Pope Francis, at the end of his week-long tour through Asia, delivered a speech Sunday morning at a Manila university in which he declared that man has a God-given responsibility to protect the environment, The New York Times reports. In shirking that duty we betray God.

"As stewards of God's creation, we are called to make the earth a beautiful garden for the human family. When we destroy our forests, ravage our soil and pollute our seas, we betray that noble calling," the text of the speech reads. According to the Times, the pope went off-script while delivering the speech; when this happens, the prepared text is considered official.

"Respect for the environment means more than simply using cleaner products or recycling what we use. These are important aspects, but not enough," the speech reads, according to the Times. "We need to see, with the eyes of faith, the beauty of God's saving plan, the link between the natural environment and the dignity of the human person."

"This country, more than many others, is likely to be seriously affected by climate change," he told the gathered crowd on Sunday morning. In November 2013, Tyhpoon Haiyan killed at least 6,300 people, left a million homeless and displaced 4 million more.http://gawker.com/cool-pope-says...

Later on Sunday afternoon, six million people—a record-setting number—gathered to hear Pope Francis speak in the capital. "This is the largest event in the history of popes," Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi told NBC News.

Earlier in the week, Francis told reporters that his papal encyclical—a letter from the pope to his biships—on the environment was nearly complete, and should be published in June. He also told reporters that he believed humans are at least partly responsible for climate change.

"I don't know if it is all (man's fault) but the majority is," he said. "For the most part, it is man who continuously slaps nature in the face."

[Photo credit: AP Images]

On Saturday night, multiple shots were fired from a road outside Vice President Biden's home in Greenville, Delaware, The Washington Post reports. According to the Secret Service, the shots were fired from inside a vehicle that then fled the area. No one was injured.

An agency spokesman says Secret Service personnel heard the shots at 8:25 p.m. and then saw a vehicle drive past "at a high rate of speed" on a public road outside the security perimeter. Agents were unable to catch the vehicle.

Biden and his wife were reportedly in Delaware but not at their house at the time, having gone out for the evening.

It's not clear whether any of the shots hit Biden's home and whether the attack was random or targeted, but the Secret Service says it is working with with the New Castle County Police to investigate the incident.

[Image via AP Images]

A$AP Yams, the founder of A$AP Mob—a hip-hop collective whose most famous members include A$AP Rocky and A$AP Ferg—has passed away, The Fader reports. He was 26 years old; the cause of death is unknown.

In a 2013 interview with The New York Times, Yams, whose legal name is Steven Rodriguez, described himself as the Yoda to A$AP Rocky's Luke Skywalker. Members of the collective registered their grief on social media.

No information has been released yet about the cause of Yams' death; however, his extensive drug use was well known. "I got to chill," he had told the Times. "It's not a good look up there in the office. They're not gonna have any faith."

Last summer, in a response to a question on Tumblr asking whether he had gone to rehab, Yams wrote that he had been clean since late July. He subsequently deleted the post.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of our friend A$AP Yams," Polo Grounds Music, A$AP Mob's record label, said in a statement to The Fader. "A true visionary, Yams was a driving force in A$AP Mob. Our condolences go out to his family. He will be truly missed."

if i die before i wake i pray that A$AP will be great my momma good and my girl be late so it'll be another me and the world be straight

— ...... (@ASAPYams) April 26, 2012

[Image via AP Images | Tumblr screenshot via Reddit]

Fighters suspected of being members of Boko Haram kidnapped around 80 people Sunday in an attack on villages across the border from Nigeria in Cameroon, Reuters reports. Many of those taken were children.http://gawker.com/deadliest-ever...

"According to our initial information, around 30 adults, most of them herders, and 50 young girls and boys aged between 10 and 15 years were abducted," a senior army officer told Reuters.

Cameroon's Information Minister Issa Tchiroma Bakary confirmed the attacks to the BBC. "They burnt to ashes almost 80 houses," he said, saying also that the exact number of people kidnapped had not yet been confirmed.

