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Eight Children Suffer Burns From Botched Tornado Demo at Reno Museum

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Eight Children Suffer Burns From Botched Tornado Demo at Reno Museum

Thirteen people, including eight children, suffered burns after a methyl alcohol and boric acid tornado demonstration caused a chemical flash at the Terry Lee Wells Discovery Museum in Reno yesterday. The burns were originally believed to have been the result of an explosion, but a city spokesperson explained to the Associated Press that it was actually more like "if someone threw gasoline on a fire," which is not exactly reassuring.

"The injuries were the result of a mishap of a routine museum demonstration that simulates a tornado," a statement from the City of Reno release Wednesday reads. "Reno Fire Department investigators are working with museum staff to determine what caused the chemical flash."

The eight children and one adult were taken to the hospital for acid burns to their hands, arms, and faces and for smoke inhalation. Four people were treated at the scene. One child was kept at Renown Regional Medical Center overnight for observation, but is expected to be released today, the Associated Press reports.

KRNV aired slow-motion footage allegedly taken during the flash in which you can see a flame burst on the ground in front of the kids.

[Image via AP // Video via KRNV]


How Not To Be An Asshole When You Fly

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How Not To Be An Asshole When You Fly

What is it with all of the anger and stupidity on planes these days? It seems like every day a plane is diverted over a fight caused by something that should be a matter of simple respect. Clearly, some people need a reminder of how to act on a plane, so let's look at what assholes do when they fly.

Assholes use Knee Defenders.

These news-making and cheap little freedom clamps attach to your tray table and prevent the person in front of you from reclining their seat. Spirit Airlines CEO Ben Baldanza said "If you need more legroom, go pay for it at another airline." Spirit is the most hated airline in the country, but they're consistently profitable, so there's a lot to be respected about their business model. Knee defenders have been the cause of some air rage lately, but people just need to lighten up and use common courtesy. Airlines can't build out their cabins based on the height and girth of the exceptions to the average traveler.

Assholes hog the overhead bins.

How Not To Be An Asshole When You FlyJust because your roller bag fits up there doesn't mean it belongs up there. All airlines have set size limitations for carry-on bags, and you should follow them. If you have a compliant-sized bag, it goes into the bin lengthwise, not sideways. And don't put your "personal items" in the bins either. The briefcases, purses, and backpacks go under the seat in front of you. If boarding is done and there's still space in the bins, then you may put your extra stuff up there.

How Not To Be An Asshole When You Fly

Pic via shutterstock.com

Assholes touch the flight attendants.

Flight attendants hate when you touch them. Don't ever touch them to get their attention while already they're busy serving someone. They can't just ignore you, so you're forcing them to put away the evil eyes and compose a smile in the time it takes to do an about-face. Would you like it if someone came up and poked you on the shoulder while you're working? If they're all gabbing in the rear galley of the plane, approach them and wait patiently to be acknowledged. If you're at your seat, wait for one to come by, or press the call button. You know you've always wanted to press that button. And for crying out loud, say "please" and "thank you" when requesting and receiving something from a flight attendant!

George Carlin absolutely nails it with his bit on the absurdity of preparing to fly.

Assholes groom themselves at their seats.

People actually clip their fingernails and toenails at their seat! That's repulsive. Were you so busy before coming to the airport that you couldn't spend a few minutes doing this at home? If you're on a long-haul overnight flight, of course you want to look presentable when you arrive, but go to the lavatory to clip or brush whatever needs attention.

How Not To Be An Asshole When You Fly

Pic by Jared Jennings on Flickr (CC Commercial License)

Assholes get up while the 'Fasten Seat Belt' sign is on.

Just keep your butt in the chair while the light is on, with your seat belt buckled. It's on for a reason, and that reason is your safety. People are injured every year when flights encounter turbulence. Unless a fractured skull, broken neck or vertebrae sound like fun to you, stay seated and buckled. You should have emptied your bladder before boarding.

Assholes get drunk on planes.

How Not To Be An Asshole When You Fly

Pic by Sarah Ackerman on Flickr (CC Commercial License)

Sorry, Dierks Bentley, but "buying drinks for everybody but the pilot" and "rocking the 737 like a G6" is not cool. By the way, the G6 is a car, not a plane. It's a fun song, but let's step back into reality. The flight attendants won't party with you. They will hate you, and they will cut you off. Being the crazy, loud drunk guy on a flight is a great way to get yourself arrested when you land, along with ending up all over Twitter and YouTube.

Assholes complain about the air travel experience while not doing anything about it.

When you have a bad experience at a restaurant, what do you do? Unless you're a glutton for punishment, you don't go to that restaurant anymore. You eat somewhere else next time you're hungry, because there are other choices just across the street. And just like dining out, air travel is a luxury. If you're one of those "I hate flying" people, spare the rest of us the misery of sitting near you and stay home, drive, or take a bus. We don't want to sit by you any more than you want to be in that middle seat. Otherwise, suck it up and keep your negativity to yourself.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

Supposed Photo of Injured Darren Wilson Is Just Some White Guy

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Supposed Photo of Injured Darren Wilson Is Just Some White Guy

Weeks after the police shooting of Michael Brown, it's still unclear what injuries—if any—Brown's killer Darren Wilson sustained during the encounter, but that hasn't stopped the officer's defenders from finding the bogus "evidence" they need.

Last month, that meant Ann Coulter holding up a discredited stock X-ray as proof of Wilson's "fractured eye socket." Today, it means photos of a clearly different white dude racing through social media as an "injured Darren Wilson."

Supposed Photo of Injured Darren Wilson Is Just Some White Guy

Taking even a cursory glance at previously released photos of Wilson, it's obvious that the above image is of someone else entirely, a person whose full list of similarities to the Ferguson police officer start and end with "is also a Caucasian male."

Supposed Photo of Injured Darren Wilson Is Just Some White Guy

In reality, the injured man is motocross rider Jim McNeil, who died in 2011. McNeil is seen here after a 2006 crash that broke bones in his "forehead, cheek, nose, jaw and eye socket."

