The American Energy Alliance is a pro-corporate right wing lobbying group funded by the Koch brothers. They also put out hilarious cartoons. Here's one comparing environmental regulations to the CIA's brutal torture of detainees.
"It's clear that the CIA isn't the only government agency engaged in torture. At least the CIA isn't torturing Americans." Heh. Good stuff.
[AEA]
In August, we began collecting stories from New Yorkers who were subject to harassment by the NYPD. With the recent decision not to indict Officer Dan Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, Gawker remains committed to exposing the NYPD's notorious history of abuse. Email me at jason.parham@gawker.com with your story.
Previously in NYPD Harassment Stories:
Daniel Kim hasn't been creating year-end pop music mashups for as long as Earworm—the reigning king since 2007 with his United State of Pop series—but this may be the year his Pop Danthologies claim the year-in-review remix crown.
When Earworm's set dropped earlier this month
Turns out that although there were many terrible pop songs this year, there were at least some worth revisiting. And they weren't all by Taylor Swift.
For the curious, here's a play-by-play breakdown of vocals and beats used in this year's mashup:
[h/t Digg]
Six people are reportedly dead after a man went on a shooting rampage near Philadelphia early Monday morning. Police say the man, who is still at large, killed his ex-wife and other family members in three locations throughout Montgomery County, Pa.
The death toll, according to police sources who spoke to WPVI, is expected to rise.
The incident reportedly began as a domestic dispute early this morning in Lower Salford Township. There, police found a woman shot to death. From WPVI:
Investigators believe it all began at 3:55 a.m. at the Pheasant Run Apartments the 100 block of Main Street in Lower Salford Twp. Police arrived to find a woman shot to death. Two bullet holes in the wall could be seen from outside.
A neighbor there told Action News reporter Annie McCormick "I heard 3 or 4 gunshots. I heard the kids yelling, saying 'Mommy no! mommy no!'" He kept saying 'We gotta go, we gotta go."
The neighbor continued "I asked him if everything was okay and I saw the kids and the kids' father exiting the house and they didn't have any coats on or anything. They just had their pajamas on."
"He was like 'She's hurt pretty bad, we gotta leave," the neighbor continued.
Police confirm the suspect took two children from the Lower Salford Twp. apartment during this incident, but were found safe a short distance away.
Neighbors say there has been an ongoing custody dispute between the mother and father.
Later this morning, police found two people killed in Lansdale and another two dead in Souderton.
The suspected gunman, identified as 35-year-old Bradley William Stone, was rumored to be barricaded in a home in Souderton this afternoon but when SWAT teams arrived they found only an injured teenager inside. Police, who warn that Stone is "armed and dangerous" and wearing military fatigues, are now carrying out searches in Pennsburg, Pa.
#Breaking: SWAT teams shoots tear-gas into basement in Pennsburg home where alleged gunman Bradley Stone is holed up. #6abc.
— Mike Neilon6ABC (@MikeNeilon) December 15, 2014
Swat making an access into a garage in #Pennsburg via @MercPhotog at the scene at #montcoshooting pic.twitter.com/HTAyESdCVI
— PottstownMercury (@MercuryX) December 15, 2014
Many things were published in 2014—things we liked; things we hated; things we didn't understand
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (FSG Originals) In a year writhing with slippery, oblique narratives (the earlier, good half of True Detective, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370), the first entry in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy was the most disorienting. VanderMeer's Area X, a Bermuda Triangle-like area of land, is beyond even its explorer protagonist's understanding—is she looking at a tunnel or a tower? That's how you write an unreliable narrator, 2014 style.
Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz (Little, Brown and Company) A heaping serving of gossip that I devoured earlier this year. Ritz, who co-wrote Franklin's notoriously underwhelming 1999 memoir From These Roots, took the legend's life into his own hands with his unauthorizedRespect. I couldn't stop reading it, talking bout it (to whomever would listen), going back over parts of Franklin's career that I had missed, and marveling over the incredible humanity (and deep shade
"Why Innocent People Plead Guilty" by Jed S. Rakoff in the New York Review of Books This is just a terrific explainer about exactly what its title says.
"The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit" by Michael Finkel in GQ This is just a great story. How often do you read a story about a hermit? I didn't even know there were still hermits, but apparently there was at least one left.
"The American Room" by Paul Ford on Medium This is terrific analysis. Paul Ford is a genius. It's really hard to write a lot of words describing something that seems simple (the backdrops of YouTube videos) in all its complexity without sounding like a total dipshit and bore. But Paul Ford always does it.
"King of the Click: The Story of the Greatest Keyboard Ever Made" by Adi Robertson for The Verge Very good design writing. It's an article about a keyboard that's not boring, but in fact very charming. That's not easy to do!
Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon (Scribner) This is a really extraordinary book if you are interested at all in humanity and the continuation of it. Solomon is a patient and sensitive reporter, unlike most of the egotistical hacks working today, and this study of families and children and resilience and adaptation is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. I cried a bit in places and I typically have very few feelings.
This old interview with Gloria Steinem in The Guardian, especially this part: "Did men's attitudes to her change after she became a feminist? Were relationships more difficult? "No, on the contrary. It attracted people. It's much worse if you're pretending [not to be a feminist]; then you attract the wrong person. At New York magazine, I was the only woman, and after I wrote the abortion article, my [male] friends there said to me: 'Don't get involved with these crazy women. You've worked hard to be taken seriously.' And I thought: they haven't a clue who I am, and it's my fault because I never told them."
Hunts in Dreams and Pacific by Tom Drury (Houghton Mifflin) Last year, I picked Drury's The End of Vandalism—the first book of his Grouse County trilogy—as one of the best things I read. Hunts in Dreams and Pacific, the second and third books in the trilogy, are as hilarious, strange, and wonderful as the first.
Panic in a Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya (Riverhead) An excellent and very funny debut novel about a family of Ukrainian immigrants living in Brighton Beach.
"The Trials of White Boy Rick" by Evan Hughes on The Atavist Hughes's fascinating and disturbing account of the rise and fall of White Boy Rick, one of Detroit's most infamous drug dealers in the late 1980s, was the best true crime story I read this year.
Anything by
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roxane Gay, Stacia L. Brown, Rachel Kaazdi Ghansah
"The Boy Who Ran: The Life and Death of Avonte Oquendo" by Robert Kolker in New York
"Florida" by Joe Coscarelli in Adult
"Schooled" by Dale Russakoff in The New Yorker
"The Parable of the Unjust Judge or; Fear of a Nigger Nation" by Ezekiel Kweku on The Toast
10:04 by Ben Lerner (Faber & Faber) It's possible that lots of people have already told you to read Ben Lerner's wonderful second novel, and that is because you should. It's crazy that you haven't yet.
"Amazing Proposal Stories" by Simon Rich in The New Yorker Simon Rich is a brilliant and envy-inducing humor writer who looks so young it's crazy. He has a baby's face and a genius's brain. This is a very funny thing he wrote.
"5 Iconic Movie Scenes That Were Actually Fake" on ClickHole ClickHole is the best website on the Internet and this is the first ClickHole piece that I read in ClickHole's debut year, 2014. For that fact, it will always hold a special place in my heart, until I forget about it. It is perfect.
