Hi there. We're trying something new out for the new year, which means Gawker's going to be publishing things a little differently. Let me explain.

Starting today, Gawker.com is going to slow down. Don't worry—as an editorial operation, we'll still be producing as much writing as we did before (probably even more). We're just going to put less of it on the front page.

Instead of publishing the majority of our stories directly to the front page, we'll be publishing them on to a set of subject-focused sub-blogs (a.k.a. "verticals," or, cutely, "diagonals"—I personally prefer to just borrow newspaper terminology wholesale and call them "sections"). Some of them—Valleywag, Defamer, Morning After—already exist. Others—focused on media, news, and politics—we've created.

The front page will update less frequently than it did before, and it will feel a bit more like the front page of a newspaper, with the best, most important, and most representative work from across the sections. At best that will mean exclusive stories, original reporting, strong arguments, funny jokes, breakout posts, and breaking news: The best and most popular of what Gawker is producing at any given moment.

What does this mean for you?

For a lot of our readers, who come to Gawker through links on Facebook and Twitter (or in their email or IMs), this won't mean much of a change except a slightly different URL and logo.

For those of you who visit Gawker.com directly but infrequently, the change should be a good thing. Instead of our former posting schedule pushing articles down the page faster than anyone could keep up, the stories we're proudest of and happiest with will get their time to shine.

For those of you who visit Gawker.com several times an hour (and thank god for you), you can change your Gawker bookmark to http://newsfeed.gawker.com, where the imaginatively named Gawker Newsfeed will deliver to you everything being posted to every section.

If you read Gawker with an RSS reader like Feedly or Feedbin, switch your feed to newsfeed.gawker.com/rss .

Most excitingly to me, the new structure should allow for a lot more flexibility and personalization for readers. If you come to Gawker for entertainment gossip and celebrity news, but hate our Silicon Valley coverage, you can now just bookmark http://defamer.gawker.com and only check Defamer. If you love our criminal justice stuff, but don't want to read about viral videos, you can stick to http://justice.gawker.com, our newly launched blog for politics, justice, labor, and inequality.

What sections can I read, and which new ones are you launching?

Five of them already exist:

Valleywag: Silicon Valley news and gossip
Defamer: Hollywood gossip, entertainment news, movie coverage
Domesticity: Home, lifestyle, parenting
Morning After: Everything TV
Gawker Review of Books: Books and everything that's in books

And we're launching another five to create homes the rest of the kinds of stories that we cover:

True Stories: First-person accounts of real-life events
TKTK: Media news and power gossip
Justice: Politics, justice, labor, inequality
Internet: Internet culture, cybersecurity, dark web dealings (formerly "Weird Internet")
Newsfeed: The news feed, in addition to sharing posts from the other nine sites, will be the home for breaking news and viral video.

"TKTK" should be taken literally: We're still in the process of naming and designing logos for the new sections. (If you have any suggestions, drop me a line.) As they develop independent voices, and as we think of good names, we'll give them more specific identities; for now, we're using generic names to get readers used to the idea.

In addition to the ten broad sections, we'll also be maintaining our regular collection of personal, subject-focused blogs:

The Vane: Dennis Mersereau's home for weather and weather media reporting
Fortress America: Adam Weinstein's security and politics blog
Dog: A dog, with a blog
Sausage: Behind the scenes in the Gawker editorial process, such as it exists
Antiviral: Jay Hathaway debunking, hoax-busting, and fact finding the worst of the viral web.

If this seems like too much to keep track of individually, don't forget: If you want everything, you can just check out http://newsfeed.gawker.com.

Why are you doing this?

For a detailed explanation, you can read a memo about Gawker 2015 here. The capsule is: This is the best way to serve our readers the stories they want to read, and to give our writers the space to take the risks we want them to take.

It'll be messy, a lot of our most dedicated readers might hate it, and traffic will take a hit. But I think that we'll be rewarded in the long run by providing readers with more focused ways to get the stories they want, and by giving writers more freedom to experiment without "front page" pressure.

Questions? Comments? Concerns? I'll try to hang out here below to post to address any worries, and I'm also available at max@gawker.com.

Who says you need a cock to crow? Here's a mashup we did using the instantly notorious ass-eating scene from the Season 4 premiere of Girls and audio from Allison Williams's embarrassing turn in Peter Pan Live.

Your past tends to come from behind to bite you in the ass. Here, it licks.

Showtime's new sex-murder-mystery series, The Affair, won awards in two categories Sunday night at the Golden Globes, leaving most viewers asking themselves Which one was that? The old-timey doctor one?

Which one is The Affair?

The Affair is Showtime's prestige mystery series, starring Jimmy McNulty from The Wire, Alice from Luther, Pacey from Dawson's Creek, and Abby Lockhart from E.R. It was promoted with big photos of its stars swimming in the ocean and looking sultry?

Should I watch it?

How much free time do you have?

If you like relationship dramas and/or flashback murder mysteries (reminiscent of True Detective) and/or Long Island beaches, and have a high tolerance for characters who make bad decisions, you should give it a shot. Otherwise, stay far away.

What's it about?