The photo became associated with Wilson thanks to a misleading Facebook post bearing the title "Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson MO Police Department." By Thursday morning, that post been shared over 40,000 times.

Supposed Photo of Injured Darren Wilson Is Just Some White Guy

Among those fooled was right-wing radio host Larry Elder, who posted the photo on his website. The page has since been taken down, but as everyone—even easily-fooled talk show hosts—should know by know, the Internet never forgets.

[ Images via Twitter/Facebook | h/t Little Green Footballs]


Antiviral is a new blog devoted to debunking online hoaxes. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Ricky Gervais Broke My Heart

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Ricky Gervais Broke My Heart

I'm mad at Ricky Gervais for a lot of things: for the monstrously dehumanizing way he talks about fat people; for lending his voice to the myopic throng railing against "political correctness"; and, most recently, for implying that Jennifer Lawrence—along with countless other women—is complicit in her own sexual victimization, because she chose to take photos of her body in the (apparently illusory) privacy of home.

But none of his stances are remarkable—I hear them daily from barely pubescent boys on Twitter. More than anything, I'm mad at Ricky Gervais for taking Ricky Gervais away from me.

I was in college in Los Angeles—still shy, ungainly, unsettled—when the British Office came out. I remember watching it for the first time, hunched over my ancient laptop in my mouse-infested room in my black-widow-infested house, and thinking, "I never knew." I'd been a comedy-obsessive all my life, but I was young. It never clicked before. I never knew that comedy could be so perfect and distilled. So artful. I'd never put it together that if you make a piece of writing very, very funny you can take it very, very dark. The power of humor to manipulate the audience's thinking, to make surgically precise points, and the responsibility that goes along with that—the responsibility to always watch where you're punching—I learned that from the British Office.

Ricky Gervais taught me that the best comedy is humane.

So it's difficult to understand how the person who wrote this scene:

"You look at the paper, you see a picture of Lindsay Lohan getting out of a car, and the headline is 'Cover Up, Lindsay, We Can See Your Knickers.' Of course you can see her knickers—your photographer is lying in the road pointing his camera up her dress to see her knickers. You're literally the gutter press."

...could, just a few years later, Tweet this:

And then double down on it with such a bad-faith, childish lack of insight:

There was, of course, no "joke" in Gervais's original tweet, and he knows that. Ricky Gervais doesn't get to use the lazy obfuscation, native to such Twitter kerfuffles, that he doesn't understand what a joke is. Any misunderstanding of jokes is willful on his part. It's the downside of mastery.

People who care about women's privacy and safety aren't "easily offended"—we just care about women's privacy and safety. This is tedious, textbook victim-blaming—leaping at a chance to tell women we're not working hard enough to avoid sexual exploitation instead of telling men, "Hey, don't sexually violate women."

And Ricky, you know that this society is structurally engineered to exploit women. I know you know, because you told me in that monologue. You informed my understanding of the sick, invasive (and gendered) perils of celebrity. A photographer crawling up Lindsay Lohan's skirt and then society telling her to "cover up"—that is precisely the same as a thief forcibly invading Jennifer Lawrence's private life and then society scolding her for not being private enough. So why did you say it?

How did the person with this much empathy for this fat woman:

...go on to say all of this:

"I don't think there's enough stigma. With all the political correctness now, and the fact that food is so refined, there's no stigma any more. I laugh about being fat but I should be ashamed. I should walk down the street and have people shouting 'Fatty'.

..."In supermarkets, the really fattening stuff should be behind a really thin door.

"Shops should be full of salads but if you want to get to the pies and cakes, you've got to crawl through a little tube."

I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight. They said something like "you're not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It's the same thing."

It's not the same thing though, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn't work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat they had to keep up the eating to stay fat.

"If there's a woman in leggings, eating chips with a fag in her mouth, sterilise her."

David Brent is not the hero of that scene. He treats that woman like her very existence is an affront, and her presuming to be his equal is hubris—he treats her, in fact, the way that society trains us to treat women like her. And it's Gervais's writing (and perhaps more significantly, I'm beginning to suspect, Stephen Merchant's) that positions us, the audience, in her corner. He engineered that moment of realization. If you've ever treated a fat woman with disgust and disdain, if you've ever reduced her to a single dimension, if you've ever scoffed at her sexuality, suddenly you're David Brent. Oh.

That kind of manipulation is what comedy does best. It's what makes comedy important. If you want to talk about "releasing tension" and "laughing at the horrors of life," this is it. Using comedy to cope with tragedy means mocking the systems that victimize people—not the victims themselves.

Ricky, I know that you hated being fat. But how could you write so eloquently about self-hatred and the ways it poisons our interactions in the world, and not see yourself falling into the same tropes you built a career out of lampooning?

How could the person who's written scene after excruciating scene like this:

...bang the "political correctness" drum without embarrassment, and stand behind the slur "Mong" (short for Mongoloid) with such shallow defensiveness?

"Just to clarify for uptight people stuck in the past. The word Mong means Downs syndrome about as much as the word Gay means happy. ie I never use the word Mong to mean anything to do with Downs Syndrome. Just like I never use the word c— to mean female genitalia."

David Brent won't tell the "black man's cock" joke in front of a black person because Ricky Gervais knows that the dehumanization of black people is part of a system of oppression. Brent might not know that (he almost certainly doesn't—his discomfort is selfish), but Gervais knows it. And in that moment—and, particularly, in the subsequent moment when Brent's black employee says that he gets and likes the joke, and a relieved Brent holds him up as one of the good ones—Gervais disembowels white hypocrisy, white guilt, and the cavalier blindness with which white people wield the historic trauma of others.

Being cognizant of and careful with the historic trauma of others is what "political correctness" means. It means that the powerful should never attack the disempowered—not because it "offends" them or hurts their "feelings," but because it perpetuates toxic, oppressive systems. Or, in plainer language, because it makes people's lives worse. In tangible ways. For generations.