Cameroon's border with Nigeria is "long and porous," the BBC reports; Boko Haram's leader recently warned that raids across the border will increase in intensity.

Thousands of Cameroonian troops have been deployed to the region, supplemented by troops from Chad. According to the BBC, Chad's military has "an impressive record of taking on insurgents."

[Photo credit: AP Images]

At its best, the Miss Universe contest is like a (more) superficial United Nations, complete with flawed solutions to tough policy questions. Just like the real UN, however, sometimes there's just no seeing eye to eye, as was the case with this week's spat over a controversial selfie showing Misses from warring Israel and Lebanon.

According to Lebanon's The Daily Star, Miss Lebanon Saly Greige has faced fierce criticism back home since Sunday, when she appeared in an Instagram photo with Miss Israel Doron Matalon. The offending selfie—which, to be clear, just shows several women from the same beauty pageant sitting approximate to each other—reportedly had some demanding she be stripped of her crown.

Now Greige appears to have thrown her pageant-mate under the bus over the image, posting a version of the photo with Matalon cropped out on Saturday with the following caption:

The truth behind the photo, since the first day of my arrival to participate to Miss universe,I was very cautious to avoid being in any photo or communication with Miss isreal, who tried several times to take a photo with me.

I was having a photo with Miss Japan, Miss Slovenia, suddenly Miss Israel jumped in and took a selfie, and uploaded it on her social media.

For her part, Matalon seems to be taking the photobomb accusation in stride.

"It doesn't surprise me, but it still makes me sad," wrote Matalon on Facebook. "Too bad you can not put the hostility out of the game, only for three weeks of an experience of a lifetime that we can meet girls from around the world and also from the neighboring country."

Oh well. We can give world peace a shot next year, I guess.

[Image via Instagram//h/t Daily Dot]

In Tuesday's State of the State address, New York governor Andrew Cuomo is expected to announce that he will lead a trade mission to Cuba, The Wall Street Journal reports. It's been a tough year for Andrew! He's earned it.

Cuomo would be among the first high-profile U.S. politicians to visit Cuba after President Obama eased restrictions on travel there last week. Six Democratic congresspeople recently took a trip to Cuba as well, Reuters reports.

The New York governor rarely left the state in his first term, the Journal reports. After his re-election in November, he has traveled more, ostensibly part of an effort to focus on import and export deals as a potential remedy for the struggling regional economies upstate.

Or maybe he's running for president! Or maybe getting re-elected was just, like, really hard—there was that whole thing with the Working Families party, ugh, and then that whole other thing with the Moreland Commission, ugh—and the guy just needs a break.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Two high school teachers in Orange County, CA were arrested this week after they allegedly threw an alcohol-fueled overnight sex-on-the-beach party for a group of male students.

It's not clear how old the students were—the Orange County Sheriff's Department reportedly declined to comment on the victims or explain how the two teachers, Melody Lippert, 38, and Michelle Ghirelli, 30, first came under suspicion.

The allegations, via the Los Angeles Times:

South Hills High School teacher Melody Lippert allegedly met a group of male students in November at the beach, where she gave them alcohol and "engaged in a sexual relationship with one of them," according to the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

A few weeks later, Lippert allegedly set up an overnight camping trip to the same beach with some students along with Michelle Ghirelli, who had taught at South Hills before being assigned to work in the school district's offices. The two women are suspected of having sexual relations with the students during that trip, which was not sponsored by the school.

Creepily enough, Lippert and Ghirelli weren't even the first teachers at South Hills arrested this week—that dubious honor went to a part-time girls' wrestling coach, who was arrested Tuesday on charges of inappropriate contact with a minor.

[image via NBC]

A stand-out sketch from last night's strong-all-around Saturday Night Live episode, fronted by Kevin Hart, focused on the real victims of gentrification in Brooklyn: street corner drug dealers.

Set in Bushwick—the "next Williamsburg" and the New York Times' 2010 "Coolest Place on the Planet"—the four-minute digital short also manages to achieve the previously unheard-of: a funny hipster Brooklyn joke.

