Mixed martial arts competitor Jonathan "War Machine" Koppenhaver, currently facing attempted murder charges for attacking former girlfriend Christy Mack, attempted suicide by hanging in his jail cell last week. TMZ has obtained a copy of the note he left behind, in which he quotes famous moral skeptic Friedrich Nietzsche and explains that he's ending it all so he doesn't have to see Mack "tell painful lies about me" at trial.

Here's Koppenhaver's entire sad, victim-blaming missive, as transcribed by MMANews:

"To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly."

– Nietzsche

If you are reading this then it must be a rap, I refuse to live a parasitic life, relying on taxes and the generosity of friends for food and shelter, while never being able to give back. I always used to say "You gotta know when the gig is up." I had a good run. I experienced more in my short life than 5 avg. men combined.

To: Christy, my one:

I truly love you and planned on being with you forever. I know that I had many flaws and that I wasn't the best BF at times. When I left you in May it didn't take me long to realize my mistake. I loved you more than freedom.

When we re-united I was 100% dedicated, I know you felt it. I guess it was too little, too late though because something seemed different about you. It drove me crazy, but I knew that you still loved me because you kept telling me to get you the ring. Looking back on it, I guess you wanted security before you "put all of your eggs in one basket" again.

That night I was so excited to see you. Finding what I found that night was devastating to me. More than you will ever know. Not just the unfaithfulness, but the way U cared for him and protected him. Not a day goes by that I don't wish that you weren't hurt that night, I hope you know that.

If I could do it all over again I'd just have laid down and let him beat me up. Maybe you still loved me enough to stop him and make him leave. Maybe I could have just laid on our bed and cried and you'd have held me.

Maybe you still loved me enough to end that fling and re-commit to me… I'll never know. I forgive you, please forgive me, I love you. In hard times know that I am there to lean on.

Ryan:

I love you brother, long live the circle. Keep alpha male shit alive.

Zsanett:

You were a wonderful wife and stronger than you know. I was always proud of you, Szeretlek.

Michael, Shannah, Melissa: I love you all so much, sorry I wasn't a better brother. Don't let the Koppenhaver name die Mike, It's all you.

Papa:

You were the best grandfather a guy could ask for, I love you. Sorry to let you down.

Nyba, R1, Kendall, 9mm, Wade, Doodoo, Julio, Heather, Trae, JD, Baret, Herman, Pav, Duza, Vitelli, Sua, Matt, D, J.R., Daniel, Fritz:

My great friends, oh how I love you all, may my strength be with you.

Amanda:

Thank you for your love and support, it meant the world to me. I hope you find your Tristan. I will watch over you.

Oh man, writing all of this has me crying like a lil' bitch! I still don't understand how I got into this mess, I don't know why this had to happen. My life was going so well.

I know that I made mistakes in the past but I had corrected that and was living life correctly. It is one thing to catch a case when you set out to commit a crime, but catching a case when you have nothing but good intentions in your heart is just so hard to accept. The severity of the charges makes it that much worse.

They wanna charge me with battery and DV? Fine, do it, but don't railroad me with B.S. fantasy charges like: rape! Attempted murder! Kidnapping! And burglary! It's fucking ridiculous. And it's making it impossible for justice.

I'm a good person with a huge heart and everyone who knows me knows that, especially Christy. I don't know what has happened to her but I'm not gonna watch the woman I love go on the stand and tell painful lies about me. I don't know if her scumbag agent is making her do this for $/publicity, or if the D.A. is just pressuring her/scaring her, or what. Anyway, thank you to all who have supported me over the years.

I appreciate you all, sorry if I've let you down. I hope you choose to remember me for my times of strength and not for this. Society has killed men. I was never meant to live in this era anyway. Follow your dreams and think for yourselves.

"Verily, often laugh at the weaklings who think themselves good because they have no claws"

– Nietzsche

Koppenhaver, whose defense is apparently that Mack made him attack her—breaking dozens of bones in her face, cracking ribs, and damaging internal organs—by being "unfaithful" and daring to care about someone else, was found hanging from his bunk by Clark County corrections officers last week. They cut him down, and he's now on suicide watch in a medical isolation area.

He had been due in court that day for a hearing regarding a possible plea deal.

[h/t BroBible]

King Tut, the man inside the golden tomb, was previously understood to be handsome and majestic based on the artistic rendering of his face that appears on his ancient burial mask. But a brief pause before you once again fall asleep fantasizing to King Tut rescue fantasy: A new "virtual autopsy" reveals that the Egyptian teen monarch had buck teeth, a club foot, and just generally looked like an enormous doofus.

A documentary set to air on BBC One called Tutankhamun: The Truth Uncovered explains the monarch's virtual autopsy is a composite of over 2,000 computer scans, in addition to a genetic analysis of the king's sibling parents. Yeah, that's right—this guy's parents were brother and sister!!!!

To make matters worse, King Tut was believed to have had girlish hips and, according to a composite image of the former pharaoh, he also wore a diaper, walked with a cane, kinda had boobs, and wasn't an athlete who died in a chariot race like historians previously thought. New details reveal he likely died from an inherited illness. :(

Here's your sexy king in all his glory:

If there were no single guys left and you had a Hamptons timeshare and Becky and Jordan had just gotten engaged and like, why not, maybe he's nice and he's got a ton of gold, have you heard about that gold stash, he might be worth a lay? Yeah?

