Bitstamp, a European web service that allows users to buy and sell bitcoin in exchange for "real" currencies like dollars or yen, was just taken for $5 million. Nobody knows by exactly whom, or exactly how it was done, and that's a big problem for the "future of money."

The theft, carried out by an unknown party at an unknown location, snatched a pretty hefty sum, reports, CoinDesk:

Bitstamp has released a new statement regarding the security of its website, admitting that it has lost "less than 19,000 BTC", about $5.1m at press time.

The revelation follows the disclosure that Bitstamp's wallet system was compromised, prompting it to halt deposits and later shut down its platform entirely.

The "wallet" in this case is a virtual storage system for the bitcoin funds of others, held temporarily before being bought or sold for other currencies. Someone managed to break into this virtual vault and take the bitcoins for themselves—but unlike an actual vault at an actual bank, there's precious little evidence to go on. Reddit's zealous bitcoin community is predictably pissed ("I imagine their's [sic] more than a few of us who saw this coming a mile away, and stayed the fuck off Bitstamp"), and the company has so far only issued vague apologies:

This breach represents a small fraction of Bitstamp's total bitcoin reserves, the overwhelming majority of which are held in secure offline cold storage systems. We would like to reassure all Bitstamp customers that their balances held prior to our temporary suspension of services will not be affected and will be honored in full.

We appreciate customers' patience during this disruption of services. We are working to transfer a secure backup of the Bitstamp site onto a new safe environment and will be bringing this online in the coming days.

Security consultant Egor Homakov explains in a blog post:

Bitcoin exchangers must understand one simple thing: you're going to be hacked. That's the truth you have to accept and build your entire architecture around this axiom (think of Erlang's fault tolerance "let it fail") . And your business shouldn't collapse after it.

[...]

While blockchain is not exactly anonymous, it's nearly impossible to track the stolen money. You cannot get them back. Ever.

The same quasi-anonymity that makes bitcoin so alluring to paranoids and underworld types is what makes it so alluring to steal: you leave just as few fingerprints stealing it as you do spending it. Bitstamp swears it has enough money in reserves to cover any funds stolen, but the site has been down for two days now, and it could be out for days more. The company's promise that any losses will be reimbursed, and that the exchange is certainly not in any permanent trouble is alarming on its own, post-Mt. Gox.

Photo: Shutterstock

The Guardian is reporting that three suspects in this morning's deadly attack at the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris have been arrested, though that report is unconfirmed. The suspects have reportedly been identified as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, two brothers in their early 30s, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad.

UPDATE 4:55 pm: Not long after the Guardian published their report, it was edited and a second paragraph was added. It now reads:

A spokesman for the French police tells the Guardian's Kim Willsher in Paris that authorities have arrested three suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack.

However Kim points out that the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, addressed the media not long ago and did not mention arrests.

Earlier in the evening, Le Monde and Metro News reported that police had identified three suspects, though no names or descriptions were released.

UPDATE 5:05 pm: Sky News is reporting that two of the suspects are brothers.

From Sky News:

The men have been named as French nationals Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, in their early 30s, along with 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad. His nationality is unknown.

French police officials have said the suspects are linked to a Yemeni terror network.

Cherif Kouachi was reportedly convicted in 2008 of terrorism charges for helping channel fighters to Iraq's insurgency. He was jailed for 18 months.

UPDATE 6:04 pm: French anti-terror police have launched a raid in the northeastern city of Reims, where the suspects are rumored to be hiding.

Live pictures right now from Reims. Anti-terror raid still underway pic.twitter.com/svfcEiUfXB

— Rodrigo (@RodrigoEBR) January 7, 2015

UPDATE 6:52 pm: One of the suspects was reportedly killed during the raid. The other two are in custody, according to NBC News.

[Image via CBS News]

On New Year's Eve, Annapolis, Md., police officer Jason Shreves responded to a call about a man wearing a ski mask and a hoodie who was armed with a handgun and a rifle. The man, it turned out, was a 13-year-old boy, and the AR-15 and pistol were both airsoft guns. Somehow, the boy survived.

It is a sad state of affairs that a story about a police officer confronting a child armed with toys and not shooting him into oblivion should be notable at all, but here we are. The Baltimore Sun's Susan Reimer interviewed Shreves to find out why his encounter may have gone differently from the one that ended in the death of Tamir Rice.

Some differences that bear mentioning: Rice was black; the unnamed boy in Shreves' encounter was white, and was strolling through a relatively tony neighborhood. Shreves, who is also white, is a 10-year veteran of the Annapolis police force; the white Cleveland cop who killed Rice had about a year of total police experience and was found unfit for duty by a previous department in 2012.

With all that in mind, here is Shreves' account:

He turned a corner and saw someone dressed all in black and camouflage, carrying what looked like an AR-15 assault rife. He was wearing a ski mask and a holster with what looked like a hand gun in it.

"Drop the gun and get on the ground," he shouted. He'd drawn his service weapon, a .40-caliber semi-automatic.

The suspect obeyed and was handcuffed.

But when the police officer took off the ski mask, he saw the frightened face of a 13-year-old boy. The teen had apparently been strutting around the neighborhood with all his Christmas stuff, an Airsoft rifle and an Airsoft pistol, both of which shoot plastic pellets.

Why didn't the Annapolis police officer shoot? That's asking about all the decisions he made in fractions of seconds.

"He didn't turn toward me. He didn't come toward me. He didn't raise the gun or point it at me. When I told him to drop the gun and get on the ground, he complied immediately," said Officer Shreves.

"I didn't feel like he was a threat to me or others."

But afterward, he had to catch his breath.

"Every time you get something like this, nothing is the same. What would have caused me to take action? I was questioning myself.

"That ski mask comes off and I see this baby face."

It's possible that race did not play a factor in the incident; as Reimer notes, the teen's skin was likely mostly obscured if he was wearing a hoodie and mask. Still, the white kid in the wealthy quasi-suburban area survived; the black kid in Cleveland died.

