Yesterday news came that David Chase had told someone that at the end of The Sopranos, Tony doesn't die. Said "news" was published by Vox, the internet's leading site for men who aspire to be Authoritative Men Who Explain Things. Late yesterday David Chase issued a statement insisting he'd been misunderstood.

It all turned into a heartwarming lesson on the Nature of Truth. We're happy to explain it to you here.

What the hell happened?

Early in the day Vox published a long shaggy piece called "Did Tony die at the end of The Sopranos?" by an academic called Martha P. Nochimson, who I guess writes a lot about movies. The article answers the question, quoting Chase as saying Tony isn't dead—more on that later—and then continues for 4,500 words after it sort-of profiling the guy in meandering, repetitive fashion.

So the article categorically stated that in Chase's opinion, Tony was not dead?

Actually, Vox did one better. The website printed said statement in giant red and white letters on a black background in the middle of the piece. The writer said she asked Chase if Tony was dead, and this is what happened:

Then the site tweeted the piece around packaged as a piece in which David Chase answered the question.

Did Tony die at the end of The Sopranos? After 7 years, David Chase finally reveals the answer http://t.co/J0ndIkdGQr pic.twitter.com/Ub0EhOnY15

— Vox (@voxdotcom) August 28, 2014

I think it's pretty clear Vox wanted people to believe it had gotten some amazing scoop with this story and that they were pretty comfortable with packaging it as coming straight from the horse's mouth.

What exactly did David Chase's statement about this say?

A journalist for Vox misconstrued what David Chase said in their interview. To simply quote David as saying, 'Tony Soprano is not dead,' is inaccurate. There is a much larger context for that statement and as such, it is not true. As David Chase has said numerous times on the record, 'Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point.' To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.

Surely Vox's editors simply elegantly acknowledged their mistake and moved on. Everyone screws up sometimes.

Well... it seems instead that at least one of their editors, Matt Yglesias, had some kind of live-tweeted epistemological crisis.

It's not up to David Chase whether Tony is alive or dead.

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 28, 2014

Which was funny because earlier in the day, he'd tweeted this:

David Chase wants you to stop asking if Tony Soprano died, so now he’s going to tell you: http://t.co/kQI0FPgeI6

— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) August 27, 2014

Yglesias was apparently unwilling to throw himself on the funeral pyre personally, however. Vox assigned one of its writers, Todd Van Der Werff, to write the quick rebuttal. Van der Werff was reduced to arguing that there was so much other text in the piece that in fact Nochimson had presented the answer as qualified. Although, as he admitted, Vox itself had not done the same thing. He added this anemic defense of how Vox sold this story:

The story, of course, has been boiled down — even by us — to the one sentence where Chase finally answers Nochimson point blank, despite the presence of an entire piece discussing Chase's background, his influences, and our lack of comfort with ambiguity in storytelling. This makes sense, because we're in the news business, and what's newsworthy here is Chase appearing to confirm something many have long suspected.

What is the moral of this story?

In the "news" business outside the halls of Vox dot com, "appearing to confirm" is not actually the same as confirming. It's a little cheap to package the story in one way and then claim that's the "news" way to do it when it was, really, just a giant, embarrassing mistake. Which would be made less giant and embarrassing if they simply admitted it.

For my money the problem here is that Vox was very excited they would get to explain the end of the Sopranos in this quick and dirty way. If said explanation came at the expense of deeper understanding, well... so be it.

But wait, what are you saying, is Tony dead?

Tony Soprano, being a fictional character, can be neither alive nor dead. Instead, in an awful cliché which is awful because it is sort of true, he "lives" in the imagination of the people who watch him. A "dead" character can continue to "live" in this way no matter what happens to him within the frame of a story.

And in any event the ambiguous nature of a story was a recurring theme in the Sopranos. When Tony sat in his therapist's chair he discovered there were stories he'd been telling himself for years, about his mother, that weren't true. (He wasn't as good at being critical about the stories he told himself about himself.) When Carmela goes and tells her story to a Jewish therapist she discovers that her apprehension of her own reality is wrong, too. Also this was a show in which fish talked in the voices of the dead sometimes. It was meant to be ambiguous. It's okay to leave it there.

[Image via Getty.]

Companies are constantly seeking ways to lower their payrolls. These methods inevitably end up screwing workers. But there are signs that the government may at last be ready to ask companies to take responsibility for their own employees.

Last month, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that McDonald's could be held liable for labor violations by the people who own its franchises—an important ruling that could make it much harder for large corporations to avoid responsibility for the way they keep wages down, just by claiming that their franchisees control that aspect of the business. For a labor movement that has been protesting fast food franchises nationwide for years now, it was an encouraging sign.

Now, the Wall Street Journal says that the NLRB may be ready to issue another ruling that could make it more difficult for companies to force employees into "contract employee" designations (often by using outside staffing companies, which are growing each year) that serve to give employers all the benefits of having employees, without the responsibilities that go along with actually having real live full-time employees. From the WSJ:

Unions say such arrangements enable companies to exercise control over wages and working conditions but escape responsibility when workers have problems or demands. But as labor groups ask the five-member NLRB to declare more companies joint employers, business groups are fighting back, saying such moves could defeat the efficiencies of contracting and expose companies to greater liability in labor matters.

(In semi-related news, an appeals court in California just ruled that thousands of FedEx drivers are legally employees, not independent contractors.)