[Image via BBC One]

Finally, some good news to report on the Ebola front: Nigeria and Senegal are now completely free of the disease. Here's how they contained the outbreak — and why the world needs to take notice.

Top image: A Nigerian health official uses a thermometer on a worker to check for fever at the arrivals hall of Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos (Associated Press).

Earlier today, the World Health Organization announced that no new case of Ebola has emerged in Nigeria in 42 days. That's the standard length of time required for declaring the end to an outbreak, since it's twice the maximum 21-day incubation period for the virus. It's an incredible achievement — one that should assuage fears and show that Ebola can be contained. Moreover, it's proof that developing nations, with sufficient support from the international community, are fully capable of dealing with the epidemic.

Thwarting an "Apocalyptic Urban Outbreak"

Things looked bleak back in July when the virus was detected in Lagos, Africa's largest city. Nigeria, with its 166 million inhabitants, is Africa's most populous country and its newest economic powerhouse. Lagos boasts a population of 21 million, making it nearly as large as the populations of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone combined. With its airport and large population living in often crowded and unsanitary conditions, news of Ebola was met with a palpable sense of dread.

"The last thing anyone in the world wants to hear is the two words, 'Ebola' and 'Lagos' in the same sentence," noted Jeffrey Hawkins, the U.S. Consul General in Nigeria, at the time. The juxtaposition of the two conjured images of an "apocalyptic urban outbreak."

In the end, Nigeria confirmed a total of 19 Ebola cases, of whom seven died and 12 survived. It's a far cry from the situation in other parts of West Africa — but that's not an accident. Here's how Nigeria did it and the "best practices" that should now be employed elsewhere:

Effective Leadership and Public-Health Institutions

The WHO credits Nigeria for its strong leadership and effective coordination of the response:

The most critical factor is leadership and engagement from the head of state and the Minister of Health. Generous allocation of government funds and their quick disbursement helped as well. Partnership with the private sector was yet another asset that brought in substantial resources to help scale up control measures that would eventually stop the Ebola virus dead in its tracks.

The response was greatly aided by the rapid utilization of a national public institution (NCDC) and the prompt establishment of an Emergency Operations Centre, which was supported by the Disease Prevention and Control Cluster within the WHO country office. Nigeria also features a first-rate virology lab affiliated with the Lagos University Teaching Hospital. It was staffed and equipped to quickly and reliably diagnose Ebola, ensuring that containment measures could be employed with the shortest possible delay.

Rapid Response to the Initial Case

Nigeria's first Ebola patient, Patrick Sawyer, was initially thought to have malaria. But once that was ruled out, doctors immediately began treating him as a possible Ebola patient. He was kept in isolation, officials were notified, and a blood sample was rushed to a testing lab. Just three days later, Nigeria's health ministry set up an Ebola Incident Management Center, which eventually turned into an Emergency Operations Center that co-ordinated the response and decision-making.

Sufficient Access to Resources

As noted, federal and state governments in Nigeria were able to provide ample financial and material resources, including well-trained and experienced national staff. Isolation wards were immediately constructed, as were designated Ebola treatment facilities (though more slowly). Other resources included vehicles and mobile phones equipped with specially adapted apps allowing healthcare workers to engage in real-time reporting as the investigations moved forward. Many of these efforts were supported by social mobilization experts from UNICEF, CDC and Médecins sans Frontières.

High Quality Contact-Tracing

Nigerian health officials, working with assistance from WHO, the US CDC and others, managed to reach 100% of known contacts in Lagos and 99.8% at the second outbreak site in Port Harcourt, Nigeria's oil hub. High-quality contact tracing was performed by experienced epidemiologists who expedited the early detection of cases and their rapid movement to isolation wards. And unlike the tragic situation in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, all identified contacts were physically monitored on a daily basis for 21 days. Some contacts tried to escape during the monitoring process, but they were all tracked by special investigation teams and returned to observation to complete the requisite monitoring period of 21 days.

Applying Lessons From Previous Outbreaks

Nigeria has been combating another blight, polio, for quite some time now and with great success. Among their many tactics, health officials use the very latest satellite-based GPS technologies to ensure that no child missed out on polio vaccinations. When Ebola first appeared in July, they immediately repurposed these technologies and infrastructure to conduct Ebola case-finding, contact-tracing, and daily mapping of links between identified chains of transmission. Nigerian health officials also adapted the learnings from their efforts to eradicate guinea-worm disease.

A Rigorous Public Education Campaign

Communication with the public was also key. Nigerian health and government officials rallied communities to support containment measures. This involved house-to-house information campaigns — spoken in local dialects — that explained the level of risk, effective personal measures, and the actions being taken for control. All the while, Nigeria's president, Goodluck Jonathan, reassured his population on nationally televised newscasts. Traditional and religious community leaders were engaged early on and asked to play a role in sensitizing the public. Finally, the full range of media opportunities were exploited, including social media and televised facts about the disease delivered by Nigerian celebrities.

