There's a lot to pore over in the New York Times Style section's coverage of a conference for über-wealthy "next-generation" philanthropists that was recently held at the White House.

There's the list of attendees, which includes the young progeny of such hallowed, moneyed families as Hilton, Rockefeller, and Pritzker. There's the breathless, classically Style section-y way in which participants and organizers are described: eloquent, nimble, and commanding gravitas, wearing pinstripe suits and "scraggy Brooklyn-style facial hair." There's the reference to one 19-year-old attendee's "swooping" Bieberesque bangs, despite the fact that Bieber hasn't had that haircut in years.

Most of all, however, there's this disclosure notice from the reporter, about halfway through the article:

Disclosure: Although the event was closed to the media, I was invited by the founders of Nexus, Jonah Wittkamper and Rachel Cohen Gerrol, to report on the conference as a member of the family that started the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical company.

At a conference for such refined people as these, not just any reporter will do. No, it must be a writer who intimately knows the struggles of the young and wealthy, and who can accurately transmit the ways in which they're saving the planet to the unwashed Times-reading masses. It must be Jamie Johnson (net worth about $610 million, according to Business Insider in 2011), heir to the Johnson & Johnson company fortune.

To be fair, Johnson has cast a critical eye on extreme wealth before. His 2003 documentary Born Rich examined the lives of super-rich kids like himself, and his follow-up, The One Percent, explored income inequality in America. Still, that he was the only reporter invited to cover the event sends a message from its organizers: we're not interested in any perspective but our own.

Given Johnson's past willingness to bite the hand that gives him money, it seems that we're looking at a textbook Style section appeal to two audiences at once. Let half the readers be awed by these young, rich crusaders out to impact invest their way to a better, more peaceful world; let the rest of us scoff at them.

[Image via: Wikimedia Commons]

On the Royals' current trip to Australia, Prince William participates in the noble act of scrubbing the underside of a giraffe's tongue because Kate Middleton triple-dog-dared him to. Via AP/David Gray

Sometimes, a cat wants to go fishing. What does he fish for when he wants to go fishing? He fishes for cats, naturally.

[h/t Tastefully Offensive]

In a landmark expression of idiocy, international news organization CNN has put together a handy little article on the future of the Ku Klux Klan. Accompanied by a detailed slideshow and about 2,000 words, the headline reads "Can the Klan rebrand?"

No, CNN. They can't. CNN reporter Ashley Fantz went in search of Klansmen on Twitter to validate her questions about what we might be missing about the violently racist and outwardly hateful organization.

@moklansman I'm CNN reporter who wants to talk to you re: condemnation of violence. Pls email me Ashley.fantz@turner.com

— afantz (@afantz) April 16, 2014

The lede alone cannot be topped:

Pointy hats, white robes, crosses burning, bodies hanging from trees.

Bodies hanging from trees, you say? Let's stop this debate right here! Seems like the Klan is full of unapologetic racists who murder people. But not so, CNN poses. Is there actually more to find beneath those wizard titles and white hats? (Still no.)

After the recent Kansas shootings by Klan member Frazier Glenn Cross, a supposed number of Klansmen came out in condemnation of violent racism. Plain old racism, enjoyed at home, is the best alternative. As Imperial Wizard Frank Ancona told CNN,

"I believe in racial separation but it doesn't have to be violent. People in the Klan are professional people, business people, working types. We are a legitimate organization."

Apparently, one of the KKK's biggest issues is that they don't have a clear leader, like some sort of KKK pope. This lack of leadership often causes infighting between different factions.

Without a clear leader, marketing experts said, crafting and conveying a spin-friendly message is impossible.

"This movement is a hodgepodge of little groups that, as often as they attack their enemies, attack one another," said Mark Potok, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups.

"To call these guys disorganized," he said, "doesn't quite do it."

Hateful white men: hard to organize. Overtly racist organization: hard to make spin-friendly. Can the KKK rebrand? Still no.

Luckily, CNN's subject (and sole KKK source for an entire feature-length article) was a pretty nice guy!