Mostly, it's a weekly hour-long Hamptons vacation. Ruth Wilson (Alice) and Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty), both non-American actors, play attractive New York adulterers with decidedly out-of-state accents. In supporting roles are the excellent Maura Tierney (Abby Lockhart) and Joshua Jackson (Pacey), rounded out by a cast of TV veterans including Mare Winningham, Kathleen Chalfant, John Doman, Victor Williams, and that one girl from Bunheads.

The show takes its time introducing its titular vow-breakers over what was, at times, a very long season. Noah, played by West, turns out to be an approval-seeking, grumpy writer from Brooklyn who married up, while Allison, portrayed by Wilson, is a working class girl stuck waiting tables and having listless sex with her amazing husband (when she's not running drugs.)

But the show's big, defining thing is the point-of-view gimmick.

What's the point-of-view gimmick?

Each episode tells the same story twice—once from Allison's perspective and once from Noah's in an hour-long armchair detective game of "Spot the Difference and Speculate Endlessly About What It All Means."

Except last week, co-creator Sarah Treem—who accepted the Golden Globe award on behalf of the show—clarified what the various wardrobe and dialogue tweaks mean to the show's central mystery: they don't mean anything at all!

One rule we did follow in the memory construction is the MORE STRESSFUL THE SITUATION, THE MORE DIVERGENT THE MEMORY. So, if you remember from the pilot, they have radically different memories about who saved the daughter from choking. That is not, as you say, "easily brushed off by tricks of memory." Someone clearly saved the kid and someone didn't. Someone has constructed a memory. But to me, it doesn't matter. All that matters, when you're telling a memory play, which I've always maintained this is, is how each party remmbers the incident and what that tells the audience about their respective character.

Is it good, though?

the affair was a bad TV show

— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) January 12, 2015

the affair was bad

— max read (@max_read) January 12, 2015

How The Affair won for anything beyond Best Show Called ¨The Affair¨ is beyond me. And I can't believe it would even have won that.

— Caity Weaver (@caityweaver) January 12, 2015

I don't trust those peoples' judgment.

It's not that bad, it's just not a very good show. It tries to do a lot of things that, while individually interesting, don't always work coherently. There's the affair plot, but to get there you also have to sit through an overly intricate storyline about town meetings and zoning regulations. There's a good chunk of time dedicated to Joshua Jackson portraying a rugged, emotionally-attuned cowboy, but first you have watch Noah struggle with a boring inferiority complex he has with his father-in-law. And someone got murdered, I think? The show had so much crap packed into it that the particulars of that fairly important plot line got pushed to season 2.

That being said, the acting is pretty good. And did I mention Joshua Jackson plays a rugged, emotionally-attuned cowboy? Because he plays a rugged, emotionally-attuned cowboy.

So why did it win two Golden Globe awards?

Because it has a gimmicky plot device? Because Ruth Wilson, who won her category, and Dominic West, who did not, are both top-notch actors who can handle playing two subtly different versions of the same character?

To be honest though, no one really seems to get why it did so well at the Golden Globes.

According to the Golden Globes, The Affair is better than Mad Men.

— Vulture (@vulture) January 12, 2015

So The Wire never won a Golden Globe with McNulty, but The Affair won a Golden Globe with McNulty? What kind of awards show is this?

— Bill Simmons (@BillSimmons) January 12, 2015

While I don't think The Affair should have won an award for best drama, the people involved in making it have always seemed very cool.

— emilynussbaum (@emilynussbaum) January 12, 2015

Happy 4 @KevinSpacey tonight. HOC & @RobinWrightWeb didn't bring home the gold? Their Macbeth is truly "The Affair" to remember. Amazing.

— Bryan Cranston (@BryanCranston) January 12, 2015

A Belgian film exec is a BIG fan of The Affair apparently

— josh groban (@joshgroban) January 12, 2015

[images via Showtime]

Our nation has chosen Boston as the city that will be bidding to host the 2024 Olympic games. They're not gonna get it, though.

The 2024 Olympics are summer Olympics. Boston is best known for being encased in a block of ice. Why would you want to be there in the summer time?

I don't see it happening.

The other U.S. cities that Boston beat out were Washington, L.A., and San Francisco. All of those are better cities than Boston. Why didn't they pick one of the better cities, rather than the worst one? It's a mystery. Ask yourself: "Out of the four cities on that list, where would I most like to go, in order?" Now imagine the Olympic Committee asking themselves the same thing. You see what I'm getting at.

Boston is well known for being full of rude people.

Now, Boston will have to compete against a global list of cities including Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Istanbul. Once again, Boston faces the problem of being the worst city on the list. Rome is a better city than Boston. No contest. So is Paris. Not even close. Berlin? Way better than Boston. Istanbul, likewise. Hard to see how Boston comes out ahead in this competition. Or even lodges a respectable finish. Did they really think this through?

If you go to Boston the first thing you want to do is leave. Try it and see.

The Olympic games bring the attention of the entire world to one city for a brief, shining moment. Do we want the attention of the world focused on Boston? If that happened, everyone would see Boston people and assume that they "represented America." As an American, do you want to be associated with that? Rude people, with shellfish juice dripping down their chins, who can't hold a witty conversation? Strategically it's a misstep. There's no denying that.

It's fine to live in Boston. Everyone has to live somewhere. We don't go putting every last hovel on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens, though. If you get my drift.