Screening At Borders — And A Refusal To Stop Air Travel

Instead of panicking and banning air travel, Nigerian health officials screened all arriving and departing travellers by air and by sea in Lagos and Rivers State. The average number of travellers screened each day reached a peak of more than 16,000.

Moving Forward With Vigilance

Clearly, this story isn't over yet. Vigilance remains high and Nigeria's surveillance systems remains on a high level of alert. It's quite possible that, given the country's success, people from neighbouring countries may try to (illicitly) enter in.

As a final note, and as noted by WHO Director-General Margaret Chan: "If a country like Nigeria, hampered by serious security problems, can do this – that is, make significant progress towards interrupting polio transmission, eradicate guinea-worm disease and contain Ebola, all at the same time – any country in the world experiencing an imported case can hold onward transmission to just a handful of cases."

[ WHO ]

During the Forbes 30 Under 30 Summit—a gathering of "the world's brightest young game changers" and the middle-aged men who are obsessed with them—Tinder CEO Sean Rad announced that his dating app will start offering a paid premium option in early November.

Forbes didn't say how much it will cost, but did report that the new service will offer users "more match-making powers."

Currently location based, Tinder lets you swipe though an endless stream of photos of people looking to meet up–but only the city you're currently in. The new premium service will likely let users break away from location limits and expand their Tinder reach. "We are adding features users have been begging us for," said Rad. "They will offer so much value we think users are willing to pay for them."

Rad says there will be no changes to the current, free Tinder app. Tinder has been growing like crazy. Rad won't comment on user numbers but did say that people now swipe through 1.2 billion Tinder profiles a day–that's billion with a B. He also says that each day Tinder makes more than 15 million matches.

The move to freemium was expected. Tinder's majority stakeholder is Barry Diller's IAC, which also owns OkCupid, Match, HowAboutWe, and has practically cornered the online dating market. Match is currently no. 10 among top-grossing apps in the Apple App Store, OkCupid is no. 33. Most of the other top-grossers are games. Zoosk, a dating competitor that filed for an IPO in April is no. 8 on that same list.

In the past Rad and Justin Mateen, the Tinder cofounder who resigned after allegations about sexually harassing a Tinder employee, have said that the app wants to expand into other "matchmaking verticals," such as business networking. Rad was short on details today, but he did insinuate that Tinder will be about more than about hooking up with the people around you:

Rad wouldn't give me specifics but hinted that one of the new features will focus on travel and could help Tinder move into markets beyond dating.

So, like, hooking up with the people around you while on a business trip?

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

[Image via Getty]

I don't think it's any surprise the publishing industry—print and digital—is overwhelmingly white. The statistics are far more upsetting than you might imagine: a recent Publisher's Weekly survey revealed the makeup of the industry to be 89 percent white, 3 percent Asian, 3 percent Hispanic, 3 percent mixed race, 1 percent black, and 1 percent other. Twenty-eight percent of respondents admitted that many publishing houses suffer from a lack of racial diversity.

In a recent roundtable for Scratch, editor Manjuka Martin assessed the current state of the publishing world, writing, "most of the gatekeepers come from a place of race and class privilege. How does this skewed power dynamic affect the careers of writers of color?" Speaking with essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Spiegel & Grau executive editor Christopher Jackson, poet Harmony Holiday, and author Kiese Laymon (who is a contributing editor for Gawker), the conversation touched on fostering community, staying true to the page despite an editor's advice, and the overall difficulties of publishing while black.

Ghansah on the diversity of new voices:

Ghansah: At times I don't understand the sensibilities of someone in the market—who looks at artists like Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, and Ha Jin—and doesn't do the math and see that the writers who are really knocking down doors now include a very powerful group of people of color. It doesn't make any sense to me—creatively or financially. Many of the up and coming big books that I hear about are by writers of color.

So I think there are visionary book editors who are doing great, important work. And, maybe, the rest of the homogenous industry is not only just failing, but also willfully putting itself on the vine to dry?

Jackson on the myth of audience for black writers:

Jackson: I would say what's happening in some of the larger publishing companies is that they're publishing fewer books generally than they have in the past, and so they're trying to publish those to audiences that they think they have mastered, they've already identified. And there's a lot of data now in the way there wasn't in the past, which can cut two ways. The olden days of "gut feelings" is passing away, and that's not such a bad thing—gut feelings are often laced with implicit and untested biases. But my fear about more data-driven publishing is that it leads to companies engineered to sell books to people they've already identified.

Some of the traditional ways of getting your name out—like barnstorming, doing a million events, that kind of stuff—still work, especially for independent publishers. It creates an audience. And because of things like digital and social media, those kinds of efforts can be amplified—so writers have more tools at their disposal to make a name for themselves, to build an audience. Even if a book publishing company has no clue how to find an audience, the writer can find and quantify that audience. I think that was true for Kiese.

Laymon on opening the door for writers of color:

Laymon: But the key, once you get that black or brown foot in the door, is to really open that shit up so other black and brown folk can get in. I don't think that means having people come in the same way you do. If you do something that works in this business, the idea should not be to make other black and brown folks go through the same kind of tired, soul-crushing shit you went through.

I do find that sometimes from older black writers and other writers who have had not such great publishing experiences. They're like, I had to be the goddamn slave opening the back door for writers who were worse than me, so you should have to do that same thing. And I'm like, no, not really. I think once someone does get a foot in, you've got to open it more. Encourage more.