Women are told they're responsible for preventing their own sexual assaults. So when teenage girls are raped, we ask what they were wearing. We force them out of school. We worry about their rapists' bright futures.

Disabled people are reduced to punchlines by the same public that turns a blind eye to their abuse, poverty, and incarceration.

Fatness correlates, often, with poverty. Fat people are less likely to be hired and earn less money. Male jurors are more likely to find fat women guilty. Fat people face cruelty and stigma from their doctors, if they seek out (and can afford) medical care at all.

Having once been a slightly overweight white male millionaire does not give you the insight required to speak with authority and flippancy on the complexities of body size and the effects of anti-fat stigma. Or race, or disability, or rape, for that matter. In fact, it makes you look fucking ridiculous. This just in: New Millionaire Discovers Millionaires Were Right All Along.

From that same Extras monologue:

"You can't wash your hands of this. You can't keep going, 'Oh, it's exploitation but it's what the public want.' No...The Victorian freak show never went away. Now it's called Big Brother or X Factor, where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multi-millionaires."

You are the multi-millionaire now, Ricky. I don't understand why you don't understand.

But it happens in any medium. Our heroes age, their priorities change, their thinking loses its elasticity—and we lose ours too, as fans. I don't tolerate intolerance anymore. When I was younger, when a comedian I loved said something that set off alarm bells for me, I'd think: it must be okay, because he says it's okay, and I trust him. I'd tell myself: there must be a secret contract I don't know about—where women, or gay people, or disabled people, or black people agreed that it's cool, that this is how we joke. But that's not true, of course. There is no contract. And it is a much bolder comedic statement to say so—to mock the powerful and stand up for marginalized groups—than it is to conduct your career with all the nuance of a frantically rationalizing 19-year-old fan.

I'm sure this seems silly. It's "just comedy." Who gives a fuck about Ricky Gervais? Well, I have vitally, painfully important emotional connections to certain pieces of music and literature, but there's just something about comedy, man. If you really need it, the things you love the most get inside of you. They fill holes. There were shitty periods of my life—years long—when I couldn't fall asleep without old episodes of Ricky and Steve's XFM radio show playing. And, later, the podcasts. Honestly, when I called Anthony Cumia a white supremacist on Twitter (which he is, by the way) and thousands of his fans descended, frothing, to call me a fat, unrapeable cunt, I understood. Those people need that radio show, as odious as it is. It's a home. I've been there.

I wish I could still listen to those podcasts. I wish I could still follow Ricky Gervais on Twitter. I wish I could bring myself watch Derek (kind of). I mourn that loss. But if there's one thing I took away from the Office and Extras, it's the importance of never losing sight of people's humanity. Even David Brent, the irredeemable, is redeemed, and I always took that as a clarion call for empathy, a challenge to see people more deeply. I hold the media I consume to a higher standard now, because of Ricky Gervais.

But maybe I didn't get it. Maybe I never got it. David fucking Brent deserves compassion but impoverished fat people don't? Disabled people don't? Women don't? Celebrities who had their privacy violated don't? Empathy applied only to certain groups isn't empathy at all. It's cruelty.

If Stewart Lee ever breaks my heart like this, I'm throwing myself into the sea.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby.

Giant Mutant Spider Actually Pretty Cool Regular Dog

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This is a video of dog chasing people through the dark in a giant spider costume, set to over-the-top horror film music, but that knowledge doesn't make it not fucking terrifying. You can hardly blame the victims for failing to waste precious seconds confirming whether that dog-sized spider is actually a dog-sized dog.

Chica the DogSpider belongs to popular Polish YouTube prankster Sylwester Wardega, whose repertoire of stupid tricks includes a Slenderman scare and a video where he provokes police into chasing him.

[h/t Reddit]

World of Warcraft's Robin Williams Tribute Is Just Great

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World of Warcraft's Robin Williams Tribute Is Just Great

Meet Robin, the World of Warcraft tribute to legendary actor Robin Williams, who passed away last month.

This re-creation of Williams' iconic Aladdin genie is just one of the multiple tributes to the beloved actor that the folks at Wowhead have discovered in Blizzard's popular MMORPG over the past few weeks. There are also references to Mork, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Toys, among others.

Last month, Wowhead's data-miners found files and assets for Robin Williams references in the game's code, but now, they've actually found the tribute in-game.

One Wowhead reader said they found the above genie on an island near Talador in the beta for WoW's next expansion, Warlords of Draenor. It's pretty much perfect. Says Wowhead: "You can summon Robin by rubbing the Ever-Burning Lamp. When first summoned, he exclaims 'INFINITE COSMIC POWER' and then shrinks and waves goodbye, saying 'itty bitty living space.'"

Perfect.

Even Noted Asshole Slavoj Zizek Thinks ISIS Is a Bunch of Assholes

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Even Noted Asshole Slavoj Zizek Thinks ISIS Is a Bunch of Assholes

Is the Islamic State evil, or really evil? We've heard from the Duck Dynasty patriarch. Now Slavoj Zizek, the Coldplay of critical Marxist psychoanalytical theory, has a New York Times post titled "ISIS Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism." It's... not bad, actually. And it raises a few good questions.

Zizek—star of The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and fashionably accented Slovenian theorist of choice for hemp-wearing graduate students still pining for ze revolyution—explains nicely what he means by true fundamentalism, and how the Islamists fall way short:

But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.

This may seem a little Pollyannaish; there's a whole lot of paranoid, militant fundamentalism, in all three of the major monotheistic faiths, and it poses a much more immediate challenge for societies than the passive cultural rejectionism of chanting Buddhists and buggy-driving Amish communities.

But I think Zizek's basically on solid ground here: the arch-fundamentalist's violent reaction to America, the West, and the modernizing Middle East is somehow bound up in a good deal of fascination with modernity. (You can see this modernity/anti-modernity tango in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's fancy watch, or the fanboyism of ISIS rallies, or their painstaking use of cutting-edge TV optics in broadcasting how they mete out Medieval atrocities.) The more an ascetic is tempted, the more decisively he must strike a blow against that temptation to maintain his sense of identity.