The unions are right. And so are the companies! Because all the companies are saying here is, "We would rather not be held responsible for these contract workers, because the whole reason we hired all those contract workers in the first place was to avoid being held responsible for things!"

The entire "contract worker"/ staffing company industry is in essence a middleman that collects fees in exchange for helping corporations avoid certain responsibilities for their workers, and it does not do much at all to help the vast majority of workers, so it is hard to have very much sympathy for it at all.

[Photo: AP]

Pranks can a real hoot, sometimes. Just goofin' on your friends, clownin' around, havin' fun. If there's any chance your innocent joke might end with your buddy facedown on the floor with an assault rifle pointed at his back, though, you might want to reconsider.

"Swatting" is a cool, reasonable prank that involves calling the cops and reporting a fake crime that might cause a SWAT team to respond. Jordan Mathewson, a Colorado-based gamer who uses the online handle Kootra, was swatted while playing Counter-Strike yesterday, and the entire terrifying ordeal was broadcast in a Twitch livestream and preserved in the six-minute video above.

The action begins about 40 seconds in, as several heavily armed cops burst into Mathewson's office, ordering him to freeze and put his hands behind his back. According to Littleton, Co., police, a caller "claimed to have shot two co-workers, held others hostage, and threatened to shoot them," and "stated that if the officers entered he would shoot them as well," so the cops' violent urgency in the video is understandable. No one was hurt, fortunately, but several area schools were placed on lockdown. Mathewson was eventually released without charge.

A garbage person who goes by @ScrewPain on Twitter appears to be taking credit. In a screencapped DM conversation with ABC reporter Eric Kahnert, ScrewPain said he called the fake active shooter situation in simply because he "could," and that he didn't feel particularly bad about it. LMFAO!

Police vowed to prosecute in a statement issued yesterday:

There were no victims or any evidence that a shooting had taken place. If the investigation determines that today's incident was a hoax, those involved will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Trey just found out he's about to have a new baby sibling, and this is exasperating. Why would his mom replace him and his sister, the two babies she just had, with a new one that's just going to cry all the time? It makes no sense!

Hang in there, little man. You're not the first to go through it, and you won't be the last—although some us didn't have the foresight to ask for earplugs.

[h/t Reddit]

Authorities say that a Centennial, Wyoming, pastor was shot and seriously wounded with his own gun after he allegedly interrupted a burglar at his rural church—which is a bit of a puzzler as authorities say they have yet to find evidence of any break-in at all.

According to the Albany County Sheriff's Department, deputies were called to the Centennial Valley Community Church around 8:20 p.m. on Tuesday evening, where they found 44-year-old Pastor Dennis Lynn Davis with a gunshot wound to what was described as his "lower abdomen area."

Davis was airlifted to a Cheyenne hospital, where he is reportedly stable after undergoing surgery on Wednesday.

Authorities say that Davis told them that he interrupted a burglary at his church and was shot following a struggle with the intruder for Davis' weapon, described as a .380 caliber handgun.

However, Albany County Undersheriff Rob DeBree says that nothing was missing from the church, and no sign of any burglar was found.

"It's alleged to be a burglary, but that's still under investigation," DeBree told the Associated Press.

Investigators say Davis described the alleged suspect as approximately 6 feet tall and wearing a black ski mask, black gloves and camouflaged clothes—a description that one Centennial resident told the Laramie Boomerang newspaper was worryingly vague.

"The description that they gave of, 'camo jacket and six feet'—that describes half of Centennial," Tara Gusea told the Boomerang.

Authorities say that an overnight search of Centennial and the surrounding area did not turn up anybody matching that description.

UPDATE: After being faced with a big pile of conflicting evidence, Davis admitted to authorities that he shot himself, KGWN-TV in Cheyenne reports.

According to authorities, Davis admitted making up the burglary story and apologized, saying that he had some personal issues to work out for himself.

Davis could face criminal charges for injuring himself and making a false police report.

(h/t Sean Brody)

Image via the Centennial Valley Community Church

What's he doin' out there?

Message from senior White House official: 'He loves that suit.'

— Susan Page (@SusanPage) August 28, 2014

HE'S THE ONLY ONE.

[Image of Obama at White House press briefing via AP]

The Washington Post reports that executed American journalist James Foley and at least three other American hostages were waterboarded by ISIS militants during their captivity. According to the Post's source, ISIS "knew exactly how it was done."

The CIA adopted waterboarding as an interrogation technique after 9/11, and critics of the practice have long worried that eventually America's extremist enemies would use it, too. Waterboarding, as described by the Post, goes like this:

The victims of waterboarding are often strapped down on gurneys or benches while cold water is poured over a cloth covering their faces; they suffer the sensation of feeling they are drowning.

President Obama declared the practice torture when he first took office.

A U.S. official told the Post that the CIA's use of waterboarding and ISIS militants' use of waterboarding are not related:

ISIL is a group that routinely crucifies and beheads people. To suggest that there is any correlation between ISIL's brutality and past U.S. actions is ridiculous and feeds into their twisted propaganda.

[Image via AP]

Melissa and Hambone are up to it again! This Labor Day Weekend all they want to do is squeeze the last of the Flix juice from the Net rind, or else what is their $8.65 a month even for? They delight in destruction; the gleam in Hambone's eyes says, "I want to see it when these movies vanish from Netflix. The actual moment they blink out of existence. To feel like a God." So let's help 'em out killing the time until September 1 with some solid info.