Read the conversation in its entirety here.

[Photo via Corbis]

During his stand-up show in Philadelphia Thursday night, comedian Hannibal Buress addressed the multiple sexual assault accusations against Bill Cosby. "…You raped women, Bill Cosby," Buress said. " So, [that] brings you down a couple notches."

The full bit, courtesy of PhillyMag.com, is below:

Thirteen? And it's even worse because Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate. Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the '80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom. Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches. I don't curse on stage. Well, yeah, you're a rapist, so, I'll take you sayin' lots of motherfuckers on Bill Cosby: Himself if you weren't a rapist.[…] I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Show reruns. […] I've done this bit on stage, and people don't believe. People think I'm making it up. […]That shit is upsetting. If you didn't know about it, trust me. You leave here and google 'Bill Cosby rape.' It's not funny. That shit has more results than Hannibal Buress.

Thirteen women have accused Cosby of sexually assaulting them between the 1970s and the mid-2000s.

[h/t BuzzFeed/Image via AP]

On Sunday morning, one of New York's carriage horses escaped from its reins and went for a leisurely stroll up Eleventh Avenue. Look at the horse, gaily trotting along, and you'd hardly know the police were in hot pursuit.

Look at the cops, trying to pull the horse over with their sirens, as if it were a human man or woman and cared about cops or sirens. Dumb cops. This horse stops for no one.

Witnesses told the New York Post that the horse was being bathed when it escaped from its Hell's Kitchen stable, and that, sadly, it was eventually corralled and returned home.

[h/t @jdavidgoodman]

For many, strolling around San Francisco is a pleasure. But for the optimization-obsessed elites of Silicon Valley, traveling through a world-class city is just laboring tax on their time. Now one former Facebook boss realizes his "soul-crushing" shuttle bus commute out of town was a blessing in disguise.

Sam Lessin, Facebook's former VP of product management, left the social network in August to explore re-entering the startup scene. But now that he's spent six weeks "on the outside," Lessin realizes: "Working at Facebook is like working in a bubble." And he wants back in.

Lessin has a recurring column for his wife's tech news site, The Information. He devoted his latest to praising Facebook's corporate organization. "[Facebook is] highly effective at distributing everything from technology to food on-demand to make employees more efficient." But San Francisco? Not so much:

I underestimated the benefits of a corporate campus that reduces time-spent traveling between meetings and procuring food and services, among other things. [...]

While a high-traffic commute can feel like a soul-crushing waste of time, I have to admit that I probably am not saving a meaningful amount of travel time staying in San Francisco, where instead I am dealing with piecemeal bit-by-bit friction among various activities that were once all in the same place.

For Lessin, the horror of grinding out his daytime hours in San Francisco includes such indignities as stepping outside an office to buy things:

While I worked at Facebook, I had one big tax on time—a roughly 45 minute commute from San Francisco to Menlo Park every day. What I didn't appreciate is the time I saved moving between activities.

At Facebook, my meetings, the gym and food were all within a one or two minute walk. Now, my gym is a few minutes ride away from where I am working. Food requires leaving a building. These little bits of friction add up quickly.

Those "little bits of friction" commonly referred to as "life" are taken care of you at Facebook. And according to this handy graph Lessin whipped up, corporate campuses really save workers time!

Fortunately, it's not all gloom and nostalgia "on the outside." Lessin has one corporate life hack to keep you running at peak efficiency even off the cushy tech campus:

If you don't work at a company that has a well setup corporate campus, it may be worth paying extra attention to planning your travel and simply not taking meetings to help minimize the ongoing tax.

Most people aren't in the position to decide which meetings they can or can't take. But that's probably their fault for not hobnobbing their way up the meritocracy.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Photo: Chris Pan Photography, Graph: The Information, h/t Business Insider

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On Friday, The Guardian posted a piece by author Kathleen Hale, a well-connected young author who once became so obsessed with the writer of a one-star review of her novel on Goodreads that she stalked her, only to find that the critic was using a fake name and identity. Can you pick a side yet? I'm on Team Nobody.

The story—at least how Hale tells it—goes a little something like this. Hale's publisher, HarperTeen, sent advance copies of her novel to book bloggers to get a sense of what they thought of it. The bloggers were then expected to post their assessments to sites like GoodReads, hopefully generating buzz prior to its release. Hale was warned to avoid GoodReads like teen YouTube stars are warned to avoid reading their comment sections. But, also like a teen YouTube star, Hale was unable to resist. And once she began picking at it, she couldn't stop herself. It didn't take long before things Got Weird.

The saga began when she found a review written by a book blogger named "Blythe Harris" that particularly upset her.

"Fuck this," it said. "I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent."

Blythe went on to warn other readers that my characters were rape apologists and slut-shamers. She accused my book of mocking everything from domestic abuse to PTSD. "I can say with utmost certainty that this is one of the worst books I've read this year," she said, "maybe my life."

Other commenters joined in to say they'd been thinking of reading my book, but now wouldn't. Or they'd liked it, but could see where Blythe was coming from, and would reduce their ratings.

"Rape is brushed off as if it is nothing," Blythe explained to one commenter. "PTSD is referred to insensitively; domestic abuse is the punch line of a joke, as is mental illness."