Greg Plitt, an actor, model and Bravo TV personality, died Saturday after he was hit by a train in Burbank, CA. According to reports, he was shooting some sort of fitness video at the time.

Plitt was reportedly a West Point graduate who appeared on Days of Our Lives, and the Bravo reality shows, Work Out and Friends to Lovers.

"We couldn't take our eyes off Greg Plitt after we cast him on "Work Out"-was as nice as he was beautiful. Seemed invincible, like Superman," Andy Cohen tweeted Sunday.

The details, via CNN:

Police have ruled out suicide, Burbank Police Sgt. Chris Canales said. Plitt, 37, was shooting video with a small crew on the southbound track of the Burbank Metrolink station when an oncoming train struck him.

Witnesses told police the train horn was blaring at the time of the accident, Canales said. It is unclear whether the crew captured footage of the incident.

As USA Today points out, Plitt has posted videos of himself working out on train tracks before:

[image via Bravo]

Freezing rain and icy roads contributed to several large pileups and fatal accidents across the northeast Sunday, leaving at least five motorists dead and dozens more injured.

In Pennsylvania, two fatal accidents shut down traffic for hours. According to the AP, one man was fatally struck getting out of his disabled car on Interstate 76 early Sunday morning. The accident reportedly led to a 60-car pileup that also left around 30 people injured.

JUST IN: Man killed in massive I-76 pileup ID'd as 31-year-old Eric Blau of Philadelphia: http://t.co/tgJwpFREeq pic.twitter.com/nAhnt8zxEi

— NBC10 Philadelphia (@NBCPhiladelphia) January 18, 2015

The crash shut down the highway for "much of the day," the AP reports. Not long after, a fatal 15-car pileup reportedly shut down a second, nearby interstate.

Police in neighboring Delaware County said Thomas Brennan of Lansdale and Jason Anderson of Dover, Delaware were killed when their vehicles hit a tractor-trailer that that lost control due to ice in the southbound lanes of Interstate 476. Police said 15 vehicles were involved in that crash and an ensuing accident, which injured five more people, one seriously.

http://t.co/wE2PmY9UMG Tractor-Trailer Crash Kills Two, Closes I-476 #PHILLYnow pic.twitter.com/xgSdzaGKvC

— PHILLYnow (@PHILLYnowAPP) January 18, 2015

2 killed in crash on I 476 in Broomall. Several cars wedged under tractor trailer. @FOX29philly pic.twitter.com/E8gWRnEAMS

— Matt Toal (@MattToal) January 18, 2015

In Pike County, PA, a fourth driver was killed when his car reportedly flipped over on an icy road, throwing him into the road, where he was hit by a commercial vehicle. And an 88-year-old woman in New Haven, Connecticut also died Sunday, FOX reports, when she struck a utility pole driving in "slippery conditions."

Rt:KallMeKG: Multiple vehicles in crash on I-95 in #NewLondon, CT near exit 83. #Ice #Weather. Via @Local1522 pic.twitter.com/OAMBk908To

— Malini Basu (@MaliniKHOU) January 18, 2015

In New Jersey, emergency dispatchers reportedly logged an additional 460 non-fatal accidents Sunday.

As Holden Caufield once said—and I'm approximating here—"You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and and fuck with the mason jar right under your little kitten nose!!!"

[h/t Tastefully Offensive]

Shortly after he'd been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. sat down with writer Alex Haley for Playboy in what would be the longest interview King ever gave a publication. It's breathtaking, and you should read the entire thing.

Haley's interview, in which King's unbelievable rhetorical and intellectual gifts are on full display, was published in January of 1965 (his Autobiography of Malcolm X would be published later that same year). Three years later, King was shot. I've put some highlights immediately following; you can read the whole interview below.

On President Johnson:

How President Johnson may or may not have felt about or voted on civil rights during his years in Congress is less relevant, at this point, than what he has said and done about it during his tenure as President of the United States. In my opinion, he has done a good job up to now. He is an extremely keen political man, and he has demonstrated his wisdom and his commitment in forthrightly coming to grips with the problem. He does not tire of reminding the nation of the moral issues involved. My impression is that he will remain a strong President for civil rights.