In typical Zizek form, the philosopher riffs on his own melody until it's evanesced into some weird generalizations, sprinkled liberally with Foucault and Nietzsche references. (For instance, he attacks the "commonplace" explanation of ISIS as an "anticolonial awakening," because genuine Foucaultian "biopowered" anticolonial awakenings are not bad things, and let's not throw out the baby with the Islamist batshit here.)

But one of Zizek's interesting riffs suggests, as usual, that there's something hypocritically sexual at the bottom of all this:

While the official ISIS ideology rails against Western permissiveness, the daily practice of the ISIS gangs includes full-scale grotesque orgies, including robberies, gang rapes, torture and murder of infidels.

To riff like this about active killers is largely and understandably taboo in mainstream U.S. media, but the "grotesque orgy" imagery is kind of worth exploring here: From a psychoanalytical perspective, what is the beheading of a Western Other, or the mass-shooting of perhaps thousands of surrendering Iraqis, but a release of tension in the otherwise abstentionist ISIS psyche? If they are receptive to secular society's temptations, but constrained from enjoying the fruits, what satisfaction can they have but to quash those fruits? Sex or death.

All of which is a pretty bombastic, meandering way of saying that, in place of the Beltway-fed geopolitical explanations of ISIS and other radical Islamist groups, we need an erotics of militancy. Or perhaps that's just a personal need on my part, because for the life of me, I can't quash the deep-seated desire to see every single one of these self-important dipshits burn alive screaming. At least you and I have that need for psychic satisfaction in common, crazy jihadi motherfuckers.

Joan Rivers, Dead at 81

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Joan Rivers, Dead at 81

Legendary comedian Joan Rivers died this afternoon, her daughter Melissa announced. She was 81.

From Melissa Rivers' statement:

It is with great sadness that I announce the death of my mother, Joan Rivers. She passed peacefully at 1:17pm surrounded by family and close friends. My son and I would like to thank the doctors, nurses, and staff of Mount Sinai Hospital for the amazing care they provided by mother.

Cooper and I have found ourselves humbled by the outpouring of love, support, and prayers we have received from around the world. They have been heard and appreciated.

My mother's greatest joy in life was to make people laugh. Although that is difficult to do right now, I know her final wish would be that we return to laughing soon.

Rivers was briefly placed into a medically-induced coma in late August following complications from vocal chord surgery, when she stopped breathing. After being brought of the coma, she was placed on life support. She was treated at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital and was taken out of intensive care and moved to a private room Sept. 3.

Before her death, Rivers was a regular panelist on E!'s Fashion Police and co-starred in a reality series with her daughter Melissa on WE, called Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? A prolific standup comic, she is perhaps most widely known for her acerbic (and occasionally controversial) red carpet interviews and talking heads stints for TV Guide and E!, often accompanied by Melissa. Rivers' breakout role was as a guest on The Tonight Show in 1965.

[Image via Getty]


Fox's Libertarian Fantasy Utopia Already Being Ruined by Contestants

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In Sunday's new show Utopia, 15 pioneering Americans ("Pioneers") will pioneer out of their regular grown-up lives like we have, and into a "remote location" where they will find the ultimate adventure: Inventing a new civilization! But as Deadline.com reports, according to EP Jon Kroll and Fox EVP Simon Andreae, it took less than a real-time week for shit to start falling apart:

"Coming to the most basic decisions has been next to impossible for them... Agreeing on anything... I almost think we cast it too well!" Men jockeying for position, women jockeying for personhood, strange fractures and striations based on little-to-no meaningful information: We've seen it all. Even as Utopia suggests about itself, this game show is no regular game show but in fact a special kind of game show with no point: "This is not a game. There is no prize. This is UTOPIA."

If the keystone of civilization is cooperation, and the prime ingredient of cooperation is recognizing that other people have value... There—did you hear it?—is where we hit the snag: "Are you so much better than everybody else, so dissatisfied by their company, that you would like to say fuck it and go live in some random place? Are you too smart to deal with the people at Starbucks, driving around on your local roads and streets, or voting in national and local elections? Are you so sick of human contact that you would like to go be on a game show about how irrelevant it is? Come play Utopia, the game that is no game and has no prize but your own human supremacy."

To me this is the secret, too, of zombie popularity: If you can't hack it in the real world, of course you would like to wipe the slate and start over with your own kingdom. (That's a huge reason why you can't hack it in the real world.) But it's not merely wannabe alpha-dogs and postapocalyptic threats of secession, no: There's been no honor among these thieves of freedom from the very start: "...[O]ne participant already has been booted, for violating The Rules when she smuggled a smartphone in... to look up who the other Utopians were." She was kicked out of their society and back into our society, which makes two societies that cannot handle her realness at this time. A second Pioneer almost got bounced for being an asshole, but then I guess he agreed with the people that he is an asshole? Or maybe was simply silenced by the group.

The call revealed some other key factors: One is that there's a competitive element in which America will vote pioneers into and out of Utopia based on God knows what rubric, and two, that "more than one" are bisexual ("or poly-sexual," the execs made oddly sure to specifically emphasize) and will probably be making a huge fucking deal about that at every opportunity. Just a guess.

I would argue that if you put any two John Galts in a gulch together, they will eventually fuck, and then one of them will brain the other one to attain control over the means of production. What works in commie-ass countries like the Netherlands will never work in America, where you're talking about a self-selected group of American people who would like to combine the jobs of astronaut, emperor, and Paul Bunyan, and call that a life; les petits princes on their tiny volcano islands of entitlement. And the fact that this, a world populated and planned by assholes, will not work is, perhaps, what truly makes it a utopia after all. Or at least a TV show.