Throughout CNN's interview, Ancona was cordial and repeatedly said he wanted to speak with media about the Klan's message. He won't be able to divulge too many operational details of his group, he said, because fraternal rites and rituals bar him from discussing exactly what they do.

Fantz consulted with a host of marketing experts on the topic, packing up the package neatly with a conclusive, "Nah, probably not." Not to be outdone, the article ends as it began: full of unbelievable bullshit. From the mouth of an advertising agent, who compares humans to cars,

Or to compare it to a product, "if you have a car that is killing people because the gas tank is exploding, it doesn't matter how fantastic the ad campaign is for that car."

[Image via AP]

Did you go to church this morning? If so, did you get a shiny new toy for your efforts? Congregants at Christian Life Church in Lexington, Oklahoma might. Anyone who attends the church's Easter services today will automatically be entered to win prizes like 32-inch flat screen TVs and $50 gift cards.

Christian Life isn't the only megachurch luring people in the door with the promise of gifts. Long Hollow, a Tennessee Baptist Church that boasts five locations and 31 Easter services, is handing out $5 Starbucks gift cards to anyone attending for the first time today. While new visitors are there, they can enjoy "Life in Color," an Easter service inspired by a OneRepublic song.

ACF Church in Eagle River, Alaska, is hoping to bring people in with a Walking Dead-themed Easter celebration. "Our church tends to attract a younger crowd of singles and families with small children," Ross Montgomery, the church's "visual storyteller," told The Daily Beast. "We see using The Walking Dead for Easter as a way to break down some barriers for people who may have a bland taste in their mouth from church or have been hurt in the past."

As any good Christian knows, if there were three things Jesus stood for in his time, they were consumer electronics, overpriced coffee, and television shows about zombies.

[Photo via AP]

Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the legendary boxer who spent 19 years in prison on murder charges that were later dismissed, died of prostate cancer in his home this morning. He was 76.

Carter was a star boxer during his career, and fought Joey Giardello for the world middleweight title in 1964. In 2004, 19 years after his release from Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, he founded Innocence International, a non-profit that works to overturn potentially wrongful convictions.

Carter told CNN in 2011,

"The system does not like people who say they're innocent in prison, but there has to be a way for innocence to survive in prison. Prison is the lowest level of human existence (you) can exist on without being dead . . . Being able to overcome that, that's the miraculous nature of every human being. It is great, absolutely fantastic."

[Image via AP]

In an excellent new discovery in Brazil, insects of the Neotrogla genus who live in caves have been discovered with completely role-reversed genitalia. The boss female has a penis and the male has a vagina, and they get after it for 40-70 hour stretches.

According to a study in Current Biology, this isn't the first female creature with a penis, but it is the only example where the "intromittent organ is also reversed."

Neotrogla females insert the erectile organs into males' vagina-like openings.

The elaborate structure, dubbed a "gynosome", is used to suck out sperm and nutritious seminal fluids.

There's a little insect erotica for you on Easter Sunday.

The rigorous copulation also provides the female insects with food as well as sperm, so having a lot of sex is advantageous for the insects. And don't try to stop them, either:

When the researchers attempted to pull a male and female apart, the male's abdomen was ripped from the thorax without breaking the genital coupling.

Brazilian cave insects, an inspiration to us all in the boudoir.

[Image via BBC]

Myspace personality, Hitler sympathizer, and greatest actor of her generation Tila Tequila is pregnant, she announced in a tweet Friday.

Surprise! Im 10 weeks pregnant! May God bless my baby on this Good Friday! I'm gonna be a Mommy! YAY I love you baby pic.twitter.com/ja9FXiDO6J

— Tila Tequila (@BabyMamaTila) April 19, 2014

In 2010, the former reality star said she was pregnant with the rapper The Game's child, which, shockingly, turned out to be untrue. Given the former reality TV star's apparent mental state — she wrote, in apparent seriousness, about battling reptilian beasts "in 4D realm" last year — if she's for real this time, there's probably reason to be worried for this child. According to Tila, there's also the truly terrifying prospect of Tequila twins.