On tactical errors, and the need of a protest movement to have a goal:

The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters. One victory of this kind would have been symbolic, would have galvanized support and boosted morale. But I don't mean that our work in Albany ended in failure. The Negro people there straightened up their bent backs; you can't ride a man's back unless it's bent. Also, thousands of Negroes registered to vote who never had voted before, and because of the expanded Negro vote in the next election for governor of Georgia—which pitted a moderate candidate against a rabid segregationist—Georgia elected its first governor who had pledged to respect and enforce the law impartially. And what we learned from our mistakes in Albany helped our later campaigns in other cities to be more effective. We have never since scattered our efforts in a general attack on segregation, but have focused upon specific, symbolic objectives.

On nonviolence:

Another of the major strengths of the nonviolent weapon is its strange power to transform and transmute the individuals who subordinate themselves to its disciplines, investing them with a cause that is larger than themselves. They become, for the first time, somebody, and they have, for the first time, the courage to be free. When the Negro finds the courage to be free, he faces dogs and guns and clubs and fire hoses totally unafraid, and the white men with those dogs, guns, clubs and fire hoses see that the Negro they have traditionally called "boy" has become a man.

On the differences between Northern and Southern race relations:

If the South is honest with itself, it may well outdistance the North in the improvement of race relations [...] the Northern white, having had little actual contact with the Negro, is devoted to an abstract principle of cordial interracial relations. The North has long considered, in a theoretical way, that it supported brotherhood and the equality of man, but the truth is that deep prejudices and discriminations exist in hidden and subtle and covert disguises. The South's prejudice and discrimination, on the other hand, has been applied against the Negro in obvious, open, overt and glaring forms—which make the problem easier to get at. The Southern white man has the advantage of far more actual contact with Negroes than the Northerner. A major problem is that this contact has been paternalistic and poisoned by the myth of racial superiority.

On the causes of riots:

I mean the white leadership—which I hold as responsible as anyone for the riots, for not removing the conditions that cause them. The deep frustration, the seething desperation of the Negro today is a product of slum housing, chronic poverty, woefully inadequate education and substandard schools. The Negro is trapped in a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign, caught in a vicious socioeconomic vise. And he is ostracized as is no other minority group in America by the evil of oppressive and constricting prejudice based solely upon his color. A righteous man has no alternative but to resist such an evil system. If he does not have the courage to resist nonviolently, then he runs the risk of a violent emotional explosion. As much as I deplore violence, there is one evil that is worse than violence, and that's cowardice. It is still my basic article of faith that social justice can be achieved and democracy advanced only to the degree that there is firm adherence to nonviolent action and resistance in the pursuit of social justice. But America will be faced with the ever-present threat of violence, rioting and senseless crime as long as Negroes by the hundreds of thousands are packed into malodorous, rat-plagued ghettos; as long as Negroes remain smothered by poverty in the midst of an affluent society; as long as Negroes are made to feel like exiles in their own land; as long as Negroes continue to be dehumanized; as long as Negroes see their freedom endlessly delayed and diminished by the head winds of tokenism and small handouts from the white power structure. No nation can suffer any greater tragedy than to cause millions of its citizens to feel that they have no stake in their own society.

On Malcolm X:

I met Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn't enable me to talk with him for more than a minute. He is very articulate, as you say, but I totally disagree with many of his political and philosophical views—at least insofar as I understand where he now stands. I don't want to seem to sound self-righteous, or absolutist, or that I think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of the answer. I don't know how he feels now, but I know that I have often wished that he would talk less of violence, because violence is not going to solve our problem. And in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.

On school prayer:

I endorse [the Supreme Court's 1962 and 1963 decisions outlawing school-sponsored prayer]. I think it was correct. Contrary to what many have said, it sought to outlaw neither prayer nor belief in God. In a pluralistic society such as ours, who is to determine what prayer shall be spoken, and by whom? Legally, constitutionally or otherwise, the state certainly has no such right. I am strongly opposed to the efforts that have been made to nullify the decision. They have been motivated, I think, by little more than the wish to embarrass the Supreme Court. When I saw Brother Wallace going up to Washington to testify against the decision at the Congressional hearings, it only strengthened my conviction that the decision was right.

