says that although she's received criticism for filming while driving, she kept her eyes on the road the entire time, and police thanked her for reporting White's reckless behavior.

"None of us are good drivers. We all have our problems. Maybe this is his opportunity for growth. Maybe he can use this as a learning tool and not go off the rails next time," she said.

[H/T: Opposing Views]

It's the story of a man. A man who went to war. And then went to college. And then decked a godless shithead professor. It's a feel-good story! And it went viral among God-fearing Murkans. And then Twitter got hold of it. And then it got really good.

That pic above tells the apocryphal story of Marine Todd, as he's now being called in your dad's email threads, just before the forwarded recipe for grandmom's leinenkugel:

A Marine was taking college classes between his deployments to Afghanistan.

One of his courses had a professor that was an atheist and a member of the ACLU. One day the professor shocked everyone by walking into class, looking up and stating "God, if you are real, I want you to come down and knock me off this platform, I will give you 15 minutes.

Several minutes tick by in silence, when the 15 min. time almost expired the Marine gets up from his seat, approaches the professor and punched him in the face knocking him off the platform and out cold. The Marine simply went back to his seat.

The professor came to, visibly shaken and asked the Marine, "What the heck did you do that for?!"

The Marine said, "God was busy protecting America's military who are out protecting your right to say stupid shit like that, so he sent me to fill in."

It's perfect, really. The ACLU prof who speaks in run-on sentences. The mixed tenses. The lack of grammatical commas. The violence in the service of holy patriotic virtue. It's the story of us!

Is there any chance it's a true story? Not unless there was a sailor in the class to tell the Marine how to tally up the 15 minutes after he ran out of fingers to count on.

Some version of this story, I know, has been going around since I was a military school pup in the mid-'90s. Our conservative Christian battalion commander with the Harvard business-school degree sent it around, in between his inspirational missives about mysterious footprints in beach sand and forwarded rants about the feyness of Bill Clinton's attempts at military saluting.

But it's older and deeper and more primordial than that. Noah was probably a Marine—he's an expert in amphibious disembarkations, after all!—and the flood was probably God's revenge on an atheistic metal-working Tubal-Cain who made Noah's kids read Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye in metal-working class. Or, if you prefer evolution, the first time a paramecium ever turned on another ciliate protozoan, consumed it, and crawled out of the sludge to become a bipedal, oxygen-breathing Lean Green Killing Machine, Marine Todd's DNA was probably in that magnificent unicellular sunofabitch.

Whatever his provenance, Marine Todd can't stand up to the snarky lefties of Weird Twitter, who began to embellish his exploits ad absurdum. Technology Tell's Stephen Silver traces the parodies back to this lovely gem on March 22:

Follow-up to an earlier report on Marine Todd. Please share if you know a warrior pic.twitter.com/B2vDxDAznJ

— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) March 29, 2014

Apres Marine Todd, le deluge:

Where does it end? It doesn't. Ever. Make your own tales up in the comments. If not for Gawker, do it for your country. Because, you see, America, Marine Todd is not a bitch: Marine Todd is you.

A volunteer from an NGO called Malaysians For Malaysia gets ready to release balloons as a symbol of remembrance for the victims of flight MH370 at Titiwangsa Lake on Sunday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Image via Rahman Roslan/Getty.

Scott Lively is an anti-gay activist who's credited for fanning the flames of homophobic hatred in African countries like Uganda, a place where it is now extremely dangerous to be gay . He has equated homosexuality to pedophilia (as bigots do ), and wrote a book called The Pink Swastika, in which he and co-writer Kevin E. Abrams state, "homosexuals [are] the true inventors of Nazism and the guiding force behind many Nazi atrocities." He is running for governor of Massachusetts. He is a clown. When people take him seriously, he is a powerful clown and that is unfortunate (and potentially devastating), but let's not let that distract from the fact that he is indeed a clown.

In the video above, from an interview with the U.K.'s Channel 4, he plays a game that few civilized people would admit to enjoying, Gay or Not Gay?, with President Barack Obama. "I think Mr. Obama may very well be a homosexual himself. He's certainly a radical homosexualist, meaning a person whether homosexual or not who is a hundred percent invested in the homosexual lifestyle," is the takeaway quote.

This is a ridiculous person. This is America's Next Top Fred Phelps.

