When Baltimore's City Paper was sold to the company that owns the Baltimore Sun earlier this year, the first casualty of its independence—before the sale even went through—was the February 26 column by City Paper stalwart and occasional Gawker and Kinja contributor Joe MacLeod. MacLeod's "Mr. Wrong" column, written in response to the news of the sale, was pulled from the presses on order of his soon-to-be-ex-bosses at Times-Shamrock Communications and spiked. More unpleasantness ensued. Here, for posterity, is that lost column.

Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page editor for the Wall Street Journal and recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, is a fundamentally bad person, as he explains in his newspaper column today.

Stephens—cited by the Pulitzer committee for his "incisive columns on American foreign policy and domestic politics, often enlivened by a contrarian twist"—has published a column today entitled "I Am Not Sorry the CIA Waterboarded." There's that trademark contrarian twist again, along with an admission of moral bankruptcy that you must admire for its forthrightness, but not as much as you despise it for its content.

Just a few of the things for which clear-eyed American Bret Stephens is sorry, or not:

I am sorry [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times]remains alive nearly 12 years after his capture. He has been let off far too lightly. As for his waterboarding, it never would have happened if he had been truthful with his captors. It stopped as soon as he became cooperative. As far as I'm concerned, he waterboarded himself.

Human life—something to be sorry for.

I am not sorry that President Obama has ordered drone strikes on hundreds of terrorist suspects hiding in Pakistan, Yemen and other places. I am not sorry he has done so despite the fact that the strikes inevitably have killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of their associates, many of whom were either innocent of wrongdoing or had committed no crime deserving of death from 30,000 feet. This is the nature of war.

The taking of human life—not something to be sorry for.

I am sorry that Mr. Cheney, and every other supporter of enhanced interrogation techniques, has to defend the practices as if they were torture. They are not. Waterboarding is part of the military's standard course in Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. Tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen have gone through it. To describe this as "torture" is to strip the word of its meaning.

Though countless people who have actually undergone waterboarding say that it is torture, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Bret Stephens disagrees. Though even a child has enough natural moral sense to feel sadness at the loss of human life, newspaper columnist Bret Stephens does not.

That's just the sort of contrarian twist the Pulitzer committee loves.

[Photo: AP]

Jimmy Kimmel happens to be neighbors with Emily Blunt and John Krasinski, and he's been in an ongoing Christmas prank war with the couple since they got married a few years back. Last year, Kimmel covered their entire house in wrapping paper and littered their walk with reindeer shit, so it was incumbent upon them, according to the doctrine of mutually assured holiday destruction, to hit back even harder.

I'm not going to spoil what they did to Kimmel, but it's a halfway decent bit of schadenfreude not only for Blunt and Krasinski, but for anyone tired of his constant pranks. It cost the couple "so, so much money" to pull off, but seeing Kimmel finally get his was no doubt worth it.

That third stunt was totally staged for TV, but I don't know about the first two. I want to believe they genuinely nailed him, but if anyone would lie about a prank, it's Jimmy Kimmel.

[h/t Digg]

The bros of Phi Delta Theta at the esteemed University of Pennsylvania are in some shit after posting a Christmas card featuring their cheery faces and a black blow-up sex doll on Facebook. The doll (in the upper left corner) was meant to resemble Beyoncé, according to Phi Delt.

The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that student minority groups did not respond kindly to the photo when it started circulating on Facebook Sunday night. Black student organization UMOJA, along with the women's, Latina, and gay alliance groups on campus, released this joint statement last night:

The inclusion of a racially and sexually charged object in such a flagrant fashion displays a serious and immediate need for repercussions that reflect the severity of this misogynistic, racist offense. We...firmly believe that when an event like this marginalizes one of our communities, it marginalizes us all.

Other students expressed that the photo was upsetting on Twitter:

The level of racial stress I've been under since being here is crazy. http://t.co/mhM9GAQHW0

— angel mills (@angel2point0) December 15, 2014

The bros are still drafting an apology to black students on campus, according to the Daily Pennsylvanian. In a draft emailed to UMOJA leaders, Phi Delt president Jimmy Germi wrote that the blow-up doll was a gag gift from the frat's Secret Santa party, and that he didn't realize how it would come across in a photo.

"There were absolutely no prejudicial motivations behind the gift," Germi wrote, but "the absence of racial motivation is no justification for this act of poor judgement and the decision not to include a sex toy in a holiday picture should have been an easy one." Yeah, probably!

The bros have not yet been reprimanded by Penn or their national organization.

[Photo via Facebook/The Daily Pennsylvanian, ht Business Insider]

Rumors of Mariah Carey's demise have been greatly exaggerated, she proved last night during the first of six sold-out, Christmas-themed concerts at New York's Beacon Theater. For much of the show, she was in as good of a voice as you could expect from a diva who's in her 25th year of wailing for the public's consumption.

Signs of Carey's vocal deline went viral earlier this month when she performed her perennial smash "All I Want for Christmas Is You" live on NBC. Though she was on pitch for most of the song, she sounded out of breath and audibly missed notes. Her face was pained. The entire affair was decidedly less than festive.

The ensuing ridicule caused Carey her biggest public humiliation since her flop pseudo-biopic vanity project, 2001's Glitter. "Remember when Mariah Carey could sing? Most millennials probably can't," is the exaggerated, Perez Hilton-esque way that Timothy Burke opened his post on the performance for Deadspin's culture site the Concourse. "Only Rep. Peter King could vocalize something more tone-deaf in New York today."

I remember when Mariah Carey could sing because she still can sing. Her voice is still a marvel, it's just less reliable than before. That makes for some underwhelming performances, but also some overwhelmingly good ones when she is on. In fact, seeing Carey now, at 45, is genuinely exciting if you are invested in her at all as an artist/performer. Her early concerts were non-events, a reiteration of what her recordings already made clear. Yes, she could sing, but that's about all she could do. Now that the voice is shakier, there is real tension at her shows. Going into last night's, I felt a level of stress that I assume sports fans do when they sit down to watch their favorite teams play important games. (Sports fans raise the back of their hands to their foreheads and mutter, "Daahhhling," when they're nervous too, right?) When she started singing "O Holy Night," toward the end of the show, I felt my pulse quicken.

At that point, she had made her way through 10 songs from both of her Christmas albums, 1994's Merry Christmas and 2010's Merry Christmas II You. Every once in a while, she'd just not sing a particularly difficult note (especially if it followed an equally difficult note), and I thought I detected a lip-synched section or two. I'm not fully convinced that the powerful bridge of her cover of Darlene Love's "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" was live, for example. But there were no songs she mimed top to bottom. In the same way that plastic surgery can be tasteful (think Judge Judy), so can lip-synching, as Carey's judicious choices proved.

Still, "O Holy Night," is one that starts big and builds to a towering climax. And for the most part, aside from a line or two that I assume Carey just couldn't strain hard enough to get out, she delivered. It didn't feel like 1994 all over again, but it also didn't feel anywhere close to doomsday. During the next song, "Hero" (the night's only non-yuletide offering), the monitor pack fell from the back of Carey's gown during the second verse and she halted the song. She explained the pack slipped off because of sweat, which was more honest and human than I'd expect from her. "You can't deny the voice, though," she added. No one argued. Yep, that's our diva.

She asked the audience, still on its collective feet after the standing ovation "O Holy Night" received, if she should take it from the top. They encouraged her to, and she did. I felt my stomach drop. She had just done so well in full voice for an entire verse and a chorus, and now she was going to do it all again? It was like having to restart a difficult video game level you'd been acing until your little sister stepped in front of the TV. Maddening. But she did it again with no noticeable flaws, and she finally saw the truth, that a hero lies in her.

The final song was, of course, "All I Want for Christmas Is You," which Carey sang more fluidly than she did a few weeks ago on NBC. I noticed her dropping some strained notes (no "on" during the "I'm just gonna keep on waiting...," she skipped a, "What more can I do," and no "sleigh bells" ringing). But in a show that was supported by a booming live band and Carey's trusty trio of backup singers, there was so much to fill in the spaces Carey left.

This song was a surreal spectacle. A grown man wearing a plush head-to-toe Frosty the Snowman costume and another dressed as a teddy bear danced amongst female back-up dancers dressed as elves. Male and children back-up dancers dressed in all white. The entire concert was performed in front of what must have been a 25-foot Christmas tree, and the arch over the Beacon's stage was covered in giant foam-board snowflakes. A screen behind the tree played a video of two arched rows of cartoon snowmen rotating. Carey was dressed in a red and black sequined gown. There was an explosion of glitter at the song's climax and then fake snow fell over the stage.