Dear Baby, are there 2 of you in there? Some people think so! I guess we'll find out soon enough! You ARE pretty big though, baby! I love u!

— Tila Tequila (@BabyMamaTila) April 20, 2014

[Image via: Twitter]

The Humor Research Lab has done the impossible and likely unnecessary, by determining through an elaborate algorithm which cities in the US are funniest. Joke's on us: Chicago is #1 and Boston is #2.

A cursory Google search for "Boston comedy" yields two-bit headshots of some goofy looking white dudes and a lot of Clip Art images of beans and lobsters. ROFL!!! An even further in-depth search for giggles 'n' stuff gets you to this Boston.com page of Tea Party-themed comics. I smell a rat.

Chicago makes sense, given the Windy City's rich sketch comedy scene and scores of famous comedians who have broken out of the Midwest. New York doesn't even skirt the top 5, only making it to #6 on the list, while mysteriously Philadelphia is at #13, an outrage for people who know that Philadelphian's do not need recognition and would prefer to be left unranked.

The professors in the Humor Research Lab at the University of Colorado (which might just be the basement of a marijuana dispensary, for all we know) determined their top fifty list by looking at a few different factors:

• Number of comedy clubs per square mile in each city
• Traveling comedians' ratings of each city's comedy-club audiences
• Number of famous comedians born in each city, divided by city population
• Number of famous funny tweeters living in each city, divided by city population
• Number of comedy radio stations available in each city
• Frequency of humor-related web searches originating in each city

The top 10 funniest are listed below. Residents of Miami, Tulsa, and Fort Worth, all cities who ranked as the least funny places according to the study, this is your chance to prove us wrong in the comments.

1. Chicago, IL

2. Boston, MA

3. Atlanta, GA

4. Washington, DC

5. Portland, OR

6. New York, NY

7. Los Angeles, CA

8. Denver, CO

9. San Francisco, CA

10. Seattle, WA

[Image via AP]

A 63-year-old Indian businessman was having stomach trouble. He told his doctors he'd swallowed a water bottle cap out of anger after arguing with his wife—totally normal thing to do, nothing to see here—and had since been vomiting and having difficulty going to the bathroom.

During surgery to remove the nonexistent bottle cap, doctors at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital instead found 12 small bars of gold, weighing nearly a pound and worth about $23,000.

Dr. CS Ramachandran, who performed the surgery, was incredulous. He told the BBC,

This is the first time I have recovered gold from the stomach of a patient. I remember having taken out a bladder stone weighing 1kg from a patient. But finding gold in a patient's stomach was something unbelievable.

There's no word on why the man swallowed the gold, but it's possible that it had little to do with the state of his marriage. As the BBC points out, illegal gold smuggling is on the rise in India after the country raised the import duty on metals to combat its account deficit. One way to secretively transport the precious metal, it would seem, is by eating it.

[Images via The Daily Mail]

Over 42 people have died in a bus accident in the Sindh province of Pakistan in what officials are describing as one of the worst traffic accidents in the country in recent memory. A bus, overloaded with 75 people, crashed head on with a tractor trailer. The driver and several others were killed immediately.

The dirtbag of the millennium is apparently back and this time, he's allegedly slithering up to model Emma Appleton, who posted this revealing screenshot on her Instagram this afternoon.

@lewisthegreat yeah, I was like whaaat and he said yes or no?

— Emma Appleton (@EmmaJAppleton) April 20, 2014

According to the post, Richardson is throwing around sex offers in exchange for Vogue photo shoots, which raises the question: when will this shitlord go away forever?

Update: Appleton has removed the photo from her Instagram and appears to have taken down her Twitter account. A representative for Richardson, speaking with Buzzfeed's Kate Aurthur, called the screenshot "obviously" a fake:

A representative of Terry Richardson says RE the Emma Appleton text: "This is obviously a fake. Terry did not send this text."

— Kate Aurthur (@KateAurthur) April 20, 2014

Hildy Kuryk, the director of communications for Vogue, stressed via email that Richardson hasn't shot for the magazine in a number of years.

