As a summer we barely knew slips into the cold seasons we know all too well, one cool dog is out there blowing bubbles in the swimming pool like time isn't passing at all.
"I can blow bubbles in the pool on command," he'll tell all of his dog friends. "I'm gonna do this forever!"
:(
[h/t TastefullyOffensive]
A new death-defying trend has emerged across the globe where daredevils have decided selfies at brunch and at girls' night are no longer cool enough: skyscrapers and monuments are the real deal
This seems chill, very normal. Perhaps a clip of the banana-eating will calm you down? Here, go ahead, watch:
The Centre Skyscraper is the fifth tallest building in Hong Kong. Daniel Lau, Andrew Tso and A.S., the least afraid people on earth, managed to get to the top of the skyscraper by the power of moxie only few on this planet possess.
[h/t New York Daily News]
A 40-year-old mother of five and grandmother of three tackled a 20-year-old man fleeing police in Washington state, reports the AP. She then pulled down his pants, showing everyone his little bum, and taunted him about being tackled by a grandmother.
According to the Tri-City Herald, Becky Powell was driving with her husband when she saw the man run from Richland police Captain Mike Cobb. When she saw how quickly the man was getting away, she told her husband to speed up and got out of the car to confront him. From the Tri-City Herald:
"I got into a football stance and said, 'You're going to stay here,' " Powell said. "He stiff-armed me and I just wrapped him up and threw him on the ground."
Powell said when she tackled Fry she grabbed onto his shorts and underwear, exposing his back side as they fell.
Another man helped her pin Fry down as police were able to catch up and put him in handcuffs, Powell said.
The Herald reports that Powell taunted him once he was in handcuffs:
"I whispered in his ear, 'How does it feel to be taken down by a mother of five and a grandmother of three?'"
She says that—surprisingly!—he did not look amused.
The AP notes that, while police appreciated Powell's actions, they warn others—even very strong grandmothers—to refrain from getting involved in police matters.
[image via Shutterstock]
Lord Richard Attenborough, an Academy Award-winning director and actor famous for his iconic roles in films like Jurassic Park and Miracle on 34th Street, reportedly died Sunday at age 90.
Attenborough, who appeared in more than 70 films and directed another 12, was reportedly in bad health after he suffered a stroke six years ago. According to the BBC, he had been living in a nursing home with his wife of almost 60 years, Sheila Sim, since the stroke.
Attenborough's son confirmed the news of his death without providing additional information.
Attenborough was an acclaimed and respected actor, but he earned his greatest accolades from behind the camera. His 1982 film, Ghandi, swept the Oscars, netting him a statute for both best director and best picture. He also reportedly struck up a friendship with Princess Diana when Prince Charles asked him to write speeches for her.
Attenborough's family said they would make a formal statement about the 90-year-old actor—known in the British press as Dickie—on Monday.
[image via AP]
Proving once again that common sense is no match for confirmation bias, this weekend an article titled "Ferguson Gang Leader Admits 'Eric Holder Paid Us To Start Riots'" began racing through social media, racking up over 50,000 Facebook shares by Monday morning.
According to the story, Missouri's 22nd Circuit Court is handling claims that the Attorney General paid gang members "to loot and spread civil unrest" in Ferguson after the shooting of Michael Brown, evidence of which presiding Judge Rineheart reportedly described as "incredibly convincing."
The article, which first appeared on National Report Saturday, began spreading through right-wing blogs like 2127 News and Viral Survival ("The #1 Newsource for Preppers and Survivalists") shortly afterward, resulting in hundreds of outraged responses ranging from "This is White House genocide" to "SHOCKER!!! (NOT!)."
The story, of course, is completely false. "There is no Judge Rineheart (or any similar name) on the 22nd Judicial Circuit of Missouri," a court spokesperson told Gawker. In reality, the article is merely the latest news hoax from "satire" site National Report, infamous for running stories like "Obama to Visit Mosque, Host
By Sunday, at least one conservative blog had retracted their post about the imaginary case, stating, "Even though we always vet stories, unfortunately we are human and accidents occur."
[Image via AP]
Antiviral is a new blog devoted to debunking fake news, online hoaxes and viral garbage. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter and send your tips to hudson.hongo@gawker.com.
Nathan Heller, a Magazine Writer, attended an "élite college." He is characteristically (for an "élite college" alumnus) reluctant to name it in the latest issue of America's Last Bulwark Against the Death of Culture. (He does tell us it ain't Yale.)
But Heller nonetheless feels free to enumerate his activities at the "élite college" in detail:
Often, after classes, I'd rehearse with the campus orchestra I played in. Later, I'd go to the offices of the school newspaper, where it might be my turn to proofread the next morning's edition. By the time the pages closed, it would be 3 or 4 A.M. I'd walk home, perch at my desk, and finish writing a course paper. A new day, somehow, had already begun. This was a great excuse to drink more coffee. Between lectures, I might visit with professors, meet deadlines for internships or fellowships, or (with a sense of wanton luxury) read through the hundreds of pages I'd been assigned. I had a federal work-study job. I wrote an honors thesis from archival research. Once, I woke up at my desk—or, more precisely, on my desk, face down, arms splayed out, murder-in-the-study style—with a caffeine-induced cramp freezing my left leg and the imprint of a notebook spiral winding down my cheek.
Hm. Sounds stressful. Heller offers this catalogue in a 4,000-word essay on William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, which makes the argument that the Ivy League is turning out exhausted, risk-averse automatons leading just the kind of back-breaking lives Heller describes.