Some of the most popular events in the Olympics are gymnastics, track and field, wrestling, and basketball. Some of the most popular events in Boston are drunken violence, violence against those perceived as "different," drunkenly running one's car into the plate glass window of a bad Italian restaurant, and ice hockey. Ice hockey is not even a sport in the summer Olympics. Futility, thy name is "A Boston bid for the summer Olympics."

Basketball is popular in Boston, I guess. Not as popular as drunkenly issuing terroristic threats against citizens of other New England states while wearing a pink baseball cap, but fairly popular. There's a point in Boston's favor.

There are many fine educational institutions in Boston. That could be helpful if Boston were bidding for the Math Olympics. Is Boston bidding for the Math Olympics? No. Boston is bidding for the real Olympics—an international showcase in which a nation wants to project its best possible image. Someone fouled up here. Big time.

We're all Americans. We're all pulling for Boston. The only thing that can—and will—lose this Olympic bid is Boston itself, and its attitude.

[ Photo: Flickr]

This week in bollocks: Cadbury Creme Eggs, the delicious confections that are everyone's go-to favorite springtime pre-workout snack, have changed in two unsavory ways for their forthcoming Easter season: the eggs are gonna be pricier this year and the recipe in America is a farce. What in the godfearing fuck is this shite?

Let's break it down by individual controversy. First, if you live in the UK, you're about to face a price uptick that is hidden as a minimizing. Cadbury Creme Eggs are typically sold in packs of six (the amount a normal person can eat in one sitting) and now will be sold in packs of five—but for the same price, The Daily Mail reports. Come on, man! That's not cool. Get it together.

But worse: for consumers of the American version of this English delicacy, Kraft Foods admitted that they've tinkered with the recipe so that the eggs' outside chocolate shells are not made from Cadbury's delicious Dairy Milk chocolate. A Kraft spokesman told The Mirror that the chocolate will be made from a standard cocoa mix instead. Hell no, Cadbury! That is some serious bullshit! We're not gonna take this anymore. Give us the good stuff, not this other crap.

BLASPHEMY! MORAL OUTRAGE! DISGUST! SOBBING! RT @MailOnline Cadbury downsize Creme Eggs http://t.co/94QIpVDWx1

— Maria Lewis (@moviemazz) January 12, 2015

Come on, man.

[Image via AP]

After all of Gawker's writing about last week's fatal shooting at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical weekly apparently targeted by extremists over its depictions of the prophet Muhammad, a French Gawker media reader named Flavien Vidal contacted me.

"I'm not a journalist, but I enjoy writing once in a while, mostly for Opposite Lock which sometimes get published on Jalopnik," he wrote "I wanted to react and give my answer to the accusations of racism that are facing Charlie Hebdo on Gawker and explain why I feel that what you wrote on the subject is very, very wrong."

Flavien's post is below.

Last week, a U.S.C. journalism professor named Marc Cooper wrote on Facebook that New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet had demonstrated “absolute cowardice” by refusing to publish any Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting Mohammad in his paper. In response, Baquet called Cooper an “asshole.” We can disagree on whether or not Cooper is an asshole. But let’s agree on this: If Dean Baquet thinks someone is an asshole, he should say so in public.

We highlight this mundane point because today the journalism experts at Florida’s Poynter Institute weighed in on Baquet’s retort in an essay titled: “Why editors shouldn’t call readers a**holes.”

“It’s possible,” writes media ethicist Kelly McBride, “that those who recognize how hard it is to create great journalism every single day of the year were animated by the idea of the polite and prestigious editor of the country’s biggest newspaper swinging back in response to a cheap shot.”

But, McBride adds:

I wish he wouldn’t have. ...

The name-calling diverted our attention. I bet it felt good in the moment. And for others, perhaps it provided a vicarious moment of satisfaction in the face of smug self-righteousness. But in the long run, calling Cooper an asshole harms the very condition that Baquet and the rest of journalism strives to create: an informed and engaged citizenry.

“Name-calling starts,” McBride concludes, “when reasonable listening stops.”

This a fundamental misunderstanding of Baquet’s comment. He used the word asshole to describe a tenured professor of journalism—who by definition straddles two worlds full of fucking assholes (hello). Reporters are assholes. Editors are assholes. Professors are assholes.

It is statistically impossible for a journalism professor not to be an asshole. Not calling Cooper an asshole, regardless of the merits of his argument or the tone of his post, would have left a crucial fact unreported. The citizenry would have been left uninformed. The polity would have remained unengaged.

McBride, of all people, should realize this. It’s not “name-calling” to point out a pertinent fact.

Anyway: Stay salty, Dean. You motherfucking asshole.

Photo credit: YouTube

Justice This Tax Bill, Which Will Not Pass, Is Exactly What America Needs | Internet Crayola's Facebook Spammed Sex Instead of Crayons and No One Cared | Defamer Who Rocked the Best Golden Globes Red Carpet Look? | Newsfeed UVa Reinstates Frat at Center of Rolling Stone Rape Controversy

Remember, we're publishing things a little differently than usual. For more, read here:

The official Twitter and YouTube accounts of CENTCOM—the Pentagon branch that oversees American military power in the Middle East—is now an unofficial propaganda machine of the ISIS "Cyber Caliphate."