Shreves told Reimer he is "confident" he would have handled the situation similarly in any other neighborhood, "Because I told him to drop the gun and get on the ground, and he complied." Rice, who was shot just two seconds after police arrived to the park where he was playing, probably didn't have the chance to.

[Photo via Vartanov Anatoly/Shutterstock]

Earlier today, the National Enquirer ran a story alleging that 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft has been cheating on his wife, the journalist Jenny Conant, with a Manhattan lawyer named Lisan Goines for over 3 years. Now the 69-year-old Kroft has confirmed the Enquirer’s scoop, which drew from extensive text message conversations between the paramours, in a statement to the New York Post:

“I had an extramarital affair that was a serious lapse of personal judgment and extremely hurtful to my wife and family, and for that I have nothing but regret,” Kroft said in a statement to the Post. “My wife and I are committed to each other and are working hard to get past this, and consider it a private matter.”

The bulk of the Enquirer’s story is not online, but the Post acquired a physical copy of the paper and highlighted a few PG-13 details of Kroft and Goines’ affair—including an incident where Kroft quaffed some champagne he had poured down Goines’ backside:

The newsman — who boasted to Goines that he was the “go-to” interviewer forPresident Obama — had some particularly unusual tastes in bed, the mag said. One time, he was “pouring champagne in her behind and drinking the bubbly,” the report claims. [...]

In one sexting session, Kroft allegedly cooed to Goines, “Miss you and all that goes with it. Especially my favorite tastes and colors … pink and brown.” Another time, the 69-year-old newsman asked Goines, 41, “What exactly would be your preference,” the Enquirer reported. “U all over and deep inside of me,” Goines responded.

At one point, the hard-working TV journalist, who has a son with Conant, lamented his long hours on the job, the report said. “Working late. Just ordered out. Would rather be eating your pudding,” he allegedly wrote.

Goines, who is 41 and married, allegedly ended the affair because she felt Kroft had become too needy: “Lisan never wanted him to leave his wife, and she never contemplated leaving her husband and she told him it was best that it end.” An active Facebook account registered under her name contains photos of a woman who appears to be her; she was most recently photographed in public at a December 2013 champagne reception held in Manhattan for the chef Paul Liebrandt.

This is not the first sex scandal to befall 60 Minutes. While stationed in Iraq in 2008, the married foreign affairs correspondent Lara Logan began sleeping with CNN correspondent Michael Ware and a military contractor named Joe Burkett (who ended up divorcing his wife to marry Logan). The tale of Logan’s love triangle was first published by the National Enquirer as well.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Chris Pratt has made the leap from everyone's favorite friendly, loyal, but not-so-bright human puppydog on Parks and Rec to a be-muscled Hollywood action hero in Guardians of the Galaxy and now Jurassic World. "But what if he hadn't?" asked no one, "What if Andy Dwyer had to save us from the killer mutant dinosaur?"

"Here, watch this," Thanks Mom Productions replied. It's Jurassic Parks and Recreation, and it's a little disconcerting how many of these lines work equally well for either of Pratt's characters.

[h/t TastefullyOff]

Deadspin Jameis Winston Accuser Files Title IX Lawsuit Against FSU | io9 How to Make Your Willpower Stronger — According to Science | Jalopnik The Ten Most Unexpectedly Useful Car Features | Kotaku Destiny Review Update: Four Months Later | Kinja Popular Posts

Three more women came forward today in a press conference organized by Gloria Allred to accuse Bill Cosby of sexual assault. Linda Kirkpatrick, Lynn Neal, and Kacey (no last name given) all shared their similar stories, at times breaking down into tears. All say fears of retaliation prevented them from speaking out sooner.

Kirkpatrick says she was drugged and assaulted in 1981 when she was 25, after playing in a tennis tournament against Cosby in Las Vegas. He invited her to his show after the tournament, where he gave her a drink. "I knew something was terribly terribly wrong with whatever I had consumed in the drink he gave me," she says. He then allegedly assaulted her in his dressing room.

Kirkpatrick says Cosby called her the next day to apologize, and that he invited her back to his show. He allegedly assaulted her again that night, using force instead of drugs, since Kirkpatrick says she was careful not to drink anything at the show.

Lynn Neal says Cosby assaulted her sometime between 1982 and 1983 when she was in her twenties. She says he drugged and raped her at one of his shows, as well. "I know that there are people out there who know what this man has been doing all these years," she says.

Kacey recalls that Cosby assaulted her while she was working as an assistant to one of his agents, Tom Illius, at the William Morris Agency between 1990 and 1996. Kacey she considered Cosby "a father figure, or a favorite uncle" at the time. He invited her to lunch at his suite in an LA hotel one day, where he allegedly forced her to take "a large white pill." Kacey says he asked her "would i give you anything that would hurt you?" when she tried to refuse the pill. She says after consuming the pill she woke up to see him naked in bed beside her. She quit her job shortly after.

Allred says the statute of limitations has run out in all three of these cases. Cosby has not yet responded to any of the claims.

Yesterday, Phylicia Rashad defended Cosby, urging the public to "forget these women" who have accused him of rape. Allred condemned her today: "Phylicia, you should be supporting these women rather than joining Cosby's paid 'attack dogs.'"

Miley Cyrus: Is she into drugs, or is she not into drugs? Hard to say, but if new photos obtained by the National Enquirer are to be believed: she is into drugs.

The photos depict Miley in her "drug den," looking at her laptop while various drug-related items sit in the foreground. She has headphones on. Her laptop has stickers on it. She looks fresh-faced and comfortable.

RT @DailyMailCeleb: Oh, she's just being Miley ... http://t.co/OjEA9zxkO9 pic.twitter.com/lgQrupzwEi / wait what now.