Carey tends toward chaos, and there it was again, but this time it was Christmas chaos. This time it was controlled.

[Top image via Getty]

"I wanted a picture of Jamaica that isn't in books, and certainly not in novels." Author Marlon James set out to depict a thoroughly vibrant portrait of the Jamaica he knew: one fissured by drug warfare and dirty politics, but a country plentiful in culture and history. The result was A Brief History of Seven Killings, an expansive and near-mythic survey of his homeland. It is, without question, one of 2014's best books.

Based on the 1976 assassination attempt on revered singer Bob Marley, Seven Killings details how one event, and its aftereffects, can ricochet for decades. "Not all the consequences are directly a result of the shooting," he says, "but everybody involved, and the people who weren't involved, are still reeling from the effects ten years later, twenty years later."

Gawker Review of Books talked to James about process, the book that freed him up to write, and what his next project will bring.

How did you get into writing?

In a weird way, OutKast kind of did it. Just the idea that you could be an artist and have this body of work that's outside of you. Regardless of what happens to you there's this document. I wanted to make art that was outside of me. That, and also reading books that make me want to write books. Gabriel Garcia Marquez talks about the book that gives permission to the writer. For him it was The Metamorphosis. For me, it was Salmon Rushdie's Shame.

Why that one?

I read lots of great books, but that was the book when I said, "All right that's it, I got to write." I think, for me, there's The Book I Should Write and The Book I Wanted to Write—and they weren't the same book. The Book I Should Write should be realistic since I studied English Lit. It should be cultural. It should reflect where I am today. The Book I Wanted to Write would probably include flying women, magic, and all of that. And I didn't think that book was allowed. I remember reading Rushdie's Shame and being appalled by it. The only way you can capture the craziness of a Pakistan-like country is to go into the fantastical and to the ridiculous, and break structure. That gave me permission to write whatever I wanted. Knowing that and then summoning the courage to write that. Even writing in dialect was big for me. For example, writing in Jamaican patois was a big deal because that's not how I was raised. It's not what you speak in school. It's not what you speak in business. It's just backward talking, and the idea of writing an entire novel, or most of a novel, in patois was almost unheard of. But the whole idea of using the language that comes out of your mouth—

The way you use it, the run-on sentences are such beautiful things.

Half of the stuff in that book I don't allow my students to do. There's a seven-page sentence in the book. Even when the book ends, it just stops.

When did you know you were there?

It took me a couple of weeks to accept it. I finally just told myself: All right, let's write an ending now. Let's write something big and cosmic.

So, you didn't have the end in mind when you started?

Not with this book. This is the craziest book I've ever written. Didn't have a clue. I had an idea of some of the characters—especially the ones who die. Things like Alex Pierce getting his ass kicked in his own apartment in Washington Heights; no way I knew that was coming.

The reading and quoting of books by Weeper; how'd that come into play?

Some of the craziest aspects about Weeper were the things I found out to be true. I mean, true of people. Actually, there are a lot of Jamaicans in prison who read Bertram Russell. Is that crazy? All the things you think would be made up are actually in the general penitentiary library, Russell's The Problems of Philosophy is right beside The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I'm like, People are not going to believe that's one of the truest things in the book. At some point, when I'm writing—and I don't exactly know when—I sort of throw the story to the characters. It's like they become real and go in whatever directions they want, and even more so than the last book. One thing I noticed—and I didn't say this, and I don't know who said it—each book you write frees you up to write the next book. My first novel, John Crow's Devil, freed me up to write about the past and The Book of Night Women freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

So what are you free to write next? Would you ever consider doing an Afrofuturist novel?

Yeah. There are lots of them out there, but I'm originally a fantasy novelist. I remember how it started; I got so sick about the argument about a black hobbit. Why must every story be politically correct? I'm tired of this argument. African mythology is as rich and as crazy as Norse and so on. So, I'm going to write a series based on African myths—an African Game of Thrones.

I find with every book you learn more about your process. What did you learn with Seven Killings?

More and more I am learning to trust my first instincts. I didn't for some of this book. There are parts that I felt very afraid to write. So, yeah, trusting yourself. It's surprising, certainly for me. I don't know about other writers, but it took me years to trust my instincts as a writer. Largely because I'm doing stuff I haven't read. I'm not saying I'm doing stuff that hasn't been done before. And to trust myself to do it—with this book I learned to. I was more comfortable taking risks. Night Women is a lot of things. It's a violent book but it's not a risky book. With Seven Killings I was risking everything. I was risking explicitness. I was risking pornography. Risking messing with genre just because I felt like it. Writing something because I felt like it as opposed to having this idea of what is good literature or even an idea of what's a good paragraph.

What one thing do most people get wrong about you?

They usually get my education wrong. They assume I was educated in America or in a first-world country, especially with this book. Some people think I have personal experience with violence. And when I tell them I don't, they want to know by what authority am I writing it. It's something that I think always happens, and not just with Jamaicans, but with writers of color—that we're not capable of creativity, that we're reporters. At the same time, I can understand why people ask me the violence question. I write about violence a lot. Trust me, nobody likes having experienced violence. But why do you think you should have a nice time reading it?

In a lot of ways, our grandparents and great-grandparents were badder badasses than we were. They could handle disturbing material and they looked at literature as the place to experience that vicariously. Literature was the place where you go to experience those things and sometimes even develop a kind of empathy. And the idea of being entertained or riveted by a book also meant being shocked, being educated, being horrified, being pulled in directions you didn't want to go. Now we look at literature as the place to escape that. I'm not trying to turn violence into pornography, but, at the same time, I think you should be disturbed. If you're touched by a story about slavery, if you're touched by a story about domestic violence, you're reading the wrong story. You're not supposed to be touched. You're supposed to be horrified, and maybe called to action.

[Photo via]

Last week, Greenpeace activists provoked international outrage when they undertook a publicity stunt, trespassing on the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site. Newly released done footage shows how much damage they left behind.

As PBS Newshour reports:

The Nazca figures were drawn between 500 BC and 500 AD by removing a thin patina of dark rocks covering light sand. This is one of the driest regions of the world, and the lack of water and wind has helped preserve the lines for centuries.

But they're still quite fragile. "When you step on it, you simply break the patina and expose the bottom surface," said Peru's Deputy Culture Minister Luis Jaime Castillo . "How long does it take for nature….to again create a patina? Hundreds of years? Thousands of years? We really don't know."

When archaeologists visit the site, they wear special pads on their shoes [below] to broadly distribute their weight. By contrast, photos taken by Peru's culture ministry showed footprints and overturned rocks, allegedly by Greenpeace demonstrators.

The drone footage documents other damage that can best be assessed from the air: The outline of what appears to be the letter "C" from the Greenpeace message is visible, horizontal lines show where the message was laid out and there are large paths revealing where the activists walked in and out of the site.

Video Footage: PBS Newshour

The Sony hackers—possibly known as Guardians of Peace and probably not working for North Korea—have escalated from threatening to release the company's sensitive information to threatening real-life violence against theaters showing the disastrous Rogen/Franco comedy The Interview.

"The world will be full of fear. Remember the 11th of September, 2001. We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you'd better leave.)" the hackers said in a Tuesday morning leak of Sony files that they're calling "a Christmas gift."

Variety reports the new file cache is named after Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton. If the hackers' past releases are any indication, it's likely a dump of his private emails.

The hackers have already followed through on their original threat, making shitloads of sensitive Sony files—including a clip of the much-discussed Kim Jong-un death scene from The Interview—public.

The Interview opens on Christmas Day, and the hackers specifically mentioned targeting the movie's premiere (although it already happened without incident last week in downtown L.A.)

"Whatever comes in the coming days is called by the greed of Sony Pictures Entertainment," they wrote, "All the world will denounce the SONY."

[h/t TMZ]

You may have noticed in the news today that Russia's currency is crumbling into tiny, useless bits before our very eyes. How will evil strongman Vladimir Putin respond? Probably by doing some crazy shit.

Plummeting oil prices are starving Russia of revenue, and Western sanctions are hurting them too, and the traders and financiers are going crazy, and last night's last-ditch drastic attempt by the Russian government to shore up the currency did not work. Russians are running around today trying to buy anything they can before their money becomes increasingly worthless. Companies have even stopped selling goods in Russia because the prices are changing too fast. The word on the economic street is: Doom, for Russia's currency!

