On Tuesday, the Phoenix Police Department named 30-year-old Mark Rine as the killer of Rumain Brisbon, an unarmed black man who was gunned down last week after the officer reportedly mistook a pill bottle for a gun.

"It has been seven days since the incident and we didn't want to hold off on releasing the name any longer," said a police spokesman Sgt. Trent Crump. "He's now had time to mitigate any threats he might receive."

On December 2, Brisbon was shot to death by police after a brief foot chase and struggle, during which cops say the pursuing officer "believed he felt the handle of a gun" in Brisbon's pocket. The object was later found to be a bottle of prescription pills.

Since then, protestors have demanded that the identity of Brisbon's killer be made public.

"This is a very minor victory in a long campaign for justice for Rumain Brisbon and for justice against police brutality," Rev. Jarrett Maupin, a local civil rights activist, told Reuters.

According to Sgt. Crump, Rine has been placed on desk duty while the shooting is investigated.

[Image via Facebook]

After a Pennsylvania woman's Facebook post threatening to shoot Mike Brown protestors went viral this week, its apparent author had a simple explanation: my kid did it!

On Sunday, demonstrators staged a "die-in" outside Lincoln Financial Field to protest the police killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner, prompting high school guidance counselor MaryKate Blankenburg to write, "If my child cannot get to the Eagles game due to protesters, I will personally SHOOT every one of them. You've been warned idiots!!"

Predictably, an online campaign to get her fired from her job at Central Bucks High School West quickly developed.

But according to The Morning Call, Blankenburg explained to reporters that while she was teaching Sunday school "my child might have gotten hold of my iPad" and made the post.

Unfortunately for her, the counselor's employers were less than convinced. On Tuesday, the Central Bucks School District announced Blankenburg had been placed on administrative leave while they investigate the message.

[Image via Twitter]

As people work their way through the passel of documents that is the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on post-9/11, Bush-era CIA torture, Fox News is ready to weigh in: The long-planned doc dump is all political subterfuge. The reactions of some of the hosts of the network's Outnumbered, though, was Fox News at their most stridently jingoistic.

Skip to about 2:15 in the clip embedded above, and you'll first hear professional agitator Jesse Watters pulls a classic, "gotta hear both sides" defense. "They didn't even interview any of the CIA interrogators to do the report," he says. "It's kind of how like Rolling Stone does their reporting—they only get one side."

And then Andrea Tantaros, visibly angry, says anyone who would dare to know about the gruesome, dehumanizing, and illegal methods of torture used by the CIA is simply distracting from the "real" issues:

The United States of America is awesome, we are awesome. We've closed the book on [torture], and we've stopped doing it. And the reason they want to have this discussion is not to show how awesome we are. This administration wants to have this discussion to show us how we're not awesome.

Awesome.

[H/T Daily Intel]

Kim Kardashian gained a fair amount of weight during her pregnancy with baby North West, and the tabloids were genuinely terrible to her about it. Now in an interview with Elle UK, Kim explains she went through that trial because of God. God smote Kim Kardashian for thinking she was "so hot."

Kim says:

I'd think God was doing this for a reason. He was saying: "Kim, you think you're so hot, but look what I can do to you." My body just went crazy. After five months I swore I'd never get pregnant again. I got so huge and it felt like someone had taken over my body.

There's a lot to unpack here, but chiefly, we should consider that 1) Kim Kardashian believes in a vindictive, slut-shaming, Old Testament God and 2) North West is possibly a vampire baby.

May the Lord above bless you from here on out, Kim.

Civilization is imperiled. Demonic dark-skinned criminals exult in seizing property and security. Only a vanguard of brave uniformed officers can take them off the streets and restore order. It is 1835, and whites are finally confronting what Mark Twain will soon call "the satanic brotherhood of the Thugs."

Nearly two centuries later, those on the lookout for the thug find him everywhere. Toddling in a diaper in Omaha, Nebraska. Trudging along the sidewalk in a hoodie in the Orlando suburbs. Turning his music up outside a Jacksonville gas station. Peddling loosies in front of a shop on Staten. "Charging" a cop on Florissant, just down the Mighty Mississippi a piece from where Twain was born. Chanting on the street not far from a Ferguson school that today bears Twain's name.

The thug was discussed last week on a police-only bulletin board, after a grand jury declined to prosecute the New York City cops who choked 41-year-old Eric Garner to death while video rolled:

People are sick and tired of thugs. Certain people better wake the hell up and stop supporting the thugs. 2 years 1 month before the head thug gets thrown out and hopefully a real POTUS gets elected.

Reacting that week to the St. Louis Rams' gesture of solidarity with Michael Brown, a black teen shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, the St. Louis police assailed the football players for associating themselves with "the violent thugs burning down buildings." When President Obama called for a post-Ferguson summit in Washington, conservative red-meat packer Mike Huckabee attacked him for inviting "thugs and rioters and mob members" to the White House.

Back when Trayvon Martin's killer went free, a chain email circulated with a photograph falsely purporting to be Martin—a photograph of a posing tattooed black man, meant in this context to strike fear in the viewer. To be a thug. You can find the image today on Snopes.com:

It was accompanied by this text:

President Obama looked at the FIVE year old photo the media chose to show the Nation and said, "If I had a son...he would look like Trayvon..." So from that comment should I assume you did not bother to look for the facts in this shooting... or should I assume you want a son who is a 17 year old drug dealing, gold teethed, tattooed thug whose name on one of his Facebook profiles was "Wild Nigga" who 'finds" jewelry and burglary tools on the way to school?

In each of these cases, the presumption of the author is the same: We true, faithful Americans know what a thug looks like. We need not wring our hands over his fate. His life is forfeit.

How has a four-letter string become shorthand for such a forceful and fraught worldview, while still sliding easily into everyday usage, free of the stigma that's stripped other four-letter words—and slightly longer racial epithets—of their respectability? There isn't a simple answer, but there is a history. It begins in colonial India.

The "historical" thug—derived from the Indian thuggee—was most vividly presented to recent generations by Steven Spielberg's exotic assassin baddies in the 1984 "neo-Orientalist extravaganza" Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom:

In Hollywood's hands, Indian thuggishness is a dark mystical psychopathy brought on by magic spells and goblets of spiked blood. It kidnaps and enslaves children. It literally rips innocents' hearts out of their chests. And it can only be vanquished by a visiting Western adventurer with right morals and rough methods. A Spielbergian thug is a stock movie menace, functionally interchangeable with a Nazi SS-Hauptsturmführer or an animatronic great white shark.

The Indiana Jones thug descends from a shaky legend that coalesced in the early 1830s, as the British East India Company deepened its involvement in South Asia. This jewel of Britannia's empire offered wealth and glory to the officers who served there, particularly to officers who had a genius for minimizing disruptions to commerce.

Such was the fortune of Major-General Sir William Henry Sleeman, who in 1835 took over the company's fledgling "Thuggee Department." Officially known as the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, Sleeman's outfit had been established to tackle the problem of banditry on the lawless roads between India's major trading centers. This was not to be a simple police matter. Sleeman and his fellow officers insisted that they were actually combating a primordial criminal conspiracy. "Here was no body of amateur assassins, driven to crime by force of circumstance," Sleeman would later write of the thuggee. "All travellers were fish for their net."

The thuggee cult was, depending on the source, either an ancient god-fearing ritualistic coven of assassins or a motley association of opportunistic Muslims and Hindus united in little beyond their crafty thieving. First alluded to in a Frenchman's Indian travel diary published in 1687, these "cunningest" thieves used guile to gain their marks' confidence. Then they would "use a certain Slip with a running-noose, which they can cast with so much slight about a Mans Neck, when they are within reach of him, that they never fail; so that they strangle him in a trice." Later, when the Brits came, the brigands would be referred to as thugs, an Anglicized version of the Hindi word for "deceiver."

"A Party of Thugs in India," Harpers/Columbia

The crime in question was essentially a native matter; Sleeman and Twain would later point out that the thuggee never killed Westerners, only other Indians. And little evidence was ever gathered by the locals to support the notion of a vast criminal tradition. Yet the British were fascinated by the subject. Beyond the commercial consequences that widespread robbery might have on travel and trade, the idea of brown-on-brown crime motivated the Brits: By stemming the violence that the natives did to each other, they could demonstrate their superior morals and breeding, justifying their role as India's civilized interlocutors.

Driven by Sleeman's self-promotion, the thug legend grew quickly in the early Raj. The major-general began issuing blockbuster reports detailing "a numerous and highly organized fraternity operating in all parts of India" and demanding more resources to combat this evil. He captured a thug leader who claimed at trial to have killed 931 men. Another top thug led Sleeman to a mass grave of hundreds of bodies. All of this was chronicled in a British-run propaganda campaign in the Indian papers.

"Thugs Strangling a Traveller"

Sleeman and his associates made a mint back home spinning yarns about the thuggee to titillate and terrify Britons who had never seen the empire's frontier with their own eyes. One novelized account, 1839's Confessions of a Thug, became an acclaimed bestseller. Sleeman himself wrote several memoirs, one of which was titled Thug: Or, a Million Murders. A devotee of the emerging disciplines of phrenology and eugenics, he had his staff collect and send home "thug skulls" to assist in research in predicting ethnic criminal types.

The ensuing moral panic in Britain gave Sleeman the resources he wanted, and he gave his countrymen a satisfying conclusion to the campaign. "Adequate measures were then taken for the systematic suppression of the evil," a fawning biographer later wrote. "'Thuggee Sleeman' made it the main business of his life to hunt down the criminals and to extirpate their secret society."

Multiple thuggee courts were set up across the subcontinent; some 1,500 prisoners were tried for thug offenses, with 1,400 being executed or handed life sentences. A special prison and industrial academy were set up for thug informers and their families, guaranteeing them factory jobs. By the 1860s, the thuggee existed only in the nightmares of Victorian children and the dreams of London publishers.

When you pulled apart the British victory narrative about the thug, logical paradoxes abounded. The thug had existed forever, committing mass slaughter against India and plundering her wealth, but he wasn't identified as a societal problem until the advanced West had come to his turf; he was unknowable, inscrutable, mystical, frightening, but also predictable and easy for a good officer to exterminate; and as quickly as he appeared everywhere, he was driven to extinction.