Update: CENTCOM's Twitter account has been suspended, but you can view a cached version of the defaced site here:

The @CENTCOM account is now host to a series of threatening messages:

AMERICAN SOLDIERS, WE ARE COMING, WATCH YOUR BACK. ISIS. http://t.co/iZULe4nTmp #CyberCaliphate

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) January 12, 2015

pic.twitter.com/SdaoKO6Zkr

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) January 12, 2015

Along with attached images that appear to list the contact information for Pentagon personnel, both active and retired:

We won't stop! We know everything about you, your wives and children. pic.twitter.com/ixz82lCDES

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) January 12, 2015

Central Command's YouTube channel is now the home of delightful videos like "FLAMES OF WAR," which shows acts of violence against American soldiers:

And guerrilla classic, "O Soldiers of Truth Go Forth":

A Pastebin statement was also tweeted out, including links to alleged "leaked" (and pretty boring) Pentagon materials:

Pentagon networks hacked

AMERICAN SOLDIERS,

WE ARE COMING, WATCH YOUR BACK. ISIS. #CyberCaliphate

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, the CyberCaliphate under the auspices of ISIS continues its CyberJihad. While the US and its satellites kill our brothers in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan we broke into your networks and personal devices and know everything about you.

You'll see no mercy infidels. ISIS is already here, we are in your PCs, in each military base. With Allah's permission we are in CENTCOM now.

We won't stop! We know everything about you, your wives and children.

U.S. soldiers! We're watching you!

Here's a part of confidential data from your mobile devices:

Defaced Twitter and YouTube accounts won't affect the ability of CENTCOM to find and kill ISIS fighters—and none of the data released seems to be anything sensitive (if they're even real). But the fact that ISIS (or ISIS sympathizers) could easily take control of online accounts run by the Pentagon is deeply, deeply embarrassing, and indicative of a federal government that still can't fucking use a decent password. Good thing CyberISIS-9000 didn't try breaking into something that really matters, or this could be a lot more than humiliating.

To the long list of permanently offended types lurking the internet, lying in wait, to meet the news of the day with self-indulgent grief, we might add one more populous and prickly tribe: colorblind white people who've grown "tired" of talking about race. What seems to cause a not-insignificant amount of distress for members of this identity group is the merest whiff of suggestion that racial inequality continues to shape American life. And so, let me warn you: I'm about to describe a recent interaction with a white family member, who is resolutely "over" race, and the degree to which that exchange has redoubled my conviction that racism stubbornly still exists.

First, some backstory. I'll admit I wasn't as moved as some of my friends by what happened in Ferguson. In retrospect, maybe I got played, but to my mind that convenience store footage mattered, as did some of the subsequent eyewitness testimony. The refusal to charge Daniel Pantaleo with even negligent homicide or manslaughter in the documented killing of Eric Garner, however, combined with the two-second execution of Tamir Rice in Cleveland and all the other abominable slayings at the end of last year was cause for a lot of sadness and reflection.

After the Staten Island verdict, a close photographer friend, who is also black, and I decided to proceed with a project we'd talked about since summer. We launched a Tumblr to compile the oral histories and portraits of as wide a variety of black men as possible. Our goal is simply to do whatever little we can to complicate what is still far too often a tragically basic understanding of what it means to be black and male in America. We made a call for submissions on Facebook and, as would be expected of something like this, received plenty of positive feedback and encouragement from friends of all colors. It all seemed rather innocuous.

But then my 20-year-old white cousin, with whom I've only ever really bantered and exchanged pleasantries, inserted herself into the thread, angered and challenging the worthiness of our desire even to tell these stories about black men. "Will you be doing one with white people?" she asked. "Maybe a long time ago the life of a black man would have been considerably different at no fault of their own … but now I believe if the life of a black man is any different than any other person's life it is their choice and their doing. Your skin no longer defines who you are unless you let it."

It brought to mind a widely circulated and apocryphal tweet from a Chris Rock parody account after the Darren Wilson verdict: "Just found a new app that tells you which one of your friends are racist. It's called Facebook." But it wasn't funny so much as flooring. I stared at the screen, something closer to fury than pain coursing through me. I should say straight up: I'm hardly a black man with a victim complex. I've written and spoken a lot about personal choices and what I've seen to be the self-sabotaging side of so much black cool-pose culture. I'm also quick to acknowledge that life was exponentially harder in, say, my father's youth in the segregated South. But what would seem so glaringly true to me—that none of that obviates the need to acknowledge and address lingering racial inequality, especially the systematic brutalization of (often but not always poor) blacks at the hands of police —was somehow lost on my cousin.

I grew up on the East Coast and now live in France; my cousin has always lived around Los Angeles County. We've only seen each other a handful of times. I can't claim to know everything about her, but by all accounts and impressions, including my own, she's a sweet, caring girl. I saw her last in August at my brother's wonderfully mixed-up wedding in upstate New York. He's friendlier with her and her boyfriend than I am, since they'd recently bonded in California over off-roading, poker and talking about the NFL. I know that my cousin likes my brother and would even say that she loves him.