A reasonable critique, if it were true, but Hale says that there is no rape in her book (others who have read the book have reached a different conclusion). The author's response scans as a drastic leap: she began tracking the online movements of Blythe Harris—her Instagram account, her Twitter, her Facebook—and discovered a number of inconsistencies she found troubling. And after even more emotionally damaging digging, Hale was pretty sure that Blythe Harris wasn't even a real person.

Still, she wanted to talk to Blythe, to figure out why the book had made her so angry, but Blythe didn't seem interested. In a last-ditch effort to get Blythe to speak with her, Hale requested the reviewer conduct a pre-book release interview and was able to get her home address to send her "giveaways." Once Hale had Blythe's location, she looked up the house on Google Maps. She reviewed census data and telephone directories and discovered that nobody named Blythe Harris had ever lived there.

It gets weirder.

Hale says that her next step was to pay for an online background check on the name of the woman who lived at the address belonging to "Blythe." That bit of sleuthing revealed that Blythe's real name was actually something else entirely (Hale refers to her as "Judy"); that she was 46, not 27; and that she wasn't a married mother of two. Hale then rented a car, drove to Judy's house and knocked on the door before freaking out and dropping a book on the front step.

Even though Hale calls that moment her "personal rock bottom," she continued to stalk Blythe/Judy, calling her at work and pretending to be a fact checker, demanding an explanation for who "Blythe" the book blogger was and why she was pretending to live at Judy's house. She asked why sample books were being delivered to Judy's address, and Judy claimed she hadn't gotten book deliveries for years. Hale called a "contact" at a publishing house, who, for some reason, confirmed to Hale that book deliveries had been received by Judy/Blythe as recently as a couple of weeks ago.

All along the way, she had the blessing of Nev Schulman, famed elevator emoter and woman-puncher, who offered his trademark brand of empty platitudes as advice.

The entire saga reads like a textbook case of Team Nobody. Blythe/Judy, who Hale says had been stealing pictures of her neighbor and spends her free time writing factually inaccurate one-star reviews of books that haven't been released with the intent of hurting people, sounds like she should find a different hobby. But, then again, she's not peering into a stranger's window and calling them at work because they said a mean thing on the internet. Stealing photos from a neighbor is creepy; stalking is illegal.

More notably, though: this isn't the first time that Hale has aggressively pursued someone and publicly bragged about it. This weekend, a tipster sent us this piece Hale wrote for Thought Catalog two years ago, wherein she describes a chance run-in with Lori, a troubled girl with an eating disorder who had, years ago, accused Hale's mother of sexual abuse.

But here, at the movie theater, Lori looked happy. I stared hard, caught her eye, and smiled nervously. She and her friends scurried off. I was seeing a different movie but went in after them anyway, and sat down a few rows ahead. When the previews started, I went up to Lori.

"You're fat," I shouted. And then I poured the entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide on her head.

In Lori's written statement to the police, she drew arrows pointing to supplementary exaggerations, underlined certain half-truths for emphasis, and wrote in the margins to fit everything she needed to say. The finished piece succeeded in making her into more of a victim, but was nevertheless false. It was very imaginative, though. Sometimes, when I am feeling gracious, I think that maybe she should have been a writer.

"She saw me and ran from the theater to go and buy her weapon, thinking only of my demise, and would not stop laughing."

A sympathetic judge let Hale off without punishment, but that didn't stop her from doing what she referred to in her Guardian piece as "light stalking;" she says she followed Lori's movements online. One day, she contacted her via AOL Instant Messenger, and within an hour, a police officer showed up to give her father a firm talking to about how his daughter shouldn't stalk a girl she once assaulted.

Ever since reading the Guardian piece for the first time, I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. I sympathize with Hale's feeling of helplessness in the face of what felt to her like people unfairly turning on her. And I'm sure most people who have ever written online understand the feeling of wanting to have a face-to-face conversation with a vitriolic critic. It's that fantasy confrontation, where all of your stored l'esprit de l'escalier flows freely. I've even skimmed the Twitter feeds of professional and romantic rivals after a drink too many, an hour too late. I get that urge.

But you do not go to somebody's house. You do not call somebody's place of employment. You do not pose as a fact checker and demand personal information. You definitely don't call a girl with an eating disorder fat while pouring hydrogen peroxide onto her head, and you do not run away laughing like a maniac after the fact. Hale's thoughts are defensible; her actions are not.

Hale's not without her own powerful supporters. Her fiancee, Simon Rich, is a writer for SNL and the New Yorker. Her fiancee's mother, Gail Winston, is an executive at Harper Collins, the house that is publishing her book. Her future father-in-law is Frank Rich, of the New York Times. And her friend, John Mulaney, is also in her corner.

This article is great, as is @HaleKathleen. http://t.co/HBwDfliTt3

— John Mulaney (@mulaney) October 19, 2014

Book bloggers—the ones who read and review books because they love it, and do it for free, and are in a mostly symbiotic relationship with people who write those books—aren't as pleased. Twitter's Kathleen Hale tag is a veritable e-waterfall of anger today, some of it measured, some of it nakedly angry. Others in the community have taken to their own blogs, penning responses to Hale's article that are well-argued and smart. The most level-headed of responses comes from SB Sarah of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, who writes that, in addition to being terrible, Hale's stalking was a deleterious exercise, helpful to nobody.