His disappearance was spun as a concrete vindication of the rationality, goodness, and superiority of British rule over the Indians. As one British commentator put it in a home journal in 1841, succeeding in this policing role would expiate any sins his country's overseas police force had previously committed:

"To the vigilance of the British Government in India, has been due the first complete detection of Thuggee, in its real character of an organized and systematic fraternity; and, if under the same sway, this monstrous hybrid of superstition and cruelty is destined to be finally eradicated, a title will thus be earned to the gratitude of the natives of India, which will alone make the benefits of our later administration more than atone for the injustices and rapacity which marked our early acquisitions of Indian territory."

Had the thuggee really existed? Yes, probably on a smaller and less terrible scale than was suggested by the authorities. But the Raj nevertheless invented him anew, because it had to.

The thuggee legend grew in America thanks in large part to Mark Twain. In his 1897 travelogue Following the Equator, the satirist displayed an earnest obsession with the myths, reporting that he stayed awake into the mornings "to read about those strange people the Thugs." He spent many pages rehashing the accounts of Sleeman and the popular novels as if they were wire news reports.

"One of the chiefest wonders" of the thuggee, Twain wrote, "was the success with which it kept its secret. The English trader did business in India two hundred years and more before he ever heard of it; and yet it was assassinating its thousands all around him every year, the whole time." It never seems to have occurred to Twain that there might be an obvious reason no one had observed a criminal thug conspiracy in India before the colonial police got there.

By his trip's end, Twain saw thuggishness everywhere. Even though he conceded it was "a bloody terror" and "a desolating scourge," he found it useful as a humorous shorthand for the evils great and small that men would visit upon each other. Watching the baggage porters at a rail station, he observed:

[W]herever a white man's native servant appeared, that native seemed to have put aside his natural gentleness for the time and invested himself with the white man's privilege of making a way for himself by promptly shoving all intervening black things out of it. In these exhibitions of authority Satan was scandalous. He was probably a Thug in one of his former incarnations.

Illustration from Twain's "Following the Equator"

The joke was on all of us, Twain felt, because "we white people are merely modified Thugs." Surely each civilized man was just as capable of evil as the empire's now-extinct assassin cult.

"We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder," he concluded, "and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way."

In contrast to Twain's tourist, Sleeman had written of the thuggee in a voice later readers might recognize as Orwell/Hemingway chic, that peculiar mode of the imperial white man speaking with a principled nostalgic reverence for the idiosyncratic animal foe he vanquished—billfish, bull, elephant, Spanish fascist, South Asian highwayman, whatever.

But, Sleeman warned, only he truly understood the thug. In A Million Murders, he cautioned American upstarts against using the epithet too loosely:

[Thug] is a term often wrongly applied, particularly in the United States, to bandits or hold-up men, who do not attempt either concealment of their intention or strangulation… no other class of criminal possesses the right to call itself by that name. Certainly not the modern type, for, contemptible and horrible as the Thugs unquestionably were, it is certain that they would be loud in their expression of horror at the deeds of these despicable ruffians in Western countries.

One could already spot this broadening application of "thug" to a particular class of lowlife, the kind for whom no one has admiration, in Twain's account. As America's power rose over the next hundred years, so would its sway over who was denoted by the increasingly nebulous criminal catch-all. Sleeman would have been aghast. The old Oriental thugs were made of better stuff.

A century after Sleeman's heyday, his objections about imprecise applications of "thug" had been defeated utterly by the term's popular usage. No longer consciously associated with an Indian society of assassins, the word attached itself to the myriad disorganized forces of lawlessness, violence, and chaos. "Thug" became part of everyday American vocabulary, rather than an exotic reference. It had lost its slyness.

In 1956, the sociologist Orrin Klapp conducted a study to determine Americans' familiarity with different "villain types," following his hunch that these archetypes played into "an informal control system of popular thought." The respondents had wildly varying opinions of various categories of bad people: bullies, authoritarians, rebels, troublemakers, even of "monsters" and "renegades." But they were almost universal in their condemnation of one highly visible, violent "outlaw" category. One synonym that kept coming up among respondents for this verboten class of individual was "thug," Klapp reported. "The group tends to unite against him," he wrote.

"Making villains is part of a societal reaction to certain kinds of deviance," Klapp concluded, adding that naming villains "has status-placing and defining functions, that is, to set him apart from normal people, idealize or exaggerate his character negatively, create a state of alarm, and call for strenuous role-playing to adequately deal with such a dangerous deviant."

Klapp considered, and ultimately rejected, the hypothesis that new media technology might lead to greater education, diminishing the power of these stereotypes. "There is little evidence that modern advances have reduced the total amount of vilification in society," he wrote; "indeed, mass communications seem to have created new opportunities in this direction."

Fear of the thug is a fear of the dark, literal and metaphorical. A pale colonizing soldier or constable—trained, armed, deputized to travel out of the warm confines of the civilization he serves—stares into the night of the frontier, whether in Hyderabad or the suburbs of St. Louis, and sees only shadow. Within the shadow, crimes and perils and swarthy locals all mix together. Perhaps they are all connected somehow, all serving the aims of the criminal, the subversive—whether as a street tough or a dealer or a user or simply a friend or relation who refuses to snitch. Perhaps this is bigger than we think. Perhaps the thug owns the night.

In the 1990s, there was something of a thug renaissance. The maligned and marginalized gay-rights movement had begun to reassert itself and claim queerness as a positive attribute, and many black men similarly responded to their demonization by finding solidarity in the old negative labels. Nobody typified or explained this celebration of "thug life" better than Tupac:

The aim was "to reclaim and transform the meaning of words in order to evade the surveillance of nonblack onlookers or to affirm self-worth," Wellesley College professor Michael Jeffries writes in his survey of hip-hop semiotics and politics, Thug Life. Just as nigga took on a new meaning, he writes, "rap acts since the mid-1990s have embraced the word thug as an unapologetic affirmation of their experiences as black men… insulted by mainstream America."

Self-styled hip-hop thugs were not universally welcomed within communities of color. The act of rejecting and shocking mainstream America by adopting its negative labels achieves its purpose. There are those, even in black communities, who say this shock is counterproductive and brings further scrutiny upon blacks—as well as greater violence, so-called "black on black" violence.

Brown University professor Tricia Rose acknowledges the value of what she calls "the ghetto-badman posture performance," but she also reminds readers that it is to some extent a commercially controlled driver of crime, violence and misogyny. "There is no way to claim that constant commercialized promotion of thug-inspired images won't negatively impact black youth, race relations, and society in general," she writes in The Hip Hop Wars.

Even so, ground conditions seemed favorable for the hip-hop thug. America in the mid-'90s felt very much like a country turning a corner in its social and cultural politics. Just a few years after Reagan and Willie Horton and welfare queens and "broken windows" and a spike in what Jeffries calls "the trope of the black predator," a Democrat was in the White House and blacks were winning greater representation in Congress. South Africa was finally acquiescing to pressure over apartheid, and Nelson Mandela—once derided by political elites as a black communist thug—was emerging as an admired statesman.

This liberalization extended to white-dominated mass-entertainment, too. Bone Thugs and Tupac and Ice Cube—who had already transitioned from the hard-ass lyrics of NWA to articulating for diverse audiences the greater challenges of law-abiding ghetto life in the movie Friday—gained a crossover following. More strikingly, straight action films sought a new racially and politically conscious core. The cowboy hero began to adopt a thug's pose. In Braveheart, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, or Bad Boys, the great enemies were representatives of larger power structures who got to define and destroy their society's alleged thugs: The English lord, the ruthless Teutonic international thief, the racist South African diplomat were opposed by marginal clans and violent heroes, rowdy individualists against effete occupiers.

The high-water mark came in Lethal Weapon II, a moral fable about the victory of honest American cops over apartheid-loving diplomats sleazing up Los Angeles. Joss Ackland's sneering South African consul, who makes gleeful sport of his racism and his freedom to define the thug in his home country, is outed by the end as a murderer and a smuggler of drug money—the exact attributes viewers would likely call thuggish. But the villain is dispatched, along with his "diplomatic immunity," by a single shot to the head from Danny Glover's old .357 Magnum police revolver. The inversion is complete: the armed black man, connected to a tradition of white movie hero-cops through his six-gun, becomes the anti-thug who dispatches the true enemy of progress, the literal colonizer.

Was it cheesy Hollywood shit? Reinforcing of old American tropes about law and order, albeit with a few new thug-related components? Sure. But for a Richard Donner action movie, it was fucking revolutionary. It was all downhill from there.

One could be forgiven in that moment for assuming that the id-impulses of mostly white, mostly male Americans were in decline. But a national id's resilience is impressive. By 1997, Tupac and Biggie were dead, but the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party were more alive than ever.

Rather than siding with the government as a check against street thuggery, paleoconservatives in this period managed to construct a new picture of government—and liberal trade unions and learning institutions—as working in concert with the street toughs to squeeze out traditional freedom-loving Americans. Just a few years after NRA figurehead Charlton Heston publicly read the lyrics of "Cop Killer" aloud as proof of Ice-T's thuggery, the NRA's real man in charge—Wayne LaPierre—indicated that his gun lobby had about as much in common with law enforcement as they did with rappers.

In 1995, LaPierre pushed back against reports that his group's rhetoric had emboldened right-wing anti-government militia types like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. The NRA honcho responded that it was Bill Clinton who had radicalized America with gun laws that gave "jackbooted Government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure and kill us."

Such rhetoric had manifold and dramatic effects. It helped give a resurgent Republican Party a near-perpetual majority in Congress and in statehouses across the American South and West. It hardened a vociferous bloc of conservative white men attempting to hang onto their traditional cultural hegemony, and one of their cultural bludgeons was control of who the "thugs" were.

The resulting definition wasn't merely a racist shorthand, as many liberals now assert. Todd Boyd had made that argument in 2007. Slate's Jamelle Bouie and Richard Sherman, the NFL standout criticized as a thug for his haughty postgame tirades, both argued the same point more recently. The National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke, a white Briton, protested against Bouie's and Sherman's arguments—perhaps too much and too fast. There is the racial code, to be sure, but that's only the half—and the symptom—of what's really at play.

The thug today is everybody who threatens Inner America's way of life. This includes the racially stereotypical black criminal who is poised to invade Inner America's homes and cars. But it also extends to the government that invades their privacy; the unions that invade their economy; the learning institutions that invade their culture.