"The last assignment Terry Richardson had for US Vogue appeared in the July 2010 issue and we have no plans to work with him in the future"

The original photo is below.

[Image via Instagram]

Today marked the first 4/20 since weed has been legal to use and sell recreationally in Denver, Colorado, and by the looks of it, it was exactly the utopia of Mr. Potato Head-shaped bongs, Nutella pancakes, and people with names like "Dina Compassion" that you'd imagine.

CNN sent a reporter to cover the event, who met a host of colorful characters celebrating the de facto holiday. There was the couple from Kansas City, Missouri who were just super stoked to be there:

"It's like his Super Bowl," said Kate, who, like many people we spoke to, didn't want her last name used. "He's been giddy about it for weeks . . . Super stoked is an understatement."

Some South Jersey bros were "too fucking stoned" to get off the bus on a tour of cannabis dispensaries:

While other groups actually visited dispensaries on the tour, no one in this crew bothered to get off the bus. Two guys from South Jersey sat dazed, staring out their windows.

At the Cheba Hut, sandwiches are cleverly referred to as "blunts."

Inside Cheba Hut, where 12-inch subs are called "blunts," drinks are listed as "cotton mouth cures" and desserts and chips fall under "munchies," a woman from Brooklyn, New York, stared up at the menu board — her eyes as wide as her smile.

"Oh, my God, that bread's crazy," she said loudly to no one. "Oh, my God, they have Kool-Aid here! What?"

Tragedy struck when an older man smoked dabs, the ultra-potent cannabis concentrate that has picked up popularity in recent years.

An emergency medical team tended to an older man who passed out, his head bleeding from when it hit the pavement after he smoked a dab, or high-grade hash oil.

The young woman who gave it to him cried, her hand trembling as she held a cigarette.

Fortunately, some benevolent souls were on hand to comfort the traumatized dab-giver.

While some pulled out cell phones to take pictures of the man on the ground, others flocked to the shaken woman.

"It's not your fault. It's not your fault," they said. "He chose to take a dab."

[Images via AP]

A little girl finally figured out how to beat the impossible claw machine odds.

The inspired event appears to have occurred this week at a Florida arcade, where a child finally snapped after losing token after token to the claw.

According to a witness, the kid was able to wriggle inside the impossible-to-win arcade game (not an uncommon occurrence).

Once she was safely ensconced inside the claw's plexiglass walls, she began to exact her revenge, passing out the game's prizes for free, apparently taking requests from onlookers.

It's not clear what happened to her after the photo was taken, but given the claw's accuracy (or lack thereof), she might be stuck forever.

[image via Imgur, h/t Daily Dot]

Four French journalists who were kidnapped and held hostage in Syria for ten months say that despite the nightmare ordeal, they never lost hope.

Edouard Elias, Didier François, Nicolas Henin and Pierre Torres went missing last June while working on assignments in Syria for French publications.

François and Elias were working for the French radio station Europe 1 when they crossed the border from Turkey to Syria. They disappeared on their way to Aleppo on June 6. A few weeks later, Henin and Torres disappeared covering municipal elections for Le Point magazine and the TV channel Arte.

The four men were held hostage together in basements and had no access to natural light for their entire captivity, according to an interview they gave to the BBC. François told Europe 1 that the men were chained together for two-and-a-half months.

Mr Francois, 53, told reporters it was "a great joy and an immense relief, obviously to be free. Under the sky, which we haven't seen for a long time, to breathe the fresh air, walk freely".

"It was a long haul, but we never lost hope," he added. "From time to time, we got snatches of information, we knew that the world was mobilised."

But it seems they might have been lucky—by the BBC's count, at least 60 journalists have been killed in Syria since the uprising against President Bashar Assad.

According to the BBC, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said that the kidnappers were not given a ransom or weapons in exchange for the journalists' release.

He also told Europe 1 that "there was no question of contact with the Syrian government", saying only that the negotiation for their release "was of another nature".

The men were rescued on Friday and are said to be in good health despite the conditions they were kept in.