The Penguin Book of Witches edited by Katherine Howe (Penguin Classics) People have never been as interested to hear about a book I was reading as they were when I spent a few weeks in October carrying around The Penguin Book of Witches. The text is a collection of primary source documents culled by Katherine Howe from hundreds of years of alleged witchcraft in England and America. When I started the book, the sections I was most eager to read were the ones containing court documents from American witch trials, but ultimately the account I find myself thinking of most often is a short news story about a Philadelphia widow who was beaten and stabbed in the street on suspicion of being a witch. In 1787! Ben Franklin was alive and you could still be publicly stoned to death in Philly for being a witch. Crazy. This book is a good gift to give to single women you know.
"Do you know a girl scout?" by Julia Alvidrez via email When Gawker HQ received this email on February 4th, 2014 from then-operations manager Julia Alvidrez, I liked it so much that I immediately added it to a Google Doc just so I could remember to include it in an end-of-the-year "Best Reads" round-up. The obvious choice for best line is Julia's surprising account of what happened when she tried to phone the Girl Scout council local to the Gawker Office, but something about the ominous phrase "If we get a girl in here…" makes me laugh every time.
Subject: Do you know a girl scout?
Hello,
Do you know anyone selling girl scout cookies? A lot of people in this office like them. If we get a girl in here we can order easily and help send her to space camp or whatever. If you know someone, put me in touch. I tried to do this last year but someone yelled PENIS when I called the local headquarters and they never called me back.
COOKIES!
Julia Alvidrez
"The Man in the Woods" by Shirley Jackson in The New Yorker Many of the best things I've read this year—Rachel Kushner's two thrilling novels; Lydia Davis' short fiction; Beloved, finally—weren't published this year, and while racking my brain to remember something that was, I remembered a short story I'd read in the spring about a cabin in the woods and the strange people who live there. It was murky and surreal, and a little frightening, and though I've thought about it periodically in the months since then I still haven't gotten to the center. After searching through the New Yorker's fiction archives, I realized that while "The Man in the Woods" was first published in 2014, it too was written earlier—by the late master of horror Shirley Jackson, and uncovered by her children amid her papers at the Library of Congress.
"Miss American Dream" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner on Matter Taffy Brodesser-Akner set a new gold standard for celebrity profile write-arounds this year (see also: her piece on Nicki Minaj in GQ), my favorite being her month-long stay in Vegas to ruminate on Britney Spears' residency at Planet Hollywood. Not a single quote from Britney herself, but I feel I like I learned something new about her anyway.
"The Real Problem When It Comes to Diversity and Asian-Americans" by Jack Linshi in TIME I hate the headline. But that's not Linshi's fault, and his underlying argument, that Asians have been whitewashed in the battle for greater workplace diversity, holds true.
Redeployment by Phil Klay (Penguin Press) Most war literature is shitty because it's pedantic: It's either a jingoistic triumphal romp in which every soldier is a hero, or it's a maudlin bender of horrors in which every soldier is painted as a demon or victim. Phil Klay, a professional writer who served as a Marine in Iraq, managed to create a sheaf of archetypal war stories without falling into the usual cliches. Post-traumatic stress, hyper vigilance, moral conundrums, isolation, civil-military disconnect: They are all here, and they are thoroughly relatable, as are the reasonably complex characters. No wonder this collection earned Klay a National Book Award.
The Pigeon Needs a Bath! by Mo Willems (Disney-Hyperion) The striking art and cheeky humor of Mo Willems' pigeon series tickle parents as much as kids. The Pigeon Needs a Bath! is like drinking an orange cream soda through a crazy straw in a bubble bath while watching a Wes Anderson-produced cartoon: You may not admit it to anyone at work, but you fucking enjoyed the hell out of it. It's no Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, but few things in life are.
Why Does The World Exist? An Existential Detective Story by Jim Holt (Liveright) This was the best book I read this year. Spoiler alert: he does not determine why the world, in fact, exists. But he does present a good overview most of history's philosophical and scientific ideas about why the world exists. Good material to contemplate, and bore people with.
Low Life by Luc Sante (Farrar Strauss & Giroux) I re-read Low Life this year. It's one of the best books on NYC and/or old-timey gangsters ever written. It takes you back to the time when New York City was cool—the late 1800s.
"A Letter From Ray Jasper, Who Is About to Be Executed" on Gawker
"The Case For Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic The paradox of black history in America is that it doesn't really exist, separably. Black history is accurate American history, accounting for the defining foundational facts of slavery and white supremacy. What it stands apart from is the strange collection of mythology, denial, and lies that white people have told themselves down through the years. So it took most of a century for W.E.B. Du Bois' straightforward analysis of the undoing of Reconstruction to supplant the untruths and nonsense put forward by racist academics like Woodrow Wilson.
And so Ta-Neisi Coates' "The Case for Reparations" arrived this year in the guise of a provocation, its title offering to promote a thoroughly marginalized policy proposal. Instead—but not instead—what the essay did was to synthesize and explain the facts of the American experience: how this nation was built on the wealth made possible by mass slavery, and how public policy from Emancipation through the present day conspired to keep the fruits of that unrecompensed labor from ever reaching black Americans. "If cotton was selling for 50 cents a pound, the Ross family might get 15 cents, or only five." The case for reparations was simply the story of America, honestly told and fairly weighed.
Months later, the heavily armed and overwhelmingly white police of Ferguson, Missouri, unleashed gas and rubber bullets on the poor and overwhelmingly black protesters there. Here was a broken and unequal society. Here were people living under laws that routinely robbed them and forced them deeper into poverty. Coates' seemingly quixotic project had taken on the power of prophecy.
"A Birth Story" by Meaghan O'Connell on Longreads Volumes and volumes of words have been written about childbirth. Nearly all of them are useless, when the event comes. Their effect is to bury the most agonizing and personal of experiences under layers of politics, platitudes, and aspirational falsehoods—a suffocating mass of judgments and expectations. Meaghan O'Connell gave birth, and it did not fit those expectations, and she wrote about it with horrifying and hilarious truthfulness:
I wanted the c-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger's house, but you still feel like you should demur. I wanted it the way I wanted someone to stick a finger in my butt during sex, but would never ask for. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I've ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.
Her essay should be mandatory reading at every childbirth-preparation class, and in a better world it would replace most of the existing mandatory reading.
"Faith-Based Diplomacy" by Nathan Thrall on Matter Nathan Thrall is one of the few writers out there who can explain the situation in Israel with patience and clarity. Besides illuminating the various actors and ideologies attempting to shape the future of the region, this essay serves as a capstone to Thrall's immensely useful commentary of the bloodshed in Gaza over the summer.
The Song is You by Arthur Phillips (Random House) I picked up this novel on a whim and couldn't get enough of it.
"Get Off the Bus" by Rebecca Solnit in the London Review of Books Solnit is one of the great anthropologists of late-capitalist San Francisco, and this essay is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces transforming the city.
"Forbearance" by Sonny Bunch at the Washington Free Beacon This is one of those rare essays that forces you to grapple with you live. Maybe that's hokey; if it is, I don't care.
"Prey" by Kathleen Hale in Hazlitt Hale's account of her rape and the two-year trial that followed is familiar and unnerving, with a gut punch at the end that I'm still thinking about months later.
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P by Adelle Waldman (Henry Holt and Co.) I think we were all supposed to read this like, two years ago, but Ross Douthat wrote a column about it that gave me shivers so I ignored it. I finally cracked it this summer, and sheesh! Very good and depressing book. If you also somehow missed the boat on this one, don't worry, the references are still current.