Utopia premieres Sunday for two hours on Fox, then begins its normal Tuesday/Friday schedule for the next year (or until the first death, whichever comes first).

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

Ex-Gov. Bob and Maureen McDonnell Found Guilty of Corruption Charges

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Ex-Gov. Bob and Maureen McDonnell Found Guilty of Corruption Charges

Ex-Virginia governor Bob McDonnell was found guilty of 11 corruption charges in a case that centered around his allegedly exchanging political favors for cash and gifts, the Washington Post reports. Maureen McDonnell, his wife, was found guilty of eight corruption charges and obstruction of justice.

Both McDonnells were found not guilty of falsifying loan documents, and the McDonnell family is "sobbing in the courtroom," according to the Post. We'll update this post when more information becomes available.

Update (3:30 p.m.): Sentencing was set for January 6.

[Image via AP]

New Study: Ebola Virus Could Reach the U.S. by "Late September"

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New Study: Ebola Virus Could Reach the U.S. by "Late September"

A new analysis of air traffic patterns by researchers shows that there's up to an 18 percent chance the Ebola virus will reach the U.S. by late September. Lead researcher Alessandro Vespignani of Northeastern University told NPR, "What is happening in West Africa is going to get here. We can't escape that at this point."

Before you panic, know that if Ebola does hit the states, it would likely only be in "very small clusters of cases, between one and three." That's still not zero. In other western countries, the risk is even higher; according to the study, published Tuesday in PLOS Currents: Outbreaks, there's a 25 to 28 percent chance Ebola will hit the U.K. by the end of the month.

These numbers are based on "the number of airline passengers coming from West Africa to various countries." Since it's impossible to block all airline traffic coming from the crisis region, eventually, infected passengers will make their way to other countries.

Three Americans have already contracted Ebola in West Africa, but they are all on the path to recovery.

[Photo via AP]

Time Inc. Wants the Right to Outsource Most of Its Union Jobs

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Time Inc. Wants the Right to Outsource Most of Its Union Jobs

Fading magazine empire Time Inc. is currently trying to negotiate a new contract with the Newspaper Guild, a union that represents several hundred of the company's editorial employees. Time Inc. would like the right to eliminate most of their jobs.

It is useful to contemplate how far Time Inc. has fallen in just the past decade or so. A once-great publishing empire with titles like People and Sports Illustrated and Time and Fortune is now just struggling for relevance (and dollars) as the media world changes around it. Last month, we reported on a much-derided internal SI spreadsheet that graded editorial employees for layoffs based upon categories including how "beneficial to advertiser relationships" their "content" was. That was bad in a mostly symbolic way. Now, the union tells us about a contract provision that could be catastrophic to writers in a very real way.

It is generally terrifying to be an editorial employee of a magazine company in 2014. When you see actual numbers on how doomed the future of your job could be, it is specifically terrifying. In the current Time Inc. negotiations with the Guild, this is what the company proposed in the "Subcontracting" portion of the contract—that is, this is what it wants to reserve the right to do to the jobs of these union members:

Time Inc. Wants the Right to Outsource Most of Its Union Jobs

This means that Time Inc. wants the right to subcontract—or even to outsource overseas, which the company has plainly stated as one of its business strategies—a full 60% of the jobs of these employees. That is most of them! And that is what they want to afford to the minority of their editorial employees who do have the protection of a union. This is not some sort of hidden scandal so much as it is a stark statement of just how committed one of America's most prestigious magazine companies is to eliminating "full time jobs" as a category under its corporate umbrella.

Subcontracting is the new being on staff.

Anthony Napoli, a Guild representative for Time Inc. employees, points out that it is not just the full time employees who have something to worry about—the proposed language would also give Time Inc. the right to outsource any temporary positions. So all part-time employees currently working for Time Inc. titles should consider their jobs threatened in a very real sense. "If you combine the two proposals the real percentage of jobs they would be allowed to subcontract would be more like 70-75% of all employees represented by the Guild," Napoli told us. "Given the fact we represent copy editors, writers, photographers, researchers, imaging specialist, print production employees among others I think it safe to assume any and all of these jobs would be impacted by subcontracting."

How willing would Time Inc. be to exercise the right to eliminate these jobs? And how soon? And where would they go? And if this is what union members get, how worried should the thousands of non-union Time Inc. employees be? We asked Time Inc. Their spokesperson, Teri Everett, told us: "we are not going to negotiate in the press."

[Photo: FB]

L.A. Times Reporter Basically Let the CIA Edit His Stories on the CIA

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L.A. Times Reporter Basically Let the CIA Edit His Stories on the CIA

As media evolves, many journalists are looking for new ways to improve efficiency. For instance, Ken Dilanian—current AP reporter and former L.A. Times writer—often lets his sources at the Central Intelligence Agency exercise editorial control over stories about them.

A new Intercept post by security reporter Ken Silverstein—who's done some serious work on reporters' and think-tankers' coziness with flacks in the past—reveals a series of emails between Dilanian and public affairs officers at the CIA suggesting that the reporter "enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication."

Running quotes or ideas by sources to make sure you have the facts straight is one thing; what Dilanian's emails show is quite another. "Of course, journalists routinely curry favor with government sources (and others) by falsely suggesting that they intend to amplify the official point of view," Silverstein writes. "But the emails show that Dilanian really meant it":

"I'm working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys," Dilanian wrote in one email to a CIA press officer, explaining that what he intended to report would be "reassuring to the public" about CIA drone strikes. In another, after a series of back-and-forth emails about a pending story on CIA operations in Yemen, he sent a full draft of an unpublished report along with the subject line, "does this look better?" In another, he directly asks the flack: "You wouldn't put out disinformation on this, would you?"

In one case, for example, Dilanian's deference to CIA flacks led him to underreport the damage done in drone attacks to kill an Al Qaeda militant, Abu Yahya al-Libi, in Pakistan. His story, with language approved by CIA, suggested al-Libi was the only person killed in those attacks; but multiple independent reports suggest up to 20 were killed, many of them likely innocent rescuers at the scene.