• About Last Night…, Can't Hardly Wait, Midnight Express, Dirty Dancing are all good ideas if you were going to have a sleepover this weekend.
• Return to the Blue Lagoon also, if you understand the conceit, which is basically that one Milla Jovovich is exactly as hot as one Brooke Shields plus one Christopher (very hot!) Atkins.

• Harriet the Spy, Penelope, and Just One of the Guys are all very educational about what is life even about. If you would like to be educated, now is your last chance.
• (The entirety of Sesame Street is also going away, but listen if you're not caught up on your Sesame Street by now I don't really think you're going to get there in one weekend.)

• Star Trek and Star Trek: First Contact, the real Doctor Doolittle, Lord of Illusions, and The Haunting are all good sci-fi movies for if you like both science and fiction.

Gothic, also, is a good one. Especially if you enjoy the gross sexiness of Julian Sands making you feel weird, small werewolves squatting on you, chilling out with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as she invents science fiction, or living through erotic horrors on your vacation.

• Popeye and The Fisher King are good movies! But make sure you are there for the right reasons.
• Same with 2004's My Summer of Love, where Emily Blunt fucks a girl and Paddy Considine is also in the movie.

30 For 30! The only interesting thing in the entire world of sports, and it's going away! You better at least watch the Tonya Harding one, trust me on that. Otherwise, I am not a great expert for what is good in or about sports, or what happened during them. I just know that every one of these I have ever seen has been really eye-opening and well done. Sports for people who aren't faking an enthusiasm for sports like the rest of America is and can just appreciate a good documentary about excellence.

At your discretion, but I can't personally recommend them:

• Superstar, a movie about not really trying very hard
• Panic Room, a dumb Fincher movie about a room and a crazy lady in it, Jared Leto outside it, and an explosion of money, just like
• The People Under the Stairs, which is at least as good as
• The Mummy, that people love in a way I am not qualified to judge, just like
• What About Bob?
• Double Jeopardy, which I really wanted to like, but at some point you just realize Ashley Judd is never pretending to be a crazy person, she is just letting her inner crazy person out and getting paid for it, which is the opposite of
• Ali G Indahouse, which should probably be in the list at the bottom of this post but honestly, somebody's watching it and if that's you, you need as much sympathy as I can muster. I actually really like Sasha Baron Cohen but I mostly hate his characters? Like Chris Lilley, same thing.

More movies you have to make up your own mind about:

• I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, a 2003 gangster movie that features Clive Owen looking the finest he will maybe ever look, Malcolm McDowell, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers with his garbage looking face.
• Never Back Down, a 2008 movie about an underground fight club starring the very mesmerizing and perfect Sean Faris, that girl Amber Heard that I can never remember what she looks like but I know I like her, and Cam Gigandet who I used to just hate but then Channing Tatum arrived, which really complicated matters with Cam Gigandet. Channing Tatum never killed Marissa Cooper, really the only plus in his column, but a mighty big plus.
• Flyboys, where James Franco joins the French military just to be silly.
• Stir Crazy, which is of course a great movie, but I've never seen it because I was terrified of both Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor when I was a child, and to this day I've never seen any of their classic caper films. I can remember my grandmother being like, "You need to get over this Gene Wilder thing. He was a very good husband to Gilda Radner." Well then make a movie about THAT!

It's okay, everybody's different and can like different things. Like, somebody probably likes Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, which sucks, which is sad because Candyman is a classic that taught me a lot about race and academia. I am being serious, it's great. This entitled white-lady grad student is like, "Black people are super interesting! But I feel like they could use my help improving in some key areas." Long story short, black people are super interesting, and when you don't know what you're talking about, things can get "interesting" real fast. This second one tries to be about passing privilege, to be fair, but it's basically just the Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows of the franchise.

Hmm. Good movies about A Guy: Bellflower, Ali, Bugsy, Capote. If you like guys, or a movie about a guy, those are some.

Sad to see leaving: Lust, Caution, the very intense The Apartment, and The Seven Year Itch. Also:

• Thieves Like Us, which is a Depression-Era romance heist with Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall. Every time a Shelley Duvall movie leaves Netflix, an angel dies screaming.
• Wicker Park, a lot of people don't understand how good that movie is but I love it; it's a romantic drama comedy filmed like a suspense thriller, which sometimes is exactly love. Sometimes it can feel like they are there to trick you or kill you and not just be your boyfriend, because that is what intimacy and boundaries mostly are about: Scaring the shit out of yourself and hoping it's for a good reason. Good movie.
• El Dorado, the only good Western that is not about Rooster Cogburn.
• A Slipping Down Life, in which Lili Taylor carves Guy Perce's name into her forehead and they become runaway buddies. (Possibly this is a documentary. It has the ring of truth.)
• Black Mama, White Mama, in which two lady jailbirds who quote "stab their way to freedom while igniting a shooting war between gangsters and militants." (Pam Grier, obviously, is in this 1972 film: Two factors that make it okay to watch.) A cinematic prequel to The Fosters.
• Charley Varrick, a 1973 bankrobber movie with Walter Matthau and Joe Don Baker. An embarrassment of sexy riches!
• Fool for Love, a Robert Altman adaptation of a Sam Shepard play; with Kim Basinger and Harry Dean Stanton. I'm a sucker for the genre of dusty motel realness—c.f. Bagdad Café, Gas Food Lodging, Last Picture Show in some ways—so I say catch up on this one.
• The Long Goodbye, which is the best Philip Marlowe movie, the best Elliott Gould movie, the best anachronistic Raymond Chandler movie ever, and also film's best use of extradiagetic music. It's a movie of superlatives.