The @AstrologyZone Twitter account Astrologist Susan Miller has been late posting her horoscopes nearly every month this year due to some mysterious illness. The more she tweets about it, the less I understand what's ailing her, but now I obsessively follow every update trying to piece it together. Her tweets are even more beautiful than her 'scopes.
"America Is Not For Black People" by Greg Howard on Deadspin
"5 Tips to Fuck Good" on Clickhole Informative.
"The Aftershocks" by David Wolman on Matter Really fascinating, and fortunately, all but one of the scientists were acquitted in November.
"Take Back the Name" by Lindsay Zoladz on Pitchfork The perils of Justin Timberlake's smug celebrity.
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (Vintage) I had never read it and was very glad to have done so this year.
"Get Out of Jail, Inc." by Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker Sarah Stillman's New Yorker coverage of the tyranny of the American justice system might be contemporary journalism's most vital reporting. Her June story on the for-profit parole industry, which needlessly and amorally traps some of our most vulnerable citizens in a hellish cycle of income extraction, is simply enraging.
"Jerry Football" by Don Van Natta Jr. on ESPN.com ESPN wizard Don Van Natta Jr. somehow talked his way into unprecedented access with Jerry Jones, the pussyhound owner of the Dallas Cowboys whose burning desire to prove his football expertise by winning a Super Bowl without any help is matched only by his incompetence as an evaluator of the sport. This piece has a number of moments so good that it could have ended perfectly like eight different times.
"How Young Thug Got Trapped By A $15,000 Advance From A Major Label" by Naomi Zeichner on BuzzFeed The rap industry is crumbling, and it has infected talent and executives alike with a sort of desperation. The pool of money at the top is shrinking, which means labels are looking to use the hottest unsigned rappers of the moment as lottery tickets, while artists are taking cash upfront from those labels and others even if it means locking themselves into situations disadvantageous to the longterm health of their finances and music. No one better exemplifies this broken system than Young Thug, who suddenly became one of America's most ubiquitous rappers this year even though something like five different labels thought they owned (or would own) the rights to his solo material. The story was broken by then-BuzzFeed music editor Naomi Zeichner in this exhaustive piece, which for my money is the best pop music reporting of 2014.
"Jaden and Willow Smith on Prana Energy, Time and Why School is Overrated" by Su Wu in T Magazine I made fun of this on our website but it's truly one of the most electric and compelling celebrity interviews in years. Much of what Jaden and Willow say here is nonsense that will embarrass them at some later point in life, but it's fascinating how resolutely off in their own world they are. It's going to be a blast watching these two grow up and I hope they eventually take over America. In the meantime, listen to their albums, which are dope.
"Memoirs of a Non-Prom Queen" by Ellen Willis in The Cut (excerpted from The Essential Ellen Willis) I spent an unfortunate amount of time this fall mired in arguments with people who seemed to understand all social interaction, through a lens borrowed from John Hughes, as a power struggle between "jocks" and "nerds." Willis' "Memoirs of a Non-Prom Queen," republished this year in The Essential Ellen Willis, was the essential corrective, a clear and stinging application of hydrogen peroxide to the infected self-mythologies of high-school victimhood. Originally written in 1976, it still managed to be the best essay I read about the pathologies at the heart of Gamergate; I have never encountered anything better or more accurate about being unpopular as a teenager.
Jelani Cobb on Ferguson for The New Yorker Jelani Cobb's writing about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the failure of the state to hold his killer accountable, was everything that great writing should be: sharply intelligent, historically conscious, rigorous, reported, experiential. It moved easily from the actual streets of Ferguson, where Cobb witnessed the civil uprising that took to the city's streets to demand justice, to the long road of black oppression and emancipation along which Brown's death was another marker. And it was vulnerable in a way journalism is not often allowed to be—aware of its power on its author as much as on its audience. It would be hard to choose a single dispatch out of the dozen or so that Cobb wrote since August, but if I had to I'd recommend "Between the World and Ferguson."
John Herrman on Content for The Awl If you want to know what it's like to write on (for?) the internet in the Epoch of Facebook, and you've already read the Book of Job and most Kafka stories, the Awl's "Content Wars" series contains the essential data points. Facebook is quickly and terrifyingly reshaping the way humans write and read—they way they live their lives entirely, really—and Herrman is the only person writing about it with any clear sense of the maddeningly arbitrary way we are all being consumed into its systems.
[Illustration by Jim Cooke]
At least nine women in Tennessee have been arrested under a harsh new law against drug use by pregnant women that "handcuffs new mothers upon delivery."
The weather models are hinting at a potentially significant winter storm in the eastern United States this weekend, but they're vague on the small details like "what will happen?" Washington D.C., for instance, could see either one or fourteen inches of snow, or rain, or sunshine. Welcome to winter!
The uncertainty with this (and most) storms is what track it will take once it hits the Atlantic Ocean. Lows that track up the East Coast are tricky. During the cold months, there are three scenarios that can play out that determine what kind of precipitation will be seen in the I-95 corridor. The first is that the low tracks either over land or directly over the shoreline. When this happens, the low kicks warm air too far inland for any of the major cities to see snow. Any snow that does occur falls at the end of the storm and doesn't amount of much (if any) accumulation.
The second scenario is the classic storm that produces major snowfall from D.C. to Boston. In this setup, a coastal low stays far enough offshore to keep warm air confined to the coast, while producing a heavy shield of precipitation in the cold air that sits along and west of the interstate. These storms are the memorable ones.
The third scenario is a low that tracks so far offshore that only some areas immediately along the coast see precipitation. When there's enough cold air present, these storms can cause some heavy snow along the beaches (especially from the Outer Banks up through the Delmarva Peninsula).
The single biggest issue with this system—aside from the fact that we're more than five days away from the event—is which track the storm will take.
This is what the Vincent van GFS model thinks the jet stream will look like on Friday night. The European model has just about the same thing, but with the jet stream smudged around in a slightly more organized pattern. When we look at the upper-levels, we like to see big, arching ridges or deep, looping troughs to give us an idea of what will happen at the surface. The above image shows a giant mess. In fact, it's so much of a mess that this particular run of the GFS model (7 AM EST) doesn't predict much more than some light rain.
The upgraded GFS model, often called the "parallel GFS" because they still run it alongside the current GFS, does show a storm forming. The parallel model shows a low pressure system developing in Texas on Friday morning, rapidly shooting across the Deep South and reaching the Outer Banks by Sunday morning. This solution produces some ice along the Ohio River Valley, as well as some pretty heavy snowfall in the northeast, possibly threatening places like New York City and Boston.
The European model has been the most bullish about the storm, as for the past couple of days it has consistently shown a significant storm developing next weekend. Of course, I can't actually show you that, because it's also against the ECMWF's usage license to distribute the images. When it comes to the weather, Europeans do that whole "money-hungry capitalist" act better than Americans. (For good reason, too—it costs $90 million a year to run the ECMWF.)
Anyway...this morning's run of the Euro for Sunday morning shows a broad trough situated over the East Coast with a strong jet streak over South Carolina. The result is a strengthening low sitting off the coast of the Delmarva Peninsula, but too far offshore to produce heavy snow in the big cities. The past couple of runs have shown beaucoup snow from Arkansas to Maine, and it's healthy to be skeptical when it starts showing enormous snowfall totals like that, especially so far in advance.