Letting sources see a full story pre-publication is a big no-no in journalism; at best, its disclosure makes the reporter appear compromised. At worst, the sources can craft a pre-emptive PR response or put pressure on reporters to soften critical language. The hazards increase geometrically on a highly sensitive beat, especially when you're collaborating with public relations people and not operators in the field. They generally can't give you much information of value, but they can exert a lot of pushback and provide warmed-over cliche quotes.

The emails cover only a few months of Dilanian's tenure at the Times in 2012. And Silverstein points out that much of Dilanian's work has valuable, some of it even critical of the CIA. But Silverstein, who obtained the emails under a FOIA request, has 574 pages of communications between the agency and multiple reporters, not just Dilanian, asking for info, exchanging jokes, and agreeing to off-the-record dinners with then-CIA director David Petraeus. The problem, it seems, is not so much a single journalist as an entire industry's reliance on government cooperation for sometimes-dubious stories.

[Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons]

Colorado Trying to Solve Legal Pot Supply vs. Demand Problem

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Colorado Trying to Solve Legal Pot Supply vs. Demand Problem

When Colorado and Washington State voters legalized marijuana in 2012, cannabis enthusiasts from across the nation were thrilled by the prospect of easy access to hassle-free weed–just hop on a flight to Denver or Seattle, cruise on into a safe and legal pot retailer and walk out with enough high-grade marijuana to keep you more or less permanently stoned.

But it's a pretty safe bet that not many of those people flying into Denver were expecting to pay up to $400 an ounce (which varies wildly) plus up to 30 percent sales tax at the store, though–especially when, with a local connection and a phone call, they could still go visit an old-fashioned neighborhood drug dealer and pay a fraction of the cost for weed that's every bit as fun and couch-locking as the state-sanctioned stuff.

The problem is a simple one of supply and demand–and Colorado is working on some new rules that they really, really hope will make legal weed more affordable while still keeping the state's marijuana crop from traveling out of state to places where it's still extremely illegal.

It's a balancing act that, to this point, hasn't really worked well for anybody–especially consumers.

According to the Associated Press, Colorado pot regulators are working on revising the state's marijuana production rules, which predate full legalization and still limit pot production to the number of medical marijuana patients served by each individual grower.

The result was that, when pot became fully legal to anyone over the age of 21 earlier this year, there was a massive demand for weed that growers limited by the old production caps couldn't meet. The net result was outrageously expensive retail marijuana.

The medical marijuana production caps were kept in place to keep tabs on the amount of weed grown in Colorado in an attempt to keep any of it from accidentally wandering across the state line to decidedly weed-unfriendly places like Kansas and Wyoming.

It's safe to say that it hasn't really worked.

The proposed new guidelines wouldn't necessarily increase the state's overall marijuana production, but it would make it easier for legal growers to add more plants provided that they prove that their selling at least 85 percent of their inventory first.

But here's the something-straight-out-of-Food Inc.-problem with the proposed revised state regulations: smaller (and generally more eco-friendly) greenhouse growers claim that the new rules unfairly favor larger, more resource-exhaustive grow operations often housed in giant warehouses. The proposed rules would cap greenhouse operations at 1,800 plants, while warehouse operations–which typically suck up gargantuan amounts of electricity–would be allowed to grow 3,600 plants.

"The only person who is going to benefit is either the power companies, people who are renting warehouses or people who have built huge growing warehouses," said Thomas Killeen, a would-be greenhouse pot grower from Colorado Springs.

To put the power use issue into context, a single warehouse grow operation uses roughly the same amount of electricity as one of Facebook's data centers. It's estimated that indoor marijuana cultivation accounts for about 10 percent of Denver's annual electricity consumption alone, in Boulder that number rises to 12 percent.

A greenhouse, of course, uses the sun—which does mean slightly lower yields for growers, but is a helluva lot cheaper and certainly cleaner than fossil-fuel generated electricity.

The need for Colorado to change their cannabis production caps is apparent–the state can't possibly hope to generate the promised tax revenue from legal marijuana (much of which is funneled to the state's public schools) if the legal stuff can't even remotely compete pace price-wise with the state's well-stocked black market.

According to new official estimates, marijuana sales tax revenues so far in 2014 are well-short of the state's previous estimates by over $20 million–the ease of obtaining much less expensive medical marijuana (which is taxed at the state's normal 2.9 percent sales tax rate instead of the sky-high nearly 30 percent tax on retail weed in some locations across the state) is a major factor, but the increasing legal supply problems are starting to become a noticeable factor as well.

According to the researchers, nearly 23 percent of the state's marijuana users have medical marijuana cards–a number that lawmakers and policy experts thought would decrease under full legalization but which has actually grown thanks largely to the higher sales tax rate.

Under Colorado law, state residents over the age of 21 can grow up to six plants for their own personal use–but often times those plants wind up on the black market along with resold medical marijuana, denying the state a big chunk of tax revenue.

The proposed marijuana grow operation regulation changes went into provisional effect in June, but the AP reports that the final call on the changes rests with Colorado Department of Revenue Secretary Barbara Brohl, who has not yet set a deadline for a decision.

Image via AP

Bearded Welsh Hero Drinks Entire Bottle of Jack in 15 Seconds

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Meet the new King of Wales, Will Williams. He recently consumed an entire bottle of Jack Daniel's in just shy of 15 seconds, which, I'm given to understand, entitles him to some kind of sword-in-the-stone style claim on the monarchy that supersedes the current hereditary system. And makes Wales independent, for some reason. Congratulations/sorry, Wales!

The Sun called his royal highness a "stag do idiot" and a "MORON," but this is incorrect. WillWillz, as he shall probably be known by the royal-chasing U.K. tabloid press, is an engineer. On Twitter, he explained how he completed the feat using a straw and some basic fluid dynamics.

"I was fine, for about an hour," the 27-year-old regal man-beast told the Sun, "I was pretty much instantly hammered. I carried on and stayed out until 3am the following morning. My mates were astonished."