Now Putin faces a thoroughly fucked economy, and few real ways to pull himself out of it. He's built a system of power atop a river of oil, and it's hard to change that very fast. Sure, he could go crawling on his knees back to the Western nations that instituted all those sanctions and tell them that he's willing to do what they want. But does that sound like the bare-chested nationalist Putin that you know? Not at all. It's not his way. And with normal economic maneuvers almost exhausted, you know Putin is bound to be considering some crazy shit.

How do you distract a fucked nation from intractable economic troubles? By fucking with somebody else.

All this Russian turmoil hasn't hurt the U.S. a bit. And as a little cherry on top today, as Russia's money was all going up in vapor, Obama announced that he will sign a bill imposing more sanctions on the country, for that whole "invading the Ukraine" business.

You know Putin is so mad. Not just mad, but astute.

So what crazy shit might Russia do next?

Double down on the Ukraine war?

Start a war with another weak neighbor?

Provoke the West with insane military maneuvers?

Have another revolution?

I sure don't know, but I tell you this: If I were a betting man—and I am—I would bet on Russia doing some crazy shit, real soon. (If that was one of the options for wagering, which it's not, which is outrageous.)

[Photo: AP]

Bradley William Stone, the 35-year-old man accused of killing his ex-wife and five of her family members, was reportedly found dead today in the woods near his Pennsburg, Pa home.

Police have been searching for Stone since early Monday morning, when he police say he fatally shot his ex-wife's sister, her husband, and 14-year-old daughter at their home. Stone's alleged crime spree continued throughout the day, and three more bodies— Stone's ex-wife, her mother, and grandmother—were found in two other locations in Montgomery County, Pa.

Stone, a nine-year veteran of the Marines who saw combat in Iraq, reportedly suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome. He and his ex-wife, Nicole Hill Stone—the two divorced in 2012—had been involved in an on-going custody dispute over their two young daughters.

"She would tell anybody who would listen that he was going to kill her and that she was really afraid for her life," Nicole Stone's neighbor Evan Weron told USA Today.

Ineloquent responses apparently run in the family. Bill Cosby's daughter Evin released an "exclusive" statement to Access Hollywood in response to her father's rape accusations. "He is the FATHER you thought you knew. The Cosby Show was my today's tv reality show. Thank you. That's all I would like to say :)"http://gawker.com/bill-cosbys-ca...

Access Hollywood has also done the kind service of directing us to Evin Cosby's very active Facebook page, where she has been posting updates defending her father and decrying the allegations lodged by more than 20 women. From yesterday:

Rape is a serious allegation and it is suppose to be taken VERY seriously but so is Falsely accusing someone. When someone rapes a person they go to prison. THAT should also happen to the person that has wrongfully accused an innocent victim.They are not ONLY destroying innocent people's life they are ALSO making it hard for the MEN and Women to find justice when they have been raped.

From about an hour earlier:

Drugged- you can remember the whole damn day but you were drugged? Just sayin. Memory- you can remember you looked at (allegedly) eachother, people were starring allegedly remembering your home address allegedly the name you called him allegedly But you were allegedly drugged.

Evin's posts appear to have been timed to her mother Camille's statement released yesterday, in which the comedian's wife compares the rape accusations made against her husband to Rolling Stone's mishandling of their University of Virginia rape story.

"It's a shame how some people sit behind the computer waiting for bad things to happen to someone," Evin Cosby wrote in a Facebook post dated Dec. 10. "Isn't it easier to be happy?"

[Image via Getty]

The regents of Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University, established 1876, the fourth-largest higher education institution in the United States, meet Thursday to decide whether or not to name the school's most venerated building after Rick Perry, '72, 2.2 GPA, according to the Texas Tribune.

All 10 of A&M's regents were appointed by Perry, including a petroleum CEO, a former ExxonMobil president, an insurance and banking tycoon, and the founder of "the Young Conservatives of Texas at Tarleton State University." They have helped advance his often turbulent efforts to replace traditional professor tenure in the A&M system with contracts for instructors, greater emphasis on student evaluations in teacher retention, and a general business orientation.

For that, the Tribune reports, the regents will likely give Perry a permanent place of honor on campus—a sort of academic tenure, if you will:

According to filing with the secretary of state's office, the regents will vote on whether to rename Texas A&M's generic-sounding Academic Building the "Governor Rick Perry '72 Building." They will also consider a resolution honoring Perry for his "outstanding dedication and service" as the longest-serving governor in Texas history.

The Academic Building, which recently turned 100, is one of its most iconic structures on campus. Formerly the home of the university's library, it now is mostly office space for several academic departments, including sociology and modern languages.

Quite the honor for a forgetful guy who failed organic chem II and got Ds in Shakespeare and "Principles of Economics," but aced "World Military Systems."

Here's the likely future "Governor Rick Perry '72 Building":

And here's Rick Perry's '72 transcript:

Rick Perry's Texas A&M Transcript by huffpost

[Photos: Texas A&M University]

For the entirety of my childhood, my brother, mom, and I spent one day a year—usually a Saturday two or three weeks out from Christmas—being serenaded by the 1970 Oakland Raiders. Specifically, we would spend the day putting up our Christmas tree while Daryle Lamonica, Jim Otto, Fred Dryer, and others mooed Christmas carols from an old LP called The Oakland Raiders Present: Holiday Halftime that popped and crackled on my mom's old record player. It's one of those things that comes off like an inside joke, something that sounds stupid when I try to explain it to other people, because, yes, the quality of the singing is about what you'd expect, and we played the eight-song album two or three times before moving on to real Christmas music.

For years, I thought this record was the only one of its kind, some accident of public relations history that's been forgotten by everyone outside of my family. Turns out I was only half right: There are in fact 26 Holiday Halftime records—one for each NFL team that existed in 1970—but they weren't strictly the result of an NFL PR stunt. They were born from the mind of a New York ad man who was looking to hit it big.

The records were forgotten almost as quickly as they were produced, but the story behind the creation of the Holiday Halftime records is a quintessentially American one about a big, entrepreneurial idea—involving an accomplished Broadway composer, a hunt for cheap musicians in Belgrade, a barnstorming trip across the country, and Ed Sullivan—that nearly brought on a million-dollar payday, but instead found its anonymous end in the forgotten corner of a Jackson Heights storage facility.

The Holiday Halftime records were the brainchild of a New York native named Mike Tatich, who made his living working for advertising conglomerate BBDO. His specialty was producing a particular style of record commercial that was popular in the '60s and '70s, the ones featuring records with names like [Beloved Singer] Sings The Classics! and track listings scrolling up the screen in big yellow letters. "He did Tony Bennett, he did Johnny Mathis, all those commercials were his," Mike's adult son, also named Mike, told me.

The elder Mike Tatich passed away in 2010, but his son vividly remembers the production of the Holiday Halftime records. Tatich Jr. describes his father as a guy who always had "big ideas"—convincing every NFL team to sing Christmas carols for him was just another one. He started by convincing a few of his friends to pool some money together to kickstart the project, and then went about haranguing the NFL to get on board.

As Tatich Jr. remembers it, the NFL was eager to throw its weight behind his father's plan. The 1970 season was the first to follow the official merger of the AFL and NFL (the merger was announced in 1966, but 1970 was the first time the two leagues combined regular-season schedules) and Tatich's idea was an easy way to drum up publicity for the newly whole league.

"The NFL embraced the whole idea, and that made it easy to get in contact with every team. I think the NFL actually told every team they had to do it," says Tatich Jr. "I think the NFL, at the time, was looking for PR. Because, literally, no money was paid [by Tatich] to the NFL, which probably wouldn't fly today."

Jim Otto, who played center for the Raiders for 14 years and sang on the album, also remembers the league's involvement being motivated by the need for PR. "The merger was just barely coming about at that time, "he told me. "I think it was something of a public relations-type action, to show that both divisions of football could work together. As I recall, it was a kind of kick in the pants. We had a good time doing it … It was a thrill for all of us guys."

If nothing else, these records represent a rather remarkable time capsule of a different NFL: A moment when the league, still decades away from becoming the all-consuming, billion-dollar industry it is today, was willing to go all-in on an ad man's harebrained idea for a novelty record. The NFL was so committed to the project that Tatich maintained a strong relationship with higher ups within the league, including the Mara family, for years. These connections left behind a number of childhood memories that Tatich Jr. recalls fondly.

"As a kid, I went to every Jets game and every Giant game, and usually after the game I'd go down to the locker room, because I knew all the players," Tatich Jr. says. "I'd just go down and bang on the door and say, 'Tell Bob Svihus that Michael Tatich is here.' Next thing you know, the security guard would come back and say, 'OK, you can come in.'" Svihus played tackle for the Jets from 1971-73. He took Tatich Jr. to see his first James Bond movie, and the two remain friends to this day.