Case in point: Last night's run showed about fourteen inches of snow falling in Washington D.C., compared to this morning's run which showed the city barely cracking an inch. Last night's run also showed all rain east of a line from Asheville to Charlottesvile, while this morning's run clobbers cities like Greensboro, Richmond, and Raleigh with a healthy coating of snow. Talk about consistency!
The event is still a workweek away, so the models are going to waffle on what they think will happen.
It's simply too early to tell. Weather sites (including the National Weather Service) and meteorologists on social media are raising the alarm right now because 1) it looks like some kind of storm will form, and 2) betting against the European model usually doesn't end well.
It's funny—we've spent the past year telling people not to place much stock in the models beyond five days, especially during the winter, only to have to write this stuff today. I saw someone on Twitter last night say that the weather media has to address this stuff so far in advance because if we don't, they'll get it off the "black market" from a bunch of hype-driven twerps
At this point, if you live anywhere from Arkansas to Maine, it's good to keep in mind that it's December and there's a chance for snow. Or rain. Or bright sunshine. Something could happen. Always be prepared for the worst, and make sure you pay close attention to forecasts in the coming days.
[Images: AP, TwisterData, WeatherBELL]
You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.
You may have read The New York Times’ profile of Charles C. Johnson,
the worst journalist on the internet
Given Johnson’s various struggles of with accuracy
Be warned: This post contains disturbing language.
Rumor 1: Johnson shit on the floor in college
This rumor,
first noted (but not confirmed) by Deadspin’s Greg Howard
The
first classmate
Hilariously, he graduated being best known for pooping on the (I think I’m remembering the floor right) 7th floor of Stark (a dorm). I’m sad this idiot is getting any attention at all, but I hope this guy becomes famous for the same reasons he was in college, his public pooping problems.
The
second
I started two years after him, so I wasn’t there since he did it as a freshman or sophomore. But the upperclassman talked about it regularly and it was an undisputed fact that he did it. Multiple people talked about it in great detail [confirmed by another commenter
] on the school’s paper/website the cmcforum.com and I bet many instances of people talking about it can be seen in the comment archives from 2008-2011.
However, in a subsequent comment the first classmate clarified that the shitting rumor
was in fact an “apocryphal origin story”
I have heart-breaking news, team, there was never any proof that he actually was the one who pooped on the floor. Someone did poop on the floor and just to sort of troll the Mountain King himself people started posting that he pooped. It was one of those things no one could prove or disprove. It started as a joke but has sort of morphed into apocryphal origin story. And there is a sort of poetic justice in tarring the biggest shit on campus with that fecal crime...but alas it’s not *really* true.
Furthermore, Johnson has explicitly denied the shitting story on Twitter:
It's interesting that the same media that accuses me of making shit up is making shit up about me me shitting on the floor. Irony. Funny.
— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) December 10, 2014
Verdict: There is no evidence that Chuck Johnson took a shit on the floor in college. Chuck Johnson was, however, so thoroughly disliked in college that his classmates chose to blame an unattributed shit on him.
Rumor 2: Johnson bragged about urinating in his girlfriend’s mouth
This story is apparently confined to alumni of the Claremont Institute, a think tank based in Claremont, California which sponsors summer fellowships for conservative college students. Johnson attended the Institute as a “Publius Fellow” in 2012. During his stay, according to another Claremont fellow, Johnson bragged about urinating in his girlfriend’s mouth as punishment for infidelity. (We’ve verified that this fellow attended the Institute with Johnson.)
As the fellow put in an email:
One night during the Claremont program, about four guys are sitting outside on the balcony at our very nice hotel. I’m there, and so is Charles. He’s drunk, which was not unusual since he’s terrible at holding his liquor. I think we had been talking about past relationships. At some point, Charles announces that he sticks to Asian women because they value intelligence, which means he can get a higher “grade” of woman. Not a completely ridiculous comment, but I just mention it to point out that the trolling never really ends; it’s become embedded in his being. Each thing that comes out of his mouth is designed to offend at least one person in the room.
A few minutes later he starts talking about his ex-girlfriend, some (by his account) “fucking whore” (or something) who cheated on him (shocking!). According to Charles, he found out about the cheating, but his ex was unaware that she had been caught. So he devises a plan: wait until his girlfriend is giving him a blowjob, and then pee in her mouth. He announces to us that he executed the plan successfully. He pee’d in her mouth. She was obviously horrified, and he gleefully revealed that he knew about the cheating. Fuck yeah; she totally deserved that. High Five (not really). He was very proud to tell us.
I called bullshit. He insisted that he did it. We go back and forth and he finally tries to call his ex. It goes to voicemail. Maybe Charles Johnson didn’t pee in his girlfriend's mouth. Either way, he wanted us to believe that he did. Or maybe he actually did. Both options are psychotic. I’d rather not have my name associated with this story, but I just wanted to throw it out there.
In an email to Gawker, Johnson denied that he bragged about urinating into his ex-girlfriend’s mouth. However on Twitter he characterized the same ex-girlfriend as “psychotic”—an apparent insinuation that our source is his ex-girlfriend. That’s not true.
We reached out to every other male Publius fellow from the summer of 2012 for whom we could find contact information. Most did not respond to requests for comment, or ceased communication after we provided the details of the story above. The one fellow who did respond said: “I was not present for that story, nor do I recall hearing it from others. I am decidedly not a fan of his but I can’t attest to it.”
Verdict: Chuck Johnson is credibly accused of bragging about urinating in an ex-girlfriend's mouth. Whether or not he actually performed such urination is unknown. You probably would not want to be romantically involved with him.
Rumor 3: Johnson fucked a sheep
This story requires a detailed accounting. Shortly after Deadspin’s floor-shitting post, Greg Howard received the following tip:
Chuck had a 2002 bestiality charge expunged from his record due to his being a minor, 14 at the time.
As far as rumors go, this was both outlandish and thinly-sourced. But who knew, maybe there was something there. So Howard sent a short email to Johnson asking about it. Twelve hours later, in the middle of the night, Johnson tweeted a screenshot of Howard’s inquiry (withoutconfirming or denying it).
This is why deadspin got the Cory Gardner story wrong. pic.twitter.com/BxdSmyWxiT
— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) December 10, 2014
(The tweet refers to a
debunked
Johnson’s response would have probably halted any further reporting beyond a few searches through Lexis-Nexis and public records. After all, nobody seemed to know where the charge, if it existed, was filed. Even if someone determined where the incident took place, there wasn’t a great chance of obtaining the incriminating police report if Johnson had it expunged.
But then, later on Wednesday, Howard received an iMessage from an unfamiliar number. It began: “Hey, sorry to use the # from chucky’s post, but the bestiality story is 100% true...”
And went on:
A friend is in the San Bernardino County Sheriff Dept... As I heard it, Chuck was about 14, had gone to stay with his cousins [for] a few weeks... He went for a weekend with one to a friend of the cousin’s who owned a ranch near Wrightwood.
The father of the friend got suspicious when they caught him coming back inside very late the first night. The next night, he apparently wandered back out & got the cops called on him by a neighbor when he was spotted attempting to copulate with his wool sheep. The neighbor took pics with a telephoto lens, which, since the cops didn’t catch him mid-act, were used as the basis for his conviction. He was pants-down, pinning the sheep against the fence.
The story is still famous in circles of San Bernardino County law enforcement, apparently. He got it expunged in 2007, saying he was just a kid experimenting, and he didn’t want it to reflect badly when he was in college working for collegiate newspapers. My friend won’t give interviews, because he’d get in trouble for leaking expunged records, but it definitely happened, and word is that the files & pics still exist. Hope that helps!!