Except Heller doesn't like the book. I think. It's sometimes hard to tell. He meanders, in each paragraph, from musing to critique to agreement and back to musing. A sample:
When Deresiewicz is not engaging in this kind of brochure balladry, he is a charismatic and elegant writer. But his desire to get students working on their souls—not just figuring out the historiography of the Dreyfus affair or learning to perform gel electrophoresis—means that he sometimes points them in bizarre directions. Like many embattled humanists, Deresiewicz is eager to explain why he is not a scientist. "We ask of a scientific proposition, 'Is it true?,' but of a proposition in the humanities we ask, 'Is it true for me?' " he writes. "The highest function of art, and of literature in particular, is to bring us to that knowledge of ourselves that college ought to start to give us." He later drives the point home: " 'That's me!': the essential experience of art."
This is a stunning definition, and not just because it is plainly untrue. (Do we appreciate Borges's "The Library of Babel" because we see ourselves in it? Is familiarity the essential experience of "Blue Velvet" or, for that matter, "Spaceballs"?) Reading for self-recognition is the default factory setting in most people's minds. It is precisely the approach to literature that you don't need to attend college to learn. When Deresiewicz insists that an objective of literary study, and the multiple perspectives it admits, is ultimately to give kids "models" and "values" that may inform their self-understanding, he's embracing a pretty solipsistic measure of virtue—something closer to therapy than to scholarship.
Hm. So "That's me," in Heller's view, is not just not the "essential experience of art," it is "stunning" to describe it that way. But also, "That's me," is the "default factory setting... in most people's minds." These statements are not very compatible but... here they are.
In spite of all this solipsism and bad reasoning and embrace of "therapy," Heller can't seem to actually bring himself torch the damn book. Instead he concludes, wanly:
Would better college years have made those people more fulfilled? Even in the era of fast tracks and credentialism, the psychic mechanisms of an education are mysterious. Let teachers like Deresiewicz believe. For a couple of hours every week, students are theirs in the classroom to challenge and entrance. Then the clock strikes, and the kids flock back into the madness of their lives. Did the new material reach them? Will the lesson be washed from their minds? Who knows. They heard it. Life will take care of the rest.
Look: Deresiewicz's book, which I have flipped through but have not read with carefulness, seems pretty bad. Heller seems to sort of know this. But why won't he say it? Heller's half-hearted genuflections, to me, encompass America's whole "Ivy League problem" in a nutshell. If Deresiewicz is trolling, if all his bloviating about the function of art and education is really missing a point, he should be called to account for it, whether he's a respected critic or not. And no matter where he taught or went to school.
If Heller can't do this, why is he reviewing the book?
And it is possible, indeed admirable, to do this. Case in point: A month ago, an excerpt from Excellent Sheep went up at The New Republic, and everyone lost their goddamn minds about it. A professor named James Marino, of Cleveland State University, much more effectively handed Deresiewicz his ass on a Wordpress blog. Marino skips all the abstract stuff and goes for the jugular:
Even the title of that article is disingenuous. William Deresiewicz has never studied or worked outside the Ivy League. He has three degrees from Columbia. He taught for ten years at Yale. Public colleges, and the students at public colleges, are merely rhetorically convenient symbols for him. He displays no understanding of, and no curiosity about, what those places and people are actually like.
Is going to an Ivy League school worth it? Unless you are already a person of enormous inherited privilege, the question is disingenuous. Of course it is. This question is like the popular media question, "Is going to college worth it?" No one asking that question honestly believes that they would have been better off not going to college; they would not be writing in whatever magazine is asking the question this week if they had not gone to college. And none of them would be willing for their own children not to go to college. Asking the question is an act of dishonesty. The writer is at the very least deceiving him- or herself.
Gotta say, that post gets more actual analysis in under 1,000 words than Heller's entire article manages. It'd be nice if someone say, took up the actual funding crisis in public education in the scant space there now is for book review-essays.
[Image via Shutterstock.]
Human cupcake Ariana Grande has
demons
Ariana Grande's sophomore album,
My Everything, is out today, and, well, it's no Pizza Hut
Below are incomprehensible snippets from each My Everything song (sans the intro). Play along and try to figure out what the hell this girl is saying. She talks reckless sometimes, there could be good content in there if only we could understand her.
Sounds like: "Everliving, and a fairytale brings malice on my life / Thank you, it's hard to believe / But the love you have is sadness, only mine" (Also sounds like: Michael Jackson's "Heal the World")
Sounds like: "'Cause it's too much to bear / Without you / I lose sight of the cure / If I close my mouth / Just know I'm yours..."
Sounds like: "I know I'm nacho, olé!"
Sounds like: "Havin' a clown / Got no weight / I'm a shutter / I should be Liza / And realize that I cough."
Sounds like: "Travelin' / Butterflies / Russian baby / Body bakin' / Pinchin me' / Eatin' bacon / Piglets need life..."
Sounds like: "You draw me a sign / Now I'm screamin' just to see who's louder / Whoo! / Weee! Na na na... (repeat)"
Sounds like: "No, I'm not Lena / Would ya talk the talk just show me what your momma gave up?"
Sounds like: "Still you walked to Bali, my shoes"
Sounds like: "Baby did you get your jeans at Champs to love me?"
Sounds like: A horse exhaling with 75 percent satisfaction and 25 percent trepidation.
Sounds like: "He shoots like Common..."