I also know that she must know this about him: About a dozen years ago, when he was pulling up to my parents' home in Fanwood, New Jersey, a couple of white cops were waiting for him with an arrest warrant (which later turned out to have been issued by the court in error) for an unpaid speeding ticket. Over such insignificant (and mistaken!) paperwork, these two officers ended up assaulting my brother in the driveway and, as he attempted to get himself to safety through the garage door, followed him inside and knocked his teeth from his mouth with a flashlight. My then 65-year-old black father, hearing the scuffle, came downstairs to be greeted, in his own home, by the barrel of a loaded gun. The only thing that could get these two impeccable servants of the law to cool their rage was the sight of my white mother holding a cordless phone to her ear, calling the lawyer, the neighbors, the station chief—anyone who could possibly do something to stop the attack.

When it came to discussing race with my 20-year-old white cousin, maybe—certainly—I was naïve. But I just wouldn't have wagered that a member of my own family could on the one hand be aware of the kind of racially motivated abuse my brother and father endured and on the other so glibly declare racism an exhausted topic. I told my cousin as much, and over the next few days we exchanged a series of comments and private messages. After I pointed out to her that blacks are some 21 times more likely to be killed by police, she countered that it can only be because they are deserving of it. "It's like names in a raffle," she explained. "The more names you have in a raffle, the more chance you have of your name getting picked." No amount of appeal on my part to census data or crime statistics showing why that threadbare logic can't possibly hold in a nation so overwhelmingly populated by whites could sway her.

On the subject of crime statistics, the exchange took on an ugliness I began to feel was impossible to recover from. In attempting to trump the debate, my cousin came back to me with a link to a website called metapedia.org, a laughable if it weren't so despicable trove of "facts" I'd never heard of, which bills itself as "the alternative encyclopedia." The site trumpets impossible statistics and hosts sections on correlations between race and intelligence, and race and physical beauty. I wrote back to her that a line had been crossed: some bells can't be unrung (nor can some spurious links to The Bell Curve be unseen). When I pointed out how offensive all of it was to me, my cousin swiftly passed through stages of what the scholar Robin DiAngelo has termed "White Fragility," or the "state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, spurring a range of defensive moves including the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation." Our exchange did not end well: my cousin unfriended me.

In the wake of this encounter, I vented to my wife and argued with my cousin's grandmother, my beloved aunt, who tried to arbitrate the matter as a simple difference of opinion—a blindness to the severity of my claim that only further exacerbated it. Finally, I returned to DiAngelo's paper, struck anew by what she describes as "the reduced psychosocial stamina that racial insulation inculcates" in many whites. And it is this, I'm afraid, that while it may be a lot easier to cope with and ignore than the rabid bigotry of the past, will prove much more difficult to overcome. What we are seeing today, often played out on social media, is the banal reality that far too many white people, even loving, caring and close ones, frankly are unprepared to talk seriously, candidly and at any reasonable length about racism and race.

Having been reminded of that, I'd imagined I'd end this piece on a pessimistic note. But as I began to write, my cousin messaged me an apology. She explained that in her work for a housing management company she'd had to tell a potential client, a dog owner, about the landlord's no-pit bull policy. The client responded by disparaging the breed, assuring my cousin she would never have such a terrible and dangerous animal as that. My cousin told me this saddened her because she herself owns and loves pit bulls and felt the woman had stereotyped them based on nothing more than misinformation and illegitimate statistics…

My cousin is young. This analogy is not ideal. And yet it is a start. I hope she will find the energy to pursue its implications where they lead her.

Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Losing My Cool.

[Image by Tara Jacoby]

On Sunday, 3.7 million people gathered all over France to mourn the lives of those killed in last week's Charlie Hebdo attack. It was almost a moving collective stand for freedom of expression in the face of terror and fear—except that its most prominent supporters are much greater threats to a free press than terrorism.

As the non-profit Reporters Without Borders noted on Sunday, and as London School of Economics Middle East Society co-president Daniel Wickham elaborated in a widely disseminated series of tweets, the world leaders given prominent photo-op placement at the Paris rally are not only free-press hypocrites—they're by any measure worse threats to the world-changing possibilities of a free press than a couple terrorists with guns.

Your murderer's row:

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron

In 2013, the British prime minister publicly threatened to use court injunctions against newspapers that published information from the Edward Snowden leaks. When the Guardian published anyway, technicians from the GCHQ arrived at the newspaper's office and forced editors to destroy their hard-drives with angle grinders.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

In July, Reporters Without Borders detailed what it called the "deliberate targeting" of news professionals with arrests and intimidation by Netanyahu's Israeli Defense Forces in the 2014 Gaza conflict. The next month, Palestinian photojournalist Rami Rayan was found among the dead after an IDF rocket attack on a Gaza marketplace. He was wearing a vest marked "PRESS."

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu

Turkey imprisoned more journalists than any nation in the world in 2012 and 2013. China officially took its seat last year, but many more reporters remain behind bars, and Prime Minister Davutoğlu's government is currently prosecuting nearly 70 journalists who covered a recent corruption case.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas

Mamdouh Hamamreh, who works for the Palestinian TV station Al-Quds, joked on Facebook that Palestinian President Abbas looked like Fayez Kazak, an actor who played a spy on a popular TV show. For that, he was sent to jail. (They do look like each other, for the record.)