Movies you should definitely NOT make time for this weekend include: William Shatner's Get a Life!, Failure to Launch, I.Q., Something's Gotta Give, and Star Trek: The Voyage Home. Obviously.

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here.

With our imperfect knowledge and limited faculties constrained, as they are, by the hedges of time and space, we cannot "know," in the narrow, popularly-used sense of the word, which of the Ten Commandments Blake Lively violated that prompted God to turn her birthday into a bee hell, but it was probably 9.

According to Blake Lively (and Us Weekly), Blake Lively was attacked by bees shortly before her 27th birthday this past Monday, August 25th. (Virgo.)

Lively recounted the incident, or, anyway, described some kind of—what now? on her idea, Preserve, in the fanciful, borderline incomprehensible narrative style that has become her trademark.

I don't know enough about insects to say if they were wasps, honeybees or Mother Nature's miniature flying tasers. What I DO know, is that just moments before we were in the midst of a gorgeous fall fashion shoot. Now, I was a Monty Python sketch; running at top speed in no particular direction, whipping my arms and hands around like I'd just discovered they were growing out of my shoulders without my previous knowledge. There was a terrible sound piercing the air too… I was later informed this sound had emanated from my very own mouth. I'd prefer to never hear it again. Along with everybody else on the East Coast.

In the same post, the actress catalogued the exact sensations she experienced as the bees' angry stingers were purposely and precisely embedded into her flesh over and over again by the steady, invisible hand of our infallible God:

Does your butt quite suddenly (and painfully) deflate when you turn 27? Because mine hurt like hell …then my neck, back, legs and forehead. And oh my hands! They were shriveling. It felt like I was being shot by dozens of tiny invisible darts. I felt like the Wicked Witch, melting, melting, burning, melting.

As it happens, I wasn't being greeted by the onset of spontaneous aging, but rather a full-fledged bee day. Attacked. All over. Everywhere.

In the end, Lively used the traumatic experience as an opportunity to talk about how she will always be young at heart, which is proof that Blake Lively can ruin anything, even if it is the kind of thing you would normally love, such as a story about Blake Lively being attacked by bees.

It wasn't until I covered the counters in coordinating candy sprinkles that I stopped to acknowledge: my butt will deflate more and more, my hands will shrivel and permanently prune, but I will never, ever grow up.

Maybe next time God will cover those counters in BEES.

[Image via Getty]

Silicon Valley's top tech firms are infamous for paying their help borderline-poverty wages, including private security. Today, some of Apple's retail and corporate guards protested their low pay at the company's flagship shop in San Francisco.

According to multiple protesters and reporters, tweeting under the hashtag #TechCanDoBetter, contractors organized by the SEIU labor union staged a sit-in at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. Holding signs reading "Invisible No More" and "Opportunity for All Our Communities," the protesters peacefully occupied the store for over an hour before a confrontation with police.

As it became clear Apple employees were going to "wait the protesters out," the contractors allegedly decided to block the doors to the store. Police officers then declared the demonstration illegal, and reportedly arrested a dozen of the protesters.

From freelance journalist Julia Carrie Wong, who live-tweeted from the scene:

SFPD is now declaring an unlawful assembly with protesters blocking the sidewalk in front of Apple Store in SF pic.twitter.com/0b61c3LrG0

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) August 28, 2014

Arrests have begun #techcandobetter pic.twitter.com/tC7uBtpg0N

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) August 28, 2014

Just two protesters remain. The rest were led away by cops. #techcandobetter pic.twitter.com/fOAJ3JtmvT

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) August 28, 2014

Zip-ties placed on protesters, who are not resisting. #techcandobetter pic.twitter.com/WQyvzAn2aq

— Julia Carrie Wong (@juliacarriew) August 28, 2014

According to Wong, a SFPD Lieutenant confirms that the protesters were arrested "for not following police orders."

We have reached out to SEIU, SFPD, and Apple for comment. We will update this post when we receive a response. To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Photo: Stand for Security

A few weeks ago we brought you the story of Million Dollar Mano, Kanye West's one-time tour DJ who was supposedly fired by the rapper for being egregiously inept at his job of queueing up songs. Well, yesterday a new video of Kanye cursing out at another DJ was discovered, and it might be the funniest one yet.

This video was taken a few months ago by someone who was at the show in which Dave Chappelle brought West out at Radio City to perform a short set. That set included a rendition of "Gold Digger," which, let's say, didn't go smoothly. In the clip we see West rapping when the backing track starts to stutter and burble out of nowhere, at which point West points at the DJ and says "what the fuck?" in a perfectly incredulous voice.

What's best about this one, I think, is that his exclamation comes right on beat, just before he is supposed to start his next verse. It's so well-timed that it actually feels like a comedy sketch.

Let's all wish Kanye better DJ luck before we go to bed tonight. He shouldn't have to endure this.

Bob Litt is general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, but not too long ago, according to the Washington Post, he was the defense lawyer for a CIA agent accused of the 2003 rendition and brutalization of an innocent German national. Should he redact the Senate's CIA Torture Report?

Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is cool with it. So is Jack Marshall, the president and founder of ProEthics Ltd., a national ethics consulting and training company that has done work for the CIA. Well, mostly cool with it:

"It does not cross the very low bar that the profession sets for an impermissible conflict of interest," Marshall explained to reporters for McClatchy this week. "But it is the kind of conflict of interest that should be avoided at all costs. The government has to be held to a higher standard."

However, another person who is more unreservedly OK with it is the Director of National Intelligence's ethics official Susan Gibson. Granted, she is Bob Litt's direct subordinate, as his principal deputy counsel at DNI—but just what are you trying to say about her? Are you saying that a strong independent person like Susan might be too afraid to stand up to her boss?

Why can't you relax about this?

Aside from representing CIA analyst Alfreda Frances Bikowsky in the aforementioned wrongful abduction and torture of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, Litt has represented several as-yet-unknown agency employees in similar legal disputes; Citing attorney-client privilege and the classified nature of some of these legal cases, he could not fully disclose the details to the intelligence committee when it began its probe back in 2009.

Litt, sufficed to say, in writing to the committee, "I represent several present and former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency in matters relating to the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists."

Big deal.

Sure, there has been a lot of arguing about which portions of the 510-page executive summary to the committee's classified 6,700-page "torture report" should be made public. There was that unflattering incident where the CIA lied and then was forced to admit that they had spied on Senate Intelligence Committee staffers. And the disclosure that the CIA had falsified evidence during that spying, so that they could charge congressional staffers with mishandling classified information. Yes, true, the CIA has been demanding that quite a lot of contextual details be removed, bordering on making the public version of their summary an incomprehensible miasma of moral decay and human depravity. It is also, for sure, a matter of record that very negative things pertaining to Bob Litt's former CIA clients might be appearing in this report, and he has been tasked with the job of deciding whether or not those details should be made public. Really, though: Where are you going with this?

A member of the committee, Mark Udall (D-Colo.), told reporters that he had been "concerned all along about conflicts of interest related to the declassification of the Senate Intelligence Committee's study."

"I urged the president in April to have the White House lead the declassification process instead of the CIA," he said. "The redaction process has not been conducted in accordance with my request, and I remain concerned about who continues to lead and drive the process."

Is it that you agree with Senator Mark Udall, for some reason? Is that it?

Oh.

[h/t McClatchy D.C. bureau; photo of Robert Litt by Charles Dharapak/AP]

To contact the author, email matthew.phelan@gawker.com, pgp public key.

In January, a St. Paul, Minn., father was tased and arrested by police while waiting in a public seating area to pick his kids up from school. His video of the disturbing encounter just surfaced this week—in the description on YouTube, he says the phone he used to record it was confiscated until months after the incident.

The video begins as the man, identified by the Minneapolis City Pages as Chris Lollie, 27, walks through the First National Bank Building Skyway after being asked to leave a public seating area by a store employee. A female officer follows, demanding to know his name and his problem with the shopkeeper.

Lollie calmly tells her that he doesn't have to give his name—he knows his rights—and that "The problem is I'm black. That's the problem."

"I've got to go get my kids."

As they continue walking toward Lollie's kids' school, another officer—identified in the police report as Bruce Schmidt—approaches them.

"What's going on, brother?" Lollie says to him.

"You're going to go to jail. I'm not your brother, I'm not here to argue with you. Put your hands behind your back," Officer Schmidt replies. Then Lollie drops his phone as the officer grabs him, causing the video to cut out.

The audio continues, though: You can hear Lollie screaming for help, the sound of a stun gun charging up, and Lollie pleading "That's my kids right there! My kids are right there!" as he's being cuffed.

"I didn't do anything wrong. I'm a working man. I take care of my kids. And I get this?" he says near the end of the recording, "And you tase me. For what? I don't have any weapons. You're the ones with the weapons here."

The City Pages obtained the St. Paul PD police report, showing Lollie was arrested for trespassing, disorderly conduct, and obstructing legal process. The charges against him have since been dismissed.

The St. Paul Police Department said on Twitter that no investigation into the officers' behavior has been conducted because "no formal complaint has been made at this point."

[h/t Slog]

Kirk Cameron, one of God's favorite Earth angels, straps on his little wing armor and floats to the Christmas battlefield in the new trailer for his upcoming film Saving Christmas. The devils at YouTube will even let you watch this one!

"Do you ever feel like Christmas has been hijacked?" Cameron asks in a voiceover. "By all the commercialism, and those who wanna replace 'Merry Christmas' with 'Happy Holidays' or 'Seasons Greetings,' whatever that means?" Uh, I think we all know what it means, Kirk. (It isn't polite to say.)

"It's all about Christmas. It's all about J— Jesus," Cameron explains to a Louis C.K.-style Christmas-fatigued friend in a way that makes you think "why didn't they do a second take?" People dance. More dancing is promised, as well as more celebrating, and more feasting. There is a very scary moment in some sort of field.

Is Christmas saved? Well, we'll just have to repent, wait, and see.

[via YouTube]

One of the nicest things about summer is a nearby afternoon thunderstorm. The storm bubbles up on the horizon and a few minutes later you get a nice gust of cool, refreshing wind. This gust of wind is called an "outflow boundary," and it's one of the most interesting weather phenomena there is.

Most summertime thunderstorms are known as "single cell," or individual storms that bubble up, dump heavy rain and lightning for half an hour, then collapse. During the early stages of a thunderstorm's life cycle, its updraft (the warm, moist air flowing into the storm) feeds the structure the energy it needs to allow it to grow in size and strength.