Hale's account of her determination to connect personally with the reviewer leads me to believe that for Hale, there was no separation between book and author. She "longed" to speak with the reviewer, as she said, and that longing makes me question why that contact was so important? Why would Hale order a background check, call that person at work, and then go to her home address? Why was that so important? What was she hoping to gain? What did she win through all that effort? That she was right, that one person was in fact using two names and one or both disliked Hale's book? That if she could just talk to this reviewer, she could...accomplish what? Changing her mind? By showing up on her porch and leaving a creepy book as a gift/message?

Once you put a book or an article or listicle or pamphlet or gif set or manifesto out there, Sarah argues, you lose control of it. That's the final step of writing: you let other people read it, you let them react. You step back.

Image via Shutterstock

What did you do this weekend, and did you find it super brief? I went to a show and I saw Gone Girl at least one more time. I think I had a milkshake at some point, that's all I really recall. Here's what's going on tonight on TV.

AT 8/7c.

• They said one hour of Antiques Roadshow in Jacksonville wouldn't be enough, and don't you know those crazy motherfuckers were right all along. Tear it up with some old folks and their old crap, deep in the heart of a swamp.
• Dancing with the Stars has been on for six episodes already! Imagine that. And meanwhile The Voice is at Part 3 of its Battles. What happens after the Battles? Truth and reconciliation commission, probably.
• The Originals continues barreling into a wolfy-witchy-mommy-daddy-race war situation like usual, while Gotham and Big Bang Theory... also air. To be entirely honest this week it's kind of hard to give a shit about the differences between them, or even remember or care which one is offensive to talk about, so go with your heart. Watch 'em both, hell. Make a night of it.

AT 9/8c.

• American Dad marks its tenth premiere, having moved at some point to TBS. It would be neat to find out like in a year that Cleveland Show has actually been on A&E or something this whole time.
• HBO's Private Violence is a documentary about domestic abuse that concentrates on a single woman rather than presenting broader, more horrifying statistics.
• CW's charming Jane the Virgin did great last week! Here's hoping it keeps people around.
• Scorpion on CBS is, apparently, based on a pack of lies! Not that it matters, it's a dumb show for dummies who watch CBS—and obvious to anyone who watched more than ten minutes of the pilot—but still kind of sad, in a way.
• TI & Tiny's on VH1, which makes this as good a time as any to tell you that at 11/10c. tonight, just hours from now, the guests on Watch What Happens: Live are TI and Matthew Broderick. I mean like I could not wait to make sure that you know, and understand, that.
• Also Sleepy Hollow, which is probably like the best show on TV.

AT 10/9c.

• There's The Blacklist, which maybe something will happen on it this week. I mean, shit is constantly happening on that show, but the ads always make it seem like something is actually going to for-real happen, and I feel like maybe tonight's the night, but we'll see.
• NCIS:LA is whatever that one is about, legal or criminal investigations taking place in the naval yards of California perhaps, while Castle is still on for its seventh season in a row.
• Otherwise it's Are You the One? on MTV, and then around midnight you can catch Wyatt Cenac's Netflix Special, Brooklyn.

So that's that! Not the hugest Monday night in history, but still pretty time-consuming depending on what you're into. See you tomorrow.

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.

Years before Jan Koum sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $22 billion, a California court granted his ex-girlfriend a restraining order against the future tech CEO. After court documents surfaced today, Koum apologized telling Bloomberg, "I am ashamed of the way I acted."

Bloomberg's summary of the claims is terse, skipping over the details. However, allegations in the court documents obtained by Bloomberg paint a picture of Koum methodically stalking and harassing the victim for months.

The order was granted in February 1996 in state court in San Jose, California, after a civil harassment claim from an ex-girlfriend who details multiple incidents from June 1995 to January 1996 in which she said Koum verbally and physically threatened her, according to court documents. The incidents included changing her school records and preventing her from attending college classes, according to the documents.

The restraining order alleges that the harassment began with phone calls after his then-girlfriend "told him that I didn't want to see him anymore." Soon, the phone calls turned into physical stalking.

July 8, 1995, Jan Koum waiting for hours outside my house until I got home after being out with a friend. At one point my father told him to leave, but he still waited until 12:30 PM when I finally arrived home that evening. He then followed my friend and slamming into the back of his car.

Much of the harassment occurred at Foothill Community College, where the victim was a student.

Eventually, the victim says she stopped going to school because of the harassment. In her request for a restraining order, she claims that Koum used her Social Security number to destroy her school records. She also says he began physically assaulting her around this time, but does not specify what that entails.

Even when the victim left school and changed her phone number at the advice of the local police, the harassment continued. Her new unlisted phone number soon received "hang up calls." Then Koum used mutual friends to trick her into answering calls.

All these actions forced the victim to take more time off her studies.

According to Bloomberg, both Koum and Facebook believe the incident is behind him:

"I feel I was irrational and behaved badly after we broke up," Koum said in a statement today. "I am ashamed of the way I acted, and ashamed that my behavior forced her to take legal action. I am deeply sorry for what I did." [...]