For upstanding 21st century social alarmists, identifying thugs is as distressingly easy as "Thuggee" Sleeman warned it would be: a readymade stigma to hang on anyone who is not mainstream, whose marginalization as a dark alien criminal serves the alarmist's aims, from South Asia to South Central to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This contemporary anti-thug movement has achieved a funny ironic resonance: Few things today more closely resemble Sleeman's thuggee brotherhood than does a tea party rally, men's rights convention, gun show, or armed anti-government standoff. From militias to neoconfederates to 4channing libertarians, a cultural underground has emerged of armed anti-government ideologues dreaming of redemptive violence. Hence a reactionary conservative can proudly call for the shooting of college-age protesters and their "SEIU thug" allies in Wisconsin; Fox News can trumpet a poll that calls for "armed revolution" in America, even as it pearl-clutches over "thugs" getting invites to the White House, again and again and again; and armed citizens can dig in for a "defense" against the "thuggery" of federal and state peace officers.

Here was the NRA's LaPierre exhorting his members to "vote your guns" in last month's elections:

Even if you take terrorists and criminals out of the picture, chaos is an ever-present danger to Americans today—especially when you factor in the undercurrent of social unrest that seethes beneath the surface of much of our society. How many times have we seen peaceful protests in this country degenerate into riots, looting, shootings, arsons and worse? How many times have we seen crowds turn into angry mobs after court decisions they didn't like, sports team defeats they felt were unfair, natural disasters that collapsed civil order — or just for the sheer hell of it?

Distrust of the police and state institutions; rejection of most mainstream politics; regimentation for violence and "prepping" for a post-state economy and culture with valuable stockpiled resources; a preoccupation with machismo and a glorification of destructive strength: They were all there.

And soon they were ratified in law, as states pressed to permit open or concealed carry of firearms among the citizenry. The right to self-defense soon extended outside the home (the "castle doctrine") to include anywhere a threat might be perceived, with no duty to retreat. Such "stand your ground" laws depended on how armed citizens, judges, and jurors determined whether a (probably dead) gunshot victim reasonably posed a threat to the shooter. But then, most Americans believe they know a thug when they see one.

The history of the thug since the Raj has been a precursor to the modern police procedural, in which civilization and reason can trap the criminal mind but never truly penetrate it. The thug's behavior may be observed and predicted. His weaknesses can be found and exploited. He can be explained. He can explain himself, describe his kills, his motives, his clan of brigands. But he is ultimately unknowable to us. Even at his most vulnerable and compassion-worthy, we must not extend him those most civilized virtues of our own Western culture, tenderness and mercy. Some part of him is not human, but another kind of animal. We don't have to talk with a dog to know he's mad and needs to be put down.

We continue to see them all around us. We continue to put them down. We continue to put down the protests that grow out of their deaths, to see these events as more proof of thuggishness all around. And we won't stop, because according to the hardening myth of the American thuggee, he never stops.

[Image by Jim Cooke, source image via Wikipedia]

Last night, two men with intellectual disabilities were put to death.

In Georgia, Robert Wayne Holsey (pictured) was executed after the Supreme Court refused his final appeal. Holsey, who had an IQ of "around 70," was not found to meet the state of Georgia's stringent legal standard for intellectual disability. The fact that Holsey's lawyer admitted to drinking a quart of vodka per day during his trial was not enough to win Holsey a new trial.

In Missouri, convicted murderer Paul Goodwin was also put to death last night. Goodwin's IQ was said to be around 73. His appeals on the grounds of mental competency were denied. Goodwin is the tenth person executed by the state of Missouri this year.

IQ scores of approximately 70 are generally considered to indicate a legal level of disability that might preclude executing someone. Clearly, this field of law is not fully developed.

[Photo: AP]

Tepid Communist New York City mayor Bill De Blasio reportedly will not support a special tax on luxury second apartments because it is perceived as a political "nonstarter." All this means is that everyone must condemn the rich more loudly in 2015.

Jon Stewart learned the gruesome details of the CIA's torture of detainees along with the rest of us yesterday, and it made him feel like Mr. Creosote after a wafer-thin mint. Which is to say, he wanted to puke—an understandable reaction after learning an inmate's meal was "pureed and rectally infused," apparently resulting in "no actionable intelligence."

Stewart leans heavily on the famous 2007 clip of then-president George W. Bush insisting "this government does not torture people," even though he was made aware of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" in 2006, but he also doesn't let the Obama administration off the hook for failing to release thousands of documents to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Obama sure was great on Colbert Monday night though, wasn't he?

[h/t Comedy Central]

Do you "do" molly? Are you not necessarily addicted to the ecstasy replacement drug, but you can't have fun without it? When the molly kicks in, do you really feel like you become one with the music? Is this basically what you've been doing for the past three years? Are you hallucinating on the ceiling? Do you keep thinking about your dog who was barking when you left the house? Are you outside of your apartment complex swinging flags around because you really need to rehearse?

You'll probably want to rethink all that after watching last night's True Life, subtitled "I'm Hooked On Molly." Another episode filed into the canon.

But just in case you feel bad laughing about the young women profiled on the show, whose highlights/low points are featured above, it all seems to be working out for Paige and Ally:

Choose life, not True Life.

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The first time I met the worst example of a boss I can imagine, he was kind to me. Daniel was new at the company; I was finishing my first year there. I loved my old boss, but I was still eager to meet Daniel because I understood that change was inevitable. I entered the office that day and there he was, waiting, his eyes already revealing a desperate need for approval that should've set off an immediate alarm. I was 23 years old. He was pushing 40.

At the time, in 2009, I was unaware of the needy, conflicted person behind those eyes. In less than a year, I would learn exactly how hopelessly damaged Daniel was, and I'm still left wondering what he was worse at: being a manager or a human being. Though that gray area lingers, one thing is for certain—we became embroiled in a one-sided rivalry that I wanted no part of. What I later learned was that it is impossible to work for someone who's competing with you.

The relationship between me and Daniel wasn't always contentious. He was hired to introduce change to the marketing department in the company's Washington, D.C. office: to create synergy, streamline processes for efficiency, and all of those other hollow, corporate buzzwords that huge, fractured media organizations toss around when they want employees and clients to drink the Kool-Aid.

I had been touted as a budding prospect by upper management, and was open to his ideas. Initially, we got along fine. And unlike many of my office colleagues, Daniel and I formed a pretty strong bond. He would rave about President Obama, who had just been elected, and proudly railed against the white privilege he admittedly benefitted from. I found some comfort in knowing I had a boss who seemed to grasp the dynamics of race relations in the workplace. But others were resistant to the procedural shift he was brought on to implement. That, and they found him unpleasant. This made Daniel an outcast from the beginning, while I was generally well-liked. At the time, I was too young to realize that this contrast would become the catalyst for all of our problems.

People fail miserably at innovation when they tinker with things that aren't broken. Daniel fell victim to this, and it wasn't because of his zeal to prove what an adept problem-solver he was. After eight months of having his methods questioned, he decided to upset a working system and move me into a different role—one which was far more stressful. He said I was "perfectly capable of handling the challenge," but my best interests aren't what brought him to this conclusion. A co-worker later told me, he did it to piss me off.

Involuntary bonding is commonplace in the corporate world. Forced fun is passed off as "team building"—which involves stale conversation over mediocre meals paid for by expense accounts and loaded intentions. Instead of trying to unite our department through common interests and happy hours at shitty bars, Daniel did it by sharing his unhappiness with us. He was unhappy with the long-distance relationship he was in, he was unhappy with the debt he had accrued, and he was unhappy with where he was at in his career. Daniel's unhappiness quickly became our collective problem.

My co-worker Sarah was Daniel's first target. Despite being nearly 15 years his senior, he treated her like a child who suffered from learning disabilities. Their struggle to communicate was difficult to witness, and the disrespect grew more intense as time went on. He talked down to Sarah regularly in the way that an exasperated owner talks to their pet, and the mental and physical toll it took on her was obvious. It eventually got so bad that she quit before finding a new job. It was affecting her health. Imagine the experience of going to work being so dreadful that it literally makes you sick. Considering Daniel once told me that he had a frightening meltdown from a job he despised, you'd think he'd have some compassion. But no.

There were more telling incidents. Daniel disliked Bobby almost instantly. He saw him as a bad influence on me, and a link to our previous manager's regime, something he was exceptionally insecure about. Daniel was the new coach who didn't want to hear anything about the old coach, as if the mere mention of her name was an insult to his very existence. After Bobby accidentally called him a "prick" in a message intended for me, Daniel began to seek out faults in Bobby, over-analyzing his every move, harassing him about being away from his desk, even if it was just to go to the bathroom. The smallest issues were amplified in an attempt to build a case against him. This obsession was disturbing, and it reached a new low when Bobby's father's health began to deteriorate.

Daniel was everything that James Hetfield sang so passionately about on Metallica's "The Unforgiven" and everything that drove Walter White to infamy on Breaking Bad: a middle-aged man who never got to have his moment in life.

Bobby began requesting to leave work early to go see his ailing father, either using his flex time or promising to come in early and stay late other days to make up for it. Daniel was convinced Bobby was lying right up until his father passed away on Christmas. One of our co-workers told me she watched Daniel break down and cry about it in his office. He confessed to feeling like a terrible person. Once again, you'd think this would compel him to do some serious self-evaluation, but that never happened.

Months later, when Bobby was searching for a new job, word got back to him that prospective employers had been reaching out to Daniel as a reference. Considering the history between he and Bobby, you'd expect he'd want to see him go. Not Daniel. He advised people not to hire Bobby because he didn't want him to move on—although he had tried (and failed) to get him fired. Jay Z had it right: "Niggas want you to be miserable with 'em."

Daniel disrespected Sarah and flat-out loathed Bobby, but what went on between he and I was uniquely toxic. He would say things like, "You're gonna take my job," or "You're gonna be my boss one day" with a look of fear in his eyes that made me uneasy. I was younger, taller, finished college, and grew up better off than he did. I represented everything that he wasn't, a mirror for all his shortcomings. I never held any of this over him and never once felt like I was better than him, but the jealousy was evident. Other co-workers acknowledged Daniel's awkward jealousy, too. Mostly, I just tried to ignore it.