The full Channel 4 package, which gives good context to Lively's ridiculousness as an activist and human being, is below:

Guests of the Stanford Court hotel in Nob Hill are greeted with a rug exclaiming #HELLO! (hashtag included.) Here and there in the lobby, iPad kiosks languish at just below hip-level. No one interacts with them. The first floor is riddled with these kind of flourishes, implanted awkwardly into what was once your average Marriott.

So the hotel was a fitting choice to host a Friday night meet-up for the Society of Glass Enthusiasts, SF Bay Area chapter. While local bars have begun banning patrons who enter the premises with a computer on their face, Stanford Court, which almost shuttered before its technological transformation, rushed into the void with free cocktails for anyone wearing Google Glass.

Sarah Slocum—the Glasshole du jour who lied about recording her fellow revelers, then cried "hate crime "—was slated to attend. But don't mistake her as representative of the community, Dave Martinez warned Valleywag. "No we're real 'Explorers,'" he said, using Google's terminology for these first-gen proto-human hybrids. "We've been in it since the beginning. We also believe in Glass etiquette."

Then Martinez, a platform/technology evangelist for Brick Simple, which develops wearable technology apps, proceeded to demo proper Glass behavior. If anyone asks questions (and they always do), "I will politely explain to them how it works."

"If you don't want me to wear it, I take it off. We put it behind our head like this," he added, turning his pair of Glass backwards and tucking them behind his head like Guy Fieri aboard the S.S. Enterprise. Wait, Google tells you to do that, I asked. No, "I made that up," Martinez said.

The meet-up wasn't organized by Google, but came with a press release sent to tech bloggers far and wide, along with repeated reminders that the event was not open to the public. A PR rep for Google Glass showed up, but in an unofficial capacity.

"We evangelize the product," Martinez continued. "Kids love it. They actually know how to use it." It's not as intuitive a relationship as babies and iPads. Rather, kids "search the web and they know what's cool."

To show me some educational apps, Martinez turned on his Glass, running his finger along the side like he was flipping pages through a book. The end of his eyepiece started glowing.

There was an app for playing the virtual piano, an app for studying the constellations, an app for sculpting—none of which really worked well when I put Glass on top of my glasses. "How bad is your vision?" asked Martinez, skeptically. I jerked my head up to the hotel lounge ceiling to see a tiny square of a star map.

Then we moved on to everyday use. "I scanned the menu" said Martinez, holding the oversized leather-bound hotel menu in his hands and staring into the middle distance. Glass located the word Stanford, which you can also find by looking at it.

Next up: animate objects. "I can look at your jacket and say, 'Scan this,'" he said, raising and bowing his head like I was a QR code. The device asked him if he wanted to scan "clothes, hair, or jacket." If he liked the jacket, Martinez said, Glass would tell him where to buy it.

It was an H&M jacket from five or six years ago, so good luck with that. But he was right about the youthful appeal. Ethan Bresnick, a 14-year-old intern with Augmedix, a wearable technology startup that raised $3.2 million in funding a couple weeks ago, stopped by the table to introduce himself to Martinez.

Bresnick, who did not look old enough to leave the house unsupervised, has been making short films about Glass since he was 13. He is "not particularly" into the app development aspect, but likes "concept videos and experimenting with UX [user interface] design."

Martinez's ears perked up. "You have it right. The UX design is such a horrible situation. Make things beautiful, people! Make it pretty!"

The aesthetic of the device itself also leaves a lot to be desired. Naturally, there's a startup ready and eager to monetize that. Gpop makes personalized decals for Glass. Many of the "explorers" at Stanford Court were wearing one. Liza Gere, who was carrying a small Prada purse in patchwork leather, said she had a different skin for every day of the week: "Some are more fun, some are more serious."

The available colors for Glass can be intense. With a Gpop, she said, "I can mellow it out a little and sometimes I don't get as many questions."

That didn't stop two aging frat guys sitting in the lobby from staring at the lounge, where people not wearing Glass were the conspicuous minority. Their mouths were agape when they first sat down and still catching flies when I left.

Libby Chang, who organized the event, said the Society's meet-ups didn't always put its members on display like this. "We do different things. We've done Segway tours. We go out to eat. We've had hackathons."

On my way out of the hotel, a cable car packed with tourists zipped down Powell Street. I took a photo with the computer in my pocket, then used it to hail a cheap ride to dinner while taxi after taxi drove by.