Sounds like: "And if in the moment I buy my limp / Baby in the moment you'll know this / Something, bigger venison, and beyond bliss..."
Sounds like: "There's no powdered gold in the rainbows we chase..."
Sounds like: Per Bradley Stern's lyric video: "I only wanna dye a lime / Never bite the hand of a broken harp / Don't wanna heal ya lion tonight / Now that I've become who I really are."
Fun fact: That last one, "Now that I've become who I really are," is the actual lyric.
[Top image via Getty]
Hundreds attended Michael Brown's funeral at Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church in St. Louis today, weeks after he was gunned down by Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson. Brown's step-mother, Cal Brown, who called him "Mike-Mike," told the crowd, "He just wanted so much. He wanted to go to college. To be a good father."
The service—religious, with moments of liveliness and cheering and music—was attended by the families of other black men slain at a young age: Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Jordan Davis.
Also in attendance were a number of White House staff, members of Congress, and Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Shaprton, who implored the crowd, "Let us not lose sight of the fact that this young man should be doing his second week in college."
"This is not about you," Sharpton went on to say, addressing the aggressive police response to protests that have erupted in Ferguson following Brown's killing Aug. 9. "This is about justice. This is about sadness. And America is gonna have to come to terms with—there's something wrong, that we have money to give military equipment to police forces, but we don't have money for training and money for public education and money to train our children."
Earlier in the service, Brown's cousin, Eric Davis, after introducing the families of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, told the church, "This generation is saying we have had enough of this senseless killing. We have had enough of this."
[Images via AP]
"In a market of brands hungry for content they can own, why not opt for words written by real journalists?" writes Matt Van Hoven of "brand journalism," the latest buzzword for human-sounding ads. "Certainly it could go a long way to convince readers that what they're getting is truth, or some form
The Guardian US and the Oklahoma Observer filed suit today in an Oklahoma federal court today, demanding greater access to witness executions. They claim a First Amendment right to see more of the procedure, including the IV insertion, which was allegedly botched in Clayton Lockett's execution
You may have heard that one-time hip-hop mogul Suge Knight was shot six times at Chris Brown's VMA pre-party this weekend
Now, nearly every Hollywood party has its fair share of random guests. This post does not aim to highlight that point, only to marvel at the amazing mix of humans present at a party thrown by Chris Brown in which Suge Knight was shot. Here is an incomplete but illustrative sampling of the attendees mentioned in various articles about the party:
apl.de.ap—misidentified frequently as Apple De Ap, which is the phonetic pronunciation, smh—is one of the people from the Black Eyed Peas who isn't will.i.am or Fergie.
Would you recognize him at a party? You would probably assume that no one non-famous would attempt to pull of that mohawk, but you would not recognize that mohawk as belonging to the head of apl.de.ap.
Mark Ballas is a dancer on Dancing With the Stars. His highest finishes were in seasons six and eight, when he won the competition with Kristi Yamaguchi and Shawn Johnson, respectively. His lowest finishes were in seasons seven and 10, when he finished in 11th place thanks to Shannen Doherty and Kim Kardashian, who was once not famous enough to not appear on Dancing With the Stars. In his Wikipedia photo, Mark Ballas is making this face.
Would you recognize him at a party? Unless you are your mother, no.
Tyson Beckford is a model and actor who currently hosts a television program on Bravo entitled Make Me a Supermodel, which has yet to produce any supermodels. He also appears in the upcoming film Addicted, where he is listed third on the poster behind Sharon Leal and Boris Kodjoe.
Would you recognize him at a party? Yeah, you'd probably recognize Tyson Beckford at a party.
Derek Hough is also a dancer on Dancing With the Stars. He has won the competition five times alongside Brooke Burke, Nicole Scherzinger, Jennifer Gray, Kellie Pickler and Amber Riley. He has finished second twice and no lower than sixth, when he was dragged down by Shannon Elizabeth. He is basically the Babe Ruth of Dancing With the Stars. He also had an uncredited appearance in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone as a Hogwarts schoolboy, which Derek Hough probably put on his own Wikipedia.
Would you recognize him at a party? He is blonde and pretty so you would probably assume he was mildly famous, but no.
Lil Twist is a rapper on Lil Wayne's label who has released zero music of note. He is most famous for getting Justin Bieber high, picking up a DUI after crashing Justin Bieber's chrome Fisker Karma and driving Justin Bieber's Ferrari during an incident in which a paparazzo was killed in a car accident. After the DUI incident, Twist had the indignity of being "relegated" to driving Justin Bieber's Range Rover, and yet he still bravely shows his face in public. Lil Twist's lil brother is Lil Za, who accepts criminal charges on Bieber's behalf in exchange for Bieber putting his ass on his face.
Would you recognize him at a party? You would assume that no 13-year-old—Lil Twist is actually 21—would be wearing this much jewelry without being famous, but no you would have no idea who Lil Twist is.
You may know The Game as a rapper who is constantly talking about all the other rappers he knows. You may know The Game as someone who earlier this year nearly came to blows with the LAPD
Would you recognize him at a party? Probably. I mean, I would, but that means nothing.
Robert Ri'chard was the star of the Nickelodeon show Cousin Skeeter. That's the most notable thing he's ever done, which in the grand scheme of world history isn't unimpressive.
UPDATE: Gawker Senior Editor Jason Parham has requested that this post note that Robert Ri'chard "appeared in the critically underrated UPN sitcom, One on One."