Lack of outlets aside, Daniel's biggest problem was his dissatisfaction with himself. He realized that the company had hired him to fill a hole, not to see him flourish. While I showed up to work everyday with a grin on my face because I enjoyed the world outside of it, he felt stagnant and had little to do past 6 p.m. Boredom, confusion, and malicious intent are a hazardous combination, and this virulent blend only fed his crab mentality.

By this point, the dynamic between Daniel and I had been irreparably damaged. I no longer respected him, but we still had to work together. But the problem was that he hated doing actual work. If he had his way, he would just delegate tasks and take the credit for our efforts. His spite started a pathetic battle where he'd attempt to outshine me, while I wanted nothing more than to finish my work, go home, and enjoy life. When he wasn't increasing my work load, he was wedging his way into situations I managed by asking to help or take the lead—only to back off when he realized it involved exerting real effort, which would occupy the time he spent watching reality TV in his office.

As our relationship continued to sour, I became his frenemy. I make the distinction that I was his adversary because this situation remained one-sided. Whatever irritated me about work I left at work; Daniel took it home and lived with it. It was all he had. Worse, rather than fix what was wrong with his own life, he chose to concern himself with mine, and I sensed he still wanted to be friends. But your coworkers aren't your friends. You might become friends with some of them over time—and it's great if you do—but that shouldn't be an expectation. I made the wise decision not to befriend my manager who, once freely admitted to me that he was "spiteful and vindictive." This was after he'd harassed other members of our team. Would you date someone who told you they cheated on every significant other they had? Probably not.

His attempts to bond were a warning sign. It was also a huge indicator that you can never work directly beneath someone who's threatened by you.

Several complaints were filed against Daniel, but the worst he suffered was a slap on the wrist and a stern talking to. His boss— the boss—once told him to take some time off after he flipped out on too many of the wrong people. But paid time away from work is hardly punishment for someone who was allergic to doing work in the first place. Daniel cowered behind the same shield of white privilege and, more specifically, white male patriarchy that he denounced so vehemently when I first met him. He was further enabled by the fact that his boss neglected to take any serious action against him since it would make him look incompetent for hiring such a petty individual. No one at any level in corporate America wants to admit fault until it's absolutely necessary, even if an entire department suffers as a result. Daniel was proof of that.

I've since moved on from that office—so has Daniel—but the the lessons remain with me. Let's be honest: if a bitter person with insufficient self-confidence can impact your success, you need to remove yourself from that situation. Few things are more pathetic than someone in their 40s seeking validation from a 25-year-old, but his behavior made sense. For him, work was like high school, a difficult time that provoked several unresolved issues. Daniel was everything that James Hetfield sang so passionately about on Metallica's "The Unforgiven" and everything that drove Walter White to infamy on Breaking Bad: a middle-aged man who never got to have his moment in life. Those are the most dangerous people.

Julian Kimble is on Twitter. You can find him here.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

Through the years we've all seen Lisa Vanderpump's Pomeranian, Giggy, wear a variety of elaborate ensembles, some with Elizabethan collars. This is necessitated in part by Giggy's alopecia, but last night we learned the shocking truth that Giggy is, in fact, a never nude.

This revelation came as Lisa and Ken shopped with Giggy at Fifi and Romeo, a store apparently dedicated to doggie couture and gaudy knick-knacks. In addition to Giggy needing an outfit for an upcoming event involving children with alopecia, Lisa tells pink-haired store owner Yana, "Plus he needs light, thin pajamas because he won't sleep naked." And if a bite-sized Pomeranian with patches of hair loss can't uncover himself in the cool comfort of a truly exceptional Beverly Hills mansion, when WILL he enjoy being in the buff?

The answer, apparently, is never. Lisa continues: "I wish he would actually wear no clothes, sometimes, but he just gets very unhappy with that." Given especially that Lisa considers the purple, ruffled horrorshow above to be "light thin pajamas," let us hope that intensive therapy can help Giggy can work through his condition, and that one day he may skinnydip in the Vanderpump-Todd pool with Rumpy Pumpy. Or maybe skinnydip in a teacup, at least? He's just so small!

Side note: We learned that Ken usually does all the shopping for Giggy, which is EXACTLY how I have always pictured Ken spending his time! That and doddering around aimlessly yet pleasantly while occasionally grunting.

All other happenings in this episode paled in comparison to Giggy's shopping excursion, to be honest. Kyle and family packed up for Mallorca, and when Kyle told Portia that she's not allowed to wear makeup (that she had already applied), Portia busted out with, "MOMS THESE DAYS!" And I'm sorry, but someone totally fed her that line, right? "Shut your butthole" is something that I can see a pint-sized terror coming up with organically, but, "…Moms these days!" sounds like the work of a second-generation stage mother.

Meanwhile, sitting as I am now in the cold gray doldrums of New England, the Richards-Umansky yacht in Mallorca looks pretty exceptional. The family is joined by Yolanda, who is coming fresh from ANOTHER yacht in Turkey, where this happened:

!!!!!!!!!! Yolanda was apparently on a romantic vacation with husband David Foster, who I'm guessing sadly is NOT a never nude. Can you IMAGINE being alone on a boat with David Foster for a week? The Celine Dion stories ALONE would cause you to jump overboard! Yo and Kyle have some bonding time while "getting out and seeing the people" in Spain, and Yolanda carries this bag:

It might as well read, "Rob me!" We also learn that Yolanda's mom isn't doing so well, which makes me wonder why she's on a boat in Mallorca with Kyle instead of back home in Holland. Yolanda's dad died in a car accident when she was only seven, which becomes especially pertinent later in the episode as Yolanda gets word from home that her daughter Bella got a DUI. Bella, of course, was left home alone as Yo and David yachted off, and Yo's housekeeper was apparently right to be nervous about it in a previous episode. Yolanda feels helpless and is disappointed by Bella's choice, and is ALSO probably disappointed that she's stuck trying to convince the ever-dramatic Kyle to jump off of a yacht in the middle of the Mediterranean when she could be home encouraging her wayward daughter to Master Cleanse.

We also learn a bit more about Eileen Davidson in this episode. She's married to Vince Van Patten, an erstwhile teen idol and tennis pro who now is the co-host of the World Poker Tour. Vince is Eileen's third husband, and they have three boys between them. They do normal stuff like bicker and install Slip 'N Slides and make hot dogs over a fire that may contain poisonous flowers. Jacob sent me this and other clips of Eileen Davidson's storied soap opera history, and now I have no choice but to FUCKING LOVE HER. So let's hope she really gets thrown in the mix with the other ladies soon.

In other exciting news, there's an all-Lisa summit, with Lisas Vanderpump and Rinna having lunch. They LOVE each other. Lisa Rinna sees in Lisa VP a fellow hustler, and Lisa VP thinks that Lisa Rinna is delightful and supportive and isn't looking for problems unlike some OTHER friends who shall not be named. Lisa VP tells Lisa Rinna that she wouldn't want to taint anyone's opinion on some of these other friends, which is lies. But Lisa Rinna is resolute that she always goes off of her own personal experience, and until someone succeeds in stabbing her in the back—and what a forgiving nature she must have if she's even OK with someone TRYING to stab her in the back! Like the Gandhi of Beverly Hills!—she'll view them favorably.

Lisa VP invites Lisa Rinna to accompany her to Palm Springs, where she's getting a star on the Walk of Stars. This apparently has something to do with her support of the LGBT community, though I'm not exactly sure how. Lisa and Lisa also go shopping in preparation for the trip, and Lisa Rinna thinks that the two of them could get into a lot of trouble together, by which I HOPE she means that the Rinna-Hamlin/Vanderpump-Todd swinging arrangement will finally come to pass.

And then there's Brandi. Do we have to talk about Brandi? OK, fine. The "unfiltered" nature of Brandi's podcast has limited her advertising revenue, and so the CEO of Podcast One suggests making it more family-friendly. And really…that particular yacht has sailed, hasn't it? Anyway, next week she tries filtering herself and I'm sure gross hijinks will ensue. Brandi also gets an unexpected six-figure check from her first book, and so goes out and buys a six-figure car that will impress LeAnn and Eddie when she picks up the kids. Didn't we just learn that he's suing her for overpaid child support? Anyway, ten years from now when the kids ask what happened to their college funds, Brandi will have this video evidence to point back to.

Next time: Yolanda tries not to have a meltdown, and Eileen busts out with, "I raped a priest. Not one of my finest moments."

[Video and images via Bravo]

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

Dan Bilzerian, a millionaire and avowed asshole with more than 5 million Instagram followers, was arrested at LAX Tuesday, and was being held without bail as of late Tuesday night. It's not yet clear whether his arrest has anything to do with the model he allegedly kicked in the face at a Miami club over the weekend.

The LAPD told the L.A. Weekly that Bilzerian was picked up on "an out-of-state warrant," which TMZ claims was issued in Clark County, Nev. According to TMZ, Instagram's leader in paying models to hang out with him is facing charges of possessing or manufacturing illegal explosive devices.

Bilzerian, who likes to say he was kicked out of Navy Seal training two days before graduation, has previously Instagrammed his arsenal of firearms, and once ran over a BMW in a tank for kicks.

If this arrest is actually related to explosives, Bilzerian still has the alleged assault in Miami hanging over his head. The victim, a model named Vanessa Castano, filed a police report claiming Bilzerian kicked her in the face, causing a laceration to her eye.

He claims she was attacked by two other women who were fighting over him, something he believes you're probably not alpha enough to understand.

[h/t TMZ]

The regrettably named Norwegian underwear brand Comfyballs was all set to make its big debut in the U.S. this year when it was shut down by the country's patent and trademark office. A trademark on Comfyballs, USPTO argued, was just too vulgar for Americans to accept.

The Independent reports on the tribulations of the company, which was already comforting balls across Australia, New Zealand, Scandinavia, and the U.K. when its trademark application was denied:

But American authorities banned it from operating under that name, finding that, "in the context of the applicant's goods... Comfyballs means only one thing - that a man's testicles, or 'balls,' will be comfortable in the applicant's undergarments.

"The mark does not create a double entendre or other idiomatic expression... When used in this way, the word, 'balls' has an offensive meaning."