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

Now that Facebook owns the virtual reality platform Oculus Rift, gamers who were once excited about the future of VR have turned cynical about what Mark Zuckerberg and company might do to make the experience more "social. How bad can it really be, though?

Just watch.

[H/T: Devour]

Naked men. Naked women. Naked dogs. All together, on the internet, fucking one another. As a parent, you know that your teen has probably watched thousands of hours of online M-F-Dog porn. But have you talked to them about it yet?

We don't need to fool ourselves. We're adults. We remember what it was like to be a teenager. Hours and hours spent staring at the "scrambled" cable stations, trying to make out a tit. Kids never change. The only difference is that now, teens have an entire universe of man-dog, woman-dog, gay couple-dog, lesbian couple-dog, and orgy-dog pornography free at their fingertips. It's likely your child spends upwards of four hours each night viewing hardcore videos of dogs ejaculating. That's okay. That's natural.

But it's important to give them guidance on these things, as a parent. Your teen may not say it, but they're hungry for adult guidance into how they should feel about all this dog fucking they're masturbating to. That's why it is absolutely critical that you sit down and talk to your teen about online pornography. Fortunately, the New York Times' Motherlode blog has a slew of useful tips today—from a board-certified psychologist—about how to make this conversation as excruciating as humanly possible.

Among the suggested things to say to your ready-to-pass-out-from-embarrassment teenager:

"We need to talk about Internet pornography; there are a few things I want to be sure you know."

"There's another reason I don't want you looking at pornography. People often find that they're turned on by stuff that they don't feel good about watching. I wouldn't want for you to be in the position of having your body react to something your head knows is wrong."

"In pornography, someone's always making money off someone else's degradation. When you watch pornography, you are participating in exploitation. We don't do that in our family."

"Needless to say, we also expect that you would never share or request content you wouldn't want grandma to see."

A simple, effective, and straightforward way to send your teen running from the house in dismay, never to return. Being a good parent is as simple as saying, "Listen here, son, we need to talk about something. Come over here. Closer. Now, guess what we're gonna talk about: pornography. That's right, pornography. The stuff that you watch in private, while you're masturbating. I'm going to talk to you about that, right now. Pornography? I don't recommend it. I recommend real live fucking. Real live fucking is the ticket. Online pornography is crap. First of all, because of all the dog fucking videos you end up watching. I know you do. Watching all that dog fucking feels great, when you masturbate, sure. But think of the dogs. They're being exploited. Exploiting dogs by raising the pageviews of online dog fucking pornography is not something we do in this family. By that I mean I'm going to tell grandma how many dog fucking videos you've been masturbating to. Consider this a lesson. I'm glad we had this chat."

Being a parent is the most important job in the world.

Cosmos is a hit, again. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a pop science star. Thanks to him, kids dream about expanding human knowledge of the phenomenal universe. Now: Where's a liberal arts rockstar to make people care about human culture that much?

Tyson makes the sciences so damned vital. After a career of "space evangelism," advocating for a bigger NASA budget to focus the dreams of would-be scientists, he's used Cosmos—a reboot of the wildly successful Carl Sagan series—to enliven the natural world and slay a few superstitious shibboleths along the way. Chances are you watched him explain the Big Bang and Einsteinian relativity last night. Before that, he reclaimed evolution from its modern-day discontents.

It works. There's actually a documented "Neil DeGrasse Tyson Effect" on listeners. And he's not just hooking in kids. "The challenge has never been children," he's told The Atlantic of his science-communication goals:

The challenge has been adults... All the adults are saying, "We need to improve science in the world. Let's train the kids." I've never heard an adult say, "We need more science in the world. Train me." I've never heard an adult say that. It's the adults that need the science literacy, the kind of literacy that can transform the nation practically overnight.

Yet it's not just science literacy that's wanting among American adults today. The liberal arts have basically been buried in the landfill of our culture under McDonald's wrappers and bank statements and William Hung CDs. Our consumption- and production-obsessed political leadership thinks these humanities disciplines should be defunded because, hey, who employs theorists these days?

"Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?" Florida GOP Governor Rick Scott said in 2011—who went ahead and answered his own rhetorical question, "I don't think so," because he probably never covered rhetorical reasoning in business school.

This is nothing new: The history of America is in some sense a long obsession with the practicalities of life and an equally long disdain for the theoretical. In universities, undergrad programs have shifted from life education to job training. The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but most advocates of "practical" degrees see theory as a threat to practicality somehow.