On his desert island book:

That's tough. Let me think about it—one book, not the Bible. Well, I think I would have to pick Plato's Republic. I feel that it brings together more of the insights of history than any other book. There is not a creative idea extant that is not discussed, in some way, in this work. Whatever realm of theology or philosophy is one's interest—and I am deeply interested in both—somewhere along the way, in this book, you will find the matter explored.

Politics is often comedy. The fact that the robotic and unloveable Mitt Romney may run for president again is funny enough. But Mitt Romney running for president on an anti-poverty platform is truly a comic masterpiece.

Mitt, the stiff zillionaire white bread Mormon management consultant. Has there been much pining for him in the past three years, since he quietly shuffled off the national stage? Not that I have noticed, but I haven't been in Utah much.

It is easy to joke about Mitt Romney's inevitably doomed quest to win the Republican nomination once again, and to point out how it represents the fundamental disconnect between the people who fund campaigns and the people who actually vote in campaigns. But it is even easier to mock Mitt Romney's new pseudopopulist platform, most notably this portion described by the Washington Post:

Romney sought to cast particular blame on the president for promising but failing to make progress in dealing with these problems. "Under President Obama," he said, "the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before. Under this president, his policies have not worked. Their liberal policies are good every four years for a campaign, but they don't get the job done."...

On Friday night, he focused his sights on those who are struggling, saying it is "a human tragedy" that middle-class Americans do not believe that the lives of their children will be better than their own. "People want to see rising wages and they deserve them," he said.

Mitt Romney, who fought strenuously against an attempt to provide health care to poor Americans.

Mitt Romney, who ran on a platform of magically cutting taxes and raising revenue at the same time.

Mitt Romney, who was famously recorded denigrating recipients of government aid to wealthy donors during the last election.

Mitt Romney, who himself became fabulously wealthy in part by employing sophisticated and systematic strategies to dodge U.S. taxes on money he earned by outsourcing American jobs.

Mitt Romney, comedian.

If Mitt Romney is really concerned about raising the wages of the average American worker, the first thing he should do is to become a Democrat.

[Photo: AP]

Minh Nguyen, a co-founder of Plaxo and a techie who was involved in several other startups, was arrested and charged with murder after allegedly shooting his ex-wife's new husband in Virginia. Police say Nguyen's ex-wife was returning home with one of the kids when the attack took place. Two other kids were in the house at the time. NBC reports Nguyen and his wife had gone through "months of strife" over "child custody and visitation issues."

Nguyen's LinkedIn page shows him working as an advisor and investor in the Washington, D.C., area over the past few years. He's best known for co-founding Plaxo with Sean Parker in 2001. Plaxo was a kind of online address book. The company was acquired by Comcast in 2008 for $170 million. Plaxo previously had been criticized for using spammy tactics to hook new users.

You might think of reporters as nothing more than pencil-pushing dorks and neutered Twitter-shouters, and this is basically correct. But according to new Edward Snowden documents published by The Guardian, Britain's NSA equivalent thinks investigative journalists should be treated much like terrorist threats.

The report says that journalists' emails were captured and saved by GCHQ, en masse, by tapping into the fiber optic cables that make up the physical infrastructure of the internet. Once saved to GCHQ's internal network, they could be perused without the senders or recipients knowing someone was eavesdropping:

Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency's intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.

[...]

The journalists' communications were among 70,000 emails harvested in the space of less than 10 minutes on one day in November 2008 by one of GCHQ's numerous taps on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet.

Although it's possible these emails were recorded by accident as part of a much larger indiscriminate email dragnet, Snowden documents show the GCHQ spending time fretting specifically about what journalists are up to:

One restricted document intended for those in army intelligence warned that "journalists and reporters representing all types of news media represent a potential threat to security".