What makes Comfyballs so comfy? According to the company, the fist-sized crotch protrusion you see on the pair above isn't just for looks. Au contraire, it is the pinnacle of testicular technology:

Package Front™ is designed to keep your equipment in place, while being lifted away from the inside of your thighs, preventing unnecessary heating of the balls. Extremely curved panels combined with innovative use of elastic fabric seams lift the user experience to a new level!

Citing successful trademarks on brands like "Nice balls," and "I love my balls," Comfyballs founder Anders Selvig told the Independent he'd like to see the USPTO review its decision to pan his application. Until then, Hanes and Fruit of the Loom will have to suffice for owners of insufficiently cushioned scrotums.

"Have you ever held a heart?" Dr. Oz asked Barbra Streisand seemingly out of nowhere, the way a friend might ask another friend, "What sound or noise do you love?" or "What's your favorite scary movie?"

"N0, but I'd like to," replied Barbra with a devilish smile that suggested the beating of a human heart is a sound or noise that she loves, and that My Bloody Valentine is her favorite scary movie.

"You'd like to?!" Dr. Oz barked back at her. He was just kidding when he asked that. She wants to take him up on his offer? What the fuck is wrong with her? Is there something wrong with her? Also...he didn't quite catch her answer. His hearing has been failing him these days with more frequency than he'd ever admit.

Barbra's eyes flashed and she responded with a firm, "Yes." Actually, she would like to hold a heart, thank you very much. Why earlier this year, her mind started wandering in the general direction of heart-holding while she received a massage (she was spa-ing in Europe at the time, naturally). Could a rough massage cause one's organs to bruise? Can organs bruise? Assuming that they can, how long does it take for bruised organs to heal? Are internal bruises like those on your skin in that they are sensitive to the touch? What is it like to touch an organ? An internal one, she meant, stop being fresh.

Dr. Oz gave her a heart, and then another. The latter was unhealthy. It looked like a congealed pile of puke, but Barbra handled it politely. They had a discussion about Streisand's work in raising awareness for heart disease, specifically in and for women. At the end of the segment, she daintily pulled off the purple surgical gloves she'd used to handle the hearts, exposing her perpetually flawless nails. They were like butter—a magical butter that has no effect on one's heart health.

This clip, especially the first few seconds, is the weirdest shit I've seen on TV in quite some time.

A senior business communications instructor at Florida State University left her job but refused to apologize last week after blaming "filthy rodent Muslims" for ruining France and telling a prominent gay hairstylist on Facebook to "Take your Northern fagoot [sic] elitism and shove it up your ass."

Deborah O'Connor knew she'd made a big mistake—a public mistake—which was probably why, just before resigning, she asked her boss over email: "Is there any chance the story can be suppressed to minimize further injury to my reputation? I think I have paid the price for my ill chosen words. Thanks and Go Noles."

Jacksonville-based Folio Weekly broke the story of a bigot gone wild on the faculty of FSU, which has had a horrible, no-good, very bad year or so, aside from the national titles in football and soccer:

Colin Lively, hair stylist to the rich and famous in New York City and Cleveland, had posted a thread last Thursday night on the police killings in Ferguson, Staten Island and Cleveland. A woman named Deborah O'Connor, a Facebook friend of a friend, interjected.

"YOU elected POTUS, Holder et al. And they are supposed to represent all Americans, not just blacks … why don't these ass clowns insert themselves into their stories?"

She was just getting started. As the thread went on, and as Lively and others engaged her, O'Connor's comments took on an increasingly racist, homophobic and just-plain-mean bent:

"Take your Northern fagoot [sic] elitism and shove it up your ass."

"I teach at a University, you asshole. What do you do?"

"You are an intellectual fraud, just like your Messiah. Obama has single-handedly turned our once great society into a Ghetto Culture, rivaling that of Europe. France is almost at war because of his filthy rodent Muslims who are attacking Native Frenchmen and women."

"I just looked at your picture and what you do for a living. I'm signing off now. I don't talk to you people."

A friend of Lively brought O'Connor's posts to the attention of the university administration, which has no official social media policy for employees, but probably wasn't keen on the attention. "The breadth of bigotry expressed was extraordinary, targeting the President, African-Americans, homosexuals, Muslims and northerners," Adner Marcelin, president of the local National Justice Network chapter, told FSU administrators in a letter. "Not only did O'Connor seek out people to offend, she explicitly cited her FSU professorship to support her hateful ideology."

FSU's business school, which has benefited from the largesse of the Koch brothers and a local tea party millionaire who sits on the university board of trustees, has long held a reputation as being more politically and ideologically conservative than the rest of campus, and of Tallahassee at large. O'Connor is a registered Republican but hasn't voted since 2010, according to state records. Her CV lists her as a faculty rep for several Greek campus organizations, as well as an advisor for "Florida State University Students Supporting our Troops, 2007-present."

It appears O'Connor was abrasive and outspoken long before last week's incident. In 2008, she took to the floor of a county commission meeting to complain about "dirt bikes revving motors and driving back and forth through green space in the neighborhood." And while she has permanently deleted her Facebook, a Twitter account of hers still exists. She most recently commented on the need for "deporting illegal aliens" and the "thug culture" cultivated by Urban Meyer, ex-football coach of FSU's rival Florida Gators.

In fact, she appears to be an active participant in FSU Twitter, deriding reporters who covered the sexual assault allegations against Seminoles quarterback Jameis Winston in peculiar terms for a communications professor:

In her resignation letter to Caryn Beck-Dudley, the business school's dean, O'Connor remained defiant. "[T]his one incident is the only black mark I have every [sic] had on an employment record in the 40 years I have been employed," she wrote, "but I sense that 'the path of least resistance' is for me to resign to forestall a litigation, although I must emphasize that I do NOT believe the punishment fits the 'crime.'

"As a supporter of FSU since 1975, I feel cheated and betrayed" she added, but "I love FSU and will continue my loyalty to her forever."

The dean's emailed response to O'Connor kind of said it all:

For several days, the Los Angeles Times has been running an excellent series on the exploitation of farm workers in Mexico. Here is a bit of information on how the people who grow the produce you buy at Walmart are treated.

Sunday was the first story in the Times' four-part series, detailing the near-slavery conditions of many agricultural workers on huge Mexican farms that supply chains like Whole Foods, Safeway, and Walmart. Today, the Times focuses on working conditions at a farm owned by Bioparque, which supplied tomatoes to Walmart, among others. The farm employed hundreds of poor indigenous workers at a salary of $8 per day. The rudimentary, scorpion-infested camps where the workers lived had not child care facilities or schools. The workers were not given enough food to feed their families. If they wanted more, they had to buy it at inflated prices at the company store. People too sick to work were denied food. Worse, workers were not allowed to leave. They were essentially locked in a prison work camp:

Two young women spotted by a company guard just outside the front gate were dragged back inside. A boss had each one by the collar. They hung their heads, Guillermo Martinez said.

"I just want to go home,'' he recalled one woman crying out.

Bosses threw the women's backpacks in a storage room filled with confiscated belongings. They routinely took escapees' shoes and docked them three days' pay.

Walmart says it has stopped buying tomatoes from this company, which is thoughtful.

This is just one example of why there should be an international minimum wage. In the meantime there are groups that you can support that help farm workers.

Santa Claus is watching, motherfuckers.

[Photo: Flickr]

Thanks in part to Rolling Stone's rape reporting disaster, fraternities will resume partying at the University of Virginia on January 9. After protests from Greek groups including the North American Intrafraternity Conference, UVa President Teresa Sullivan has decided to end the frat suspension that was meant to "give the university and Greek leadership a pause to identify solutions that would best ensure the well-being and safety of students."

It's not clear what solutions have been identified. After Rolling Stone's story was published, Sullivan suspended all fraternity and sorority activity and asked the Charlottesville Police Department to investigate the claims made in the article. Now Greek life will go back to normal while the PD continues to investigate.

The truth about what happened to Jackie, the woman who told Rolling Stone she was raped by seven men at the Phi Psi house her freshman year, may never be clear. Her father now says she may have misidentified the frat where her rape took place. Regardless, UVa students still feel that something like a gang rape could happen at a UVa frat house. Julia Horowitz, the managing editor of the student newspaper, wrote for Politico last week:

I am drained. I am confused. But I keep returning to one question. If everyone here believed Jackie's story until yesterday—a story in which she is violently raped by seven men at a fraternity house as part of a planned initiation ritual—should we not still be concerned?

There was something in that story which stuck. And that means something.

Sullivan couldn't punish frats forever without cause. But if the entirety of UVa's student body believes that a violent rape could happen at a frat house, that's worth considering before letting bros run amok again.

I. Ruby lost her virginity in July of this year, not long after she turned 28. Five days later, she knew, with deep certainty and not a little dread, that she was pregnant. Her nipples grew and darkened, she says; her abdomen tingled. The man she'd slept with refused to see her, and when he finally agreed to meet up, he insisted on buying the morning-after pill. She refused to take it, and they didn't talk much after that.

Soon after, Ruby started seeing doctors, one after another. A curious pattern quickly emerged: No one but her could see the fetus.

Ruby spent the first few months of her pregnancy shuttling back and forth between her parents' house in her hometown and New York, hoping to move to the city for good. She underwent at least two ultrasounds between July and October, one at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and one at a facility in her hometown. (To protect her privacy, Jezebel is identifying Ruby by a pseudonym, and omitting some details that could potentially identify her.) Multiple blood and urine tests also came back negative for pregnancy.

But Ruby knew something was there, and as her stomach started to swell, she only became more certain. She felt a stretching sensation in her vagina and occasional, fluttering contractions in her uterus. She grew increasingly frustrated and desperate as all the test results continued to be, in her mind, inconclusive. She made an appointment with a specialist on the Upper East Side who she hoped might be able to tell her what was happening. But then, on the night of October 8, she walked into the emergency room of NYU Langone Medical Center. She wanted another ultrasound. She couldn't wait.

The ultrasound technician there didn't see a baby either. Ruby thought his scan had been far too brief to show anything. Things grew tense, and something happened between them. Ruby calls it an argument; the hospital, citing medical privacy laws, declined to comment.

After a little verbal tussling, Ruby says, the ultrasound technician told her she would be taken to see an OB-GYN, who would examine her further. Instead, she was taken into a psychiatric seclusion room and held down by four male orderlies, one pinning each of her limbs. She was given injections of Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug, and Zyprexa, an antipsychotic. She screamed, thrashed, and finally, defeated and sleepy from the medication, fell asleep. When she woke up, she was in a locked ward at Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric center. (This is Ruby's own recollection of events, but the fact that she was physically restrained in the emergency room is also backed up by court testimony given by her psychiatrist.)