The humanities breed curiosity. A certain epistemological humility. And as a result, empathy. Language matters. Stories matter. Art matters. History matters.

This is your brain without a grounding in the humane arts and letters:

The National Endowment for the Humanities is more endangered than NASA. Funding for humanities research amounts to about 1/200th of the federal funding dedicated to scientific and engineering scholarship.

Yet science has Tyson, whose show airs on the same channel as American Idol. More than that, it has Bill Nye and Brian Greene, all of whom stand on the shoulders of Sagan and Richard Feynman. The pure and applied sciences have always had champions who can stir up national pride and, in so doing, strengthen our civic education and bolster our economy.

The humanities, they don't even have Sister Wendy anymore. Ken Burns made superstars out of some historians, trained and amateur, back in the '90s. But Shelby Foote is dead now.

Imagine if a philosopher or historian or literature professor could show mass-TV audiences the inner workings of things that are not science—from the assumptions of economics to the greatness of the great books to the sociocultural complications of canon-building to the cultural coding of Duck Dynasty. Imagine if they factchecked movies like Spiderman and Gravity for ethical and intellectual lapses with the geeky gusto that Tyson displays in factchecking the films' scientific content. Imagine if we live-tweeted these professors' lively, decidedly untraditional lectures and Q&As and documentaries the way we did with Tyson's.

Imagine if, owing to these liberal arts communicators, people dreamed about discovering the next great writing style, or using principles of art history to illuminate modern advertising, or building a neo-Kantian theory of relations between states, or uncovering new archival evidence of America's history, warts and all.

Who are those superstars? Where are they? And without them, where are we?

[Photo credit: AP]

Two weeks ago, it was reported that Flight 370's final words to Malaysian air control were "all right, good night," spoken by the plane's co-pilot, Fariq Abdul Hamid. As it turns out—just like nearly every other report about the plane—that wasn't the case.

According to a statement Monday from Malaysia's Department of Civil Aviation, the final words were actually "Good night Malaysian three seven zero." Officials still aren't sure who spoke the final words, Hamid or the flight's pilot, Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah.

"We would like to confirm that the last conversation in the transcript between the air traffic controller and the cockpit is at 0119 (Malaysian Time) and is "Good night Malaysian three seven zero," DCA said in a short statement issued on Monday night, according to the Strait Times."The authorities are still doing forensic investigation to determine whether those last words from the cockpit were by the pilot or the co-pilot."

The full transcript will be released soon, according to the DCA. No reason was given for the false report.

[Image via AP]

Amidst the pushcart vendors selling bacon-wrapped hot-dogs, religious leaders blasting damning sermons over megaphones, and the homeless wandering around the city, there is one San Francisco fixture most people don't know about—not even the locals. It's not a bridge or a winding street or anything like that: I'm talking about certain folk who roam San Francisco streets. People who can give you the credentials that make your life actually matter.

Most folks may not notice them, but you can rest assured they'll notice you if you walk by. Your face is an open book to them: they can glean your ambitions and dreams and aspirations—your entire life story—all with a quick glance. If you have a certain air about you, if they sniff out a certain dire situation, they'll offer you a small miracle. All you need is a few fake documents, which they procure with ease—for a price, of course—and voila. You've got a new life.

It starts with a new name. For many people who come to this country, using fake papers to temporarily adopt a new name, or a slightly different name, is practically a rite of passage. Here's how I've seen it go down with some of my own family and friends. They grow up in a third world country, spending years saving up to pay a "coyote" to lead their trek across the United States border—an undertaking so grueling, chance are good that the person taking the 'trip' is young and foolish. If they manage to survive the Mexican desert, and if the coyote doesn't decide to rape them or suddenly hold them hostage until their family agrees to pay way more than they initially agreed to, then they make it into the country—only to have to figure out how to find work, get (under)paid, and do their taxes. For many, this means fake papers—which you can get if you know who to look for.

The people selling fake papers, they'e never talked to me, personally. They can tell I'm an American, I think. And so, I'd almost forgotten they existed, if it wasn't that I made the mistake of losing both my ID, and eventually, my passport—this is apparently what happens when you get drunk watching go-go dancers at a gay bar. That makes the entire thing sound kind of silly, but don't get me wrong here: not having identification on me was straight up terrifying.