"I mean, Spider Lockhart taught me how to run backwards," says Tatich Jr., remembering one of the days he was hanging out with the Giants defensive back after a game. Lockhart told him that the secret was staying up on your toes, and Tatich Jr. made good use of that knowledge when he went back to school. "I went back to elementary school and challenged to other kids, and I won every time." Everyone wanted to know where he learned to run backwards so fast, and the 11-year-old Tatich Jr. would reply coolly, "Spider Lockhart taught me."

But before Tatich Jr. could spend chunks of his childhood palling around with NFL players, his father had to complete the rather monumental task of actually making the records. With training camps starting, he had about six weeks to record the music, hit every camp in the NFL to record the vocals, and then get the records pressed in time for holiday sales. And he didn't even have a composer yet.

Tatich found his man in Jacques (Jack) Urbont, an accomplished composer whose credits include the Mission: Impossible theme, the theme music for The Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon, and a musical called All In Love. Urbont lives in New York with his wife, Rosalind, in an Upper West Side apartment that is thick with his accomplishments. Multiple Emmy awards sit on his piano; every inch of wall space is covered with photos of him with various Broadway and Hollywood stars, expensive-looking paintings, and framed collector's items. (One of his favorites is a letter, addressed to Richard Wagner, written by Italian composer Gaspare Spontini in the 1840's.)

Urbont and his former collaborator, Bruce Geller—the guy who wrote and produced Mission: Impossible—had ambitions of becoming, as Urbont puts it, "The next Rodgers and Hammerstein. But it was tough to make a living at it, so to do that, we went into television to make a few bucks." He got into writing music for commercials, too, which is how he met Mike Tatich.

(Urbont used to make extra money playing piano in mob clubs, too. He once played for Crazy Joe Gallo, a famous New York gangster who probably murdered Albert Anastasia and was something of a fixture in the Greenwich Village counterculture of the 1950s. "He came over to ask me if I could play a song. I did a jazzy version of "'O Sole Mio," and he liked it. He gave me a big thank you, and I said 'No problem, paisan,' and he gave me $100.")

The composer didn't know a lot about football, but he liked Tatich's idea, and, more importantly, he had a plan for getting the orchestra music recorded on the cheap. Urbont had done the music for a few famous quiz shows— What's My Line?, Play Your Hunch—and the production company had asked him to record the music in London. "The upshot of that was, that I mentioned to Mike Tatich that I noticed the English were recording a lot in Yugoslavia in order to save money, and Mike was worried about money," Urbont explained to me.

"Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, because I was a union member, and as a union member you're supposed to record in America, but what we did was record in Yugoslavia. All those music tracks were done in Belgrade. You could hire the musicians in Yugoslavia for maybe $40 for the day."

Tatich and Urbont weren't the first Americans in show business to go hunting for cheap labor in Yugoslavia. In the aftermath of World War II, the country created one of the biggest film industries in Europe, thanks in large part to Communist strongman Josip Tito's fondness for movies. In the 1940s and 1950s, the Yugoslavian film industry was pumping out big-budget, state-funded propaganda films that were mostly about Tito leading the Partisans into battle during WWII and kicking the shit out of the Nazis. By the 1960s, though, the industry had become more liberated from state control, and that's when American filmmakers started rolling in.

Yugoslavian production companies were just as competent as the ones in America, and they could provide foreign directors with easy access to the country, cheap hotels, fantastic shooting locations, and cheap labor. In a 2008 article about Jadran Films, a Yugoslavian production company that helped produce 145 foreign films in the country, historian Ivo Skrabalo explains part of Yugoslavia's appeal for foreign filmmakers (translated via Google):

Film business requires security, and Croatia has long been a free country with open borders, they came without visas, they had no trouble importing equipment. In other countries were rigorous, browse their recordings. In addition, Jadran film at that time had very skillfully director named Sulejman Kapic, who is in the business thought socialism in a capitalist manner. Due to the needs of co-production Jadran Film was educated at least three parallel teams that could do more complex co-production. Everyone knew at least two languages.

American movies like Sophie's Choice, The Tin Drum, and David and Goliath were all made on the cheap in Yugoslavia.

This is the tradition that Tatich and Urbont were working in when they went to Yugoslavia in search of day-rate musicians. A German colleague of Urbont's put them in touch with a contractor in Belgrade who cobbled together a few players from the Belgrade symphony orchestra.

"The best musicians were in Dubrovnik for the summer," says Urbont, "so I didn't get the pick of the top musicians in Yugoslavia, but I did get a good orchestra."

As Urbont remembers it, he and the musicians didn't get off on the right foot. "The musicians at first played lousy, and I didn't like it at all, but then I found out what the problem was. The musical contractor had hired his father, and his father was an old guy who couldn't play in tune. So I had to tell him, 'If you can't play in tune, just don't play at all.'"

Things eventually turned around, though. He picked up a few Bosnian words from the translator they had hired, and he asked what he should say to the orchestra when they actually played well. He was told to exclaim, "Odlicna!" which means "great."

"Finally, when the orchestra played well, I said, 'Odlicna!' and then they started to like me. Before that, I was the dirty capitalist," says Urbont.

Tatich got along great with the musicians in Belgrade. "It was an amazing trip. They were totally embraced by the people in the band," recalls Tatich Jr. "I remember when he came home, my dad boxed up a bunch of disposable diapers—which they had never heard of in Yugoslavia—to send back to one of the musicians he'd befriended there who was about to have a baby." A few of the musicians, who had also served in the military, even sent Tatich home with some of their medals. "He came home with all kinds of medals, which I still have," says Tatich Jr. "Tank commander medals and stuff like that. Being 10 years old and getting pinned with a military medal was the coolest thing in the world."

After a few days of recording in Belgrade, Tatich and Urbont headed back to the U.S. to record the vocals. It was August, and they had to hit every NFL team before the preseason was over.

The two decided to divide and conquer. Urbont would cover half of the teams, while Tatich and another conductor, Jack French, would take care of the rest. Tatich and Urbont were on the road for weeks, booking studios near NFL training camps around the country for recording sessions that could last longer than five hours.

Along with the logistical struggles came the problem of convincing hundreds of exhausted NFL players to actually give a shit about singing dopey Christmas songs. "My dad was the life of the party, always," Tatich Jr. says. That was the angle from which he came at the players, turning the recording sessions into big parties, complete with beer, pizza, and sandwiches. "By the time I'd finished that tour of all the teams, I'd put on about eight pounds," says Urbont with a laugh.

Tatich's plan seems to have actually worked. A September 1, 1970 article from the St. Petersburg Times portrays the Washington recording session as lively and light-hearted:

Vince Promuto, the Holy Cross baritone who doubles as a Redskins' guard, had some reservations before the start of the session.

"Wait," he said. "We have a problem. We gotta get one thing straight. We can't do 'White Christmas.' We're a team. It'll be 'Gray Christmas.' Okay."

Charley Taylor and Brig Owens led the other black players in applause.

Urbont, taking the first delay of game in stride, urged his charges into "Frosty the Snowman," but the result was not acceptable.

Urbont called for a retake.

The second time around such a success that guard Ray Schoenke applauded—too soon. He was hissed.

"Winter Wonderland was next, and it was a toughie. Conductor Urbont stopped the music and asked, "Where's the bad voice?"

All 30 players raised their hands.

Urbont remembers all of the players he worked with having a great attitude about the recording sessions. There was, however, a sensitive question: Which players' voices should be most prominently featured? "The black guys were the best singers," says Urbont. "So I said, 'No offense, guys, but I'm putting the best singers in front.' Here I was bossing around these big guys who could squash me like a cockroach, and they were very responsive. They were all excellent."

Tatich Jr. also has fond memories of the sessions. He accompanied his dad to both the Giants' and Jets' recording sessions, and remembers being taken aback by how many of the players actually came.

"It was just amazing to see all of these players show up. I think the Jets, it was virtually everyone except Namath," he told me. "I even sang with the Jets and the Giants. My voice is somewhere in that cacophony."

San Diego Chargers tight end Willie Frazier at a recording session. Photo via.

Urbont and Tatich did manage to get all 26 Holiday Halftime albums recorded, but the project hit a snag when it came time to get the records into stores. Tatich decided at the beginning that he would try to distribute them himself; it was that decision, more than anything else, that would doom the project to obscurity.