[image via AP]

Primates are growing smarter every day—case in point is this recent Monkey Planet episode about a Bonobo ape that can comfortably build a fire from scratch, flip burgers, and even toast marshmallows.

The scary-smart ape featured in the clip is showbiz veteran Kanzi, a famous Bonobo with an Oprah appearance on his resume and the ability to express himself to humans by using icon-like symbols. And marshmallows appear to be just the tip of the iceberg of Kanzi's talents—the ape can also cook and flip hamburgers.

Kanzi's trainers say that he has long been able to light a campfire and roast marshmallows without any assistance from them, but neglected to explain why they deprived the Bonobo of graham crackers and chocolate.

[h/t Tastefully Offensive]

Lindsay Lohan dropped a bombshell tonight on her reality show's finale, telling producers that she had suffered a miscarriage in the middle of filming the series.

Close to the end of the episode, Lohan brought the topic up when one of her interviewers asked what it had been like to watch herself on the show.

Lindsay: When the camera's on, I'm on. And if I know I'm not capable of being on, that's why I would say that I couldn't film today. And no one knows this, and we can finish after this, I had a miscarriage for those two weeks that I took off. It was a very long story.

Producer: I'm so sorry.

Lindsay: That's why on the show when it says, "She doesn't want to come down, she doesn't want to come down," I couldn't move. I was sick.

Producer: I'm so sorry.

Lindsay: And mentally, that messes with you. And watching this series, I just know how I felt at that moment, and I can relate to that girl, which sounds kind of crazy, but I'm like, "Oh my god, this is really sad. Like, who's helping her?" And no one knows what's going on in my head at every second because I'm constantly thinking. Like my mind does not shut off. Which, the only time it does is when I start doing meditation or I put music on in my headphones, there was a lot going on in my life then.

Lohan did not say who the father is.

While the finale aired, Dina Lohan took to Twitter with a since-deleted response.

Oprah call me

— Dina Lohan (@dinalohan) April 21, 2014

[image via AP]

A 16-year-old boy somehow survived a five and a half hour flight halfway across the Pacific Ocean—from San Jose to Maui—while stowed away in a passenger jet's wheel well.

"Kid's lucky to be alive," FBI spokesman Tom Simon told the Associated Press.

According to Simon, the teen, whose name was not released, hopped the fence at the San Jose airport after running away from home. He then walked around the airport's tarmac until climbing into one of the plane's wheel wells.

The teenager spent much of the 2,400 mile flight in freezing temperatures—the flight's cruising altitude was 38,000 feet—and with limited oxygen.

"He was unconscious for the lion's share of the flight," Simon said. "Doesn't even remember the flight. It's amazing he survived that."

Authorities in Hawaii detained and questioned the teenager after finding him wandering the Maui airport tarmac without identification. After a medical examination—amazingly, he escaped injury—he was released to child protective services. He won't be charged with a crime.

[Image via AP]

Deadspin How The Boston Marathon Went Pro And Outran The Myth Of Amateurism | Gizmodo A Teenager Somehow Survived a Five-Hour Flight in a Jet's Wheel Well | io9 The Most Astounding Cosplay From WonderCon: Day 2! | Lifehacker Your House Isn't Perfectly Clean, but People Aren't Judging You

A high school senior has been suspended for 3 days after asking the reigning Miss America to prom at an assembly last Thursday.

Nina Davuluri was at Central York (Pa.) High School to discuss the importance of science, technology, and math studies. 18-year-old Patrick Farves used his question to present her with a flower and ask if she'd go to prom with him.

School officials apparently knew about the plan, and had warned Farves not to go ahead with it. He received a 3-day suspension for defying them and "disrupting" the assembly.

But Miss America is on his side. Although she can't be his prom date due to scheduling conflicts, Davuluri wrote on the official Miss America Facebook page that she had written to the school asking them to reconsider Farves' suspension.

Meanwhile, Farves appeared on the Today Show this morning. (Hey, it's not like he had to be in class.)

[Photo Credit : Getty Images]