I remember having people disappear in my life because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I grew up with stories about "redadas." Police or immigration officers would descend onto a workplace or a home, despite not having a warrant. Sometimes, they'd ask for papers. Sometimes, they didn't give a fuck and they'd just plain arrest everyone, legal or not. No amount of sweet talk or knowledge about laws—which might prohibit or at least limit the ways the raids take place—could save you. Off to Mexico you went, even if you weren't Mexican, with whatever you happened to have with you at the time.

I remember having people just…disappear in my life because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time. It was such a common occurrence that I'd watch comedy movies about young, attractive Latinos getting mistakenly deported on major Spanish channels every weekend. What could anyone do about it all, really, except laugh and hope it never happened to them?

In the two weeks I didn't have anything on me that could prove I was who I said I was, I became an anxious mess. I became sensitive to every crack about my race, sensitive to every glance from a white person who seemed to ask me what I was doing in their five-starred Yelp reviewed restaurant—didn't I know that establishments for 'my kind' could never be found on a damn smartphone app? I know it was me being paranoid, but when you consider the class and race tensions that have arisen in San Francisco thanks to the tech boom, and when you consider the sort of thing I grew up around, could you blame me? I sometimes feel unwanted in this city even when I have all my documentation on me!

During the time when I didn't have papers with me, everything ate at me. Even being home felt unsafe, somehow—I'm the only person of color I've met my admittedly affluent San Francisco neighborhood, and if I worried that one day I'd be coming home past midnight and someone would call the cops on the mischievous-looking (read: not white) girl who didn't look like she belonged there before, it only got worse when I had no ID on me.

During those two excruciating two and a half weeks, I did as any nerd probably would: I took refuge in a make-believe world where I didn't have to worry about my race or my temporary lack of papers. A place that could grant me control. I'm talking, of course, about a video game.

Everyone who tries to pass through an immigration checkpoint has a story, both in real life and in the indie computer game, Papers, Please. Maybe they're visiting family. Maybe they're looking for work. Maybe they're taking refuge. Maybe they're just taking a vacation. Or sometimes—and this is probably way more common in the game than in real life—they might be something a bit more dangerous. Maybe they're a smuggler. Maybe they're a terrorist. Just the same, regardless of their intentions, everyone in Papers, Please hands you some documents—passports, ID cards, work permits—and tells you the purpose of their visit.

Your job is to inspect the documents and try to spot discrepancies, if not catch any suspicious behavior (whatever that means)—which is to say, you are the arbiter of the fate of the undocumented. Obviously, it's the sort of job you want to treat with utmost care. Thing is, when there are dozens if not hundreds of tired-looking people waiting in line, when you've spent hours checking that every number on every document is correct, when you've spent hours making sure that the face on the flimsy square piece of paper matches the person standing in front of you, and when you can't keep track of all the new, sometimes arbitrary laws about immigration, you start feeling more and more detached from the people trying to cross the border. Everything and everyone becomes suspicious. You start doubting your own judgement, and start double, triple checking the same damn things—and it won't matter, because you'll still somehow let someone with a bomb through. It's the sort of game post 9/11 America has been trained to play, almost.

So, the more you play, the more you notice your little stall and the way you can barely fit all the documents, letters and rulebooks and governmental edicts is incredibly claustrophobic. You start wondering how long it will take for you to crack, ever-aware that a simple task has somehow become gargantuan, impossible—and that if you mess up too many times, it won't be hard to find someone to replace you. The joys of living in a dystopian world.

Me, I'm used to being on the other side of that sort of interaction. I'm used to being with my family, who would hand over (sometimes false) documentation, since I typically acted as the translator. It's the sort of experience that makes playing Papers, Please feel a little surreal.

One of the things that particularly struck me about Papers, Please is just how often either terrorists or people with obviously fake papers tried to cross the border. You'd have to have lost your damn mind to put yourself in a situation where you're choosing to give an officer your fake papers out of your own volition—obviously, it happens sometimes, but in my experience, people who get fake papers hope they never have to use them. The fake papers are a last resort, the sort of thing that you present when you've fucked up.