"Jan has written a thoughtful and honest response that we believe demonstrates the sincerity of his remorse over what happened nearly two decades ago," said a Facebook spokesman.

Facebook may want to fixate on the fact that it happened "two decades" ago, but the more disturbing part seems to be that Koum, a Facebook board member, is not denying any of her claims.

To contact the author of this post, please email kevin@valleywag.com.

Photo: Getty

Jesse Leroy Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the abduction of UVA student Hannah Graham, was indicted by a grand jury today for a separate sexual assault case dating back to 2005.

Prosecutors declined to comment on the details of the case, which involved a 26-year-old Fairfax, VA woman, but the grand jury charged Matthew with attempted capital murder, abduction, and sexual penetration with an object. According to the Washington Post:

The fresh charges stem from an attack on a 26-year-old woman that occurred as she was walking home from a Giant on Jermantown Road on the night of Sept. 24, 2005. Police said the woman was grabbed from behind about 10 p.m. and carried from Rock Garden Drive to a nearby wooded area, where she was assaulted. The attacker then fled.

Matthew has been linked in a myriad of other sexual assaults and abductions—as a student, he reportedly left two different colleges mid-semester to avoid assault charges. Police say he's also forensically linked to the abduction and murder of Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington, who disappeared during a concert in 2009.

[image via AP]

The FBI released a statement this afternoon announcing that its agents arrested a National Weather Service employee in Wilmington, Ohio today after she was indicted for "allegedly downloading restricted files" from government servers.

The statement says that Xiafen "Sherry" Chen, a hydrologist, downloaded "sensitive files" from the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams—a database that keeps sensitive information on every dam maintained by the United States—in May 2012. Authorities further allege that Chen lied about her actions when pressed by investigators looking into the matter back in 2013.

The Army Corp of Engineers is an agency of the federal government responsible for erecting and maintaining water management and flood prevention structures around the country, including structures like dams and levees.

This wasn't the first time that the security of sensitive information in the National Inventory of Dams was compromised. The International Business Times reported back in May 2013 that an IP address from China hacked into the database in January 2013:

"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined not to have proper level of access for the information," Pierce said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon.

The IBTimes report further states that the database contains vulnerability information about the country's dams and how many casualties could result from each dam failing.

If found guilty of all four charges leveled against her, Chen could face a maximum of 25 years in prison and a $1,000,000 fine.

[Image: NWS Wilmington, Ohio, via Facebook]

You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

According to reports, legendary designer Oscar de la Renta died Monday at age 82.

De la Renta—who recently designed the dress Amal Alamuddin wore at her wedding to George Clooney last month—was diagnosed with cancer in 2006. The cause of death, however, has not yet been reported.

Earlier this month, de la Renta appointed Peter Copping as the new creative director of the Oscar de la Renta brand—reportedly his second choice after a failed effort to bring John Galliano on board.

The Times noted at the time that de la Renta was one of the few designers to appoint a successor before death:

Though Yves Saint Laurent worked with Christian Dior before briefly taking over the house at the designer's untimely death, and Karl Lagerfeld was hired by founder Gaby Aghion at Chloé, the modern fashion world is not known for its smooth passing of design power. Indeed, according to Mr. de la Renta, this was an impetus for the decision to identify Mr. Copping and put him in place.

[image via AP]

The FCC says a software glitch that made it impossible for the entire state of Washington to call emergency services for six hours "could have been prevented."

The April 9 outage actually affected 11 million people across seven states. According to the Washington Post, close to six thousand people tried to call 911 but were unable to complete the call.

At the center of the disruption was a system maintained by a third-party contractor, a Colorado-based company called Intrado. Intrado owns and operates a routing service, taking in 911 calls and directing them to the most appropriate public safety answering point, or PSAP, in industry parlance. Ordinarily, Intrado's automated system assigns a unique identifying code to each incoming call before passing it on — a method of keeping track of phone calls as they move through the system.

But on April 9, the software responsible for assigning the codes maxed out at a pre-set limit; the counter literally stopped counting at 40 million calls. As a result, the routing system stopped accepting new calls, leading to a bottleneck and a series of cascading failures elsewhere in the 911 infrastructure.

Intrado employees reportedly failed to notice the warning alerts and categorized them as "low level" issues.

The company says it has corrected the issue and created a new warning alarm to signal when the number of successfully routed calls drops below a certain level.

[image via Shutterstock]

Being friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg apparently means a lot of free T shirts—the Supreme Court justice of fun says she stockpiled those Notorious R.B.G. shirts and gives them out to people as gifts.

Ginsburg—who seems to delight in her meme status—was talking with NPR correspondant Nina Totenberg at the 92nd Street Y when the Notorious R.B.G tumblr came up. At one point, Ginsburg reminded Totenberg she'd gifted her a shirt from her private collection—twice. From TIME:

Ginsburg: I think a law clerk told me about this tumblr and also explained to me what Notorious RBG was a parody on. And now my grandchildren love it and I try to keep abreast of the latest that's on the tumblr. I have—and in fact I think I gave you a Notorious RBG—

Totenberg: Two of my three. I bought one.

Ginsburg: I have quite a large supply.