The sleeve of each Holiday Halftime record says that it was produced by "Manlius Records, a division of Mike Tatich And Partners, Inc., NY, NY." This was just a pop-up company—there are no public records indicating that Manlius Records or Mike Tatich And Partners were ever officially incorporated—that Tatich created for the sake of selling these albums. Without the financial and logistical backing of a real record label, Tatich didn't have the means to actually get the records into stores, and to consumers. "They never had the distribution ability that a real record company had. And that's why it never worked," says Tatich Jr.

Tatich did score one major coup, though: getting the albums plugged on the Ed Sullivan Show. An episode of the show that aired on December 6, 1970, featured 12 players from the Jets, Giants, and Raiders—Fred Dryer, Gene Upshaw, Don Maynard, and Jim Otto were among them—singing "All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" at a competence level that I would describe as "not entirely humiliating." They all wore suits and generally looked like they'd rather be somewhere else, and Sullivan razzed them a bit when the performance was over.

"Gentlemen," he said, "I think you all have budding careers in show business, but maybe you should stick to football a little while longer."

(This clip doesn't exist anywhere online, and we can't embed the copy of it that we have due to exorbitant licensing fees.)

There's something else about the Ed Sullivan clip, though, that makes it just as much a relic of a bygone era in the NFL as the Holiday Halftime records themselves. Interspersed with the musical performance are clips of violent NFL game footage that would horrify even the sort of modern fan who can't stop griping about the "sissification" of the game. There are shots of scrambling quarterbacks getting clotheslined, receivers being upended in mid-air and landing straight on their heads, and more than a few forearm shivers deliberately delivered to the faces of quarterbacks and tacklers alike. Three of the more brutal tackles—all guys taking elbows and forearms directly to the face—are synched up with the players roaring "Teeth! Teeth! Teeth!" through the song's bridge, a bit of auditory and visual congruity that was met with chuckles from the audience.

"Football has changed tremendously in recent years," Otto said when I told him how startling I thought the violence in the footage was. "I was one of the guys who played in that era, and I thank God every day that I'm not full of dementia or heading for the Alzheimer's shed." Otto has had 74 surgeries resulting from football-related injuries, including the amputation of one of his legs.

Despite the bump from Ed Sullivan, Tatich's records never sold. He held onto them for years afterward, keeping them in a storage facility in Jackson Heights. He would dust them off every now and then to try and sell a few on his own, but most of the records never made it out of storage. Tatich Jr. remembers his dad feeling very disappointed about how the project turned out. "They just never sold the way he wanted them to," he recalls.

The financial failure of the project was made all the more bitter by the fact that Tatich had an opportunity to cash in early on, but refused. "He had been offered a lot of money when it first started," says Tatich Jr. "Columbia Records or someone came in and said, 'Look, walk away from it. Give it to us, and we'll give you a million dollars.' And he said, 'Oh no, we're gonna make so much more than that.'" In the end, most of the records ended up being sold to scrappers for their vinyl.

I've always been weird about Christmas. Even through my high school years, I was intent, in a way that could be described as "obsessive," on my small family—it's always just been me, my brother, my mom, and my aunt—adhering to a strict set of (often very odd) traditions. Listening to the Raiders' Holiday Halftime record while we set up the Christmas tree was one of those traditions. My brother and I would always wait for my mom to put it on the record player, responding with the kind of faux-outrage that all kids are required to display any time a parent suggests something, but we never complained enough to stop her from running the record back a third or fourth time. If she hadn't, I'm sure I would have done it myself. I was the kid who, on multiple occasions, got more than a little heated while explaining to mom that we did in fact need to watch It's a Wonderful Life from beginning to end on Christmas Eve, and that we definitely needed to get up at 5:00 a.m. on Christmas morning to open presents—just like we do every year.

I think that I was like that because a small family like the one I described above, my family, is also a fractured one. Maybe some part of me understood that Christmas isn't quite the same for families that don't have fathers, uncles, grandparents, and cousins all gathering around the tree at Nana's house. I think I obsessed over all those dumb traditions—the Raiders' album chief among them—because it was the clearest way for the four of us to remind ourselves that, yes, this is a family that doesn't make much sense, but it's still a family. Haven't you noticed all of these traditions? We are still here.

In addition to the classic Christmas songs on each Holiday Halftime record, there is an original song called "A Tropical Winter." The music was written by Urbont, and Tatich came up with the lyrics. It's a solid Christmas song, if for no other reason than that during the countless number of times I listened to the Raiders' album, it never stood out from the rest of the classics. When I talked with Urbont, he showed me the original sheet music for that song. I told him my mom would love to see it, and he offhandedly told me I should just take it with me and give it to her.

I responded like he had just casually offered me one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. I awkwardly mumbled something along the lines of, "Oh … no. I mean, I couldn't possibly …" and waited for the conversation to head elsewhere. Objectively speaking, that was a pretty embarrassing way to react to being presented with an artifact from an unmitigated failure that most people in the world have never heard of and that the rightful owner probably never wanted to see again. It was the best I could do.

Top Image by Jim Cooke. Photo via

If your New Year celebrations are anything like mine you are probably going to wake up in 2015 feeling vulnerable and nauseated, tossed aside like Renee Zellweger's old forgotten party clothes. Best to stay in on January first, eat sparingly but continuously, and find yourself a way back from wreck to masterpiece by meditating on these fine new Netflix offerings, starting 1/1.

COMING JANUARY FIRST

TV Shows

• Friends: The Complete Series (1994-2004) at 0300 EST New Year's Day. You will still be awake, if you have friends of your own. If not, you have every reason to rise and shine, facing 2015 with a strong spirit and maybe some of that coffee with the butter in it.
• Dallas Season Three (2012)—This recently cancelled show about some troubled ranchers fucking each other, but not like you'd hope, could easily be included in the next category.

Lesser Sequels

• Bad Boys II (2003)—In which the audience finally learns, along with the Boys, what happens "when they come for you." It is not that great what happens.
• Wayne's World 2 (1993)—What the film lacks in Rob Lowe, it gains with the absence of Rob Lowe. However, Queen to Aerosmith is an unbelievable downgrade and I say this as a fan of neither.
• Batman & Robin (1997)—All of the advertising for this movie covered up Alicia Silverstone's curves worse than Wilson Phillips putting Carnie behind a boulder on the other side of a canyon. She coulda been Andre Leon-Talley under there. Never saw the film, it looked terrible.
• It seems like a day doesn't go by that I'm not like, "Chris O'Donnell, who does that guy think he is."

True Classics

• Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003)—You might think this is a Lesser Sequel but I defy you to watch them both, and revisit that opinion. As the Hostel franchise proves, you cannot go wrong with terrified quarterbacks running around in their underwear for no reason.
• Election (1999)—Like all Tom Perrotta adaptations, this indelible film improves on the source material.
• Mean Girls (2004)—Simply the greatest film ever made.

Sure, Why Not?

• Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)—Your teenage self will thank you!
• Cast Away (2000)—Subtitled "An Evening with Tom Hanks," the secret to this movie is hidden in the Federal Express logo. Look close enough and you can see a tiny bloody handprint!
• Ben Affleck won rave reviews and a Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of "Wilson," Tom's "Guy Friday" in the film.
• 101 Dalmatians (1996)—Like any musician, Roger is way less hot when he's three-dimensional and not just an idea on paper. The name of Pongo's bitch bride, Perdita, comes from a Spanish phrase meaning "but where did all of my puppies go."
• Shall We Dance? (2004)—Richard Gere must choose between Jennifer Lopez, Susan Sarandon, a gerbil and the Dalai Lama. Each brings something different to the table.

From Long Ago

• The Quiet Man (1952)—John Wayne's confused by Ireland, but even moreso by love.
• The War of the Worlds (1953)—The usefulness of microbes in repelling alien invasions demonstrated in this film inspired the anti-vaccination movement now championed by Jenny McCarthy, Kristin Cavalleri, and other scientists.
• The French Connection (1971)—This Oscar winner about people running around all over the place was inspired by a bitchy Howard Hawks comment. That part is true. He told the director that his movies sucked and to just make a really good chase movie, so he did. Never underestimate the power of a neg.
• Bruce Almighty (2003)—Morgan Freeman (played by God) uses Jim Carrey as his divine tool, granting Steve Carrell the ability to write his own check for the rest of his life.

Worth a Look

• Fort Bliss (2014)—From writer/director Claudia Myers comes this overlooked film in which Michelle Monaghan returns from Afghanistan and has trouble reconnecting with her young son.
• To Be Takei (2014)—The gilded cage of celebrity has never been so oft-memed, nor so deep- and velvet-throated.
• Get Low (2009)—Robert Duvall plays Felix Bush, who in real-life 1938 Tennessee was named Felix Bushaloo "Uncle Bush" Breazeale. Based on the true story of a hermit who meets Bill Murray and/or a ghost.