— SMITH (@officialSmith_) January 7, 2015

Rolled up banknote. Bottled white powder. XL rolling papers. Marijuana like substance. All strewn about, like Miley doesn't even give one shit about whether or not her drug den is put together enough to have friends come over unexpectedly or to take a young Kennedy home for the night. According to the Enquirer, the photos were taken at 4 a.m. on November 26th and sent to the magazine by a friend of Cyrus's "in a bid to expose Miley's out-of-control behavior." We can see now that this is true.

Miley, clean up your drug den.

[image via Getty]

Politico's Dylan Byers reports that the Associated Press removed an image of Andres Serrano's 1987 photo Piss Christ from its photo library in the wake of today's deadly attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Update: The AP pulled the photos after the conservative Washington Examiner noted that it pixelated Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting Mohammad but left images of Piss Christ intact, as Slate points out.

Removing images of the artwork seems preposterous. I searched AP's library for Piss Christ before this post went up found at least one photo of Serrano posing in front of his most well-known work, which depicts a crucifix submerged in the artist's own urine. But a few minutes later, it was gone. What gives?

"It's been our policy for years that we refrain from moving deliberately provocative images," AP spokeswoman Erin Madigan told Byers when he asked about the removal. "It is fair to say we have revised and reviewed our policies since 1989." Little is known about the Paris attackers, but it is likely that they were inspired by Charlie's publishing of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammad.

If the AP once hosted a full-bleed photo of Piss Christ like the Wikipedia image we're using above, I wasn't able to find it; that may have been the removed photo referenced in Byers' post. Earlier this evening the aforementioned photos of Serrano posing with his work were still available, as well as an image of a museum curator alongside a copy of Piss Christ that was attacked by a group of apparent Christian extremists when it was displayed in France in 2011. As of this writing, the image of the vandalized work is the only one that remains.

Madigan gave a version of the same boilerplate she provided to Byers when I asked about the photos, and has not yet responded to a request to confirm that the removals were in response to the attacks. If they were, it is a cowardly and unfortunate capitulation to the men who killed 12 people today in an apparent effort to quell speech. But it isn't particularly surprising: the Associated Press was among the outlets that pixelated images of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons in its coverage of the attacks today.

In any event, here's Piss Christ in all its heavy-handed glory.

[Image via Andres Serrano]

You likely haven't heard of Frederick County, Md., councilman Kirby Delauter, and that's exactly the way Kirby Delauter likes it. In a textbook example of the Streisand Effect—which should probably be renamed The Kirby Delauter Effect at this point—Kirby Delauter threatened a local journalist who dared to publish his name.

The reporter, Bethany Rodgers of the Frederick News-Post, gently and respectfully explained that individuals, especially elected officials, are not immune from being covered in the press. Kirby Delauter, a Republican representative from District 5, responded with vague threats of a lawsuit for "using my name unauthorized."

The News-Post backed its reporter and the established fundamentals of journalism in a staff editorial using the strongest possible terms. To wit: "Kirby Delauter. Kirby Delauter. Kirby Delauter" (a headline so perfect that I shamelessly ripped it off here).

They wrote, in part:

Kirby Delauter, an elected official; Kirby Delauter, a public figure? Surely, Kirby Delauter can't be serious? Kirby Delauter's making a joke, right?

Round about then, we wondered, if it's not a joke, how should we now refer to Kirby Delauter if we can't use his name (Kirby Delauter)? Could we get away with an entire editorial of nothing but "Kirby Delauter" repeated over and over again — Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter, Kirby Delauter? OK, imagine we agreed because of temporary madness or something funny in the water that week, how would we reference "Kirby Delauter" and do our job as journalists without running afoul of our lack of authorization?

The whole thing is great and worth a read, especially for the subtle details: the first letters of each paragraph in this masterful work of art spell out, yes, "Kirby Delauter."

Incidentally, the News-Post story that Kirby Delauter was so incensed about is a Jan. 3 piece that features Kirby Delauter and fellow conservative councilmember Billy Shreve making a big fuss about their official parking spaces.

"I did not see his post," Shreve said of Kirby Delauter's Facebook threat, "but I think The News-Post is extremely biased and someone should sue them," Shreve told the News-Post.

That's so Kirby Delauter.

[h/t NPR, Photo via News-Post]

According to NBC News' Pete Williams, one of the suspects from this morning's attack at the Charlie Hebdo office was killed during a raid this evening in Reims, France. The other two suspects are reportedly in custody. UPDATE: NBC now says it cannot confirm its report.

From NBC News:

One of the suspects in the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine has been killed and the two others are in custody, two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News.

Authorities identified the three men as Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi, both French and in their early 30s, and 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, whose nationality wasn't immediately clear.

Williams's report corresponds with one from France 2's Lionel Feurestein, who earlier tonight reported that a young man was killed in the raid while two brothers were taken into custody.

BREAKING @13h15, source police : les 3 auteurs présumés viennent d'être interpellés a Reims le + jeune a été tué, les 2 frères vivants ...

— Lionel Feuerstein (@olesmains) January 7, 2015

UPDATE 9 p.m. NBC retracted part of its report, explaining the that the actual status of the parties involved is unconfirmed. News outlets, including the AFP and AP, are now reporting that the youngest suspect is actually alive after turning himself in to French police.

"To be fair here we just don't know exactly what the situation is in France," Williams later explained on MSNBC.

Time for Gretchen Carlson's take on the Charlie Hebdo shooting now.

It is what it is. It meaning I can say anything I want and no one can stop me lalalalalala I'm still getting paid. Terrorism is what it is.

Below you'll find a handful of Gawker Media stories from 2014 that I enjoyed for one reason or another. This is only a sampling, not a comprehensive roundup, and I'm putting it here partly as a way of telegraphing my tastes to the many staffers who know me only as the editor of an often impenetrably abstruse sports-and-dicks website. Pranks, scoops, FOIA, good long reads, great short reads, helpful primers: Use this as a rough guide to the sort of things I'd like to see on the sites in 2015.