Would you recognize him at a party? You would see him at a distance and think "Wait, is that Cuba Gooding Jr. ...?" before worming your way up to a better viewpoint and concluding that no, that isn't Cuba Gooding Jr.
Hahaha. We know who Richard Simmons is. What we don't know is why Richard Simmons was in the same room as Suge Knight when Suge Knight got shot six times.
Would you recognize him at a party? Yes you would, and you would text your friends saying "lol Richard Simmons is at this party" and your mom "Richard Simmons is at this party."
[top image via Splash, all others via Getty]
The guy who filmed NYU student Gerry Shalam claiming to be the heir to "half of fucking Manhattan"
Step, if you dare, into the circus of puking, staggering, public urination, and indecent exposure that this person can apparently see every Sunday morning from a Madison Avenue window.
Pranna: Come for the bottomless mimosas and screwdrivers, stay way too long on the sidewalk outside.
"It just seems like these places promote getting stupid drunk in order to make money and then the people that live there have to live with the fallout. I'm sick of it," the man who filmed the videos told Gothamist.
After realizing that there were videos of this scene online—shot over the past three weekends, no less—Pranna's owner released a list of changes they plan to make. It's actually a list of things he claim they're already doing, coupled with a weaksauce pledge to consider stopping the flow of unlimited booze before 3:30 p.m..
Per Gothamist, here's the list:
1. We will increase our security outside and do our best to clear the sidewalk faster (as we are seeing doing in several parts of the video).
2. We will continue to have security and management monitor our guests inside and try to prevent them from drinking excessively.
3. We have already reduced the brunch reservations by 20 percent to keep patrons under control.
4. We will look into reducing the hours of serving alcohol during brunch so people will consume less drinks.
5. We will try and set up meetings with our neighbors regularly to discuss their concerns and try our best to resolve them.
According to the New York State Liquor Authority, Pranna's liquor license expires Sept. 30. Gothamist says the restaurant plans to submit its renewal application at a community board meeting Wednesday night.
Should be a fun and enlightening renewal process.
[H/T Gothamist]
In recent months, Airbnb has come to resemble a political operator that happens to run a hotel network. As politicians and governments on both coasts turn the screws
Their new television ad implores New Yorkers to remember the outpouring of generosity Airbnb users had for Hurricane Sandy's victims and to "get involved" with the company's lobbying campaign. As Gothamist put it:
Over the weekend, the company premiered a new advertisement that pairs images of the disaster with the kindness of Airbnb hosts who offered their homes out for free to victims of the storm. The advertisement, which asks New Yorkers to visit airbnbnyc.com, a website that touts the beneficial impacts of NYC on the city, banks on the goodwill earned during a time of desperation.
Airbnb did create a tool for Sandy's victims to find free or cheap housing, and they should be applauded for that. But internet-fueled housing charity wasn't limited to Airbnb: users of Facebook and Twitter similarly opened up their homes to strangers in the hurricane's aftermath. There's a big difference between that, what we usually call "altruism," and this, which is marketing.
It would be one thing if their business was designed to share homes with disaster victims, but it's not. Specifically, Airbnb is a company that pushes rooms for rent and facilitates a financial transaction between strangers. At its worst, it's a company that leads to tenant evictions
That's business. But it's not noble.
To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.
The World War II program to develop an atomic bomb was the largest secret project ever undertaken by the U.S. government. But newly-declassified documents reveal how it hard it was to keep things secret as the weapon neared completion. Information leaks were everywhere, even in church sermons.
Trinity Test plutonium bomb image courtesy of Truman Library.
These detailed accounts have been made public on the website of the Department of Energy, which has posted the 36-volume, official history of the Manhattan Project, which had been commissioned by General Leslie Groves in late 1944. Among the most intriguing set of documents, released last month, is the volume about intelligence and security, which reveals:
"Since September 1943, investigations were conducted of more than 1,500 'loose talk' or leakage of information cases and corrective action was taken in more than 1,200 violations of procedures for handling classified material…. Complete security of information could be achieved only by following all leaks to their source."
Counterintelligence officials had their work cut out for them.
Efforts to keep a lid on atomic energy research had begun even before the Manhattan Project had started. In 1939, refugee scientists—mindful of the growing threat posed by Nazi Germany—urged their U.S. colleagues to undertake voluntary censorship of published studies concerning uranium fission. Initially, they rejected the idea—but as one European country after another fell to the Germans in 1940, the U.S. scientific community came to understand the importance of self-censorship. The Division of Physical Sciences of the National Research Council established a committee that succeeded in convincing most scientists to withhold publication of papers on sensitive subjects.
Still, occasional newspaper articles wrote about the potential applications of uranium fission in warfare. One such article, sympathetic to the plight of Europe, appeared in the March 18, 1941 edition of the Montana Standard:
It is known that there is enough power in one portion of uranium-235 the size of a pear to shoot the Empire State Building in the air with the speed of a rocket. It would be more than two million times as possible as one 1,000-pound air bomb of the type used by the Nazis in bombing London.
But nature has used her usual foresight in guarding such potential annihilation. Scientists admit it is impossible to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. It is not that science has not figured out a method. It has. But the apparatus would be so complicated there is not now in existence enough scientists to set it up, even though they were to work a lifetime doing it.
We might say, quite frankly, that our scientists have disillusioned us.
Although physicists continued to play up the "impossible task" of separating sufficient amounts of uranium-235 to construct a bomb, reports and rumors of such a secret weapon continued to pop up in the press. Finally, in 1943, the director of the wartime Office of Censorship sent a special request to editors and broadcasters to not report on any rumors of "secret weapons" and to withhold any information on:
- Production or utilization of atom smashing, atomic energy, atomic fission, atomic splitting, or any of their equivalents.