LATER IN JANUARY

TV Shows

• Psych: Season Eight and White Collar: Season Five. Two completely different television shows about two completely different mismatched pairs of cuties. (3 Jan)
• Z Nation: Season One. This show touts itself as The Walking Dead, but fun, which sounds even worse to me. I honestly thought this had to be some crappy Canadian import like [redacted] because no way could this be in current production, but no. The market will bear what it can. (3 Jan)
• Gillian Anderson returns with Season Two of The Fall, leaving plenty of time before Jamie Dornan's debut in Valentine's Day rom-com The Boy & Girl Who Loved Sex So Much They Hated It. (16 Jan)
• Beauty and the Beast: Season Two, even though it seems like it's been on forever. This show just seemed like it took everything weird and cool about the bonkers Linda Hamilton version, leaving just the name, and then jacked some Twilight on there via CW clichés and called it a day, so I don't know. My impression is that this season is about having too many Beasts! (16-Jan)
• Wolfblood is a British show for a younger audience that is either like Kid Teen Wolf or maybe "wolfblood" is just British for "werewolf," like how all kinds of foods that are not pudding are, in the UK, called "pudding." Blood pudding, wolfblood pudding, you name it. People I trust speak highly of this show, but I have not seen it. (Season Three: 16-Jan)
• Being Human: Season Three of the US version, which I really loved—it's the one with zombie Sally, Aidan taking care of creepy little Kenny, and tons of screentime for Nora—but that just makes the tragic back half of Season Four that much harder to swallow. I forgot just how long the show was actually great. (16-Jan)

Movies

• Frank (2014): This beloved movie features a mysterious and talented Michael Fassbender wearing a prosthetic head over his real head, and his junk in his pants. (8 Jan)
• Brick Mansions (2014)—Paul Walker, and a charming Frenchman, break into a dystopian ghetto that cannot possibly be as racist as it appears, to kill RZA. I love Paul Walker, and I like French action films, but I am gonna need some more info. (Week of 3 Jan)
• Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014)—William Tiberius Kirk plays the fifth Jack Ryan in the fifth Jack Ryan movie, which takes place in a different timeline. (Week of 3 Jan)
• Not to be confused with Jack Reacher, which is about a man too small for recruitment even by shadows.
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)—Benedict Cumberbatch's finest hour, in my opinion, and Tom Hardy wears lots of different kinds of clothes on his body (not to mention wigs, on his head). It's fun to watch this decade-spanning spy thriller and imagine how, if they just had cell phones, the whole thing never would have happened, like literally it could have been solved in five minutes. That's so crazy to me. (Week of 13 Jan)
• Chef (2014): Swingers Auteur Jon Favreau stars, as a chef who can't use Twitter right! What's really hilarious though is this copy:

"This foodie comedy will make your mouth water and your belly ache from laughing."

• Doesn't that sound like a death threat? What a grim fucking proposal. "This nightmare machine will make you wish you could travel through time, to kill yourself before you see it." Guest-starring Sofia Vergara, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr., Bobby Cannavale, Dustin Hoffman, and other people who should be imprisoned. Or shit, maybe it's not as appalling as it sounds? Maybe it's just the quote that's killing me. "This brutal shitshow redefines cinema as pain, and comedy as dread." (Week of 13 Jan)
• Iliza Shlesinger: Freezing Hot (2014)—Do you hate women? Not as much as this asshole. If you've ever wondered whether you're alone eating salad on a first date, walking in heels, or why your heteronormative boyfriend puts up with your Pinterest addiction, Iliza—host of syndicated dating show Excused and winner of Season Six of Lowest Denominator Standing—will set you straight. Unless your boyfriends are looking, bitch! Then she might make out with you! (23-Jan)

For Chrissake, just watch Mean Girls instead. Do yourself a favor. And don't forget to check out our list of the stuff they'll be replacing!

[Image via]

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

In the past few days, The Daily Beast has published a number of scoops gleaned from the leaked Sony Pictures documents obtained by a hacker group called the Guardians of Peace. Unlike every other outlet covering the leak, however, the Beast is posting all of their articles about it under a fake byline.

So chickenshit for the Daily Beast to publish its Sony hack coverage, whatever you think of it, under a pseudonym. http://t.co/CA2FcSQs8Z

— Jack Dickey (@jackdickey) December 15, 2014

The byline, “William Boot,” is a reference to a character in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh novel Scoop (in which Boot writes for a newspaper called The Daily Beast—get it?). It’s usually used for slideshows or best-of lists, where a traditional author byline would be unnecessary. Using the pseudonym for stories based on the Sony leak is highly unusual: These stories are obviously controversial, and often require labor-intensive reporting. Why would an outlet not want to keep their readers in the dark about who’s writing these articles? And why would the author of a big story not want the credit for it?

After noting the byline on Twitter, Time reporter and former Deadspin writer Jack Dickey suggested the method was less to hedge against potential litigation and more to preserve a particular staff member’s future access to Sony Pictures:

@petersterne My guess is some reporter or editor wants to keep access to Sony stars on future press tours.

— Jack Dickey (@jackdickey) December 15, 2014

In its morning media-industry newsletter, Capital New York suggests that the staff member in question is entertainment reporter Marlow Stern:

“Boot” may in real life be a freelancer, but if it’s a pseudonym for a Daily Beast writer who wants to avoid offending Sony by reporting publicly on the hack, the most likely candidate is media and entertainment reporter Marlow Stern. Yesterday, BuzzFeed media reporter Matt Zeitlin jokingly tweeted that “Boot” was stealing Stern’s beat—the obvious implication being that Stern was behind the posts attributed to Boot.

Stern, who did not acknowledge Capital’s emails, replied to Zeitlin’s tweet with an emoticon:

@MattZeitlin :(

— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) December 15, 2014

So it remains a mystery. (The Daily Beast’s executive editor, Noah Shachtman, did not return multiple emails from Gawker seeking clarification about the practice.) If you know who’s writing these articles, though, definitely let us know. Anonymity guaranteed.

Email the author of this post: trotter@gawker.com

Adding to the ever-growing pile of powerful men who just want everybody to chill out about their alleged rapes already, all right?, jeeze, come on, relax, celebrity lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz has filed a motion asking permission to represent Roman Polanski in an effort to close his ol' statutory rape case.

If you need a refresher, Roman Polanski was charged in 1978 with the drugging and raping of 13-year-old Samantha Geimer (née Gailey) the year before. He was convicted on five charges and, accepting a plea bargain, pled guilty to one: engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse. As part of the plea deal, Polanski reported to a state prison for a 42-day psychiatric evaluation. Before he was sentenced, the director and rapist fled to France and has since successfully avoided extradition.

Though he's been able to avoid it, the threat of extradition stills hangs over his head, the poor thing. But why attempt to close the case now? So Polanski can safely shoot a new movie in Poland, of course! It all comes back to his art, and how his wonderful, beautiful art is more important than human women. The New York Times reports the film is about "an Alsatian Jew, Alfred Dreyfus, who in the late 19th century was accused of passing military secrets to Germany." However, traveling to Poland might put the great artist's career at risk:

But to shoot in Poland, Mr. Polanski and his backers have said, would require assurance by the Polish authorities that he would not be subject to extradition.

So this is where Dershowitz's grand move comes in. The Times reports Dershowitz's motion seeks both to end the threat of extradition and obtain an evidentiary hearing to determine whether evidence in Polanski's latest extradition attempt contained false information:

The new filing says that the recent extradition request falsely characterized Mr. Polanski as a "continuing flight risk" — it points out that he appeared voluntarily for questioning by the Polish authorities — and, the filing says, "deliberately omitted the fact that Polanski has already served the term of imprisonment imposed by the trial judge. "In a statement, reports the Times, Mr. Dershowitz said Polanski "has taken responsibility for his actions, served his sentence, and a remedy should now by fashioned by the court once and for all."

The filing also claims Judge Peter Espinoza, Superior Court judge in 2009, had a plan to briefly jail Polanski:

Mr. Parachini's affidavit also repeated his claim, published last year in The Los Angeles Daily Journal, that Judge Espinoza had expressed willingness to limit Mr. Polanski's sentence to the time he had spent in prison. But, Mr. Parachini wrote, the judge had decided first to let Mr. Polanski "cool his heels in jail" by delaying that ruling for weeks should he return.

According to the Times, Dershowitz said, in a statement, Polanski "has taken responsibility for his actions, served his sentence, and a remedy should now by fashioned by the court once and for all."