Lena Dunham's unretouched Vogue shoot

http://jezebel.com/here-are-the-u...

Probably not a popular choice, even—or perhaps particularly—among Jezebel staffers. It inspired the predictable smarmathon on Twitter, where for various reasons Lena Dunham, a multitalented celebrity whose cultural cachet was more or less granted to her as a birthright, is afforded the sort of delicate and hypervigilant treatment generally reserved for imported zoo pandas. Fuck that. And fuck the notion that the purpose of commentary is to fortify a proper and respectable consensus. This was a coup, and a good one at that—just as interesting in its own right as the infamous Faith Hill Photoshop job obtained by Jezebel in 2007. The bien pensant backlash it provoked was more revealing than the photo manipulation: Here was an avatar of millennial feminism in the pages of Vogue, sacrificing a bit of her chin and a chunk of her neck at the altar of feminine standards she'd become famous for flouting—and much of the response was premised on the idea that the coverage had interfered with her right to be the prettiest princess the industry could make her. If that's not a story for Jezebel, then I'm Judith Butler.

Our Sony hack coverage

http://defamer.gawker.com/leaked-the-nig...

The Sony hack was a perfect Gawker story—scummy enough that a lot of media outlets kept themselves at arms' length but not so scummy that they weren't happy to follow up on our coverage.

The full Donald Sterling audio

http://deadspin.com/exclusive-the-...

TMZ got the first piece, but Deadspin got the full thing, which made it plain that Sterling was no doddering old coot caught in a racist slip of the tongue but a doddering old coot with a racist worldview that is round and whole and not too far removed from the plantation. It was a valuable reminder that we have the muscle to make a difference even on stories where we weren't the first to move.

FOIA spelunking

http://deadspin.com/these-emails-c...

Having learned through Twitter that ESPN talking haircut Darren Rovell had narced on some dude who'd made a joke at his expense, Deadspin went to get the paper trail. By sending an email to the chair of the University of Michigan's political science department, where the dude had gotten his Ph.D., Rovell created a public record of what a petty and vindictive crybaby he is. FOIA is a powerful tool that allows journalists to fulfill their solemn duties as watchdogs of the public interest. It's also a great way to point and laugh at penises like Darren Rovell:

Disney dicks

http://jezebel.com/disney-dudes-d...

The great wave of " what if Disney were real?" hypotheticals crested and broke here, petering out into dribbles of sun-dappled water beneath the swaying, half-erect cock of Prince Eric.

10 scientific ideas you're misusing

http://io9.com/10-scientific-...

I love this post. Clicky as shit but no dumber for it, the story went to plaid on the traffic charts, and it was heartening to watch it bop around my Facebook feed alongside the usual crap, scientific literacy scoring a rare victory on the road. The conceit is simple—humble, even. Here, io9 says, why don't you listen to some people who know what they're talking about? Thanks to some very straightforward reporting, a story that might've seemed hectoring and intellectually claustrophobic comes off instead as helpfully big-minded. More than anything Annalee's post performs the basic function of any good Gawker Media story: It puts neglected truths on the internet.

Remember when?

http://gawker.com/who-wants-to-r...http://deadspin.com/the-former-bas...

Tom Scocca wrote about Bill Cosby's multiple sex-assault allegations back in February, not long after Dylan Farrow had published her open letter accusing her father, Woody Allen, of sexual abuse. The Cosby allegations were well known, as was Farrow's case; neither story was news in the strictest sense of the word. But both took hold in ways they never had before, in part because the media landscape had changed, in part because the transgressions of two aging comedians could more readily be fit into the prevailing narrative of their public lives now that they lacked the temporal and creative power to make people talk about something else.

There's a good lesson in this and in other stories around the company. (I'm thinking specifically of Diana Moskovitz's story about the index case in the Cosby saga; Dave McKenna's deep-dive into the various allegations against Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson, the former NBA guard who was instrumental in bringing down Donald Sterling; Daniel Roberts's bill of indictment against Floyd Mayweather; a lot of Matt Novak's work on Paleofuture; Alex Belth's best excavations on Deadspin's Stacks subdomain; and Gawker's "Remember when?" series.) A story doesn't have to be new to be of value. People forget. Or people prefer not to remember. Sometimes all you have to do to drive the conversation is to remind readers of an important or interesting truth at a moment when they're most attuned to its resonances.

Caity Weaver's adventures in deep-fried Americana

http://gawker.com/my-14-hour-sea...http://gawker.com/gravy-boat-my-...

"Everyone on the boat is racist and nice. Including me." Caity was nominally writing about Paula Deen and TGI Friday's in these two stories, but really she was writing about race, culture, and life in general here at the shank end of the American capitalist experiment, and also about cheese sticks.

Gizmodo's cult beat

http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/synanons-sober...http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-man-who-fo...

Three great features, about the Syanon cult and the still-extant Heaven's Gate website, from Matt Novak and Ashley Feinberg. I will always read a cult story.

The weed-kingpin racecar driver

http://jalopnik.com/the-man-who-tu...

Patrick George's story, about a promising racecar driver who in the 1980s got a life sentence for smuggling weed into a country where bootleggers more or less invented auto racing, is very well done.

Leah Finnegan, baby name critic

http://gawker.com/dont-name-your...

Nothing displeases the Baby Name Critic more than a name like "Kaya" and its counterpart, "Kaia" (which means, loosely, "by the sea" in Hawaiian). This is a name not meant to age with a child and accompany it through life, but to evoke a feeling, like "Cordovan leather" or "Angelina Jolie." The name Kaya says: My head is full of ocean air, and my hair is full of kelp.

Love this shit.

Sunday puzzle

http://io9.com/can-you-solve-...