- The use for military purposes of radium or radioactive materials, heavy water, high voltage discharge equipment, cyclotrons.
- The following elements or any of their compounds: plutonium, uranium, ytterbium, hafnium, protoactinium, radium, thorium, deuterium.
But, the greatest challenge to secrecy was the expansion of the Manhattan Project itself. As noted in the book, Counterintelligence in World War II:
The modest security system sufficed until, in the spring of 1942, with the start of the uranium program's rapid expansion. The letting of numerous contracts with industrial firms; the employment and interaction of ultimately tens of thousands of workers, scientists, and engineers; and the formation of complex organizations to construct and operate the large-scale production plants and their atomic communities—[all of this] enormously complicated the problems of security just at the time the Army undertook its new role as project administrator. Although these measures were necessary for the more rapid achievement of a successful fission weapon, they also tended to weaken security.
And it was at this time that the Manhattan Project began springing leaks.
The declassified official history of the Manhattan Project is fascinating in that it reveals the tremendous amount of resources invested in tracking down the source of each and every reported leak—which encompassed more than 1,500 investigations.
And, the documents include several examples of the type of "loose talk" and careless behavior that occurred more frequently as the program to build the atomic bomb expanded. All of the cases had to be investigated, sometimes revealing false alarms, other times revealing potentially serious breeches in security.
Here's a sampling of some of the cases discussed in the documents:
1) A Naval lieutenant at a dinner party in March 1945 openly wondered "when we would use the atomic bomb," adding that "only about ten pounds of U-235 are needed to end the war." He also said that "several thousand persons were working on it in Tennessee."
When agents interviewed the lieutenant, he recalled a 1942 lecture given at the chemistry department at Harvard regarding the possibilities of atomic power, and he had since discussed the subject with friends and had read many speculative articles in technical magazines. He stated that "anyone traveling for the government realized there was a great secret project there" and he merely assumed that it was engaged in the development of atomic power.
2) In the fall of 1944, an employee of a New York firm, doing engineering work for the project, was taking a train from New York to Oak Ridge carrying a highly secret file of engineering details. He arrived at Penn Station with several minutes to spare before the train departed, so he used the time to make a last minute call to his wife from a telephone booth.
After finishing the call, he headed for the train and discovered that he didn't have the secret papers with him. He decided to catch the train, so he called his office and requested that someone come down to the station to look for the papers. The security agent for the company rushed to the station and made a frantic search, finally locating them at the information booth. The employee who had lost the papers was ordered to return to New York, where he was "soundly reprimanded" and fired by the company.
3) One case concerned a pamphlet titled Startling Power. In the winter of 1945, a patent engineer secured a copy of the pamphlet, which had been published by the Good News Publishing Company in Chicago and was distributed by the Moody Bible Institute. The pamphlet declared that, "Uranium 235, extracted from natural uranium ore, promises to make all of our power sources mere child's toys by comparison. Professor John R. Dunning, Columbia University Leader in Atomic Energy Research, has stated that the natural substances from which Uranium 285 is extracted abound abundantly in the earth and throughout many sections of the world." However, the pamphlet continued, "We must not overlook the far more vital and assured fact that God has given to Christians the gift of the Holy Spirit with energies far more dynamic than those of exploding atoms or mysterious elements."
Upon reading this pamphlet, the patent engineer concluded that U-235 merited investigation by his company. His boss contacted the prominent physicist Arthur Compton to find out more about the potential applications of uranium, which triggered an investigation. Security officials were relieved to learn the source of the inquiry was a harmless reading of a religious tract.
Religious sermons were occasionally investigated over the years, such as when a Lutheran minister declared to his flock that, "One of the developments in the field of science today is a new source of energy called uranium-235. But regardless of the power of uranium 235 or other energy which science may discover, it will never be powerful enough to comfort us in affliction or strengthen us in despair. We must search out the Lord for those things." Discrete inquires revealed that this, and other sermons like it, were taken from the same pamphlet, Startling Power.
4) An employee at Oak Ridge wrote a letter to her uncle, telling him the war would be over quickly, when "the product" being produced was finally used. Unfortunately, she dropped the letter on a bus prior to mailing it. She admitted to intelligence agents that, in her position as a confidential secretary, she had "acquired considerable information about the work of the project, but had been very foolish to reveal any of the information to her uncle." She was fired.
Reading these few examples reveals how vulnerable the Manhattan Project was to discovery, despite its unprecedented level of secrecy. As Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science who specializes in nuclear weapons has previously observed:
There were a tremendous number of puzzle pieces out there for an enemy power to notice and put together regarding the bomb effort. It was not quite so perfectly secret as we often talk of it as being. We know it was possible to put some of the pieces together, because the Soviets did it, and even a few others did it. General Groves wanted a hegemonic, all-encompassing, all-controlling secrecy regime. Understandably, he couldn't accomplish that — but he pulled off just enough that, with a bit of luck, the project stayed more or less below the water line.
Matter, an online magazine with convenient time-to-read counters for the fastidious consumer, published a captivating story this morning that details an incident in L'Aquila, Italy involving seven scientists, a major earthquake, and a subsequent manslaughter case. It is worth all 24 of your minutes.