Seems like Roman Polanski really wishes this rape didn't happen!

[image via Getty]

Better safe than sorry, Seth Rogen and James Franco have cancelled all of their press appearances relating to their embattled North Korean comedy The Interview due to threats of 9/11-esque violence from the group that hacked Sony, BuzzFeed reports. And BuzzFeed would know, because the actors pulled out of an appearance at BuzzFeed Brews today.

The hackers, who are trying really hard to convince everyone they're North Korean, have successfully backed up their threats to release heaps of confidential Sony Pictures Entertainment documents if SPE went through with the release of The Interview. Now they've escalated to threats of real-world terrorism, advising theatergoers to see The Interview at their own risk.

The movie opens on Christmas. The hackers' note specifically threatened the premiere—although that already happened last week. At the event, Rogen declined interviews, and told The Hollywood Reporter "being pursued by a reporter at the premiere was the only time he'd "felt 'insecure in months.'"

Along with the BuzzFeed event, Variety reports Rogen has dropped his scheduled Thursday appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, but both he and Franco will still be at the New York special screening of The Interview that day.

[h/t BuzzFeed]

If the data visualization below is to believed, pop music of the 2010s is just as vulgar and nihilistic as your stodgy parents say it is: the decade's most distinctive musical words are evidently "we," "yeah," "fuck," "hell," and "die."

The chart, compiled by data-viz blogger David Taylor for his site Prooffreader, uses a database of Billboard hits to find the words that are most unique to popular song titles of every decade since 1890. Crucially—like the map of most distinctive musicians for each U.S. state that went crazy viral earlier this year—Taylor's analysis does not purport to show the most popular words in song titles, because that would likely fill it with boring words like "the," "and," and "is" for every decade. Instead, using a metric called "keyness" that Taylor lays out at length in a follow-up post, it shows words that were disproportionately common in each ten-year chunk.

Taylor's follow-up post also gives the most popular songs whose titles contain each decade's key words: you might remember "Die" from Kesha's "Die Young," for instance, or "Fuck" from Cee-Lo's "Fuck You."

The full list (click to expand):

If you were a boring jerk, you could use Taylor's findings to make some hackneyed point about the decline of popular culture—from "baby" and "twist" in the 1960s to "thang" in the '90s and "fuck" and "die" now. Instead, let's marvel at the rich spectrum of language on display. Who knew "Uncle" and "Casey" were so popular a century ago?

Below is a roundup of exactly what the headline of this post states from various members of the Gawker editorial staff.

Aleks Chan

Ariana Grande (feat. Zedd) "Break Free" - Ariana Grande is the pop star with the best (reputed) bad attitude—she's a real diva-in-training, I hear. This song, co-written by Swedish uber producer Max Martin, is lyrically impenetrable ("now that I become who I really are"), sonically dense, and if you hear it exactly twice, totally consuming.

The War on Drugs Lost in the Dream - God. I feel like such a fucking nerd for enjoying his album. Honestly, I had never heard of the band until one of my co-workers (Max? Andy? Jordan?) played some of the songs over the Gawker Media office's sound system. Since then, Lost in the Dream has been on regular rotation and it's really an album fit for all occasions: writing, walking, sitting on the subway, lying down and doing nothing. Give it a spin.

Kelly Conaboy

Spoon They Want My Soul - Spoon's eighth album has made its way onto many 2014 year-end lists, usually in the better part of the middle. "Another great album from rock's most consistent band," all of the accompanying blurbs say. "How rude!" I think, every time I read it. This album is truly great and deserves to be highlighted, not thrown onto lists simply because Spoon is the greatest band on Earth and nearly everything they release is flawless, removing the element of surprise. Give me a break! It rules.

St. Vincent Saint Vincent - St. Vincent has gotten weirder on every album since her first, and, I'll tell you what, she didn't stop getting weirder for her self-titled. Weirder than ever! It's wonderful to watch her evolve as a performer and it's wonderful to listen to her carefully piece together a brilliant new sound, a sound all her own. Wonderful. "Regret"? Give me a break, it's so good. "Bring Me Your Loves"? Come on. "Birth in Reverse"? This album rules.

Andy Cush

Angel Olsen Burn Your Fire for No Witness - The kinds of words that usually get used to describe Angel Olsen's music—direct, honest, raw, unflinching—are all true: Burn Your Fire for No Witness contains a seven-minute dirge that opens with the irony-free lyric, "Everything is tragic/It all just falls apart," after all. But those words also do her music a disservice. In concert, Olsen is charismatic and kinetic, and her second album of folk- and country-inflected indie rock aims for both sides of Hank Williams, the forebear she quotes from on the record's most well-known song: the guy who's so lonesome he could cry and the one who wants only to dance, play cards, and drink a jug of wine.

Future Islands Singles - Samuel Herring of Future Islands has always had enormous ambition as a performer: the stage-devouring energy he displayed in the band's career-making Letterman performance this year has been there in force since the band was playing small stages and DIY spaces in their Baltimore hometown. Four albums in, that ambition is fully realized. The band, channeling classic dance-pop, is precise and restrained for much of the record, and Herring uses the space it affords him to contort his titanic voice in all sorts of ways, from yacht rock crooning to black metal howls. Lots of bands working this mold get compared to New Order, but Future Islands—in its chops, its songs, and its frontman's outsized sense of romance—actually earns the comparison.

Young Thug and Bloody Jay Black Portland - I listened to lots of inventive, surprising music this year, and returned to none more often than Black Portland. In 2014, that Young Thug gives a revelatory performance is almost a given; what keeps me coming back are the unexpected moments of brilliance from ostensible second banana Bloody Jay: the sedated, nearly incomprehensible mumbling on "Florida Water"; the life-or-death screams on the first verse of "Signs"; the baffling way his ad-libs are mixed louder than his actual rapping on "Movin." Black Portland also contains my single favorite song of 2014: the soaring "4 Eva Bloody."

Dayna Evans

Allison Crutchfield Lean In To It - Groovy and dancey solo material from Swearin's Allison Crutchfield with lyrics that bring private thoughts into a public, cathartic light.

Amanda X Amnesia - The debut album from a noisy post-punk trio whose sound is punctuated by strong melodies, thoughtful lyrics, and perfectly placed shredding.

Big Ups Eighteen Hours of Static - One of the best punk records of the year by New York's most enigmatic and dynamic live band. Recommended if you're angry or sad or you can't feel anything.

Frankie Cosmos Zentropy - Art school pop that is heavy on feelings and sweet, loving harmonies. It will get you dancing and thinking back to those touching early university days.

GRRRL PRTY TNGHT Mixtape - "I ain't seen no ceilings / we came in through the top floor." This mixtape is the girlgang mixtape of my dreams and features Lizzo, a Minneapolis-by-way-of-Houston rapper who is bound to blow up in three . . . two . . . one . . .

GUNWASH Cock God - The infamous GUNWASH podcast, which I wrote about earlier this year, has released a compilation of live performances from their show that are *mostly* about cock. If you're familiar with the bizarro and beloved show, this comp will only sound like part one of a greatest hits album. Really gratifying in-studio music to round out a fucked up 2014.

Mannequin Pussy Gypsy Pervert - GET. YOUR. FUCKING. HEART. RATE. UP. You will feel good. And then go see Mannequin Pussy live. You will feel BETTER.

Pinchy and Friends mixes - Every single one of these lush and unpredictable mixes gets me through the year when I'm flailing to find something I want to listen to. They fill the gaps very nicely and go along with most everything. The new stuff is really good.

Strangulated Beatoffs The Beatoffs - This is a weird one. It's a reissue of the St Louis duo's 1989 album, The Beatoffs a.k.a. The White Album. On paper, it is a cover album of Beatles songs. But if you are listening closer (or while high), it is a weird, compulsively listenable album of artistic and hilarious renditions of classics. Crude and captivating and glad to be not lost to the ether.

Allie Jones

LIZ Just Like You - When I heard the intro of Mad Decent singer Liz's "Y2K" in February, I flipped out, it's so good. "Y2K" is the standout track on her Just Like You EP, but honestly, all the songs are fun and danceable. It's Britney meets Aaliyah, and even though I know it's being marketed to me as a millennial who appreciates "90s nostalgia," it's still exactly what I want to hear.

Rich Juzwiak

R&B - When various critics and FKA twigs herself argued that labeling the artist's music as R&B was wrong-headed, they did so in defense of twigs (don't box her in!). At the same time, they underrated the elasticity of the genre. R&B is always the music story of the year because it is the most forward-thinking commercial genre of music. It sets the tone of pop. It is perpetually appropriated and diluted by pop artists, but more importantly, those pop artists never catch up to it. R&B's burden is staying ahead of those who dumb it down. R&B turns that burden into joy.