Ten days later, Ruby sat at a table in the visitation room on her ward, her eyes welling up with tears behind her glasses. She's very tall and extremely thin, with long arms, dark hair pulled back in a long, low ponytail and thick eyebrows. She wore a black long-sleeved top and slacks, with a green sleeveless dress layered over them. The sleeves of the top were rolled up, revealing a row of thin white self-harm scars on her left arm.

"I shouldn't be here," she told me, her voice cracking. "This is horrendous. I'm just contained in here."

Ruby talked fast, smoothing her hair back and fixing her glasses whenever her thoughts started to race. She held a pile of papers: printouts from her ultrasounds, material on rare pregnancy disorders with handwritten notes in the margins. "I never go on YouTube," one of them read. John, an on-again, off-again boyfriend she'd met through OKCupid last year, sat across the table from her, looking pained. (John is not the man she believes impregnated her. His name has also been changed.) He'd brought her a piece of pizza, but she was too agitated to eat much.

At Ruby's request, John had sent out a series of frantic emails to media outlets over the previous week. The one Jezebel received was titled "Possible Story About Bellevue Hospital Corruption." It read, in part:

[Ruby] wound up in the Bellevue Psychiatric Ward, because of a ultrasounds technicians decision to commit her to the ward because of his displeasure with her attitude and argument that she was pregnant and it was undetectable because of a rare but not impossible uterus abnormality, technically called a retroflex uterus, that he was not aware of even being possible. I will send some pictures of her ultrasounds that you can look at for yourself. They contain what appear to possibly be a fetus in a fetal position with the cranium and feet.

He included ultrasound photos, which he'd also posted on Craigslist, asking for feedback.

Ruby had refused medication for the first two weeks of her stay at Bellevue, but her psychiatrist had recently won a court order to medicate her against her will. The regimen had started just moments before she'd walked into the visitation room.

"They just gave me my first dose of Depakote, and I can feel it burning my brain cells," she said, clutching her head. "Pregnant women should not be taking this. It's lethal for a fetus."

Depakote is a mood stabilizer and anti-epileptic, typically used to treat seizures, bipolar disorder or migraines. In Ruby's case, she says, they told her it was intended to treat her schizoaffective disorder, which she doesn't believe she has. She was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome as a teenager, and while she accepts that she is autistic, she was adamant that she wasn't delusional or psychotic. She was just pregnant. She was sure of it. In the visitation room that day, she raised her dress and showed me her stomach.

Resting there, standing out in sharp relief against her thin body, was a bulge the size of a cantaloupe.

"This wasn't planned," she said, lowering her dress. "But I'm totally—" She stopped, frustrated, her eyes welling up. After a moment, she took a deep breath and began again. "There's no reason for them to be doing this. I should have full power and control to make reproductive decisions for myself. I do not want something taken from me, to kill a living being."

There was no one she could call, she said. No one except John was even taking her calls or coming to visit. She's not in regular contact with her family, she said. "I don't have friends I can count on." Her eyes filled with fresh tears. "If I did, I wouldn't be here. They wouldn't let this happen to me."

II.

Although they're increasingly rare in the United States, pregnancies rooted in the mind but entirely absent from the body do happen. Victorian-era doctors referred to them as "hysterical pregnancies." Today, the favored terms are "delusional pregnancy," "false pregnancy" or "phantom pregnancy." When a patient suffers from some or all the symptoms of pregnancy— stomach growth, cramps, loss of period, morning sickness—without a fetus actually being present, it's known as pseudocyesis. Occasionally, this condition has even fooled doctors: in 2010, two North Carolina doctors were formally reprimanded after they performed a C-section on a woman, only to find there was no baby at all. The same thing reportedly happened in Rio de Janeiro in 2013.

The division between the physiological and psychological aspects of this syndrome isn't always clear. Pseudocyesis and false pregnancy, once seen as two starkly different diseases, can more correctly be viewed on a spectrum, says Dr. Mary Seeman, a professor emerita of psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

"The line is blurred and one slides into the other," she explains. She went on:

Essentially, the word 'delusional' means the person is ill with a psychiatric disorder of some kind. But pseudocyesis can occur without any psychiatric illness: you can believe that you're pregnant and have signs of pregnancy for any number of reasons. Certain drugs will do it. There have been cases reported where a woman gains weight, starts having other signs like nausea and she starts believing she's pregnant—but she's not mentally ill and she never has been, other than this one area. And so she'll have some trouble being convinced she's not pregnant.

Pseudocyesis and false pregnancies have both appeared in medical literature for thousands of years. Hippocrates claimed to have encountered 12 women suffering from pseudocyesis sometime around 300 B.C.E. Mary Tudor, the 16th-century queen of England, is thought to have had at least one false pregnancy. McGill University professor Jackie Rosenhek writes that Mary was "pregnant" for 11 long months, with no sign of a child.

"As the weeks dragged on with no news of a royal baby, people began to wonder," Ronsehek writes. "Whispers circulated that the queen had been seen curled up with her knees tucked in, which wasn't exactly possible for an overdue mother-to-be. Eventually, few people thought that Mary had ever been pregnant. One dubious courtier mocked her outright, saying that the Queen's pregnancy would 'end in wind rather than anything else.'"

Mary eventually issued a decree stating that God wouldn't allow her child to be born until a crop of Protestant dissenters were properly punished (in other words, executed). But even after that, Rosenhek writes, no baby came:

In August, in the 11th month of her false pregnancy, Mary emerged from her confinement chamber at last. She was impossibly thin, utterly silent and completely humiliated. No word of her "pregnancy" was mentioned at court again, at least officially. Her political rivals rejoiced, relishing in the entire situation as a sign of weakness and divine retribution.

Mary died the following year, still childless.

During China's Qing dynasty, around 1644, gynecological texts referred routinely to Ghost Fetus, just one of many types of false pregnancy they recognized. Yi-Li Wu, a professor of Asian history at Albion College, writes that ghost fetuses "were originally explained as the product of human-ghost intercourse." Later, they were attributed to "excessive female emotion."

Men can suffer from false pregnancy, and so can animals; dogs and pandas seem especially susceptible to the disorder. A six-year-old giant panda named Ai Hin who lived in the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Center in China started showing all the signs of pregnancy back in August, thrilling her keepers. (Pandas notoriously have trouble mating, getting pregnant and giving birth; at least one zoo has produced and screened panda porn to encourage them, which didn't work.) But plans to live broadcast the baby panda's birth were called off when officials at the center realized that Ai Hin was either suffering from a delusional pregnancy or else deliberately pretending to be pregnant, because she was canny enough to know her "condition" resulted in nicer living quarters and more food.

In humans, delusional and false pregnancies and pseudocyesis were relatively hard to spot for hundreds of years. A truly reliable pregnancy test wasn't developed until 1960, and over-the-counter tests weren't available until 1976. After that, in countries with strong medical frameworks, cases of false pregnancy dropped precipitously. In North America, they're now believed to happen about one to six times for every 22,000 real pregnancies, according to a study published in 1982 (seemingly one of the few that has tried to figure out how common the condition really is; there's a consensus that it's fairly rare, albeit slightly more common people already suffering from other types of psychosis or mental illnesses.)

Still, though, there have been a few notable cases in recent decades, including Ms. U, a British woman who looks to have had the longest delusional pregnancy in medical literature. She believed she was with child for almost 10 years, pretty much continuously.

Ms. U's treating psychiatrists found a dense nest of conflicting emotions that they thought might have contributed to her condition. She was raped by a classmate at 14, not long after she'd been traumatized by a particularly brutal sex education class, one that left her with a paralyzing fear of babies, sex, and childbirth. Ms. U first started to think she was pregnant when she was 22, newly married to a man who refused to wear a condom during sex. She started to complain that she "felt something" in her lower abdomen, and although she and her husband split up after just a few months, the feeling in her stomach waxed and waned for the next decade. Other symptoms of pregnancy seemed to appear and disappear: painful breasts, no period, a swollen belly.

Ms. U, writes Karel De Pauw, the psychiatrist who worked with her last, was admitted for inpatient psychiatric treatment on four occasions. Every time she was admitted, she escaped, repeatedly showing up at various emergency rooms, doctor's offices and pharmacies, demanding an abortion. She was frequently loud and agitated when hospitalized; De Pauw writes, dispassionately, that "her screaming [disturbed] the whole ward."

De Pauw say that he managed to cure Ms. U for good with a large dose of pimozide, an antipsychotic. She was able to accept that she had never been pregnant and mark her symptoms down to anxiety. She went on to become a secretary, living in an apartment of her own. It's unknown if she ever remarried or had children.

These days, false pregnancies are still fairly common in places with less-developed health care networks, like parts of Nigeria and India: one study estimates that one in 160 pregnancies in Nigeria are delusional. Dr. Mary Seeman, the University of Toronto professor, reviewed the medical literature from 2000 to 2014 and found just 80 cases in North America. She and several other academics attribute the prevalence of pseudocyesis in some countries to both the lack of health care, as well as the strong social emphasis that's placed on pregnancy and motherhood.

"There's such a pressure on women to get pregnant," Seeman says. "So much depends on it. There's such a high stake in having babies, especially boy babies. They want so very much to be pregnant that they'll interpret anything as a sign. Also, they're treated much better when they're pregnant."

Patients in Nigerian and Indian case studies are usually depicted as desperately wanting to be mothers, but there's more uncertainty in North American cases. Seeman has come to see pseudocyesis and delusional pregnancy in Canada and the U.S. as the product of incredible ambivalence about pregnancy and childbirth. "There's either a huge wish to be pregnant or a huge fear," she says.

Depakote, the anti-psychotic that Ruby was placed on at Bellevue, can be used to treat delusions, Seeman says. But when it comes to a delusional pregnancies, Depakote and other anti-psychotics can have some odd, rather counter-intuitive side effects.

"The medications that are used to treat a psychotic illness, they can make a patient put on weight, make your breasts swell, often bring milk to your breasts," Seeman says. They can also cause menstrual periods to cease. All that is particularly true of Depakote, which can drastically increase prolactin levels, the hormone that increases milk production. (Ruby may not have been taking any of these medications long enough to see a rise in prolactin levels.)