Eventually, the weight of the water in the thunderstorm will become too great for the updraft to sustain, causing precipitation to fall and a downdraft to develop. The downdraft, or the cooler air that sinks out of the thunderstorm, will pool up on and above the ground beneath the storm in what's known as a "cold pool." This cold pool will begin spreading out away from the storm like a ripple on a pond, cutting off the updraft and starving the storm of its fuel, causing it to dissipate.

When the cold pool starts radiating out away from the parent thunderstorm, it's often called an "outflow boundary." The outflow boundary acts like a mini cold front, bringing with it cooler temperatures and gusty winds. Oftentimes, these outflow boundaries are able to force the warm, moist air ahead of them to rise, triggering more thunderstorm activity. This often happens on the Gulf Coast; a couple of storms will form and dissipate, sending out outflow boundaries that trigger a domino effect of thunderstorms that continues until the sun sets and the instability subsides.

While these pop-up storms are the most familiar, all types of thunderstorms — single cell, multicell (clusters or lines), and supercells — all produce outflow boundaries.

We can often see these outflow boundaries on Doppler weather radar thanks to two major factors: density differences and bugs. Warm air is less dense than cold air, so there's a change in density along the outflow boundary. This density difference can reflect the beam back to the site, appearing as a fine line on radar imagery. Clouds of bugs and dust can also get caught along the leading edge of an outflow boundary, which also reflects back to the radar site as a return.

The above radar image is from Chicago this past Monday. Thunderstorm activity in the area produced some very visible outflow boundaries on Doppler radar. If you can't spot them all, here they are highlighted in white:

You'll notice that two outflow boundaries collided with each other between Kankakee and Pontiac, creating enhanced lift and triggering a small but intense thunderstorm just west of Kankakee.

The best spot in the country to see outflow boundaries on weather radar is in Mobile, Alabama, which sits smack in the middle of the northern Gulf Coast. Mobile is the wettest city in the country thanks to its almost-daily thunderstorm activity during the summer, and the radar is almost as fun to watch as it is to experience the storms themselves.

Here's a snapshot of some storm activity in Mobile from September 16, 2013, showing nearly a dozen outflow boundaries:

There are more boundaries than what we can see on the radar — the radar eventually stops detecting these features because the beam gets higher off the ground the farther it gets from the radar site.

It's not just individual storms that produce outflows. Lines of thunderstorms develop along the leading edge of a well-developed cold pool. The most organized lines of storms are called mesoscale convective systems (MCS), and an MCS basically creates its own outflow boundary to sustain itself. You can see some very well-defined outflow boundaries on radar during these situations, especially after a particularly intense derecho starts to weaken.

A great example of an outflow boundary ahead of a line of storms is the Ohio-D.C. Derecho of 2012. When the derecho crossed the Appalachian Mountains, the northern half of the derecho kept up with the cold pool, allowing the storms to remain severe as it walloped the D.C. and Baltimore areas. The southern half of the derecho rapidly weakened after the cold pool started moving faster than the storms, cutting off the updrafts and forcing the storms to dissipate.

Even though the storms began to dissipate, the cold pool kept on racing to the southeast, appearing on radar as a well-defined outflow boundary.

The next time there are storms in the area, check out the radar and look for these awesome features, and be sure to look up towards the sky. Not only are outflow boundaries pretty cool (figuratively and literally), but the clouds they produce are often spectacular as well.

[Top image by the author, radar images via Gibson Ridge]

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Fueled by a potent mix of ignorance and teenage boredom, rumors of an upcoming "purge" raced across the country last week, with just about every major American city named as a target. A purge, in case you're not familiar, is the eponymous night of terror from 2013's The Purge, a dystopian horror-thriller where once a year all crime is legal for 12 hours.

Of course, the supposedly imminent violence and mayhem never came. Police in Louisville—the city most often named in the warnings—dismissed the rumors as the work of "some kid who thinks it's funny." But L.A. Laker and Iggy Azalea beau Nick Young apparently didn't get the message, taking to Twitter to condemn the completely fictional practice.

"So they got a real life purge in Chi-town and Milwaukee, that's crazy" wrote Young on Tuesday, correctly assessing the hoax as a crazy thing no sane person should believe and sharing it with 150,000 people anyway.

So they got a real life purge in Chi-town and Milwaukee that's crazy ...

— Nick Young (@NickSwagyPYoung) August 26, 2014

To his credit, Young did hedge his statement somewhat, saying, "We need to wake up for real if that's true." Although really, we could probably use some waking up either way.

We need to wake up for real if that's true

— Nick Young (@NickSwagyPYoung) August 26, 2014

[ Image via Viralglobalnews.com]

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.

We used to have white flight. Now, in city centers, we have something that one policy researcher calls white infill. So what happens when a bunch of white people start moving in? The changes are a lot more profound than getting a new Starbucks on the corner.

Photo by torbakhopper

Actually, it probably does mean getting a Starbucks or another upscale cafe, as many people protesting the gentrification of New York's Harlem neighborhood have pointed out. But it also means a lot of other changes, mostly economic, which lead to dramatic cultural shifts.

Put simply, across the United States, white infill is associated with gentrification.

Sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term "gentrification" to describe class struggles in London's Notting Hill and Islington areas. In 1964, she wrote about how gentrification took place after rich Londoners moved to these previously working-class areas, displacing their current residents. What's crucial about Glass' idea is that gentrification describes how wealthy migrants push out low-income locals.