I've enjoyed the proliferation of weekend anchor features on all the sites, from the Saturday essay on Gawker to Foodspin to Robbie Gonzalez's popular Sunday puzzle. Somehow, without really trying, we've created across the sites a sort of deconstructed version of a newspaper's Sunday edition. That's cool.

Kotaku's embedded gamers

http://kotaku.com/the-future-of-...

This story on its face looks like a bit of housekeeping from Kotaku EIC Stephen Totilo, but it's actually a smart blueprint for covering consumer goods in a way that doesn't require a total capitulation to the bought-and-paid-for hype cycles of any product rollout. He writes:

Short version: While we remain a site that puts gaming first and will continue to tell you about the most interesting games as soon as possible, we are shifting from what has been a heavily pre-release approach to covering video games to one that gives a lot more attention to games after they've been released.

How will they go about doing that? "Each writer is essentially 'embedded' in up to four or five games or series," Totilo writes. "They play games they're embedded in regularly. They keep up with the community around those games."

This may seem like a small shift, but it's actually a conceptual overhaul that moves the locus of the site's attention from the marketing of gaming companies to the experience of the gamers themselves, which is where it belongs. It's a cool move by Kotaku.

Why Gandhi's a dick

http://kotaku.com/why-gandhi-is-...

There's no news value here. There's no hugely compelling reason for this story to exist, beyond that the bug is funny and the game had lately been on the mind of Luke Plunkett, Kotaku's Civilization beat writer. Just one of those reasons would've been reason enough to write about this.

The dude who gamed a game show

http://kotaku.com/meet-the-man-w...

The hack in question is a little bit of a nothingburger, but I like that the site covered the story at all. Optimal strategy, whatever the context, is a good beat for Kotaku.

Gamergate Gamergate Gamergate, we've all been there

http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-...

In his explainer, Kyle Wagner pointed out what was obvious to anyone paying attention: that Gamergate was only the latest in a long line of status-quo movements led by men who felt their hold on the cultural consensus was slipping. The only problem with this was that it arrived so late, long after the orcs had breached the Deeping Wall.

For various reasons too tiresome and disheartening to detail here, we fell down on the job of covering Gamergate the way it deserved to be covered. You could see our failure in, of all places, the prose of this New York Times story, about Intel's craven decision to pull ads from a game-developer site under braying Gamergater boycott (an important story that went cravenly unmentioned on the Gawker sites).

For a little more than a month, a firestorm over sexism and journalistic ethics has roiled the video game community, culminating in an orchestrated campaign to pressure companies into pulling their advertisements from game sites.

"A firestorm over sexism and journalistic ethics"—the phrase, in all its cringing value neutrality, in the way it treated a large flock of gibbering masturbators as high-minded activists pressing a legitimate grievance, suggested that Gamergaters had successfully set the terms of the debate. And they had, because to that point few people outside of the Gamergate cause had bothered explaining the phenomenon to the lay reader in plainspoken and familiar terms, as Deadspin's Kyle Wagner would eventually do in his piece. Because of that void the Times, lacking the intellectual cover to call things for what they were, could only retreat into a lobotomized disinterestedness, which it turn only fed whatever panic advertisers might've been feeling.

There was a lot of internal debate at the time over whether we were giving Gamergaters oxygen merely by covering the "movement," but that was always silly. What gave them oxygen was the absence of good coverage. Wagner's explainer, along with Jay Hathaway's on Gawker, was where we finally decided to take a hand.

Gizmodo and Deadspin stunts

http://gizmodo.com/antiques-roads...

I like stunts. More stunts, please.http://deadspin.com/revealed-the-h...

The time Neal Pollack shat himself in a Lexus

http://jalopnik.com/i-shat-myself-...

No one would publish Neal Pollack's account of shitting himself in a Lexus press car, so he came to Jalopnik, which speaks well of Neal and even better of Jalopnik. The site's in a healthy place if it's known as the sort of publication that would eagerly grant asylum to a refugee story about shitting oneself. In general I wish we'd do a lot more of this sort of thing.

(Tara Jacoby did some fine work on the image here, by the way. Jim Cooke's art department—with Sam Woolley working alongside Tara—had a very good year, even if at times our puerile interests rendered it the most talented penis-drawing shop in the land. Work closely with Cooke, whose editorial mind is as keen and as articulate as that of any writer in the company. If he and his team can't come up with a good image for a story, it's the story's fault, not theirs.)

2004's most exciting phone, reviewed in 2014

http://gizmodo.com/razr-burn-my-m...

This should absolutely be a regular Giz rubric. It's larky, but in the negative space of the story you can make out all the ways that the last decade's worth of gadget evolution has reconditioned our expectations.

Rape at Norman High and delusional pregnancy at Bellevue

http://jezebel.com/why-were-three...

Anna Merlan pulled off a delicate piece of reporting here ...http://jezebel.com/ghost-child-th...

... and here. Tom Scocca likes to say that magazine-style features nowadays tend to read like notebook dumps: Reporting on limited time and a limited budget, the writer comes up with a thin set of facts and scenes and is forced to put all of them into the story, rather than gathering a rich body of knowledge and carefully selecting the best of it. For an example of the latter, read Peter Kaplan's great profile of David Letterman, in which every word is fat with Kaplan's mastery of his subject. Or read Anna's "Ghost Child" story.

The way we die now

http://gawker.com/this-kid-just-...

Kelly Conaboy killed this. Please share.

We immerse ourselves in ectype pain and then treat normal human responses to these enforced emotional tests as badges of honor. We've convinced ourselves that these adventures into the darkest moments of others lives' are a way to honor them, and to honor humanity in general. We put our compassion on display in a Facebook post. We turn grief into a shibboleth for humanity. We stare at someone else's death and then tell others to do the same. It's porn we can share, because it demonstrates our compassion.

Ferguson

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/america-is-not...http://gawker.com/what-black-par...