In a subsequent text, the tipster explained how their friend put two and two together:
His wife was browsing my Twitter feed one day & he saw Chuck’s name & pic over her shoulder... He called me right away & told me the story. Said it was the strangest case he’d ever worked on as a police officer.
The source declined to provide the contact information for their officer friend, but was otherwise willing to speak on the phone at length about the incident. So we know, at the very least, that this source is a real person.
Johnson denied this account on Twitter after Gawker followed up with him:
Gawker is making up two stories about me fucking animals and pissing in an ex-girlfriend's mouth. Seriously. pic.twitter.com/blITThk2TM
— Charles C. Johnson (@ChuckCJohnson) December 12, 2014
In an email he sent an hour later, Johnson added: “Both statements are untrue, in their entirety. If you publish these stories, or any version of them, you will have intentionally libeled me, with malice.”
A search through public records and the archives of local newspapers did not turn up any mention of an arrest matching the one our source described. (This does not necessarily mean that the arrest didn’t occur, though; editors don’t necessarily publish all incidents involving the police, and public records databases would not contain an expunged record.)
The San Bernardino County Sheriff referred our inquiry to the county’s district attorney; a representative at the juvenile division there said they do not to divulge information pertaining to individuals arrested and/or charged as juveniles, as Johnson allegedly was.
Verdict: There is no evidence that Chuck Johnson was arrested in 2002 for pinning a sheep to a fence and fucking it. Johnson is, however, the kind of guy about whom random people make up and circulate rumors about him being arrested in 2002 for pinning a sheep to a fence and fucking it.
If you know any more about these or other stories, send an email to trotter@gawker.com or hop in below.
Photo credit: YouTube
A robust 8-1 majority of the Supreme Court ruled today that, contrary to folk belief, ignorance of the law is a perfectly good excuse—as long as it's a cop who's claiming ignorance. The case, Heien v. North Carolina, dealt with a car owner who ended up charged with cocaine trafficking after a police officer, who thought the driver looked "nervous," followed the car and stopped it because it had only one working brake light.
The North Carolina state court of appeals had concluded that because state law says a car must have "a stop lamp," singular, it's not illegal to operate a car that's down to one functioning brake light. But the Supreme Court decided that even though the car was legal, the arresting officer's "mistaken understanding of the law was reasonable."
"To be reasonable is not to be perfect, and so the Fourth Amendment allows for some mistakes on the part of government officials,," the majority wrote.
The majority explained that this ruling, upholding an incorrect act of law enforcement, will not encourage the police to enforce laws incorrectly:
An officer may, however, also be suddenly confronted with a situation requiring application of an unclear statute. This Court's holding does not discourage officers from learning the law. Because the Fourth Amendment tolerates only objectively reasonable mistakes, cf. Whren v. United States, 517 U. S. 806, 813, an officer can gain no advantage through poor study. Finally, while the maxim "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" correctly implies that the State cannot impose punishment based on a mistake of law, it does not mean a reasonable mistake of law cannot justify an investigatory stop.
Here was the Court's trademark, cross-partisan detachment from ordinary American experience on full display. Surely the cops would never pull anyone over on bogus grounds, out of malice, and blame it a law that doesn't apply
As for the problem of how officers might grapple with suddenly encountering a legally confusing situation, it's hard to imagine a less esoteric law-enforcement question than whether or not the police are allowed to stop your car for having some of its brake lights out. Cops make, or don't make, such stops every day.
The mystery is how North Carolina's law had gone unclarified before this. But as the lone dissenter, Sonia Sotomayor, argued, the majority's line of reasoning effectively moots future questions about what such a law would mean:
One wonders how a citizen seeking to be law-abiding and to structure his or her behavior to avoid these invasive, frightening, and humiliating encounters could do so.
In addition to these human consequences—including those for communities and for their relationships with the police—permitting mistakes of law to justify seizures has the perverse effect of preventing or delaying the clarification of the law. Under such an approach, courts need not interpret statutory language but can instead simply decide whether an officer's interpretation was reasonable. Indeed, had this very case arisen after the North Carolina Supreme Court announced its rule, the North Carolina Court of Appeals would not have had the occasion to interpret the statute at issue.
"One is left to wonder," Sotomayor wrote, "...why an innocent citizen should be made to shoulder the burden of being seized whenever the law may be susceptible to an interpretive question."
[Image via AP]
Hey dummy, what do you do with trash? Let it sit around, I bet. Think about throwing it away, get up to get a drink, forget to throw it away. Stuff it in your pocket. You stupid idiot. This elephant—not even a human—knows exactly what to do with it:
Throw it away in the trashcan!
[h/t LaughingSquid]
Remember Ecce Homo, the best meme of 2012?
The Times traveled to Borja to see how the simian image of Christ—lovingly restored from a nearly 100-year-old fresco by an 83-year-old amateur—has impacted tourism in the northeastern Spanish village, and while hard dollar figures are scant, the consensus seems to be that "Beast Jesus" was a good thing:
Since the makeover, the image has attracted more than 150,000 tourists from around the world — Japan, Brazil, the United States — to the gothic 16th century Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mercy on a mountain overlooking Borja.
Visitors pay one euro, or about $1.25, to study the fresco, encased on a flaking wall behind a clear, bolted cover worthy of the Louvre's Mona Lisa.
In the two years since Cecilia Giménez turned the face of Jesus into a fuzzy whirlpool with eyes, Ecce Homo has become a cottage industry. The painting's earless face adorns lottery tickets. Two different local wineries have vied for the right to place it on their labels. Museum visits are up. According to the mayor, while other industries flagged thanks to the financial crisis, tourism remained steady thanks to Homo. Giménez herself, lest we forget, made a pretty penny on the fresco fiasco.
The only people who aren't happy with the fate of Ecce Homo, it seems, are the grandchildren of Elías Garcia Martínez, the artist behind the original painting. They retain no legal right to the image, the mayor told the Times but sent a letter asking for it to be completely erased nonetheless. Giménez's restoration, they claimed, "damages the honor of the family."
[Image via AP]
One thing that's fun to do during the holidays is get the hell away from your family for just like one solid second of peace and quiet or so you can strategize. While any of these films that will be leaving Netflix on December 31 are suitable for family viewing, it's also true that you can do things on your own because you are a grownup now. So close that door, pop in your headphones, and lay back on a bed that is too small and feels weird and different than what you are used to, because the clock is ticking on these guys.
CLASSICS
ROMANCE, PEOPLE DYING—THAT OLD DANCE—EROS & THANATOS
MAN FEELINGS
FOR YOUR INNER CHILD
THRILLING ACTION & ADVENTURE
[Image via]
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Pharrell and Gwen Stefani got off to strong starts on The Voice, yet somehow tonight we've reached Part One of the finale, the performances, and Adam Levine is coach to three of the four finalists. Which means we get to hear Adam duet with three of the four finalists. Hope you like falsetto!
The concept of "Coach Duets" IN THEORY is a really excellent idea, but WHO could have imagined this particular scenario when dreaming it up? (Other than a sadist.) (Or Adam Levine himself.) (E.g., a sadist.) Still, as the Buddha told us, life is suffering, and if we're going to get the marvel that is Matt McAndrew singing his original song, "Wasted Love," then we must face life's trials with grace and courage.