"Aftershocks," which was written by journalist David Wolman, looks at a 6.3-magnitude earthquake that hit L'Aquila in 2011, and the members of a committee who were charged with warning the town's residents of the forthcoming disaster. Italy's Grand Commission of High Risks is tasked with informing the public of danger to come; in this case, Italian prosecutors argued, the scientists on board shirked their responsibility and acted flippantly, not advising residents to leave their houses. "The scientific community assures me that the situation is good because of the continuous discharge of energy," one scientist was recorded saying.
The meeting, attended by seven experts, including Selvaggi and Boschi, and a handful of local officials, took just an hour and a half. Their conclusion: A major quake in the near term was unlikely. But remember, this is earthquake country: You never know. Boschi's words during the meeting would later prove pivotal. "A large earthquake along the lines of the 1703 event is improbable in the short term," he said, "but the possibility cannot definitively be excluded."
An Abruzzo official pressed the prediction question once more. "We would like to know if we have to believe those people who go around creating alarm." She was referring to the self-proclaimed expert, Giuliani. Such claims have no scientific basis, replied commission chair Franco Barbari. "The seismic sequence doesn't foretell anything, but it surely refocuses attention on the seismogenic zone where, sooner or later, a large earthquake will occur." The only thing you can do to protect people in such a place, he reminded her, is make sure structures are safe. As scientists and engineers repeat almost like a rosary: Earthquakes don't kill people; buildings kill people.
As the story points out, there's no reliable way to predict earthquakes with certainty. After the high-magnitude earthquake killed 308 people in L'Aquila in 2009, a case began to brew among locals who thought the seven scientists on commission should be held accountable for not giving warning of the damage to come, despite the murkiness of that responsibility.
In 2011, they were charged with manslaughter.
Once the shock had subsided, bodies were removed, and rubble cleared, survivors began speaking out against the commission. They insisted that it had been the reassurances of the experts that persuaded people to stay inside the night of April 5, even after the two tremors, rather than head outdoors and away from unsafe buildings.
The rest of the story you should absolutely read for yourself, and it's worth the plunge; Wolman explores not only scientific ethics but also etymology, risk management, and the often shoddy, unsubstantial Italian legal system. Should seven major, influential Italian scientists be held for six years in prison for...not speaking perhaps when they should have? Is "forecast" a more stable term than "prediction"?
[Image via Matter/Chiara Goia]
Rapper Cakes da Killa appeared on The Hot 97 Morning Show last week, despite not having a song on the New York hip-hop station's playlist. The reason hosts Ebro Darden and Peter Rosenberg invited Cakes on is because Cakes is gay and skilled. And not only is he gay and a rapper, but he's the kind of gay rapper who will correct you if you call him a gay rapper, as Ebro did early on in their interview. Cakes told Ebro that he considers himself not a gay rapper, but "a rapper that happens to be gay. There's no gay mailmen, but there are mailmen that are gay." Feisty.
The 20-minute conversation that ensued was good natured, but not without the irritations that result from a conversation in which one party must be extremely patient about the other party's ignorance, which seems at this point willful and lazy. Ebro told Cakes that while he admired Cakes' skill as a rapper, in terms of Cakes' actual songs "the content I can't relate to, it's not for me." As if that doesn't go without saying (cool straightness, bro), and as if you need to relate to pop culture to enjoy it. I am not Groot, but I love that little lambchop.
Rosenberg owned up to them both conducting the interview with their ignorance "for the purpose of learning," and yet that didn't make his garbled question (above) about whether Cakes would be sexually attracted to a lesbian seem any less stupid.
"Is it directly penis that excites you the most?" asked Rosenberg.
"Oh, this cannot be a serious question. YES!" said Cakes.
"Why would you ask that?" asked Ebro.
"It's directly the penis that excites me," reiterated Cakes.
"I don't know I've never been gay. Maybe it's more like a style thing, like you could meet gay girls that have a different sort of interest…" said Rosenberg.
I think he meant to ask if a femme guy could be sexually attracted to a butch woman, which I guess, does follow a certain line of logic, though it abandons another (that being: gay boys kiss boys).
You can watch the entire interview below. It's pretty humorous and not exactly cringey, though, Ebro does at one point early on note, "Your cadence is naturally like a real MC!" like he's amazed a gay person could actually be capable of such a thing. Ebro's mind, consider yourself blown. (Pause.)
Shannon Watts, the head of the pro-gun-regulation group Moms Demand Action, is a mom. The National Rifle Association hates Watts. So it wrote a blistering profile of her. And dressed her up as a cutout mom with kitchen and housekeeping accoutrements, because moms oughta know their place!
The pics in this post are from angry gun guy Dave Kopel's angry anti-Watts article in the September issue of America's 1st Freedom, which is sort of like the September issue of Vogue, if Vogue were owned by pro-gun Bircher-types and Jean-Paul Gaultier designed .308 assault weapons with optical rails.
The story itself is typical of Kopel's single-minded blather, in which he finds it impossible and misleading that a proper "stay-at-home mom" could also run a consulting business while at home. No doubt Moms Demand Action, which is well-financed, has a whiff of Astroturf. No doubt it's also a rich indictment coming from the NRA, which purports to be the mouthpiece for America's estimated hundred million or more gun owners, while claiming (without proof) actual membership of 4 million, pulling strings on legislation nationwide, strong-arming politicians with its campaign dollars and endorsements, and downplaying its financial and political ties to the firearms industry.