It continued: "Of specific concern are 'investigative journalists' who specialise in defence-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest.

The agency went so far as to rank journalists (who write things) as a more "capable" security threat than actual terrorists (who plot murder on a large scale):

GCHQ information security assessments, meanwhile, routinely list journalists between "terrorism" and "hackers" as "influencing threat sources", with one matrix scoring journalists as having a "capability" score of two out of five, and a "priority" of three out of five, scoring an overall "low" information security risk.

Terrorists, listed immediately above investigative journalists on the document, were given a much higher "capability" score of four out of five, but a lower "priority" of two. The matrix concluded terrorists were therefore a "moderate" information security risk.

Emphasis added. Terrorists: one single priority point lower than Reuters.

Photo: Getty

Despite many gracious pleas for the cessation of this practice, it appears that wealthy people (in Canada) are making bold and whiny public declarations of their puzzling inability to "afford" the lifestyle they purport to deserve.

Today's almost-impossible-to-believe journey into financial fantasyland comes courtesy of the Globe and Mail's "Financial Facelift" column, which offers advice to people struggling with their finances. Today's beleaguered couple: Eric and Ilsa, a doctor and a dentist, respectively, with five kids and a combined income of $450,000 per year. Their struggle: although they are "living rent-free in a relative's house" currently, they need to move out soon—"Last fall, they bought a building lot for $1.1-million and are planning to build a house large enough for their family and a live-in nanny."

But this is all very expensive!

"Two professionals should be able to afford a modest house, but we can't get the numbers to work and would appreciate some help," Eric writes. He earns $200,000 a year working one day a week in a medical clinic. But his real love is teaching, which he does one day a week at a university; this earns him $100,000 a year.

Two professionals should be able to afford a [HOUSE LARGE ENOUGH FOR SEVEN PEOPLE AND A LIVE-IN NANNY] [WITHOUT TAKING ON ANY DEBT] [WHILE WORKING A TOTAL OF TWO DAYS PER WEEK]! This is a message we can all get behind.

The actual expert advice offered: Eric should work three days a week.

On this Martin Luther King Jr. day, please take a moment to remember Eric and Ilsa and others who are unable to fend for themselves.

[Photo: Flickr]

Reminder: Gawker is trying a new publishing system where we post less often to the front page. Read about the change here. Happening elsewhere: Newsfeed Jessie J Can Sing "Bang Bang" With Her Mouth Closed, And It's Terrifying | Justice Study: Half of America's Public School Children Qualify For Free Lunch | Defamer Billy Crystal On Gay TV Scenes: I Hope They Don't "Shove It In Our Face"

Over the weekend, the New York Review of Books published a long essay by Michael Greenberg about the standing hostility between mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Police Department. While writing the piece, Greenberg found himself at a bar in Glendale, Queens, where several N.Y.P.D. cops had gathered after the funeral of slain Officer Rafael Ramos. What did they talk about? Bill de Blasio “sucking the cock of every protester” of police brutality—and a lot more:

A diminutive, white-haired sergeant climbed onto the top of his stool, silenced the bar, and in a booming voice delivered a rhyming toast that ended with the verse, “De Blasio is nothing but a whore’s court jester, sucking the cock of every protester.” The cops in the bar roared, and three or four officers followed with de Blasio–hating toasts of their own. Drinks flowed. A retired detective from Yonkers reminisced in great detail about the various suspects—or “mutts”—he’d clobbered and left for dead. When he saw me listening and obviously suspected I wasn’t “one of us,” he said, with an unconvincing smile, “None of those stories are true, understand?”

Greenberg’s entire report is more than worth reading in full, especially for his investigation of the perceived power relations between the N.Y.P.D. and the elected officials of New York City:

Contempt in the bar expanded from de Blasio to politicians in general. There was the sense that, as police, they believed themselves to hold an unquantifiable power over elected officials. The idea seemed to be that there was a pact between law enforcement and politicians. Cops did the dirty work, they waded in the muck, keeping the poor and violent in check and monitoring the human detritus that is the result of inequities they’d had no hand in creating. In return, politicians turned a blind eye to the excessive use of force. On the beat, cops could have their way.