Totenberg: Do you have the one—what's the one 'you can't have truth without Ruth'"

Ginsburg: Without Ruth. [nods]

According to the Post, Ginsburg is also pleased with an upcoming opera based on her and Justice Antonin Scalia. She told Totenberg her favorite part is his "rage aria."

[image via AP]

South African track star Oscar Pistorius, 27, was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday for the shooting and killing of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp. "I'm just glad it's over," June Steenkamp, Reeva's mother, told reporters after the sentencing.

Last month, a judge found him guilty of culpable homicide, a South African analog to manslaughter. As the New York Times reports, Pistorius' lawyers have noted that the terms of his sentencing will only require the athlete to serve one-sixth of his term, or 10 months, before he can be placed on house arrest. From the Times:

But some South African legal experts said the conversion of prison time to house arrest was not automatic and required negotiations with the correctional authorities. After serving half the sentence, Mr. Pistorius can also apply for parole.

http://gawker.com/oscar-pistoriu...

"Oscar will embrace this opportunity to pay back to society," Arnold Pistorius, Oscar's uncle, said in a statement.

Last Valentine's Day, Pistorius, claiming that he believed an intruder was in their Pretoria villa, fired four shots on a closed bathroom door. Steenkamp, inside, died almost instantly.

Judge Thokozile Masipa, who has presided over the months-long trial and sentencing of Pistorius, said she believed her ruling to be "fair and just, both to society and to the accused."http://gawker.com/what-the-hell-...

"It would be a sad day for this country if an impression was created that there is one law for the poor and disadvantaged and another for the rich and famous," Masipa said in court. "Righteous anger should not cloud judgment."

[Image via AP]

Back when prissy lil' peanut Ariana Grande's life coach quit because Ariana was such a diva—allegedly—Ariana called Miley Cyrus for advice. According to Ariana, Miley told her, "It will blow over and tomorrow they'll be talking about something else." Huh, well.

Ariana told The Mirror that when those pesky diva rumors started percolating, "I was upset and I contacted Miley. I said, 'Miley, I'm so sad—what do I do? This isn't true. My heart is broken, I feel so bad.'" According to Ariana, Miley "was like":

Girl, don't even look at it. Just be happy that you're blessed. You have family and friends love you, you have fans that love you who know what's true and what's not. ... It will blow over and tomorrow they'll be talking about something else.

Aw. Ariana feels a certain kinship with Ol' Foam Finger: "She lives for love and that's something I do too. She has a beautiful spirit and she made me feel so much better."

Additionally, getting branded as a diva who hopes all her fans "fucking die" made Ariana realize that the music industry is tough for women:

If you see a woman working hard who is successful—who doesn't stop until she reaches her goal, who is strong and has wishes and dreams she wants to fulfill, and works hard every day—you label them a diva. But if you see a man doing that, you're like, "He's incredible, he's an amazing businessman."

Which, dang, that's true. Hopefully this is America's favorite suspected serial killer's feminist awakening.

[Photos via Getty]

Yesterday I took a US Airways flight from Raleigh-Durham to Washington, DC to drive some Hellcats. So far so good, right? Across the aisle from me was a woman, from Boston, who was feeling a bit queasy. She asked the flight attendant for some club soda. They responded by trying to kick her off the plane. Any idea why?

If we're absolutely being honest, there were two very simple reasons why: the woman was black, and had an African accent. In the popular culture of panic, those two factors seem to be enough to turn an entire plane full of people around and return to the gate to attempt to kick a paying traveller off a plane.

Though the flight attendants that surrounded the woman and asked her to leave the plane (and threatened to call the airport police if she wouldn't get off the plane) never once used the word, it's clear that they were afraid the woman had ebola. It was pretty absurd listening to them dance around saying what they were thinking, instead talking about their "health concerns." Come on. If you're going to be a paranoid, own it.

Let's just be clear about some things about this woman: she was 34, felt she quite possibly could be pregnant, and lived in Boston. She'd been to Nigeria back at the beginning of the year, but came back in fine health. She felt a little nauseated; that's it. He eyes weren't bleeding, she wasn't spraying revolting fluids out of anything, she was simply a young woman trying to get home.

I was sitting next to a woman who worked at the UNC School of Public Health, who was traveling on the plane with a bunch of other colleagues who knew something about diseases and epidemics. And, interestingly, one of them, an older white man, mentioned he'd been to Liberia recently, and was technically much more of a potential ebola risk than the woman. Nobody asked him to leave the plane.

It was absolutely inane. This poor woman was reduced nearly to tears because she was nauseous and had the wrong accent. That's it. They had zero evidence of her medical history, and absolutely no rational reason to assume she was in any way a danger. And yet they had flight attendants going back and forth to her seat, and had the plane return to the gate in an effort to get her to leave. It wasn't until a bunch of us other passengers around her, including several of the public health workers, got together to tell the attendants that we were just fine with the woman staying, that they finally backed down.

It's incredible that a paying customer can be just kicked off a flight for the flimsiest of reasons. I understand the disease is scary and airline workers can hypothetically be at greater risk of exposure, but come on. This is a woman from Boston, in North Carolina, going back to Boston. There's been no ebola cases reported at any of those locations. People get nauseous on planes. People have African accents. We've got to get a grip.