From there, it deteriorates into a series of grumpy grunts that tell the reader more about Kopel than his subject, like when he expresses scoffing disbelief that any responsible person can assert—as Watts does—that the Second Amendment is fine, and certainly some guns should be legal, but having five times more licensed gun dealers than McDonalds franchises in America is a bad thing. (Pro tip, Dave: You can favor legal access to lots of things, like pot and abortion, while believing limits are reasonable and fair.)
Kopel's got every right to offer his melange of facts and frothy outrage. Perhaps it'd be a different piece sans art. But it's telling that the NRA can't take aim at its political enemies without blowing an orchestra's worth of dog whistles: the anti-gun left, bankrolled by that New York City billionaire named Bloomberg! And his attack dog, that lady who ain't a lady all, where's her feather-duster and ironing board!
But Kopel wants to make clear he's not saying all ladies are a problem, just the crotchety ones who don't know their place. As proof that authentic momhood exists, he cites "Julie Golob, captain of Team Smith & Wesson and author of 'I'm An NRA Mom' in our June issue. A mother of two, Golob is giving a voice to thousands of NRA Moms who aren't recognized by the national media."
(Yep, there are none of those in the national media.)
Golob says that unlike those other nasty knee-jerk breeders in pantsuits, the "NRA MOM stands up for freedom—and the Second Amendment rights that guarantee all of our other freedoms."
You got that, moms? Get with the gun program. Or get back in the kitchen!
Neighborhood curmudgeon Jack Shafer, now the last valuable property at Reuters, wondered yesterday whether anonymous sources at the New York Times were worse than the internet's top location for anxious teens, Yahoo! Answers, which felled one BuzzFeeD Benny (now just Benny). But obviously there's only one place to go to get an answer to that question.
Shafer was likely referring to a weekend article in the Times by Landon Thomas Jr., titled "Michael Bloomberg's Harder Sell," about the former mayor's projects post-reign. It included this quotation:
One rival billionaire, who asked not to be identified because he did not like to discuss publicly the charity efforts of his peers, wondered why Mr. Bloomberg was not making larger contributions. "You want to meet your unique capabilities," this person said. "Giving away $2 billion in one shot — now that would meet Mike's capabilities."
Why give a "rival billionaire" (we could probably narrow this one's identity down pretty quickly) anonymity so not to piss of his rich friends? It's chill, baby. It's just the news. It doesn't have to be all so serious and like, on the record. Have a martini. It's on Bloomberg.
So Shafer's question nagged at us. We posed it in Disputations
I guess we have our Yahoo! answer.
Back in October of 2012, Lena Dunham sold a comedy memoir to Random House for $3.7M with an illustrated, 66-page proposal. The first season of
Girls ended mid-June of that year—if you want a picture of where we, collectively, stood with Horvath and Co.—and so the news of the book deal was received about as warmly as you'd expect
Girls is a funny thing: A story about some fairly shitty people, well-told on balance, that we treat like a reality show about white girls in a precious bubble of privilege and self-absorption. As a concept, it's a double lightning-rod comprising the words "feminism" and "hipster," the two most volatile words in the English language ca. 2012.
We have a propensity for taking women, young women especially, at face value. Young women are not alone here: Dave Chapelle quit comedy when he realized the racists weren't laughing with him, but at him; Kurt Cobain killed himself in part because his rapist fans were winning. I get infinitely more laughs with jokes about theater than I do about football. Taylor Swift continues writing singles about the haters because we've convinced ourselves that she isn't making conscious choices to write about love, an abiding subject in poetry for a while now, but in fact just writing her diary for our consumption.
Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Johnny Cash: Those are artists, because their experience—of white heterosexual masculinity—is after all universal. Everybody can identify with the love of a good woman, the vicissitudes that attain thereof, but nobody wants to hear about some dumb white girl getting dumped. We can all agree that Rabbit, Run and Portnoy's Complaint are literary classics, because after all, haven't we all been there? How could it be a canon if it didn't accurately describe the lives of every human that matters? Who cares, Lena?
For some reason, when we go to appointments to help my mind, it's always my father who comes. My mother comes to the ones for my body.
Autobiographical works of art are not autobiographical works of nonfiction, a tautology that spawns thinkpieces with every Sad Young Literary Man's latest take on his fabulously unique life. But we never make the jump, with women. All women are de facto character actors, unless they are virginal ingenues or femme fatales, because all stories—we have an abiding sense—are written by men. And the ones that aren't (if we can't fill in the authorial blanks with imaginary Svengalis, with showrunner daddies taking the work in hand; if we can't self-soothe away the cognitive dissonance), we despise: Veena Sud, Lena Dunham, Mindy Kaling, Emily Gould get subjected to a rigorous rundown of their arrogance, their absolute gall, in treating their own lives as uniquely fascinating in and of themselves.
Any one of these women
may be an asshole, but probably not all of them. That sounds unlikely. And moreover, it doesn't matter: When somebody tells you their story, and your response is "Who the fuck do you think you are to tell a story," the asshole is you. Rich Juzwiak recently changed my mind entirely on the subject of marriage equality
When I see waning literary giants, your Franzens and your Roths and so on, bitching about how all you need to be a literary giant in the modern dissipated era is an internet connection and an unhealthy obsession with Twilight fan fiction, it always takes me right back here: To this idea that those old white dudes have every right to be terrified of the world as it is, just like the poor oppressed Christian right, or anybody else who is used to having the loudest voice in the room. What Franzen finds meaningful, important, revelatory, is Franzen; everybody's just getting too loud. Volume outstrips value swiftly, when only certain people should be allowed to speak.