As an example, prior to getting the paperwork to be here legally, my stepdad had a driver's license that he bought from an infomercial—yes, there's an industry built around tricking people into spending money to acquire documentation that is actually legally useless—which he carried around with him. He still drove around with the utmost of care and, to be frank, paranoia, to try to ensure he'd never get pulled over—because if he did, it wouldn't take long for the officer to figure out the card wasn't legit. Other times, you'd have people gamble on not showing anything at all—I remember this one time when I was little where an uncle was driving, but the officer let him go after I promised him we were driving straight home and it was nearby.

I mean, even if they did carry around top-notch documentation, it wouldn't really matter. Fear can rule you, and often dictates the way you carry yourself. When you're in this country illegally, you become so fearful of being sent back (to poverty, to violence, away from your family, or the world you've gotten used to), you become obsessed with presenting the right way—having the right clothes, sure, but also obsessed with the idea of 'acting' American. You may be asking yourself, what in the world does that even mean? Truthfully, I don't have a clear-cut answer for this. It's something I grapple with every day, after growing up poor and moving up to middle class by way of the tech industry. Still, there are times I become keenly aware that it's a thing—like when I'm in line in an all Latino neighborhood where the cashier speaks in Spanish to everyone except me, even after I make it clear I can speak Spanish too, even after it's clear that the cashier can't actually speak English, either.

They can tell, just like the people selling fake papers can tell, too. So it dawns on me that a ton of people who come to this country illegally aren't just likely to adopt menial, sometimes degrading jobs, but they also learn how to become actors. Actors who are capable of convincing everyone around them that they're an American, too. But the top prize for some of the best actors of our time isn't an Oscar: it's being allowed to stay in this country, just like the rest of us. When you consider how hyper-vigilant people become about the way they come across, you could say the 'movie' everyone is acting in feels like something in the vein of 1984.

The top prize for some of the best actors of our time isn't an Oscar: it's being allowed to stay in this country.

These are the sort of things I think about whenever I look at someone who is trying to cross the border in Papers, Please—because I know that if everything checks out, documentation-wise, there are probably more nuanced things that go way beyond simple Visas and IDs that influence the way I judge someone, though perhaps the game doesn't account for/test me on it. The way people answer when I interrogate them, for example. How fluent they are in English. The color of their skin. Their profile in relation to their name—in real life, you might be able to get perfectly forged papers, but there's still the question of whether or not you "look" like the name on the documentation. Think about McLovin in Superbad, for example.

I also became suspicious of people I have absolutely no reason to be suspicious of in the game—that's the sort of oppressive environment the game cultivates, even without featuring real nations or races. I can only imagine how telling, racism and class-wise, a game like this would be if it did. Of course, the situation isn't helped when you consider that in Papers, Please, the government has taken your family and that every mistake that you make costs you money—money that you need for heat, rent, food and medicine. When that's the case, hearing the real, human stories behind the obviously fake ID cards may not be enough. Do you want to be a hero—this is a video game, remember?—or do you want to provide for your family? Is smuggling someone through the border worth it if it might mean your family goes hungry? What if you were the only thing standing between them and the hope for a better life?

I empathize with the character and his unfortunate situation, but only to a certain degree. I don't know, there's something about your role as an immigrations inspector that reminds me that even when a game manages to be different from most, it's still likely to have a hell of a hard time giving you a role that isn't defined by power. You're in control of the lives of so many people—you can even choose to play a small part in taking down the government, if you play your cards right. And when I think about things like how my grandmother likes to go off about a time before you needed a piece of paper to prove the land you lived on for generations is actually yours, the fact that your chief activity in the game is sorting through paperwork makes the game feel profoundly white, profoundly of an empowered class. A well-disguised power fantasy, if you will.

It's an interesting, worthwhile game, to be sure—but I end up wondering, as I do with so many games that put me in the same, tired roles, what it would be like to play as the disenfranchised. It seems like it would make for a fascinating story, no?

It took me a lot of gritting my teeth, laying low, and a lot of paperwork to get my ID and passport back. The experience pales in comparison to the decades some people in my family had to wait before they could legally acquire certain documentation to live in this country, though, obviously. Funnily enough, of all people, it was my stepdad who ended up coming down with me to the passport agency to swear to an immigrations official that I was, in fact, Patricia Hernandez. The officer didn't even look up the entire time we were there, just like I sometimes didn't even look at the person standing in front of me in Papers, Please if all the other parts of their paperwork seemed to check out.