We were remiss in not dispatching a reporter to Ferguson at the outset, not for any prestige-pandering reasons but because I wish I'd read more stories from the scene with the sensibility of the two pieces above.

Good white people

http://gawker.com/my-vassar-coll...http://jezebel.com/i-dont-know-wh...

Some of the sharpest stories written about Michael Brown and Eric Garner had little to do with the oafish racism that led directly and indirectly to their unprosecuted murders and more to do with its uptown cousin—what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls "elegant racism." These two essays, by Kiese Laymon on Gawker and Brit Bennett on Jezebel, were relentless and discomfiting.

Jason Whitlock and black respectability politics

http://deadspin.com/can-jason-whit...

Greg Howard's story about the columnist Jason Whitlock, who'd been hired by ESPN to launch a black-interest website despite years of smearing and pathologizing the very people the site intends to reach, was an angry and dispiriting look at how to make it as a black pundit in white media. In a lot of ways it was a companion piece to Deadspin's "Big Book of Black Quarterbacks," which was also about the narrow and rigid parameters of black public life.

Ebola and moral panic

http://jezebel.com/from-miasma-to...

As an Ebola panic overtook America, Stassa Edwards reminded us that the response to an outbreak has always been a negotiation—and very often a collusion—between science and the social anxieties of the day.

How not to get fucked over

http://lifehacker.com/how-the-unit-p...

Maybe this is the embarrassed ex-Naderite in me talking, but my favorite Lifehacker posts are the ones that demystify a consumer experience given over to the for-profit mystification of greedheads and hucksters.

The fight over a college basketball player's coming out

http://deadspin.com/how-one-gay-at...

The scrabbling, opportunistic side of gay progress in sports.

A gentleman's guide to life in prison

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/a-gentlemans-g...

I urge you to read all of Dan Genis's stories about his decade in prison, a sort of Foucault-for-shitbags collection of essays in which you will learn, among other things, how to make a fifi.

Deadspin's coded-language interactive

http://deadspin.com/which-words-ar...

There's a tedious backstory here that I think illustrates the importance of Adam Pash's new role at Gawker: A freelancer for Deadspin who'd done the scut work of identifying the races of all the NFL prospects had dumped a massive set of scouting-report transcripts on our lap. None of us had any idea of what to do with the project. We kicked around a few notions, the obvious one being some sort of breakdown of key words that tend to take on a racial coloring: "scrappy," "leader," etc. That wouldn't be saying anything new, though, and in any case would've only led to the usual accusations of cherry-picking, race-baiting, etc. We hit upon the idea of making this an interactive, thus letting the readers themselves cherry-pick and race-bait to their hearts' content. With Pash's help, Deadspin's former data/infographics guy, Reuben Fischer-Baum, pulled together the interactive within a couple of days, and the post in its final form, rough-hewn though it was, made our point better than any earnest, table-banging essay could have. Readers led themselves to the correct conclusion, and all it took was a little programming know-how.

People want

http://gawker.com/asshole-gorill...

"These Photos Of Koko The Gorilla Mourning The Loss Of Robin Williams Are Incredibly Moving," read the dumbest BuzzFeed story ever, which like the press release it had copied-and-pasted was premised on the idea that you are a paste-eating halfwit stuck in a fairy-tale version of life in which the beasts of the planet weep over dead celebrities. It was stupid, cynical shit, BuzzFeed indulging its very worst tendencies, and Gawker, with this exercise in pure id, gave it the treatment it deserved.

One of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shooting has reportedly turned himself in to authorities without incident.

French newspapers been reporting that 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad—who is believed to the youngest of the gunmen—surrendered early Thursday morning in France.

Earlier reports by NBC incorrectly claimed Mourad had been killed during a shootout with police. According to the AP, French police confirm Mourad is now in custody but did not explain where or how he surrendered.

Somewhere under the Southern Californian moon, midwestern gin fizz Allison Janney is having a dance party and if she invites you, Conan O'Brien, you'd be a real moron not to go.

Janney—who once made a film called Drop Dead Gorgeous that was, in one reviewer's opinion, the high-water mark of 1999--started doing her "stewardess" party dance for Conan on his show last night. And you know what, I believe that she actually does this at parties and that it's not just a cute talk show anecdote.

Why do I think this?

Because of The Jackal.

Go ahead and ignore Aresnio's inane comments about Janney's height, skipping straight to 2:00 for... The Jackal.

Never change, Allison Janney.

We live in the era of big data, which means unprecedented insight into when and how long we jerk ourselves off. A new PornHub analysis of 2014 JO data is like looking at a giant info mirror, staring at ourselves, and then spankin' it.

The question of what we chose to masturbate to last year isn't anything notable—lesbians, MILFs, gay sisters, cum dad, big cocks, et al. What's surprising is the disparity between how long different nationalities spend tugging on themselves:

It looks like there's a direct correlation between living in a sad place and cumming real fast. Belarus, Jesus! Look at all those sub-seven minute times compared to the wealthy jerk-dudes over in Canada, Australia, and the UK—they're grooving for several minutes more on average. If anything, you might assume the opposite: the rigors of late capitalism should be distracting us from leisurely masturbating, right? If you lived in Azerbaijan, wouldn't you want to spend as much time possible lost in a streaming pornography fantasy land, and not looking out the window at Azerbaijan? Who the fuck knows what's going to happen next in the Ukraine? No time to waste.

Shoutout to South Korea, though:

In terms of which countries showed significant changes in their visit duration lengths from 2013 to 2014, South Koreans extended their stays by an impressive 140 seconds compared to last year's numbers, as they did in Turkey and Thailand, with 64 and 30 second average visit extensions each.

The wealth/beatoff relationship inverts itself, for some reason, in the United States:

Mississippi boasts some of the highest averages for both daily sleep hours and time spent working in a day. Incidentally, they also hold the current American record for longest average visit time on Pornhub, with an impressive 10 minutes and 47 seconds. They're hanging loose in Hawaii with a respectable 10:36 average visit length, alongside Arkansas at 10:11. Overall, these lengthier visits occur within the southeastern states, with the exception of Hawaii.