One night, my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he takes a walk and doesn't come back for three hours.
While he's gone, I start to plan our life without him.
But if you look at any internet discussion thread about hot-button matters, race or sex or gender, you will see one thing happen every time: Somebody provides a hot take on the subject, and is greeted with absolute rage. A woman, or a person of color, or a gay person, is presumed to be the default, the straight white male, until proven otherwise. Until they declare their bona fides—actually I am gay/black/female, so please don't lecture me or try to be an ally right now—they're just asking for trouble, because it's what we hear when we read words. (Assuming we don't call them out for lying, "No True Scotsman" style, erasing them altogether.)
Is this unavoidable? Are we stuck with the Default Voice in our heads for the rest of our lives? I don't think so. I think that's the moment we are in, at the dawn of the internet where we very much are, that all words and stories and thoughts and opinions come to us as received wisdom from atop White Guy Mountain. And I think a tricky symptom of that is, we look at women telling stories and still see them as characters in someone else's. We look for hidden authorial intent and, stymied, we invent it whole: Whatever it takes to avoid what we're looking at directly, because we've never seen it before.
A symptom of leukemia is dizziness, and I have that, when I sit up too fast or spin around in circles. So I quietly prepare to die in the next year or so, depending on how fast the disease progresses...
Especially for comics and comedy writers; standups have it rough. Amy Schumer did okay her first season, but her jokes only made sense—we only caught up to her—in the very successful Season Two. Because a woman making jokes about what a slut she is, and this has been true throughout the history of comedy, is not actually making jokes about things that matter: She's asking you to validate what a slut she is. There's no artifice to this art, being a woman is already a performance: She might as well be telling you what she had for lunch today, because she's only telling you what you need to know about her. It's the same reason it took us a decade to comprehend The Comeback (and even now that's mainly just gay guys, according to Twitter).
The most popular female comedians have always either excised their sexuality altogether (Poundstone, O'Donnell, DeGeneres, Notaro; Morgan Murphy and Maria Bamford, for the most part) to render objectification out of the equation, or more recently jacked it up to such crazy levels (Handler and Lampanelli, Leggero and Schumer) that the joke becomes apparent. Either way we're not talking about real life, because when you're already a joke the jokes don't come so easy: Name the five most successful gay male comedians you can think of. Then x out every one of them that's better known as a writer, off-screen, or as a character in someone else's story.
Just imagine if we removed the frame around every single comedian in that way, asked the men to codify and justify their humor and constantly reassure us that it's all pretend. The trigger warning is the death of comedy; the prior restraint of mere existence, this life without its own subjectivity, is a challenge that traps lots of very funny women. "Let me preface this joke with an explanation that it is a joke. The next one will also be a joke, but don't worry: I'll make sure to remind you of that as well." To be always-on, performative, and to be desirable and to always keep your seat on the bucking razor's edge of double consciousness, that's a lot to be asked for, when all you want to do is make people laugh, and maybe think.
Reading this first excerpt of Lena Dunham's forthcoming book, preceded as it has been by a year's worth of death knells and straight-up unadorned hating, I was irritated. Of course I was; it's irritating as hell. But the funniest and loveliest thing about Dunham has always been, to me, the deadpan irony of exactly those choices. Tiny Furniture is every bit as self-excoriating as the first season of Girls was, and just as confusing for those of us (most of us) who find it hard to switch gears, to hear that register at all: The one where a woman telling you the worst things about herself is an attempt to bridge the gap, to create art that transcends selves, rather than to simply confess.
The first doctor... invites me to play with the toys scattered across her floor. She sits in a chair above me, pad in hand. I have the sense she will gather all kinds of information from this, so I put on a show that I'm sure will demonstrate my loneliness and introspection...
...She asks me to share my three greatest wishes. "A river, where I can be alone," I tell her, impressed with my poeticism. From this answer, she will know that I am not like other nine-year-olds.
Sarah Silverman once said—quoting somebody else, I'm just assuming; a strong white man with excellent posture and a goatee he can stroke, perhaps a raging masturbation habit that will make us all laugh with shared embarrassment—that most or maybe all comedy comes from shame: Our identification with the shameful story, and the release we feel when we realize we are not alone and never were.
But without doubling down on that classic Apatow touch, without letting us in on (and into) the joke, you're just confessing to shit nobody wants to hear, which is maybe the only thing more boring than listening to somebody else's dream: In order to feel shame, you have to know better in the first place.
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According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, America's teens loooove e-cigs. They are trying them at a rapidly increasing rate and reporting that yeah, vaping is chill. CDC figures released today show that over 250,000 youths tried e-cigs last year, which is triple the number of kids who tried them in 2011.
While the jury's still out on the health risks e-cigs actually pose, the CDC does not think teen vaping is "good." Rebecca Bunnell, the associate director for science at the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health, told the Associated Press,
The increasing number of young people who use e-cigarettes should be a concern for parents and the public health community. Especially since youth e-cigarette users were nearly twice as likely to have intentions to smoke conventional cigarettes compared with youth who had never tried e-cigarettes.
Based on the CDC's data, e-cigs are a gateway drug to real cigs.
While this study is bad news for teens and the people who love them, it is great news for e-cig marketers, who have been allowed to push e-cigs on kids with wild abandon. (E-cigs currently aren't regulated on the U.S. market.) At left, you can see an example of an ostensibly successful ad for Blu e-cigs, which was published in Sports Illustrated.