In North America, gentrification takes on a racial hue. Especially in the United States, it's likely that your class position will be correlated with your racial background: for example, blacks tend to be overrepresented among low-income people, while whites are overrepresented among middle and higher-income people. This is the result of many factors, including the history of slavery and immigration in the U.S., as well as profound ongoing problems with racist forms of discrimination.

As a result, the gentrification of Chicago looks very different from gentrification in Berlin, Istanbul and London. But still, they are all examples of how wealthy groups from outside a city or neighborhood displace locals with low income.

White People's Money

If the incomes of these locals in the U.S. were rising at the same rate as the incomes of whites, this might not be such a problem. Maybe whites would come to town, move into some abandoned places, and spruce up the joint. The problem is that the income disparity between blacks and whites has been growing immensely over the past few decades. Local black residents can't compete with the white infillers for space.

So when whites flock to a black neighborhood, they are often the harbingers of doom. Rents skyrocket to the point where the original population can no longer afford it — and they move to low-income suburbs like Ferguson outside St. Louis.

Suburbs have been America's ghettos for years now, though many people didn't realize it until the mortgage crisis unfolded. In media reports and analysis, it became obvious that the people hit hardest in the resulting foreclosure disaster were the suburban poor and working class, many of whom were made homeless. That was the moment when we could no longer ignore the way the populations of cities were transforming before our eyes.

Whites once fled the inner cities to the suburbs, but now it's the outer cities that whites abandon for the "excitement" of city life. I'm not saying that these white people came up with a devious plan to kick out the local black or Latino populations in cities. They just don't notice when it happens, or they believe that the benefits of gentrification will "trickle down" to the poor. Their beliefs are even backed up by a few studies, using pre-2000 data, finding that gentrification doesn't result in displacement. But in the years since 2000, that picture has changed.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Earlier this month, sociologists Jackelyn Hwang and Robert J. Sampson published a massive survey of gentrification in Chicago neighborhoods. What they found was that the notoriously racially-divided city was gentrifying its neighborhoods unevenly. Neighborhoods with 35 percent or more white people tended to gentrify over time; neighborhoods with 40 percent or more black people tended not to gentrify, or would show a few signs of gentrification that never led to a complete transformation. Neighborhoods with a high percentage of Latinos tended to share the fate of these black neighborhoods.

In a summary of their research, Hwang writes:

Gentrification is often depicted as a process in which middle-class whites move into and thus integrate minority neighborhoods. But in fact, gentrifiers prefer already white neighborhoods; they are least attracted to black neighborhoods and see Asian and Latino neighborhoods as middling options.

Gentrifiers seem to prefer mixed neighborhoods that already have a high percentage of whites in them. By moving in, they push up the percentage of whites in a mixed neighborhood, and black and Latino locals have to find somewhere else to go. Perhaps they're moving over to the non-gentrifying neighborhoods — we just don't know.

Here's what's important. Hwang and Sampson's research shows that recent gentrification is absolutely changing the population of neighborhoods. Locals are being displaced. And often, those locals are people of color.

But why do whites only seem to gentrify partly-white neighborhoods in Chicago? Hwang and Sampson tackled that question by refining how we understand gentrification. Instead of looking at just census records or crime rates, they also used Google Street View to examine Chicago's neighborhoods block by block, looking for signs of homes being renovated, infrastructure being upgraded, and new construction (yes, they also looked at the number of Starbucks). They also noted when neighborhoods weren't gentrified, and the signs of that included dilapidated houses, trash on the street, and graffiti. The researchers were aiming to capture something that the census can't: How a neighborhood looks and feels to the people in it.

A big part of what attracts gentrifiers to a neighborhood has to do with this difficult-to-define "look." Sometimes, the researchers noted, whites would score a neighborhood as looking more run down than it really was if it were a black neighborhood. This kind of indirect racism might be what's keeping Chicago's black neighborhoods from being gentrified by whites.

Of course, this is only in Chicago. The fear of a majority black neighborhood does not seem to be slowing down white migration into New York's Harlem or Atlanta's city center.

The Field of the Hittites

With this in mind, it might seem like the answer to the question, "what happens when whites move into my neighborhood?" is simple. They drive up housing and rental prices, and they drive out people of color. But something else is going on, too. Whites are changing the culture of these neighborhoods.

In his excellent book Cairo: Histories of a City, urban planning professor Nezar AlSayyad explores the way the neighborhoods in this ancient city changed over time. He notes that even Memphis, the ancient Egyptian city across the water from Cairo, had ethnic neighborhoods going back to the mid-2000s BCE. Back then, the city that built the pyramids had a neighborhood called the Field of the Hittites. That's where the Hittites lived, an ethnic group distinct from the ancient Egyptians. Later, there were Carian and Phoenican neighborhoods too.

Maybe the Egyptian hipsters headed over to the Field of the Hittites for cool music and excellent food. Maybe they complained that the Hittites had a run-down neighborhood. We don't know. But when Cairo began to grow, a couple thousand years later, it too had ethnic neighborhoods that changed over time as new groups arrived to conquer or assimilate. It seems that humans have formed ethnic neighborhoods for almost as long as they have built cities.