For the most part, Adam's duets with his coachees were fine. He and Chris Jamison sing a Robin Thicke song about boning a lady (NOT "Blurred Lines," thank goodness), and for obvious reasons their voices blend quite well. My exact note was, "Falsetto up the wazoo." At this point and later, when Chris was singing about sexing ladies while swiveling in his very tight pants, I did start to worry that Adam might have become TOO big of a role model, but I hold faith that his solid Pittsburgh upbringing will check any wayward douchey tendencies that emerge.
Where Adam really lost it was singing with Damien on "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" amidst what I can only presume is an illegal amount of dry ice. First, are they really trying to fashion Damien as the 2014 version of Clay Aiken? (Side note: OH NO now I am totally going to be watching Clay Aiken videos all afternoon.) And secondly, you, Adam Levine, are no "Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Elton John!" Damien sounded great, though.
And then for his duet with Matt McAndrew, Adam had Matt sing…an Adam Levine song. That was part of a film that Adam Levine was in. It's nice that he wanted to make the evening all about showcasing the contestants, though. Blake Shelton also got to sing one duet, with Craig Wayne Boyd. It was called "Boots On," and was about, like, wearing boots or something. Being a country guy. I don't know. They at least looked like they were having fun.
The contestants each did one coach-selected cover. Damien sang "A Song for You" by Donnie Hathaway, which was typically competent. But neither this, nor anything else that Damien did in his finale performances, is going to win him the show, I don't think. Matt McAndrew's "Over the Rainbow" was the show-closer, and though Adam Levine claimed it was so powerful that it paused the universe, I was maybe too focused on his sparkly brocade suit jacket to be properly moved. Plus, he got a little wayward on those last big notes, did he not?
Every bit of emotional manipulation that Blake put into choosing "In Pictures," an Alabama song all about being an absentee dad (LIKE CRAIG WAYNE BOYD IS BEING NOW!!!! AND ALSO LIKE HIS TRUCKER DAD WAS!!!), 100% worked on me. This was not a flawless vocal performance, but I attributed the wobbliness to emotion, also embodied by the sad glint in Craig's eyes. Anyway, I totally felt a thing. I also felt a different kind of thing when Chris Jamison sang "Cry Me a River" in his tight pants. I still maintain that he's a little goofy looking, but ALSO I am finally starting to recognize some of his, um, appeal. I think there's actually a chance that he might win this thing, too.
There were a couple of notable things about the finalists' original songs. One, related to the above paragraph, is that Chris Jamison's song "Velvet" contained the lyric "Her sex just changed my life," which he sang with aplomb while his mom and sister sat in the audience. Also, again, the pants.
Forget Justin Timberlake, I think this kid is going for some Tom Jones realness. This performance also made Adam emphasize, after earlier basically declaring Matt McAndrew the winner, that he loves ALL of his finalists equally, and any one of them could win! I think he realized the power of the pants.
Damien sang the Max Martin-penned "Soldier," which is maybe about how Damien brought about the nuclear apocalypse by sinning? But maybe also he's Jesus? I don't know. The lyrics were a little confusing, let's say. In contrast, Craig Wayne Boyd's incredibly repetitive, "My Baby's Got a Smile on Her Face" is very clearly about boning your lady to happiness, like twice a day. Not while listening to this song though, because then she'd just be asleep.
The thing to end all things on this show, however, was Matt McAndrew's "Wasted Love," a song that he actually wrote himself. And I mean, they gave him a fiery ramp to walk down and a gospel choir (or at least a spirited a capella group). I wouldn't recommend listening to the lyrics TOO closely, but I will for sure be singing that hook all day. And if you watch the video below, you will too!
And then you can also sing, "Has everybody seen my big neck tattoo?" And "Has anybody seen all my Hogwarts' wands?" (Sorry, I couldn't manage to shoehorn "Harry Potter glasses" in there rhythmically.) And "Is anybody blind from my patterned shirts?" And, "Has anybody seen my precious hard-earned dollar? Oh, I spent it on iTunes buying the rather excellent studio recording of this song. Damn you, Adam Levine!"
Tonight: A winner is declared! Also buckets of special guest stars including… Lynyrd Skynyrd?!?!?!?
[Videos and photos via NBC]
Morning After is a new home for television discussion online, brought to you by Gawker. Follow @GawkerMA and read more about it here
The past few years have seen an absurd amount of companies getting hacked, from simple passwords to entire databases of email. And sure, when we're affected by these hacks, we look for someone to blame—but we rarely stop to look at our own lives and see what we can learn from these companies' mistakes.
Companies often seem like they're monolithic titans that can't be touched. Underneath all the branding, though, they're made up of people. People who can make mistakes, overlook something, or even get lazy. Whether you're one of the people who works for a big company, or just an average Jane looking to protect her chat logs, we can all learn a thing or two from these slip-ups.
To say Sony has been making news lately for its round of hacks would be a bit like saying a few people have heard of The Beatles. As our sister site Gawker pointed out, though, the biggest problem with the Sony hack was how low the barrier to entry was for the intruders
In case you're unaware (or work for Sony), this is particularly bad because if an attacker gains access to one machine that stores these passwords, they can access everything. At the very least, protecting the spreadsheets themselves with a file-specific password
It's pretty common, I've seen, for large non-progressive organizations (older software dev shops, finance places) to have precariously old ways of thinking - like that "their firewall will save them".
Often, when we analyze our security threats, we can assume that intruders will come from shadowy overseas elite hackers that can break through our locks anyway (and, to be fair, in Sony's case it was probably true). But that's no excuse for making it easy on them. Encrypting those spreadsheets—or using proper password management software—could have at least slowed down the intruders.
In Sony's case, even encrypting those specific files could have helped. For most regular users, our online security checklist
Around the Gawker Media circles, we aim to be big enough to admit when we're wrong. And when our company was hacked
The commenter account leaks would've been bad enough. However, excerpts from internal chat logs also made their way out. Arguably, these were the more embarrassing part of the attack. While we've all said things in private that can be interpreted badly if made public, but we often don't think about it at the time—and neither did the folks at Sony, who have found all their emails released to the public domain. Whether it's right or not doesn't matter when the damage is done.
You can't always watch every single thing you say, and it's hard to endorse obsessive paranoia as the right approach to security. Nevertheless, it's good practice to treat everything like it will someday be hacked. It's happening to everyone these days, and while our primary goal should be to improve our security, we should also take precautions to ensure that our skeletons aren't so easy to find. That doesn't mean you can't ever speak your mind. Just be aware that you may have to own up to it someday.
Most of us don't have a very accurate idea of what a "hack" looks like in progress because we don't see it happen. As a result, we fall back on the Hollywood image of a skinny person in a dark room typing away on a Linux terminal, breaking through layers and layers of complex virtual security. As Target learned the hard way, though, it's not always a virtual firewall that gets breached.
When Target lost millions of customer records to one of the biggest retail security breaches in history, it wasn't because someone hacked the Gibson. They installed malware the little box that you swipe your card in. While technically the hack was initiated remotely (using network credentials from an HVAC company of all places), most people don't focus on the physical locations where data is collected, as it's assumed the "big hacks" wouldn't happen there.
To bring the point even further home, our sister site Gizmodo has talked at length about card skimmers
What does this mean for you? For starters, don't assume that you're safe just because you use 1048-bit, end-to-end encryption on your files stored in heavily guarded server facilities. While Google or Dropbox may be able to provide reasonable protection from remote hackers, if you don't protect your desktop, someone can walk right in and see your files. Lock the doors to your office, enable a PIN on your phone, encrypt your Wi-Fi, and don't let your laptop out of your sight. Just because some hacks happen over the internet doesn't mean you can forget about the places you physically interact with technology.