Chalk it up to the southern tradition of hot weather leisure time, maybe. But know this: whether they're jerking slow, or jerking fast, the whole world is blowing loads nonstop.

Photo: Shutterstock

Hey dudes, I have a question for you, but before I ask I just want to make sure you know that this is not because of anything I've observed firsthand, but because of something I heard. I think you're straight until you say otherwise, and feel very justified in this based on your baseball cap, default manspreading, chill vibe, and job as a construction worker, police officer, cowboy, soldier, leatherman, or Native American. In fact, I hope Tom Cruise is as straight as they come. I never thought he wasn't!

With efforts made to preserve your brittle masculinity and narrow-minded sense of it out the way, I would like to know if you go from being bro-tomatic to...not like other guys once you get some marijuana in you. Does weed make you temporarily gay? When you get high, do you just want a big cock to suck and a man who fucks the shit out of you? Anyone? Anyone?

I ask because a few weeks ago, someone posted such a query to Reddit:

I'm quite a hardcore pothead but I quit at some months of high intensity studying. I feel very attracted to girls and not at all to men when sober, but when I get high I just want a big cock to suck and a man who fucks the shit out of me.

Anyone else happens to have the same effects? Just curiosity, not that it really bothers me since I'm still attracted to girls while high, but I sometimes feel weirded by male friends with whom I don't usually feel attracted to.

PD: this only happens when I'm WAY too high, a few shared joints don't put me like this, but oh boy, when I'm on the edge of passing out in the couch...

Like anything that sounds too good to be true, I want to call bullshit on this straight dude who goes from fiending for marijuana to fiending for cock, but he received a few responses from people claiming similar experience, like this one:

Same here man! Or I don't think it's temporary really but I don't think I'm gay or bi either. Or maybe a bit bi but I've stopped thinking of myself like straight, homo or bi.

I like to think nowadays that whatever you're in the mood for at some points in your life doesn't have to define you. Weed made me realize that I like the thought of dicks, and also being penetrated. But the thought of being together with a man and being intimate on a romantic level kinda hard to stomach.

But I'm attracted to dicks and I enjoy being penetrated and submissive. I love smoking a spliff and then doing some anal masturbation to some shemale porn, that's the second best thing about weed. The first being just messing about socially with some friends. But usually when I smoke alone I end up with some kind of dick porn. Someday I might find a gal to put on a strap on and fuck me, but until then I'll just do it on my own!

Is marijana why so many kids today don't believe in labels, or are those sexually fluid hippies drawn to all kinds of devilish things including his weed and sexual interests? Is getting high making people gay, or is being gay making people get high and then forget that they got high to cope with sexual confusion? Are we all too burned out to really know anything at this point? Are you gay, yes or no? Are you sure? How sure are you? Huh? Huh?

"Does weed make me gay?" is a question that people have been asking on the internet for years now. This Grass City post doesn't ask but tells: Smoking weed made me gay.

I was smoking since I was 14. I was always interested in girls and usually had a girlfriend. When I started to smoke weed I became less interested in girls. Now I find myself fantasizing over men and hot trannies a lot of the time.

I don't know what it is about weed but it made gay.

And then there's a little animated version of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ below that post.

Someone in that thread offered a salient counterpoint:

then don't smoke weed??

or be a gay man.. the choice is yours

but i don't see how the hell weed makes you gay.. i can't stop thinking about puss when im blitzed.. mm puss..lol

Please share your stories of weed making you gay below, and let me know if you need a smoking partner :p

[ Image via Shutterstock]

[ H/T NewNowNext]

Karl Rove's predictions for 2015 include a Supreme Court vacancy, a Seahawks Super Bowl win, and Republican Congressional leaders "producing a governing conservative vision for 2016." Our prediction for 2015: Karl Rove will look like an egg.

In the late 1980s, Lisa Bonet was simultaneously the coolest of The Cosby Show cast and the black sheep of the fictional family. The then-20-year-old actress endured a public fallout with Bill Cosby thanks to a "racy" movie called Angel Heart, marriage to fellow black hippie Lenny Kravitz and pregnancy with daughter, Zoë. In hindsight, Bonet looks like the woman who escaped Cosby's long shadow in the knick of time.

In November, a Twitter account purporting to be Bonet, who changed her name to Lilakoi Moon, published the following message:

Bonet quickly denied that she had written the 140 characters. But as the sexual assault allegations continual to mount against Cosby, it's hard not to think back to her public duel with her former TV dad in the late 1980s. In those days, rumors suggested that she was banished in 1987 to A Different World, The Cosby Show's black college spin-off, because she was often late and headstrong against Cosby's direction of the cast.

In a vintage Late Night With David Letterman appearance above, Bonet says this about A Different World and why she took the role: "They told me to?" followed by "Well, it's called Hillman and it's not very original. It's about kids in college."

Here's a transcription of the rest of the interview, surrounding her first cinematic role in 1987's Angel Heart, where she played a New Orleans Voodoo priestess and love interest of Mickey Rourke.

Letterman: You appear nude in the film [Angel Heart]?

Bonet: Yeah.

Letterman: Is that alright, you think, to appear nude?

Bonet: I thought it was OK.

Letterman: What will Cosby say when he finds out about this?

Bonet: I don't know, I told him that I was going to do this film and it, you know, had a little nudity in it.

Letterman: What'd he say?

Bonet: He was good, he said 'I know that this is just a job' and, you know, it is a 'Cosby Show' and we know what Cosby spells backwards.'

Letterman: What does it spell backwards?

Bonet: King of … I don't know.

Letterman: That's a conundrum! *awkward laugh*

Sounds like Letterman knew Cosby was at least a Hollywood heavyweight with a reputation for being a controlling egotistic boss.