When people come to a city from far away — or even from nearby — they regain a sense of home by finding people similar to themselves. They move into a neighborhood partly because it has the amenities that they want, whether those are schools or public transit. But they also do it because the places where we live help us to define our identities. So when white people come into a neighborhood and start gentrifying it, what they're doing isn't just economic. It's also cultural and psychological.

They're changing the feel of the place.

From Race to Class

I mentioned earlier that in the United States, race and class are often connected. The economic gap between black and white families is growing — but so is the gap between wealthy and poor regardless of race. As Justin Feldman notes in a research survey for the Harvard Shorenstein Center, this gap is even wider in cities, and since the 1970s, city neighborhoods have become more segregated by class.

The results of today's gentrification processes may be that ethnic neighborhoods will slowly transform into class neighborhoods. People in lower income brackets will move out of the city center into suburbs — or into low-income neighborhoods with few whites, as we saw in Chicago.

As several studies have shown, economically segregated neighborhoods lead to a society with less class mobility. The people in it those neighborhoods may get pushed around in terms of where they live, depending on whether the whites are fleeing or infilling that decade. But they won't get pushed up the economic ladder.

That's why our next battle against segregation in our cities will be against class segregation. Because when whites move into your neighborhood, they aren't just bringing in fancy coffee drinks and a fetish for Victorian moustaches. They are changing the economic playing field for everyone, possibly for generations to come.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9. She's the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction. Follow her on Twitter, or email her.

Tonight it's either two hours of aliens or two hours of dorks, Maria Menounos figures out some stuff that's been bugging her, Big Brother continues into its perennial shitter past the halfway point, a heartwarming story about Jamaica is related, and we make some guesses as to Nicole Richie's whole deal.

At 8/7c. on Syfy, Defiance is having its two-hour finale. I didn't totally love the last two episodes, but this season has been so fantastic that I'm still hugely excited for tonight. That's up against a double episode of The Quest, which is funny if you think about it, and then on e! Maria Menounos who I quite like, who—along with Seacrest obviously—is like, the only e! person I can honestly stand at this point. Downside, she's investigating tonight such Untold things such as: "Rags To Reality," "Star Stalkers," and humiliat-/infuriatingly, "EDM-Pire." Maria, let's get you a real job. I just think you can do anything, I honestly do.

At 9/8c. it's the deciding Big Brother episode: Will Donny or Nicole go home? I can't wait to see what the bores, dipshits and lunatics left in the House will decide. Last night I said definitely Donny will be back for an All-Stars, right? And then somebody whispered, "Donny and Ian Terry" and I got shivers all over my body. What if it was Donny, Ian Terry and Zach Rance. I would die. I would implode, like a star turning itself into a black hole portal to other dimensions. Like a coal making diamond of itself.

There's also Braxton Family Values, whose episode title "Jamaican Me Crazy" was the theme of my Junior Homecoming. I remember exactly where I was standing, in Midland Park Mall by the Claire's—with my Alternative friends—when who should appear, worlds colliding, but my best Spanish Class buddy The Glamorous J'Lynn:

J'Lynn: "Guess the theme for Homecoming, I just got out of Committee."
Jacob: "I can't wait for you to tell me the end of this joke."
J'Lynn: "It is ... 'Jamaican Me Crazy.'"
Jacob: "I have never been more impressed or prouder of the Robert E. Lee High School Student Council in my life."
J'Lynn: "Had a feeling you needed this info ASAP, lol."

Jacob: "...Say it the fuck again."

Dating Naked, Doomsday Preppers ("There Will Be Chaos"!), Project Runway, and Rush on USA also air. At 9:30/8:30c., the excellently titled Bravo parenting show with the excellently titled episodes, Extreme Guide To Parenting, airs an episode called "The Highly Disciplined Warriors & The Total Package." Don't you already feel like you know both those families intimately just from those seven word sand one coordinating conjunction? I hope that one day people will refer to my brood just casually as "the highly disciplined warriors." I hope the fuck out of that. "Oh and here comes the highly disciplined Clifton warriors, better lock up your daughters! Or your sons, whatever happens it's fine, it's your life, we won't think of you any differently."

At 10/9c. the generally well received #candidlynicole returns. The impression I get about Nicole Richie, based on almost zero information, is that as she got older and better at life, she did not get dumber. Sometimes when people get less crazy they get less interesting but it seems as if for her, the smart girl imprisoned inside her awkward years is still with us. (I still don't watch the show, so like I said this is based almost entirely on no facts whatsoever.) IFC has another Garfunkel & Oates, if you don't have a problem with that sort of thing, while the fifth Honorable Woman airs on Sundance. It's Married/You're the Worst on FX, in other words giving you a half-hour before You're the Worst to finish up your day business.

At 11/10c. there's an afterparty immediately following the just-wrapped second season of Party Down South on CMT, and the fourth Deadly Sin (Envy) on Showtime, but what I wanted to mention is that I just caught up on Black Jesus, and it's fucking amazing. I highly recommend it. I don't even know what else to say, just that I feel dumb I took so long to get to it, but also highly satisfied by the fact that I got to watch three in a row just in time for tonight. Great show.

Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. What are you watching tonight? What are we missing out on? Recommendations and discussions down below.

Good news for people who love tiger news: This 25-day-old black tiger exists. The unnamed, cute-as-hell cub resides in Hangzhou, eastern China, where it uses a dog as a wet nurse and "owns the color of black due to pseudo-melanism," according to ChinaFotoPress.

[Photo: Getty Images]