King Abdullah II of Jordan

Last year, Mudar Zahan was sentenced to up to 15 years hard labor in prison for publicly criticizing the state. Zahan was granted asylum in the UK, where he currently lives.

Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita

French journalist Dorothée Thiénot was expelled from the city of Gao, where she was living, after reporting on the Malian army's executions of suspected Islamist militants.

Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar

Qatari poet Mohammed al-Ajami was arrested in 2011 and sentenced to life in prison for writing a poem that allegedly insulted Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. His sentence was later shortened to 15 years.

Slovenian Prime Minister Miro Cerar

In 2013, Slovenian blogger Mitja Kunstelj was sentenced to six months in prison for "defaming" and "insulting" two fellow journalists on his blog.

Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny

In Ireland, blasphemy is a criminal offense.

Polish Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz

Polish law enforcement officials raided the office of the magazine Wprost after it published a secretly recorded conversation between two government officials last year.

Saudi Ambassador to France Mohammed bin Ismail Al Al-Sheikh

In May, Saudi blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashings for "insulting islam." He was flogged in a public square in the city of Jeddah just two days before the rally.

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras

Photojournalist Tatiana Bolari was beaten by riot police at a demonstration in Athens last year, even though her gear "clearly identified her as a journalist," according to Reporters Without Borders.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry

Two Al-Jazeera journalists were sentenced to seven years and jail and one to 10 years in jail after they covered the ouster of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and subsequent demonstrations.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov

Russia famously banned LGBT "propaganda" in 2013. Last year, officials arrested a journalist for interviewing an advocate of Siberian independence.

Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra

Algerian authorities jailed radio journalist Abdessami' Abdelhai for 15 months without charging him after he allegedly helped a newspaper editor flee the country. The editor had been charged with "endangering national security" because he publicly discussed president Abdelaziz Bouteflika's health.

Here, Wickham points to several other noble defenders of expression who had the courage to attend the rally. U.S. officials were notably absent, but had they showed up, rest assured that they would have made the list too.

[image via AP]

Sasha Frere-Jones, who is not a black French woman, has accepted a job with annotation start-up and ephemeral website Genius (formerly known as Rap Genius), leaving his comfortable perch as pop music critic at analog paper magazine the New Yorker. Presumably, Genius offered Frere-Jones the promise of an intellectually stimulating experience, a chance to mold editorial content in his image, and a trough of cash and stock options.

Perhaps you, the media observer, haven't noticed, but Frere-Jones is only the latest in a long conga line of writers and editors leaving "legacy" or "old guard" or "broadsheet" publications for "start ups" or "web-based media" or "mobile apps," and often for luminous 3-G salaries. That's great! Websites rule, and truly are our future. I can't wait to see these pioneers produce wonderful things.

Ah, but there's the catch: the actual production of things at these new "properties," (which aren't always run by "media folk"), seems... to be cloudy... it sometimes... doesn't happen... where is the stuff? We all know what you're getting paid, but what are you... doing? Exactly? Hello?

Location: Glass-walled conference room. One suit and one former legacy journalist with feet on table. Stumptown in the French press. They're there to talk ideas, and their discussion goes as follows. Journalist: "I got some big ideas. I'm thinking Hong Kong. Yeah, Hong Kong is hot. So are teens. Let's do a travel guide for teens in Hong Kong. We can make it interactive so they don't even have to go! Let's make it an app. Oh, we don't have the tech? Ok, we can do a listicle. Assign it to the intern. Great. High five." Repeat for two years until start-up runs out of money and crashes into the East River. Legacy journalist goes to work at the Huffington Post.

The newspaper industry, which had all but been reduced to shreds eight years ago, knows suffering well. And it is still suffering; the New York Times just bought out/laid off 105 souls. Newsmen (a group which includes women, and dogs) are traditionally one of the least respected classes of Americans, along with one of the lowest paid. This is correct. Journalists read and write and learn things and talk to people all day. The job is a beautiful luxury. In fact, journalists should not make money. They should work for free. They should pay the government for the privilege to do their job, which is mostly gossiping. But at most, they should not earn more than $90,000. Any more is an insult to certain public servants and municipal workers (but especially teachers, public defenders, and bus drivers) and the entirety of the service industry.

This is not a capitalist argument. Really, people who make money are useless. If you would like to read more about this, please visit the writings of my colleague, Hamilton Nolan (though he's gotten a bit softer in his advancing age). Earnings of all Americans should be capped. What will these newly rich "journalists" do with their wads of cash? They will buy fancy sneakers and send their children to private school. They will buy country homes. They will become (bigger) assholes. Because that's what money does to people. Therefore everyone should earn the same amount of money. If this is how the government functioned in the first place, there would be no mega buildings ruining the shadow cover over Central Park.

Anyway. With all these new "media properties" hiring bold-faced-and normal-faced-named writers for inflated salaries, we are surely in a new media bubble. Much like nice weather in January, the bubble cannot last long. Who will reabsorb these writerly souls when it pops?

[image via Wikipedia]

There are two sure-fire ways to get yourself immediate mainstream media attention: Allude to terrorism, and do it on Twitter. Someone purporting to represent the dread Islamic State did both Monday, proving the U.S. military's public affairs business is a trainwreck but accomplishing little else.