"Depakote can cause all these signs of pregnancy that could only reinforce the delusions," Seeman says. "This is the paradox of it."

III.

From the moment she walked into NYU's emergency room, Ruby was insistent that she wasn't delusional or psychotic. But the emergency room staff, as well as her new psychiatrist at Bellevue, Dr. David Nardacci, thought otherwise. On October 10, two days after she walked in asking for an ultrasound, she was involuntarily admitted to the hospital on an emergency basis. Under New York state's mental health laws, an adult can only be involuntarily admitted if "the person has a mental illness which is likely to result in serious harm to self or others and for which immediate observation, care and treatment in a psychiatric center is appropriate."

It's worth noting that Ruby visited numerous other doctors and emergency departments in her quest to get what she saw as an accurate ultrasound, yet Bellevue was the only hospital that took this route. The hospital wouldn't comment on what their specific criteria are for deciding an adult needs to be involuntarily admitted, but a few things about Ruby may have factored into their decision: her agitated state, the visible self-harm scars on her arm, her autism, and a previous involuntary stay in a psychiatric ward in 2013. Hospital staff may have also been troubled by the fact that Ruby had recently gone through a bout of homelessness: she'd been planning on subletting a room in Greenpoint, but it fell through, and she ended up at a shelter for two days. Her housing situation was unresolved when she went to the ER.

Ruby didn't want to elaborate much on what had sent her to the hospital in 2013. But she said she'd learned the only way to get out of the hospital was to simply agree with everything the doctor said. "You have to express complete compliance," she said. This time, though, she wasn't ready to do that—not with her potential baby's life at stake.

Although Ruby had said she wasn't in regular contact with her family, according to John, her mother did visit at least once during her stay at Bellevue, bringing her what Ruby interpreted as maternity clothes. (Ruby's mother declined to comment for this story, telling Jezebel in a brief phone call that she found our contacting her and reporting on her daughter's situation to be "highly offensive.")

Ruby's condition didn't much improve after 10 days in Bellevue, during which time she says she didn't see an OB-GYN, but was assigned a social worker, whom she met with only once. She also saw another patient's penis, which he pulled out as they both sat in the empty visitation room. A nurse helped shoo him out, but, Ruby says, wouldn't take her claims of sexual assault seriously.

Ruby wanted to leave immediately, but her doctors didn't find think it was safe. Every patient in New York has a right to a court hearing if they believe they're being held improperly, and the New York State Supreme Court has a courtroom on the 19th floor of Bellevue to hear mental health cases. Ruby got in touch with the state's Mental Hygiene Legal Services office and was assigned a lawyer, Kent Mackzum. (Mackzum declined to speak on the record for this story.) Two weeks into her stay, Mackzum and Ruby faced off there against her psychiatrist, David Nardacci, who had a host of reasons why Ruby needed to stay.

In his petition to the court, Nardacci wrote that Ruby was "markedly motor agitated, anxious and irritable." He continued:

Although she has had multiple negative urine, blood and ultrasound studies, she is insistent that she is pregnant, on the basis of her own review of her ultrasound exams. She is in disagreement with the professionals who reviewed her labs and ultrasounds, although she has no medical training. She is self-taught via YouTube and the Internet. In my opinion, medication over objection is in the patient's best interests.

The judge agreed, and Ruby was ordered to remain under a two-week hold.

Ruby had several theories for what might be happening, which she alternated between at different times during her stay at Bellevue. Underpinning all of them was her belief that she has a fairly rare syndrome, a retroflexed uterus, that was complicating the diagnosis. If that were true, it would mean that her uterus was tipped back towards her spine. (In court testimony, her psychiatrist said her medical team does not believe she has that condition.) Her first theory was that she had been pregnant in the recent past, and what she was seeing and feeling was a fetal skeleton. The second was the she had what's known as a dermoid tumor, which can grow hair and teeth, and sometimes resemble a fetus on an ultrasound. Her third, slightly contradictory theory—which she didn't like to talk about, knowing how it sounded to other people—was that she was pregnant with twins.

"There originally were two fetuses on the ultrasound," she said, in Bellevue's visitation room, two weeks into her stay and, as she estimated, about 14 weeks into her pregnancy. "I'm still seeing that, but only one image is clear."

Jezebel asked three OB-GYNs, including one who specializes in high-risk pregnancies, to look at several printouts of Ruby's most recent ultrasounds, with her name redacted to protect her privacy. None of them saw anything they could interpret as a fetus or fetuses.

"That's not twins," one responded. "The uterus looks enlarged, i.e. the wall looks thick. Fibroids or adenomyosis maybe. Has a little bit of tissue in the center. I can't tell what the tissue is, but it doesn't look fetal."

"It's really hard to read an ultrasound based on one image," wrote the high-risk OB. "However, I don't see anything there that looks like a gestational sac."

The OB-GYNs said that it's virtually impossible that a pregnant person could have multiple negative blood and urine tests. Ruby discounts that by theorizing that she's experiencing a rare syndrome known as the Hook Effect or Hook-like Effect, which can cause negative urine tests in early pregnancy. She flatly rejects the idea that she's delusional or that she could have pseudocyesis. She doesn't really believe in the syndrome.

"I truly do not believe that is the case," she says. "It's a misogynistic idea that's slapped on people." And the idea that false pregnancy arises from some deep ambivalence about motherhood just doesn't apply to her, she points out. "I have no reason to want this pregnancy, given how long I've known this person, what I have else going on in my life. I didn't want or plan for this."

The OB-GYNS Jezebel spoke to all said that in order to have a clearer idea of what's going on in the ultrasound, they'd want to see the written ultrasound report that usually accompanies it. But Ruby said that report too, was "flawed."

"What I really need is a radiologist to look at this," she said. "Anybody in their right mind would look at these images and think…" She trailed off.

Ruby never got defensive or angry when I asked her if she thought she might be experiencing a pregnancy delusion, which I did several times over the course of our conversations. She seemed to anticipate not being believed, and she responded, patiently and politely, with more theories, more studies, more Google search results. Ruby had theories for everything: the negative pregnancy tests, the lack of clarity on the ultrasounds and, most especially, why none of the doctors who had seen her thought she was pregnant. All of it seemed to stem from her previous experiences with the medical establishment, a lifetime of having her opinions discounted.

"They don't want to admit these tests aren't foolproof," she said. "There are definitely people they're not accurate for, and it's just absurd that all these doctors I'm going to have never heard of this."

She recognized that she didn't have medical training, but added, "When I research something, I get really, really into it."

At least one doctor I spoke to also questioned the wisdom of involuntarily committing Ruby. "The question is what legal and medical grounds they're using to hold her there," the doctor wrote. "An involuntary psych hold has very clear criteria. And a fixed delusion shouldn't be enough."

"Delusions are very difficult to treat," says Dr. Catherne Birndorf, a psychiatrist who specializes in reproductive issues. (Birndorf was speaking generally; she hasn't treated Ruby and has only seen one case of pseudocyesis, years ago, during her residency.) "With any delusion, it's a very firmly held belief. It's not like you can talk anybody out of it. You can present all the rational evidence you want and it doesn't matter."

She added that this presents a particular problem for a psychiatrist or a therapist trying to treat a delusional patient. "You never try and talk somebody out of a delusion. By doing that, you essentially lose their alliance with them. But you don't want to collude with a delusion either—you don't want to be like, 'I see the Martian too.' Nor do you want to lose your treatment relationship with them. You can say, 'I don't exactly see it the same way, but I know you feel that way.'"

Nor is a pregnancy delusion—or any other delusion, for that matter—really treatable with medication: "Usually you try antipsychotic medications. The one that's famous for working in these is pimozide." This is the drug Ms. U was supposedly cured with, which is marketed today under the brand name Orap. But generally, she says, "it doesn't work."

Does anything—any medication, any type of therapy, any combination of the two—reliably work to cure pregnancy delusions?

Birndorf pauses, thinks about it.

"Not... so much," she says.

IV.

On November 3 , two weeks after the court ruled against her, after she'd been at Bellevue nearly a month, Ruby had a chance at a "do-over" hearing to get out. This time her case would be tried by a different judge. She was brought down from her ward around 11 a.m., where John was waiting, clutching her coat, her phone, and some mac and cheese he made that morning. Neither thought it was likely she'd be allowed to leave that day, but he wanted to be prepared just in case.

John wasn't sure if Ruby was pregnant. He'd started out believing fully, but as time went on and her negative pregnancy tests kept rolling in, he was unsure.

"She was definitely preoccupied with this," he says. Just talking about Ruby outside her presence seemed to make him feel a little guilty. "I think there's a 95 percent chance she's not pregnant, but that five percent is gnawing at me." He said the same thing several times in several different ways as he waited for her to arrive: "I just need to be sure." He clutched a sheaf of papers, the email results from when he'd put her ultrasounds on Craigslist.

"You are definitely pregnant," the top email read. "Please see a doctor soon."

The scene as John waited for her was chaotic: a waiting room for patients was full of people waiting to see the judge, most of them black men, ranging in age anywhere from 20 to 60. The sole woman in the room was a round, pale girl who didn't look much older than 20, pacing around and practicing her speech for the judge: "Your honor, I need to be in therapy while I experience life, not locked away…" Two hospital employees kept a wary eye on her.

When Ruby appeared, she was nervous as a cat, barely able to greet John or meet his eyes. She wore a grab-bag outfit indicative of the haphazardness of psychiatric care: sweatpants much too large for her slender frame, bagging down around her hips, pink and blue sweaters layered one on top of the other, and shiny black patent leather shoes with a leopard pattern on the toes.

"Do you have the print-outs?" she asked John. She wanted to show the judge her ultrasounds, although her lawyer was advising against it; he wanted to focus instead on her competence, the fact that she wasn't a danger to herself or anyone else.

"He said he didn't want to focus on that," John said gently.

"Just in case," Ruby said, urgently. "It's important to me." He nodded and handed them over.

"You can just focus on that when you get out," John said, referring to the pregnancy. She looked at him sharply.

"What are you saying?" she asked. He changed the subject and handed her the mac and cheese. I tried to ask how the last two weeks had gone, but she couldn't respond, starting a thought and then stuttering to a stop. She paced. The round pale girl from the waiting room paced too, the two of them occasionally coming to a near-collision in the hallway. They kept eyeing each other, shyly.