Google, Facebook, and Twitter have all made efforts to make it easier to access services on the internet. You can use your Google account, for example, to log in to our own commenting system here on Lifehacker, among many others. This is a handy way to avoid keeping track of yet more passwords. While Google and Facebook are pretty secure, if you use a smaller service to connect your accounts, and it gets hacked—like Bit.ly did
For those who don't recall, Bit.ly is a URL shortener. It allowed users to connect their social media accounts so it could post for you. When it got hacked, the company warned users that their authentication tokens—the keys that allowed Bit.ly to access Facebook or Twitter on your behalf—were stolen as well.
This meant that even though neither Facebook or Twitter were hacked, people's accounts were still semi-vulnerable. Hacks of this kind allow the intruders to gain access to whatever information the service itself had, like your name, email address, phone number, timeline activity, or even the ability to post for you.
Previously mentioned
More importantly, if a company gets hacked, check your accounts even if you don't use that service anymore. Similarly, you should be careful of which companies you entrust your accounts to. Don't just ask "Would I let this company post to my timeline for me?" Ask "Do I trust this company not to get hacked?"
When you think of companies that are likely to be hacked, a firm that specializes in computer security doesn't sound like it would top the list. Nonetheless, RSA Security found itself the victim of what it described as "an extremely sophisticated cyber attack." How did they do it? By sending phishing emails—emails designed to look like they come from a different, trustworthy entity—to a small group of employees.
As regular consumers, most of us don't tend to familiarize ourselves with the intricacies of enterprise-level corporate security. In fact, most of us get bored reading that phrase. Instead, we fallback on the comfortable notion that "They're experts. They can handle it." And in many cases, that's true! People who are trained and paid to know more than we do can probably handle things better than we can.
However, nothing is foolproof. Even people who work in information security for a living can be hacked. By a similar token, we can think that because we read Lifehacker, use a password manager
Neither case is true. We all take risks, of course, but we should never assume that a system is bulletproof just because we (or the people we trust) are smart. There's always someone smarter out there. Be aware of your vulnerabilities. Patch the holes
When something bad happens, it's natural to want to deny it. It can upset your entire day (or week), throw you off your schedule, and put you in a bad mood. The longer you wait, though, the worse it gets. Just ask Monster.com, who waited several days after discovering a hack to disclose it.
Now, this is obviously problematic for a variety of reasons. Monster's customers were none too pleased that their accounts were vulnerable without their knowledge. During that timeframe, scammers with full access to users' accounts were sending emails from what appeared to be recruiters to other users, asking for financial information.
This wasn't just an issue of Monster's reputation getting damaged. Users were in active danger because the accounts weren't closed down immediately. As we've discussed before
Of course, companies that get hacked and news outlets like us can only do so much. If you discover a vulnerability in your accounts or devices, don't hesitate. Take action immediately to fix the problem. It may suck for a while that your day had to get interrupted with yet another security problem, but it's far better than letting a hacker run wild with your data.
Photos by marc falardeau, notoriousxl, Billie Ward, and Chad Cooper.
Jeb Bush, the "smart" one, announced this morning in a tweet and a Facebook post that he is probably running for president in an election that's 693 days from now, and definitely forming a PAC through which you can give him money if you like the idea of him running for president.
"I am excited to announce I will actively explore the possibility of running for President of the United States," the land profiteer-turned-governor-turned-charter-school profiteer tweeted. Speaking of which, remember when Jeb's son George P. actively explored the possibility of breaking into his ex-girlfriend's bedroom in the middle of the night, according to a Miami-Dade police report from that night, just after Jeb lost his first bid for Florida governor? Those were the days.
Jeb is busying himself with the January birthing of "a Leadership PAC" that may be the real point of all this, a soft-money coffer that lets him influence the tenor of GOP politics, even if he doesn't actually run for office himself. The overpaid Beltway writerly class is busying itself with pats on its own back for amazing, oddball prognostications of a Bush-Clinton 2016 matchup months, even years ago, because who could have seen that coming?
In the meantime, if he really is going to run for president, Bush has to convince Republicans to shy away from the divisive social politics and populist demagoguery to opt for a traditionally conservative Ivy League businessman with family ties to politics. Which would be a real break with recent history for the party, if you don't count 1988, 1992, 2000, 2004, and 2012.
In a callback to the very beginning of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert kicked off the show's final week with Formidable Opponent, a segment where he debates the only worthy adversary available: himself.
And, to show how far we've come as a country in the 9 years the show has been running, the topic is the same as it was in 2005: U.S. torture of detainees.
Blue-tie Stephen Colbert (disturbed by the Senate intelligence committee's recent torture report
Colbert, the character, will disappear for good Thursday night (and possibly die
[h/t Digg]
Will Reese Witherspoon win an Oscar for "Wild" because she overcomes the hardship of wearing a really heavy backpack for most of the film? I sure as hell hope not, but she probably will, because Hollywood is stupid. In any case, this movie was awful, and terrible for women. Wild was by far the worst movie I saw this year—and I saw Heaven Is For Real.
Now, I have not read Cheryl Strayed's memoir, Wild, upon which this movie is based. Thank you for asking. I do not believe this fact will have bearing on my review of the film Wild, starring Reese Witherspoon. Please keep them as separate works of art in your mind.
Wild has been heavily marketed as Witherspoon's comeback film, aiming to bring her yet again into the entertainment electorate's good graces through her portrayal of a strong yet aggrieved woman. The hope of Witherspoon's public relations arm seems to be that this performance will erase that delicious moment from our memories when she revealed her true, entitled celebrity self to a few cops in Georgia a year and a half ago
In this movie Witherspoon bends from type to portray Cheryl Strayed, a woman dealing with sex and drug addiction and the premature loss of her mother who decides to hike the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail. I gather Strayed, in real life, is a from-the-earth type. I mean, she has a Bob Marley T-shirt and thinks hiking will solve her problems. She's like the white Oprah, if her advice column is any indication. But Witherspoon, even when acting as Cheryl, is none of these things. This movie proves that Witherspoon couldn't act like a sympathetic character if there was an Uzi to her back. Witherspoon is a sniveling, Flickian, narcissistic bitch, and therefore this so-called story of redemption—Woman Goes on 1,000-Mile Hike to Cleanse Herself of Sins and Find Herself—comes across not as real or raw or uplifting but just another tale of easy blonde triumph.
Take the hike, the central narrative of the film. It goes like this: Reese, er, Cheryl, walks for a bit, grunting and sweating, and humming a song that reminds her of her dead mom (played by Laura Dern, trying her damned hardest to carry this saccharine dump of a movie). Then she has a flashback to her dead mom doing something virtuous because her dead mom is an angel with no flaws. She emerges from her flashback to meet a male stranger on the trail, thinks the male stranger is going to rape her, but then the male stranger ends up being really nice and helps her because somehow she has run out of food and water even though her backpack is 150 lbs (it is full of books?). Repeat cycle for two hours.
So Cheryl gets through the trek with the help of many male strangers who provide her sustenance and advice and don't want to have sex with her (although she does have sex, consensually, with one man, after a Grateful Dead tribute concert, in a yurt). All in all, a very good feminist message.