The real-world immigrations official couldn't see how scared I was because a different security officer joked about how Mexican I seemed, and she couldn't see how excited my stepdad was to be able to whip out his legitimate, hard-earned ID card. We weren't people, not really—just names and signatures to mail out and file away.

NEXT.

Pippa Middleton's hella embarrassing dork family released an official portrait over the weekend to celebrate the UK-specific holiday of "Mother's Day (UK)." The public neither sought out nor sought to avoid this picture. Just turned around and there it was. A can of soup you don't remember putting in your cart. OK, fine.

The portrait offers an illuminating glimpse of the private lives of the "of Cambridge" family behind the palace walls, where all objects bear labels written in clear block letters in the style of a high school Spanish classroom. "DOOR," reads an index card taped to a 400-year-old solid oak door. "EL MAPA," declares a map of the United Kingdom, hand painted in 1820. "SWORD," reads a card taped to an antique sword mounted on a wall in Duke and Duchess' bedroom, written in red to indicate it is bad to touch.

Imagine, if you will, the morning of the portrait session: Prince George fresh from the bath, swaddled in a towel, giggling and cooing as he studies his face in a mirror. ("MIRROR," reads a card taped to the gilded frame.) Prince William grabs the shirtless infant by his tummy and holds him aloft. "What the bloody hell is this thing?"

"That's the baby, lamb. That's George."

"Well, whatever it is, it needs a damn sight better labeling."

Sighing one of her trademark sighs, Kate tugs a pale blue cashmere sweater over her son's enormous baby head. It is personalized; a gift from his grandfather. "See? That's George."

Later that night, Prince William's eyes fill with tears as he places his son in his crib. "I love you, George, and I'm so proud of you," he whispers to the sweater, gently covering it with a blanket. "I know one day you will make a fine king."

The baby lies in another room, unlabeled and, so, forgotten.

[Image via Jason Bell/Clarence House]

A strengthening low pressure system over South Dakota this afternoon is producing a pretty striking temperature gradient across the northern Plains. The system is causing blizzard conditions over much of the Dakotas with temperatures as low as 10°F, while just a few dozen miles away, the town of Shenandoah, Iowa is sitting at a comfortable 79°F.

Here's a zoomed-in view, which gives you a much better look at the warm and cold air flowing around the center of the low:

[Images via SimuAWIPS]

I Married A Guy Three Months After Meeting Him On A Dating Site. Here's What I've Learned: "Upon my suggestion, my husband and I wrote a 'date report' to each other after our first date which allowed us to know exactly how we felt about the date and each other." (Thought Catalog, yes.)

A private massage in a Las Vegas hotel room turned into a crime investigation when a $35,000 Rolex disappeared. As tends to happen in these cases, the watch was later found inside the masseuse's vagina.

In January, Kenneth Herold met Christina Lafave at a bar in the Wynn Hotel in Vegas. One thing led to another, and the 66-year-old ended up paying the 25-year-old Lafave $300 for a private massage in his room. Several hours later, at about 3 a.m., Herold called hotel security after he noticed that his watch, a $35,000 Rolex Presidential, was missing.

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:

Herold later would tell investigators that once he and Lafave had gone to his room, he disrobed and got onto a massage table that was in the suite. About 30 minutes into the rubdown, Lafave told Herold to take off his watch so she could massage his arms.

He put the watch on the ground within his view. Five to seven minutes later, it was gone.

Herold accused Lafave of stealing the watch, charges which she initially denied. Police searched the room to no avail. Eventually, Lafave admitted to taking the watch, which she told police she'd hidden in her vagina.

To retrieve the timepiece, police took Lafave to University Medical Center.

"Prior to medical staff assisting Lafave with the removal of the watch she admitted to them that she had stolen a watch and concealed the item in her vagina," a police report said.

Lafave was arrested and faces felony charges grand larceny and possession of stolen property. She was released on $40,000 bail. Her lawyer, Chris Rasmussen, plans on fighting the case, claiming illegal search-and-seizure.

"We intend to file a motion to suppress the medical intrusion," Rasmussen told the Review Journal. "The search is an unreasonable search when medical providers have to use equipment to conduct an invasive procedure to remove what police believe is evidence."

"We believe he gave her the watch and later he tried to take it back when he wasn't satisfied with her services," Rasmussen added. "Like any person who works in these hotels, she believed she was going to be compensated for her massage."

[h/t HyperVocal/Image via Shutterstock]