"How long have you been in?" the short girl asked, finally.

"28 days," Ruby replied, her voice almost cracking. "It's horrible."

"It's horrible," the girl agreed. They smiled awkwardly at each other.

"At least you know you're going to get out," the girl added, bitterly. "They're trying to send me to a state hospital."

At that moment, Ruby and her lawyer were called into court, with John trailing close behind. Her psychiatrist, David Nardacci, was the hospital's first and only witness, soft-spoken, in a dark grey plaid suit, with deep acne scars lining his cheeks. He mostly addressed his comments to the judge, Arthur Engoron, a man with mad scientist white hair and a cheery demeanor. He kept his eyes firmly away from Ruby. Treating her, he said, had been a challenge.

"She has two psychiatric diagnoses," he explained. "Schizoaffective disorder and Asperger's syndrome. The combination of these two diagnoses in particular has made it harder to treat her, and placed her at higher risk." The medications were beginning to work, he said, "but I don't believe she's fully responsive to the extent that she's ready to be released into the community."

In particular, he said, he questioned her insight into her situation. "Ms. [Ruby] is in the hospital because she became very preoccupied with a delusional pregnancy," he said. "She had sexual relations in July and within nine days became obsessed by the idea of being pregnant. She went to different providers in New York and got at least a half dozen ultrasounds. She was becoming increasingly frantic."

"Did she want to be pregnant or not?" Engoron asked, his brows knitted.

"That was never entirely clear," Nardacci responded, without looking at his patient, who was violently shaking her head. "She's preoccupied with misdiagnosis." But in either case, he added, "Her obsession with this delusional pregnancy became so intense it erased all the other activities in her life." In the NYU emergency room, he said, she became "highly agitated, requiring restraints." She'd since undergone another ultrasound and another set of blood and urine tests, all of them negative.

Ruby raised her hand. Her lawyer shot her a look and she put it down, reluctantly.

But according to Nardacci, Ruby's ultrasounds weren't normal either. They had given her treatment team some cause for concern. The ultrasounds showed a possible enlargement of her left ovary, possibly consistent with cysts or endometriosis. Ruby, he said, believed that they were seeing a fetal skeleton. The whole thing warranted further investigation, requiring a transvaginal ultrasound, an invasive procedure that he didn't feel she was ready for.

"She was only able to tolerate a limited study," he said. Because of her Asperger's, he said, "she's extremely uncomfortable being touched." With a few more days of treatment, he said, "we believe she'll be able to tolerate a full ultrasound exam and a full gynecological exam."

"Does she still believe she's pregnant?" the judge asked.

"I believe she's beginning to entertain other alternatives," Nardacci answered.

Mackzum, Ruby's lawyer, asked Nardacci whether he really believed she was being treated in the "least restrictive" setting possible, the standard under New York's mental health laws.

"I believe she is," he replied. "She doesn't believe she's mentally ill. She'll only accept certain diagnoses. She believes if she had just the right doctor or the right test she'd be able to convince someone she's pregnant." And as long as she still believed she might be pregnant, he said, "she's not fully committed to taking her medications." She didn't even seem fully aware of what having a baby might mean, so fixated was she on the pregnancy itself, he said. "I do not believe she's stable." With more treatment, he said, "I think we have the opportunity to receive closure."

Mackzum pointed out that Ruby had traveled back and forth easily between her parents' home and New York over the past few months, and that she'd taken care of basic physical needs like food and clothing. At Bellevue, she hadn't assaulted or threatened anyone. And both sides agreed that if Ruby were released, Bellevue would still provide follow-up testing and treatment, if she wanted it.

Judge Engoron tipped back in his chair and thought for a long moment.

"I'm ordering her released," he said finally. "I just don't see the danger. Not believing a doctor? Going to another doctor? I just… don't see the danger there."

It took Ruby a moment to register what had happened. "Oh my God," she cried, when it sank in. She beamed and hugged her lawyer, looking near tears as they left the courtroom. She and John headed up to her unit, where she gathered her things and was gone within an hour.

Ruby had a lot to do, she said. She wanted to see whether the specialist on the Upper East Side might be able to see her this week. She swore that would be the last doctor. "If she doesn't see anything, I wouldn't have any other choice but to let it go."

She got her appointment, not with the specialist, who didn't do second opinions, but with someone the doctor referred her to. But Ruby found, again, that it was too hard for her to wait. One morning several weeks ago, she walked into an urgent care facility in Brooklyn asking for an ultrasound. They didn't have a machine, she says, "but the doctor looked at the picture and said it could be an ectopic pregnancy."

It was enough to give her some hope. That, she said, and the fact that a few people had recently given up their seats for her on the subway, which she interpreted as a sign that she was beginning to show: "I'm happy to know it's not just me who sees it anymore."

She held onto that hope even after finally seeing the next doctor, who proved to be a disappointment.

"It took a total of two minutes," she told me by text. "I was given wrong information. He's not a specialist, just a normal OB-GYN. And he was indeed very rude, like the reviews said and I feared. He shook his head when I said that it is possible to have negative tests and be pregnant, and said 'Not possible.' He did not touch me for any kind of physical examination at all or do an ultrasound. I asked if he had heard of the Hook Effect and he said no."

As her weeks of freedom wound on, Ruby grew increasingly worried about this story being published, before, as she put it, "an actual expert in complex OB issues has been consulted," a concern she expressed several times.

"I have been prevented from seeing any specialist so far due to legal strictures," she told me at one point via text. "This isn't all about a sensational story and page-views. It's really useless if it's not going to be accurate. It's like writing about advanced calculus and using the input of kindergarten math teachers as the final word in it. It's not fair to me and it's not factual."

At the same time, her suspicions about her pregnancy grew darker and darker.

"It unfortunately looks to me like there are indeed twins," she wrote to me in a text message, shortly before seeing the disappointing not-specialist. "But they are anencephalic, meaning they have an early neural tube defect that caused their skulls to not close properly and the brain develops partially or mostly outside the skull and they're missing part of the head, etc." She continued:

Sorry if this is really weird and macabre. But I am just stating the facts. I know though that upon accurate diagnosis I will be able to expose Bellevue's wrongdoing, which is positive. I am upset the pregnancy was missed early because apparently these defects occur 27 to 28 days in, well after the medical attention I had already sought.

Two days later, she texted another ultrasound image, the clearest yet, she said. I didn't ask when she'd gotten it. "Deformed, probably anencephalic fetus lying like a doll across bottom," she texted, "Head at L."

I was curious about something Dr. Nardacci said in his court testimony, that his impression was that her preoccupation with the pregnancy was outweighing any thoughts she might have about actually having a child. I asked how she'd care for a severely disabled infant.

"Anencephalic babies unfortunately mostly cannot survive," she answered. She'd read studies, she said, rare cases where "their bodies can be kept alive and they have reflexes but no cognition." She felt that was the most likely case here. "It would be a miracle to have any baby come out alive and sentient in this case."

It struck me then that I didn't know Ruby very well. We'd spent weeks talking about her body, in highly intimate, embarrassing ways. But I still had little sense of her as a person, how she spent her time outside of doctor's offices. I'd looked at her Facebook profile early that week and found a funny, eccentric person, interested in live music and articles about autism.

I didn't see any of that, though. The woman I saw was buried under the weight of an obsession, growing increasingly more frustrated and desperate.

"What if you somehow had a healthy child?" I texted her. "Can you imagine parenting? Is that something you'd want to do someday?"

Her answer was guarded and tired-sounding. "Yes it is," she wrote. "I just am not letting myself hope in this case. It's not looking great."

A few weeks went by, and a few more disappointing doctor's visits, including one to a midwife, who Ruby had hoped might be more sensitive to her concerns, less dismissive. "They were useless," she said after. "They said if the radiologist didn't see a baby then there can't possibly be a baby."

Ruby has set up yet another appointment with a specialist in abnormal pregnancies. In the meantime, as she approaches what she believes to be her fifth month of pregnancy, she's been reading up more on anencephaly.

"I have gotten used to looking at pictures of babies with anencephaly while researching so it doesn't disturb me as much anymore," she wrote to me in a recent email. "I have gotten used to the idea that it's just not a survivable condition and at least they have peaceful times on earth while they're growing in the womb. They are usually deaf and blind, so I guess noise doesn't startle and hurt them."

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

Here is an interesting story: The New York Times points out today that the January 2015 issue of Vanity Fair contains a reference to a sex tape depicting New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. Let’s look. First, check out the cover:

Zoom in:

As you can see on the left-most billiard ball, the text reads:

ILL
LASIO
EX
TAPE!

Or:

[B]ILL
[DE B]LASIO
[S]EX
TAPE!

(The ball’s caption reads: “OFTEN THE TEST of COURAGE is NOT TO DIE but TO LIVE. — VITORIO ALFIERI.”)

Some context: Anyone who’s spent a goddamn second in the vicinity of a New York City political reporter has heard a rumor or twenty about the famously liberal de Blasios. And, well, a sex tape would hardly be the most salacious rumor ever told about the mayor’s marriage.

So: Did Vanity Fair scuttle a story about a Bill de Blasio sex tape? (Remember their infamous—and never published—profile of Gwenyth Paltrow’s GOOP?) Perhaps former Spy editor Graydon Carter just messing around?

Via the Times:

Contacted on Tuesday, a representative for Vanity Fair said in an email, “That’s what you get for letting Kim Kardashian guest edit the cover lines.” The spokeswoman, Beth Kseniak, declined further comment.

Uhhhhhhhhhh.

A spokeswoman for Mr. de Blasio’s office, Rebecca Katz, emailed a statement from his wife, Chirlane McCray, offering an alternate reading: “Bill de Blasio Spandex Cape?” she wrote. “Great idea for Halloween next year!”

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Sadly, we’re pretty sure Vanity Fair is just trolling its readers. As you can see in the magazine’s U.K. edition, the magazine editors altered the text to read:

[HE]NRY
[PO]RTER
[S]EX
TAPE!

(Henry Porter is the London editor of Vanity Fair. Why not Boris Johnson?)

None of this, of course, means that a sex tape depicting Bill de Blasio doesn’t exist. Maybe you’ve heard something about that. If so, get in touch.