May his reign be a wise and prudent one (although that seems very, very unlikely).

[h/t BuzzFeed]


What Comedy Is About, According to Joan Rivers

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Trailblazer Joan Rivers is dead, and over the next few days, you should expect to see various takes on what her life and career meant. These takes will probably fall on one of two sides: "Joan Rivers was fearless!" vs. "Joan Rivers was bigoted!" Supporting evidence abounds for both, which is to say that the truth is more complicated than what an outsider's summation of a person's life work can provide.

I think, though, that this scene from Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg's 2010 documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (really, its centerpiece), does a good job of explaining Rivers' ethos and why she continued her abrasive brand of comedy unapologetically even after tastes had evidently shifted toward something less hostile, more politically correct.

To a heckler who took issue with Rivers' Helen Keller joke on account of his having a deaf son, Rivers retorted:

Oh you stupid ass. Let me tell you what comedy is about. Oh please, you are so stupid. Comedy is to make everybody laugh at everything and deal with things, you idiot. My mother is deaf, you stupid son of a bitch. Don't tell me. And just in case you can hear me in the hallway, I lived for nine years with a man with one leg, OK you asshole? And we're gonna talk about what it's like to have a man with one leg who lost it in World War II and then went back to get it, 'cause that's fuckin' littering.

But then, when a woman backstage expressed solidarity with Rivers, the comedian, who had by then cooled down, replied, "I'm sorry for him. He has a deaf son. Tough." On her way out of the venue, Rivers said she hoped the guy who gave her a hard time achieved catharsis.

Rivers was edgy. She knew it, and she knew what it meant—that she could offend people, that doing so might make her feel bad, that it still could be worth it. She said nasty things that sometimes hit with a thud, but sometimes were sublime in their pithiness. She was a spectacle until the very end, an everlasting provocateur whose approach to mainstream comedy and commentary was endangered, and now is even more so.

Jerry ​Bruckheimer Producing TV Show Based on a Carrie Underwood Song

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As E! reports, Jerry Bruckheimer's developing a six-hour "event series" based on Carrie Underwood's song "Two Black Cadillacs" and with Underwood's involvement. Written by Ildy Modrovich (Necessary Roughness, CSI: Miami, Californication), the story will track six hours' worth of two ladies, the wife and the mistress, who team up to kill the man they have in common. After that, the plan seems unclear, but as they say: When you go looking for revenge, always dig two graves and bring two Cadillacs.

In the song's music video above, directed by PR Brown, the two black Cadillacs are metonymic stand-ins for the two ladies, their widows' weeds, and their private parts; the Cadillacs in the video are also alive, like the famous haunted car named Christine. It was too scary to watch the whole thing, but the impression it gives is that two ladies kill a guy, and then cars come alive.

In 2006's teen classic John Tucker Must Die, Ashanti teams up with Sophia Bush and Brittany Snow in similar fashion, but the death is a metaphorical one because they are just kids. No cars are alive in that one. Just John Tucker, played by the vigorous Jesse Metcalfe, whom no woman has yet been able to tame.

In Bruckheimer's critically lauded CBS series The Good Wife, the eponymous cuckquean takes no revenge on her faithless husband, because that is not her way. Instead, she reenters the workforce and becomes more and more amazing over time.

Even if you are a fan of many of Carrie Underwood's songs, you may not enjoy this particular song, because it—a platinum record from her 2012 album Blown Away—is not actually very good. It is a musically flat retread of "Before He Cheats," which also involved cars and damage to cars, but only had one heroine in it. In the great video for that song, Carrie Underwood is magic, chock full of both zingers and telekinesis.

(By using mathematics, we have thus been able to deduce that—given that the video for "Before He Cheats" is based on Carrie, and "Two Black Cadillacs" takes elements from Christine, the next time Carrie Underwood sings about being cheated on, the video will include imagery from Stephen King's 1992 novel Dolores Claiborne. Mark our words.)

However enjoyable you find the song, video, or forthcoming miniseries on Fox, it at least has a nice message of ladies sticking together in the face of adversity, not blaming the other girl, and also cooperating for the common good. It cannot just be about bitches fighting all the time! Sometimes—maybe all the time—it should be about committing murder alongside them.

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

Brave Teen Refuses to Attend Middle School, Chooses Jail Instead

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Brave Teen Refuses to Attend Middle School, Chooses Jail Instead

Middle school is a nightmare, and any impulse to avoid it is totally understandable. A Florida teenager who had the courage to fight back, however, was rewarded for his bravery this week with a pair of handcuffs and a trip to the St. Johns County jail.

According to an arrest report obtained by The Smoking Gun, the 14-year-old boy, whose name was redacted, repeatedly refused to go to school after moving from New York to Florida, resisting even after his mother took away his cell phone and laptop and disconnected their home's internet. This week—two weeks after the district's August 18 start date—the mother called the police, who reported to the house and told the teen he could either go to school or go to jail. His stoic reply, delivered from bed: "Do what you gotta do. I'm not going to school."

The martyr for teens everywhere was arrested for misdemeanor resisting without violence/obstruction of justice, cuffed, and taken in, before eventually being released into his mother's custody. Is this how America treats its heroes?

[Image via hxdbzxy/Shutterstock]

Just a 400-Kilo Drug Bust at Paris Hilton's​ Family Ranch in Cañas

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Just a 400-Kilo Drug Bust at Paris Hilton's​ Family Ranch in Cañas

Costa Rica's Judicial Investigation Police (OIJ) confiscated roughly 400-kilos of cocaine and $1.5 million at a private airstrip on the Hilton family-owned Rancho Horizonte in the country's northern Cañas region. Three Nicaraguans were among the arrested, (realistically) because of leftover Iran-Contra bullshit.