When ISIS, or an ISIS acolyte, or a disgruntled soldier, or some lunatic rando with WiFi, commandeered U.S. Central Command's Twitter and YouTube accounts Monday, the act could be seen by outsiders as a devastating deed of derring-do for the brutal militant group. Critics have long underestimated the Islamist syndicate at their peril, as it rolled back America's "gains" in Iraq and established a quasi-state state in the fog of regional civil war. Its mostly millennial coreligionists have long been obsessed with tech and media—although its social media capabilities and achievements have long been overblown by reporters, too.

The most recent hack seems to have exploited that nervous sensitivity in the media, causing a lunchtime sensation by using CENTCOM's accounts to post pro-ISIS propaganda videos and images purporting (falsely) to show sensitive U.S. military info. "You'll see no mercy infidels," the hacker wrote on Pastebin. "ISIS is already here, we are in your PCs, in each military base. With Allah's permission we are in CENTCOM now."

This will likely be the jolt of horror leading evening news reports tonight and occupying Fox News screamers for days to come. Don't believe it. The hackers have nothing of value so far, and they've proven nothing—except, perhaps, the absurd futility of soldiers running social media accounts.

First, despite the hacker's "Pentagon Networks Hacked!" insistence, it was dumping nothing unclassified or sensational in its tweets from the CENTCOM account, and it offered no reason to believe it had anything important in its possession, other than a few old military and academic presentation talking points.

As my colleague Sam Biddle points out, the hacker did tweet out some contact info for soldiers and retired generals, along with stock threats to their families, which deserve to be taken a little seriously, owing to their specificity. But none of that info is secret, or even difficult to obtain.

"[T]here's no evidence that any DoD system, computer or network has in any way been compromised," Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said Monday.

Sure, but... still. Of course Uncle Sam would say that. Could the hacker have gotten something else juicy from its incursion into CENTCOM? Nah. Most military work computers that contain sensitive non-classified information don't even run Facebook, Twitter, and other "timewaster" websites; in Iraq, we needed to requisition a special "clean" console to run social media, and that web-surfing console could do very little else. And all of these systems were very separate from SIPRNET, the secure intranet the military uses to share secret data. This means that you simply can't access sensitive military information by cracking a weak Twitter password.

And that's all this was: a banal takeover of weak social media accounts. How easy is it? Speaking as someone who helped set up the Army's first social media accounts in Iraq in 2008 and 2009, it's really, really easy.

I knew someone who once went to a conference at the Naval Academy and guessed their wifi password because it was B34t4rmy #CyberWar

— Kelsey D. Atherton (@AthertonKD) January 12, 2015

Typically, social media is a low-order priority for military public-affairs outfits, a place to stash "grip and grin" photos of soldiers getting medals or doing hometown howdies that only their families would probably care about. The accounts are often run by junior service members or contractors, and security is light.

Thus Monday's attack was not a hugely impressive one, embarrassing and bold as it was. It seemed a one-off crime of opportunity. CENTCOM's Facebook, Flickr, and Pinterest pages were all unmolested Monday, for example. (Though why the hell the theater-level headquarters for military operations across 20 countries needs a Pinterest page flummoxes even me, a former military public affairs flack.)

This sort of thing is not uncommon—LulzSec, an offshoot of Anonymous, once hacked the CIA's external home page, leading to this XKCD comic (h/t to Paul Jones):

Finally, it's unclear who even did the CENTCOM hack. The hacker's rhetoric certainly claims some strong affinity with ISIS, but some observers have pointed out that ISIS rarely refers to itself as ISIS; that the MO sounds an awful lot like that of the anti-ISIS, pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army; and that it's always possible that a bored or disillusioned soldier decided to screw his bosses over for the lulz.

Does all this mean we shouldn't take ISIS seriously? Of course not; it's a confederation of bloodthirsty psychotic assholes who have long threatened to kill Westerners in their homes, as they've killed thousands of innocents in Iraq and Syria. But neither should we overstate the threat they pose and perpetuate the ever-spinning myth of ISIS's cyber-savvy. Perhaps instead, we could focus on the incompetence and pointlessness of military-sponsored social media accounts.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

Babies are like wallpaper: Some houses have them, some houses don't. But Blake Lively's baby may have even more in common with wallpaper than we would have guessed, which was already an amount slightly above average. Her name might be "Wallpaper."

Did Blake lively name her baby "Wallpaper"?

In pursuit of fact, we turn now to an article on PEOPLE.com titled "The Hilarious Way Amber Tamblyn Found Out That Blake Lively Gave Birth." In it, Lively's Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants co-star and fellow member of Lively's sisterhood of traveling pants, Amber Tamblyn, describes how Lively coaxed her into a visit without revealing she had just given birth.

"That bitch! She tricked me! I went up there and I didn't know, everybody knew but me, and she does that shit to me. She was texting me about wallpaper, she was like, 'You gotta come see my new wallpaper,' and I went up there, and there was her baby."

And there was her baby.

Allow us to make a slight edit to PEOPLE.com's article—to convey a nuance that could have been lost in speech:

She was texting me about Wallpaper, she was like, 'You gotta come see my new Wallpaper,' and I went up there, and there was her baby."