The media hubbub surrounding Bonet wasn't only because she was nude in the Angel Heart sex scene. Like the gory Gone Girl sex-murder scene, she and her co-star Rourke were covered in blood, which initially earned the film an X rating until the director shaved a few seconds off the shoot. By today's standards, I doubt the scene would be seen as so edgy.

Then there was Bonet's topless Interview magazine spread in April 1987 that catalyzed another round of media pearl-clutching around Bonet. From Newsweek in 1987, referencing Interview:

Cosby, for his part, doesn't much like Bonet's role: "It's a movie made by white America that cast a black girl, gave her voodoo things to do and have sex." But he did advise her to take it. As Bonet puts it, "My obligation wasn't to Denise. I felt obligated to myself and my career."

Around the debut of Interview's chat with Bonet, Ebony published an odd article about whether Denise Huxtable would be able to "find herself," both on and off screen. The historical African American magazine didn't interview Bonet, but did contact Phylicia Rashad and Cosby, whom the writer referred to as "Father Cosby," about Bonet's career. While Rashad seemed supportive, the embattled comedian, then on top of Hollywood, came off a bit fatherly and controlling.

Both Cosby and Ebony's writer Lynn Normet were pretty worried about Bonet's "blackness," as if Hollywood casting directors would be able to hire her as anything other than herself. But what really jumps out is Cosby's quote about having "very, very strong conversations" and "Lisa knows that if I'm upset about something, like, say MAD, I don't bite my tongue."

In many of the Cosby's accusers' stories, the women say after he opened himself up to them under the guise of helping their careers, he shamed them into either taking his abuse or staying quiet, similar to the tactic he used on an Associated Press journalist just a few months ago.

Like Malcolm Jamal Warner or Tempest Bledsoe, Bonet hasn't commented on Cosby's allegations. Elsewhere, Keisha Knight Pulliam weighed in after being fired from The Celebrity Apprentice for refusing to ask Cosby to fund her charity during the reality show, saying, "They're just allegations." Yeah, upwards of 20 of them. And on Tuesday, reports of Phylicia Rashad telling a reporter to "forget" Cosby's numerous accusers surfaced. (She later told ABC that she was "misquoted.") Disappointment abounds.

Image via NBC.

Terrorism persists because terrorism works. Terrorism works because we let it.

It takes a great deal of violence to wipe out an army. But it only takes a tiny bit of violence to instill a sense of fear in a population. Terrorism is not meant to conquer through force; it is meant to conquer through fear.

How did you feel when you heard that men with machine guns had murdered a dozen people at a French newspaper because they did not like its political content? Angry. Afraid. Those of us in the media felt these twin emotions most of all. "I am shaking with rage at the attack on Charlie Hebdo," wrote the New York Times' Roger Cohen. "It's an attack on the free world. The entire free world should respond, ruthlessly."

Rage and fear. These are the twin goals of terrorists. And terrorism is wonderfully effective at achieving these goals. All of our rhetoric about bravery and freedom and honor and Settled Determination to Push Forward After This Tragedy rarely adds up to anything more than rage and fear. Our responses to terrorism are based on rage and fear. Because of this, terrorism works.

The attacks of September 11 were a spectacular success. Is there any other honest interpretation? They were a success not because of the Americans they killed that day, but because we chose to spend the next decade mired in hopeless, counterproductive global wars that cost us trillions of dollars and killed thousands more Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Terrorists wanted to show the world that we were brutal and unjust, and we did our best to help them do that. Terrorists wanted a war, and we gave them one. And we lost. We lost by giving them the stupid, fearful, angry response that they wanted.

Two men with a rifle paralyze Washington, DC for weeks. Two men with a couple of homemade bombs paralyze Boston for days. One man on a plane with a dud bomb packed inside his boots has an entire nation taking off its shoes at the airport for years to come. A small group of religious zealots send three U.S. presidential administrations down a nightmarish rabbithole of drone war, torture, and total surveillance of the citizenry.

Terrorism works. Against us, terrorism works very, very well. Our collective insistence on treating terrorist acts as something categorically different than crime—as something harder to understand, something scarier, something perpetrated not by humans but by monsters—feeds the ultimate goals of terrorists. It makes us dumb. It makes us primitive. It is our boogeyman, and no amount of rational talk will drive it out of our minds.

Terrorists who despise freedom of speech shoot up a satirical magazine. How do we respond? We respond with fear, by censoring ourselves and refusing to show the very images that prompted the attack in the first place. (Nothing new about that—the free press has demonstrated its cowardice on this issue for years now.) We respond with rage, by condemning all of Islam and instinctively calling for a response violent enough to dwarf the violence of the initial attack. We cower in fear and cry for war. We countenance any countermeasure as long as it will keep us safe. We let the ideal we once proclaimed so strongly sink into a pool of terror, and drown.

Sound familiar? It is always the way. We are richer, and mightier, and far more deadly than any of our terrorist foes could dream of being. And yet we happily play into their hands. We declare a "War on Terror" of our own making, an absurd construct with no possible victory. We overreact so harshly to every injury that our reputation as bullies and savages is confirmed. We allow ourselves to be cowed by fear. We allow ourselves to be rendered senseless by rage. The terrorist lays the bait, and we give him the terror he seeks. The terrorist may be the criminal, but we are the hapless suckers who make his act worthwhile.

Terrorism works. But it does not have to. Terrorism reduces us to the sort of society that we claim to despise. But it does not have to. The ideals we espouse when times are calm—justice, understanding, rationality, proportionality, a love of peace—are the ones that we must cling to most tightly when things get scary. If we discard them, we have lost the game from the start.

We cannot control the terrorist. We can only control our response. Let that response be just, and wise, and proportional. Let that response embody the best of who we are, and not the worst. Terror is momentary. A loss of our ideals can last forever.

[Image by Jim Cooke]