R&B needs weirdos like twigs, as much as it needs those who can translate the weirdos' left-field tendencies into something that speaks to the masses, like Tinashe. It needs people who further obliterate the boundary between hip-hop and soul, artists who don't just sing and rap but who sing and rap simultaneously (think Tink, Future, Makkonen). It needs its foundation, as we know it, to be reiterated and reintroduced to young people via albums like J. Cole's soul-sample happy 2014 Forest Hills Drive. It needs Mary J. Blige to cross the Atlantic and to re-baptize her soul in house music. It needs a giant personality like K. Michelle. It needs guys who make music explicitly for fucking, deep and bass-heavy electronic ballads that you can feel down in your pulsating blood (August Alsina, Trey Songz, Omarion). It needs a daring superstar like Beyonce, whose self-titled fifth album stopped the world late in 2013 and then set its pace for much of the following year. In terms of invention, cultural significance, variation, and sheer accessibility, there has been no album like BEYONCÉ since Thriller.

And then R&B needed to explode, to have everything we understood about its commercial appeal be blown away by the dirty bomb that is D'Angelo & the Vanguard's Black Messiah. The music industry changes constantly, but music is as exciting as it always has been, if you know where to look. If you're not looking at R&B for a thrill, you're doing it wrong.

Ghostface Killah 36 Seasons - At one point in the several hours it took to put together and edit this post, "Double Cross," a track from Ghostface's 11th solo album shuffled on my iPod. I heard Ghostface rap the following lyrics:

I seen the police pull up, and rides hopped out:
"Put your hand behind your back, you're guilty without a doubt
What you mean, son? We built on this
Illegal chokeholds, slap cuffs on my wrist
I don't know what you talking about, boy,
I'm the authority I'm just here to question up minority
A thug drug pusher, violent man of deception
And you just happen to fit the description."

It was an unfortunately perfect moment.

Dance pop that isn't EDM - Even if it's only for a few moments in a drug store or a pizza parlor or a gym, it's nice that Top 40 radio has opened up its sonic palate to include dance music that doesn't smother you like Axe Body Spray at a club in Jersey. Welcome examples of dance crossovers that weren't much concerned with making you feel the drops included Disclosure's "Latch" and Clean Bandit's "Rather Be."

Rich Homie Quan's voice - He's got the most soulful voice in hip-hop, or the roughest voice in soul, or he's the best blues singer who gets played on Hot 97. Or maybe he's all of those things. Cash Money's Quan sounds like he studied at Future's School of Warble, but unlike Future, he sounds like he means every craggy syllable that comes out of his mouth. The guy's impassioned wailing elevates everything his voice touches: his own material, collaborative work, and Mariah Carey flop singles alike.

Hamilton Nolan

Homeboy Sandman "Anything" - This is my favorite jam of the winter so far. It feels like "I Can" by Nas for a new generation. Homeboy Sandman in the new year.

Jason Parham

Kwabs - There is the voice, and only the voice: unflinching in its presentation; it commands and swells, but never loses control of its true power (and perhaps it is made all the more powerful in its vulnerability; to let listeners in; to open up). With Vienna-based producer SOHN at his side, Ghanaian-born soul singer Kwabs has proven himself a singular and absolute force. The three EPs he's released this year—Wrong or Right, Pray for Love, and Walk—suggest the possibility of an artist who doesn't plan to decelerate in the coming months. By my estimation, he's one of the year's best breakout singers.

SBTRKT ft. Raury "Higher" - The song's dark pulse begins simply: a man wanders the dead of night and is greeted by an unknowable, alien energy. A voice enters the void: "Got this feeling going higher." The song then rises, ascending into the ether: "Higher, higher, higher." Once in orbit, there's no opportunity to disembark, the light now all-consuming. "I could live my life aloud and I wouldn't give a fuck/ Ride with me, ride with me, I don't really give a damn/ Jesus piece above my head, nigga you know who I am." This is a destiny foretold—and I never want to come down.

Max Read

Five Mixes I Loved This Year:

Universal Cave "Hongry"

Soft Rocks "Kinfolk Mix"

Mark Barrott Beats in Space (7/15/14)

Psychemagik "Cosmic Code"

pH "Sweet Friction"

Jordan Sargent

My favorite songs to hear in the grocery store:

1. Ariana Grande: "Break Free"
2. Clean Bandit: "Rather Be" (ft. Jess Glynne)
3. Mr. Probz: "Waves (Robin Schulz Radio Edit)"
4. Demi Lovato: "Really Don't Care" (ft. Cher Lloyd)
5. Nico & Vinz: "Am I Wrong"

My favorite songs to hear with friends:

1. DJ Snake: "Turn Down For What" (ft. Lil Jon)
2. Rich Gang: "Lifestyle"
3. Big Sean: "I Don't Fuck With You" (ft. E-40)
4. Iggy Azalea: "Fancy" (ft. Charli XCX)
5. Magic!: "Rude"

My favorite songs to hear alone:

1. War on Drugs: "An Ocean in Between the Waves"
2. Mariah Carey: "Dedicated" (ft. Nas)
3. Perfume Genius: "Fool"
4. One Direction: "Night Changes"
5. FKA Twigs: "Pendulum"

Musicians I'm happy existed in 2014:

Charli XCX: A blue raspberry Warhead of a person.

DJ Mustard: If you are not wired to enjoy minimal, danceable rap beats: we are not the same, you are a martian.

Jessie Ware: Something that says a lot about you as a person is when you realize adult contemporary is cool.

Young Thug: Atlanta produces more socially impactful geniuses than Harvard.

Zedd: With each drop comes every color of the rainbow.

A Spotify playlist of notable tracks

[Image by Sam Woolley]

I have been trying to find a link within the books that I loved this year. There's nothing overt in subject or voice, but in retrospect, I think I gravitated toward books that forced me to slow down. This might be (is) grand bathroom psychologizing, but I think this has something to do with the fact that 2014 has been my most prolific year of online reading to date. Many of the most memorable pieces that I've encountered have been delivered to me on a scroll, already couched in other peoples' comments. I read them greedily so that I could join whatever conversation they sparked, or feel that particular satisfaction of telling someone else that there is a new piece that they simply must read, like now.

This hasn't been a bad thing at all—it's been a year of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Mallory Ortberg, Jeff Sharlet's Instagram essays. But I think it has put extra pressure on the books that I've read. Frankly, I've had a hard time paying attention. In the end, the books that stuck out were the ones that slowed time, that meandered in the best ways, that were unafraid to linger.

Three essay collections resonated with me this year. First, Hilton Als' White Girls, which came out at the end of 2013. Als is the best critic working in America and many of the essays in the book have been published already, but, for me, they took on new life when collected. He writes about varied subjects—Truman Capote, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor, among others—with patience, nuance, and imagination. But my favorite essay in the collection is perhaps the most personal. "Tristes Tropiques" begins the book and extends for a hundred pages, tracing Als' loves over the backdrop of the films and literature that help him understand his own life. It's fucking incredible.

I was also, like everyone else, completely blown away by Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. For me, the pleasure came from the wandering quality of each essay in the collection. Whether she's writing about ultra-marathoners or prisoners or her own relationship to pain, she lets the feelings and ideas sit and germinate, paces around them on the page. This quality reminds me of my other favorite collection of the year, Angela Pelster's Limber. Jamison's work is loosely tied to a common feeling (empathy), while Pelster's revolves around a common subject: trees. I myself am not a tree aficionado, but it doesn't matter—each essay roots in so many different directions. Trees become art, love, morality—everything that we read for packed into a slim, wholly unexpected collection.

Finally, onto fiction. In the story of my reading life, this has been the year of Marilynne Robinson. I am, I realize, decades late to this party, but now that I'm here, it has become very difficult to remember the other novels I've read recently. I'm reading Lila right now, the only book of Robinson's to come out in 2014. It's amazing. But it's particularly amazing because I'm reading it fast on the heels of Gilead and Home, the first two novels in the same trilogy about a fictional Iowa town and two families that live there. Each of the books reflect the story through the lens of a different character. Each is as purposeful, deeply felt, and fully human as any novel I've ever read. Marilyn Robinson cuts through the noise. Now, I know that I'm by no means the first person to make that observation, so I will end with this specific direction: Buy Gilead. Open to page 51. Read the paragraph about honeysuckle.

Lucas Mann is the author of Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, and the forthcoming Lord Fear.