Turns out, Costa Rica is the country just below Nicaragua in that skinny Central American land-bridge between our two continents. During the Reagan administration's secret, frequently illegal, war in Nicaragua, northern Costa Rica was the staging area for the CIA and the Contras in their cocaine-and-Iranian-arms-deal-funded guerrilla war against the Left-ish Sandinista government. One of the most wealthy and prolific drug traffickers in Central America at that time, Norwin Meneses, moved over 50,000-kilos of cocaine through Costa Rica, by his own accounting, while simultaneously being an off-the-books DEA informant—and allegedly a fence for the CIA's illicit Contra monies.

"They used Meneses in Costa Rica basically for money laundering operations," the former chief of criminal investigations for the Nicaraguan National Police told investigative reporter Garry Webb back in the 1990s. "He was really in the background."

Anyway: None of this got solved really. Conductors changed, but the train moves along just the same.

A trusted employee of the Hilton's 6000-acre ranch property is said to be responsible for the illegal use of their runway, according to the Costa Rican newspaper (and vacation real estate guide) The Tico Times. Manuel Estrada reporting for Diario Extra says that both of Paris Hilton's parents, Kathy and Rick Hilton, were frequent visitors at the property. Paris, herself, the aughts-era celebutante or la diva estadounidense, was off in Ibiza where she is conducting a "DJ residency" at "superclub" Amnesia:

Just a 400-Kilo Drug Bust at Paris Hilton's​ Family Ranch in Cañas

Liliana Zamora, assistant prosecutor for Liberia, the capital of the Guanacaste province where the Cañas-area ranch is situated, told reporters that the Hiltons are not suspected of any involvement, or other wrongdoing, at this time.

Just a 400-Kilo Drug Bust at Paris Hilton's​ Family Ranch in Cañas

Just a 400-Kilo Drug Bust at Paris Hilton's​ Family Ranch in Cañas

In a news conference, OIJ director Francisco Segura told the press, including Peruvian newspaper la República (Google-translated here), that the bust was the consequence of a three-month long investigation into the cocaine smuggling operation. The discovery of the $ 1.5 million in cash (which some reports place at closer to $2 million), he added, was a "surprise".

OIJ is still hoping to discover the actual owner of the single-engine Cessna where the drugs and money was located, noting that its license plate, N473EY, was a forgery.

At the time of the Sunday, August 24th, cocaine bust, Paris Hilton was covered in foam at Amnesia Ibiza, Instagram photography confirms. Her DJ residency there concluded on schedule the following Wednesday.

[top photo via the Tico Times; other photos via White Ibiza, and Diario Extra; h/t Daniel Hopsicker]

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

How Apple Owns the Media

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How Apple Owns the Media

In about a week, Apple will announce a new phone. This will become national news, and coverage of a piece of metal, plastic and glass will dwarf that of human suffering here and abroad. You've probably already read some exciting things about the iPhone 6, even though it doesn't technically exist yet, and is a "big secret." That's not an accident—Apple makes reporters do their advertising.

Apple blogger child prodigy Mark Gurman's recent profile of the Cupertino PR machine is a terrific read from someone with deep knowledge of the company's deviousness. You should read the entire thing. But ahead of the release of the iPhone 6, one section sticks out in particular: "Strategies: The "Art of Deep Background" and Controlling the Press."

That's where you come in. Almost everything you read about a new Apple product in mainstream websites and newspapers is engineered by Apple itself, part of a large, ever-churning strategy to create hype and in turn drive sales. By treating itself like a mix between the Gestapo and DARPA, Apple's vise-grip on information makes any details a golden commodity. Apple scoops are the most coveted among tech and business journalists. An email from Apple is a favor from Apple. A story from Apple is a great day. You're lucky to be invited. Apple knows this—so much so, Gurman says, that it can play publications off one another like jealous suitors:

When Apple is not pleased with coverage, it sometimes works to shift the narrative, even attempting to undermine giant news organizations.

When Apple realized that The New York Times was gunning to win the Pulitzer Prize for its controversial iEconomy series on the Apple supply chain, Apple's PR team sent articles criticizing The New York Times to other journalists, according to a person familiar with the strategy.

[...]

Most recently, Apple utilized covert tactics to challenge a Reuters story about Apple's accessibility practices. Reuters referred to Apple as a champion of the blind community, but called for the company to do even more work in the accessibility field. Unable to get Apple to comment for the story, the article quoted a 2013 Tim Cook speech to underscore Apple's understanding of accessibility's importance. Despite being unwilling to officially participate, Apple asked Reuters off the record to include more quotes from Cook's speech, said a person familiar with the situation. Reuters declined, since the speech is publicly available material. Instead of commenting on-the-record before or after the article was published, Apple's PR team disapprovingly pointed a loyal group of Apple-focused bloggers to the entire 2013 speech transcript, and these bloggers then used the supplied details to attack Reuters.

Gurman explains how individual writers can be singled out by Apple's propaganda machinery:

Off-the-record, the company has warned journalists off of following the paths of other writers, or suggested that a relationship problem with Apple would be avoided if the journalist opts not to cover certain topics.

As well as his own website, to which Apple reps sent tips about Android product failures:

How Apple Owns the Media

Trying to plant stories is something every PR firm in the world does. But no other PR team on Earth is able to manipulate almost the entirety of the media. So many tech journalists are so beholden to Apple, and so afraid of getting blacklisted or chastised, that they obey Steve Jobs' ghost-via-press-release.

When our own sister site Gizmodo pulled off perhaps the greatest tech scoop of all time, it was essentially sent into a time-out that only expired this month, when they were presumably removed from Apple's blacklist, invited to the launch event next week, and allowed to have some fruit snacks and milk with the other kids. So long as people care about iPhones (that is to say, until our generation dies), Apple will keep playing reporters like cheap Zunes. And so long as carefully timed articles about Apple's flagship products keep materializing, you should know why: because someone in Cupertino decided you should read them.

Photos of best buds Walt Mossberg, Steve Jobs, and Katie Cotton via Getty

To contact the author of this post, write to biddle@gawker.com

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