She was texting me about Wallpaper.

You gotta come see my new Wallpaper.

Wallpaper...

...Lively.

Wallpaper's name has not yet been officially confirmed by Lively.

[Image via Getty]

We're trying a new publishing format. Read about it here. And check out what's going on elsewhere: Newsfeed Teen Girl Violently Attacked Classmate Who Farted Near Her: Prosecutor | Justice The Rich are Expected to Represent Us All | Defamer Leonardo DiCaprio Photobombs His Way Back to Decent Model Percentage

This is the cover of the Charlie Hebdo issue set to be released on Wednesday. Libération, which is helping to publish the issue, says more than three million copies of the magazine will be printed.

Mahomet en une du «Charlie Hebdo» de mercredi http://t.co/2JGWBH2Qpz pic.twitter.com/1AzjFiFvmL

— Libération (@libe) January 12, 2015

One of the things you learn when you spend any time reading ISIS Twitter is that ISIS Twitter is filled with the cutest darn jihadis you've ever seen.

There's basically no context provided for any of these images, popular among Twitter's thriving ISIS and ISIS sympathizer community—mostly just tots posing before the increasingly iconic al-rāya black flag. Most of these come from Twitter user Osman Iraqi, who maintains a feed consisting mostly of beheading video stills, Islamist cartoons, and combat photos. And... babies!

@naser1758 @kkkhhhmmm9 @gghhgg123478 @mggggen @isiscoool @tvjh12 @aaalaajmiii @binjuher1 @RimaTati22 @allliraqi pic.twitter.com/PHy4ZvRiU6

— عثمان العراقي (@allliraqi) January 12, 2015

Aw.

@grand44telecom @is__is__ @gm_isis @yaserababel @allliraqi pic.twitter.com/bbVPBvTcXx

— عثمان العراقي (@allliraqi) January 12, 2015

Awwww.

@om__osaid @isiscoool @marmaar93 @Isis01323state @k_a_i_z @ISIS_GUN @isisbomb_4 @iis_____iis @KChourfi @allliraqi pic.twitter.com/bkAijt8ZW4

— عثمان العراقي (@allliraqi) January 12, 2015

Number one dad.

@Khattab_Isis @saif5albari5sh5 @fajer_aljihad @allliraqi pic.twitter.com/Nrp9k1TbxA

— عثمان العراقي (@allliraqi) January 12, 2015

Alawwwhu akbar.

@zainab22_ak @omsa1268 @gsaan2009 @lslalslam898989 @hhmmwwnnnii @allliraqi pic.twitter.com/aqizKefcHi

— عثمان العراقي (@allliraqi) January 12, 2015

#الدولة_الإسلامية_قريباً_في_جزيرة_العرب #الحدود_الشمالية #الدولة_الإسلامية #آل_سلول #باقية_وتتمدد #الخلافة_الإسلامية pic.twitter.com/kBdMxXTu1N

— عثمان العراقي (@allliraqi) January 11, 2015

@MajedSLeftawi @khalifa_now @allliraqi pic.twitter.com/a9TW3N7Qhf

— عثمان العراقي (@allliraqi) January 12, 2015

It's almost easy to forget the lives of these children are being coopted for propaganda purposes by a murderous criminal conspiracy. ISIS has so far proven pretty lousy at building the next great caliphate, but its media savvy is—really—unquestionable.

To contact the author of this post, write to biddle@gawker.com

Sure it could just be an accident, but I saw the 1994 winter Olympics.

Our modern-day Nancy Kerrigan—best supporting actress in a miniseries nominee Kathy Bates—was reportedly injured by an unknown assailant during the Golden Globe broadcast Sunday night.

The onlooker tells Us Weekly that Bates, 66, "screamed out in pain and almost collapsed" before steadying herself on a chair. It's unclear what happened, but the eyewitness speculated that someone may have stepped on her foot.

But where other outlets see an "accident," I see something different: "professional jealousy."

Just spitballing here, but seems to me there's a handy list of suspects already drawn up by the Hollywood Foreign Press. And who can say what best supporting actress in a miniseries nominee Allison Janney is really capable of? Can anyone prove best supporting actress in a miniseries nominee Uzo Aduba—who probably has access to a wealth of former cons among the consultants on the set of Orange Is the New Black—definitively didn't do it?

"[Bates] limped back to her table and looked to be crying in pain," the onlooker says, adding that people were en route to tend to the actress.

There's no way best supporting actress in a miniseries nominee Michelle Monaghan thought she had a chance in hell of winning, so she's probably not involved. Did she even show up? But best supporting actress in a miniseries winner Joanne Froggatt, who would suspect her? Exactly. If she's winning awards for her acting skills, can we really trust anything she says?

UPDATE: Us Weekly caught up with Bates at the Patron-sponsored Fox party, where she said, "I'm fine now! I'm absolutely fine."

This injustice has not gone unnoticed Kathy Bates! But was it Janney? Really seems like it could've been Janney.

[image via AP]

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It seems like it was only weeks ago that our image of Britney-sister Jamie Lynn Spears as the type of person who wouldn't go for a knife during a brawl at a Pita Pit was forever shattered when she did go for a knife during a brawl at a Pita Pit. And now, we can all watch it.