This was not a good movie for Reese (what I would have given to see her as Amy in Gone Girl!
I'm not a total hater of movies based on memoirs by women (even though I think a person should exhaust every other possible avenue of creative a/o therapeutic expression before turning to writing down their personal story for public sale). I'm one of three people I know who liked Eat, Pray, Love. But that's because Julia Roberts fucking crushed that role. That movie was uncomfortable as heck but also very happy and fun. Julia put herself through the meat grinder to do justice to Elizabeth Gilbert. It may be the same meat grinder she went through for every other role she's played, but it's fun to watch every time. I can't say the same for Reese and whatever hippie bullshit she tried to fabricate for this movie. Her performance, unlike the vistas of the Pacific Crest Trail, was as soulless as a parking lot.
[Pic via Getty]
New York magazine issued a succinct and straightforward apology Tuesday morning for publishing an article that implied Mohammed Islam, a senior at Stuyvesant High School, made $72 million trading stocks. "We were duped," the magazine's editors said in a statement. "Our fact-checking process was obviously inadequate; we take full responsibility and we should have known better. New York apologizes to our readers."
Monday evening, The New York Observer published an interview
You seem to be quoted saying "eight figures." That's not true, is it?
No, it is not true.
Is there ANY figure? Have you invested and made returns at all?
No.
So it's total fiction?
Yes
New York's initial defense of the piece relied on an eight-figure bank statement from the teen, which the magazine claimed a fact-checker examined. But Tuesday morning, the Washington Post published an article in which a source close to Islam's family said the bank statement was a fake. "[He] created some bullshit thing on the computer with blacked out numbers," the source told the Post. "He said she could look at it for 10 seconds, and pulled it away."
When reached for comment by the Washington Post, Pressler replied via email. "I'm I guess moderately surprised. In my day (2008?) it took at least a few days to cop to a fraud. I have to talk to nymag before officially comments as the story's really theirs."
New York also added the apology to the article (replacing an Editor's Note placed there yesterday, which noted a change in headline):
The full apology is below.
In the most recent edition of New York, its annual Reasons to Love New York issue, the magazine published a story about a Stuyvesant High School senior named Mohammed Islam, who was rumored to have made $72 million trading stocks. Islam said his net worth was in the "high eight figures." As part of the research process, the magazine sent a fact-checker to Stuyvesant, where Islam produced a document that appeared to be a Chase bank statement attesting to an eight-figure bank account.
After the story's publication, people questioned the $72 million figure in the headline, which was written by editors based on the rumored figure. The headline was amended. But in an interview with the New York Observer last night, Islam now says his entire story was made up. A source close to the Islam family told the Washington Post that the statements were falsified. We were duped. Our fact-checking process was obviously inadequate; we take full responsibility and we should have known better. New York apologizes to our readers.
Fuck. You forgot to buy your Asian Friend a Christmas present. You didn't realize until recently that your Asian Friend even celebrated Christmas. You're really learning a lot about your friend...and yourself.
Take a moment to sit down and think about your Asian Friend. What does he like? How do you spend your time with him, usually?
You have noticed that your Asian Friend tends to get turned around kind of easily. He never quite gets "lost," per se, but you've seen how he has a hard time orienting himself. He's always walking down the street with his phone, his Google Maps app arrowing blipping brightly. Weird that your Asian Friend does not have this mathematical mind that guides him—weirder that you underestimate his capacity for stupidity.
Luckily, you and your Asian Friend live in a major city (mostly) laid out on a grid, so really, all he needs is something to quickly tell him which way is which when he step out of the subway.
Get him a compass, the original Google Maps. Does not require a cell signal or battery. This one from Coleman—those guys who make camping gear—is no frills and doesn't look like a stupid pocket watch.
Oh yeah! Your Asian Friend got a new job recently. You remember he was so thrilled when he told you. He didn't have a job there for a little bit, which you thought was strange. You remember that he interviewed for a lot of jobs, all ones you figured he was going to get, but didn't. You just kind of assumed your Asian Friend has never really had a hard time finding work. Maybe you should get him something that says, "Congrats! I'm happy for you!"
Your Asian Friend loves gin, you've noticed. He'll love this kit to make his own. He doesn't like dark liquors so much because of that one time in college you had to walk him up the stairs to his apartment and put him to bed on the cold, hard floor of his bedroom because he was dizzy and the floor, he said, "doesn't move." Actually, it's funny how much your Asian Friend drinks. His face always looks so red after one drink. He told you it's a dumb biological condition that makes it a little harder for his body to process alcohol than you. Weird he always drinks you under the table.
Your Asian Friend gets stressed out. He works long hours (he has that new job and all). Sometimes longer and more often than you. He sure seems motivated to do well. He really resents you calling him a "workaholic," because that is a television show and no one wants to be solely defined by what they do for a living? He doesn't understand why caring about his job (more than you, by the way, who hasn't been promoted in years) makes him a soulless careerist.
He needs a white noise machine to help him get to sleep at night. A full, restful night of sleep is a great gift to give. Maybe if he isn't feeling as tired from a long day of work he'll have more time to hang out with you, who has all this time on their hands.
What TV shows does your Asian Friend watch again? He keeps talking about some Danish political thriller...
Borgen. He keeps telling you how his other friends keep telling him to watch this show, because it's "so, so, so good." Three "so's!" Sometimes, when your Asian Friend asks you to go to the movies with him, and wants to see period dramas and that one where Julianne Moore has Alzheimer's, you find yourself fascinated by his taste. It's just so interesting he could like boring white people shit, too.
Whenever you ask your Asian Friend where he wants to eat out, he almost always tells you, "Tacos." One time you asked him where you could get good dim sum, and he only replied by arching his eyebrow, as if to communicate, "Are you fucking kidding me?" And then you didn't ask him again.
Your Asian Friend always assesses the quality of a Mexican restaurant by how much punch their house salsa has. His favorite, he told you over enchiladas, is tomatillo salsa, because it pairs well with more food. (He told you once to try in on scrambled eggs, and you thought he was crazy, but then you tried it and loved it.) Buy him a jar and a bag of tortilla chips.
When you're catching up with your Asian Friend, your conversation eventually leads to your mutual travails in the dating scene, and you will admit, that sometimes, you're surprised by your Asian Friend's dating life and how active it is (read: at all). It's not hard, but also not exactly easy, to think of your Asian Friend as a sexual organism.
Buy him some condoms. Just like, any? It's all about the sentiment, remember—the sentiment that you do not think of your Asian Friend, also a human being, as a feckless, asexual nub. Because your Asian Friend has a tricker time dating than you do, white man. He does not have centuries of popular media to codify that he can be attractive. In fact, if you ask your Asian Friend in a vulnerable moment, he might admit that having grown up with strong-jawed, slick-haired white men being idolized as the sexiest men alive, he does not immediately think of himself as attractive. He might tell you, when he closes his eyes, and thinks about what an attractive man looks like, the first image is never someone who looks like him. It's not the second or third, either.
If he thinks this, what must his potential dates be thinking? Actually, there's a good chance they aren't even considering him at all. This is not a cross your Asian Friend bears. He generally doesn't ever think about it—do you walk around thinking very hard about your whiteness? Of course not. But every so often, and just often enough that it keeps the wound fresh, he's subconsciously reminded (sometimes by you) that he is different, and that's genuinely more painful than any one person's explicit, articulated rejection. Happy Holidays!
[Art by Jim Cooke]