In case there were any remaining doubt: The N.Y.P.D. is an embarrassment to the City of New York.

Read the rest of Greenberg’s essay here.

H/T Ali Gharib · Photo credit: AP

If current trends continue—and there is no reason to suspect they won't—we may be just a year away from a time when the wealthiest 1% of people in the world control the majority of the wealth.

Oxfam has released a new report on the dispiriting accumulation of more and more of the world's wealth in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of outrageously wealthy individuals. You may recall that in 2013, the bottom 50% of people on earth—about 3.5 billion people—had only 1% of global wealth. Here is a stark indication of just how fast the very rich are getting richer: " In 2010, it took 388 billionaires to equal the wealth of the bottom half of the world‟s population; by 2014, the figure had fallen to just 80 billionaires."

Eighty people have as much wealth as three and a half billion people. If you do not view this as an alarming threat to peaceful civilization on earth, you are either a fool or a billionaire. Furthermore, Oxfam says that the share of global wealth held by the richest 1% currently stands at 48%, and should cross the 50% mark by 2016. At that point, we can make it official: it is the top 1%'s world. The next 49% of us are just living in it. The bottom 50% of us are just dying (pretty soon, of preventable causes, without leaving an inheritance).

[Image via Oxfam]

The New Year, or South Philadelphia's share of it, was being assembled in a warehouse with a bright yellow Cottman Transmission sign at the entrance, right on the corner of 13th and Reed. "You don't want to get a screw in your foot," Jinks warned me. All around us were the raw materials and detritus of fun: brightly colored vinyl sheeting; racks of satin dresses, fringed costumes, and sequined suit jackets; prickly tinsel; stacks of lumber; buckets of nails, screws, and paint.

Jinks—his full name, mostly unused, is Howard Jenkins—is the head marshal of the Murray Comic Club, which has been part of the city's Mummer's Parade for 79 of the parade's 115 years. There were four days to go, and the space was full of stage setups worked up in secret. A few men were sweeping and organizing props to be loaded into moving trucks. Jinks, gray-haired and dressed in the club's blue and gold colors, pointed out a mock police car with rotating red lights, huge cardboard dice and roulette wheels, a tribute to Robin Williams with a person-sized painted genie one on side and a Captain Hook illustration on the other. He and his team had been in the warehouse every day since Christmas, a campout marked by Sterno cans and two-liter bottles of soda on a foldable table.

"I'm starvin'," Jinks said to one of the club's captains, Dennis Pellegrino. "What are those?"

"Mozzarella balls," Pellegrino said, holding up a quart container of cheese in oil and a Ziploc bag of shredded pork.

"Too much oil," Jinks said, though it came out Too much erl. "Nah."

"This parade will be my 31st," Jinks said. "I'm a newbie as far as people go. I got taken out of my house by two friends. Well, one was a friend and one was a new guy, captain of a club out in Southwest Philly. They wanted me because I'm mechanically inclined. Within two hours, I had a key to the club; within two weeks I was head marshal. I've been trying to get out since."

A young Murray Club mummer

Despite growing up in Philadelphia, I had never been to a Mummers Parade in person before. The parade for me was a thing on television. Marching up Broad Street, groups of 40 or 50 men wearing sateen clown outfits would strut to music, music that came from either brass bands driven alongside them or from huge speakers carted in U-Haul trucks. These were the comic and wench brigades. When they would arrive at City Hall, they'd perform lampoony skits that addressed current "issues," the quality of actual performance depending on the brigade and the level of investment it had made. A lot of times it just meant drunken strutting, a backward and forward motion requiring a little handheld umbrella as a prop, bobbing up and down above each wily head. Occasionally there would be actual choreography, all done with a beer can in one hand.

The more elaborately costumed brigades—fancies, fancy brigades, and string bands—all brought with them strict movements and over-the-top design to their shows, a few of which ended up with live performances at the Convention Center as detailed and impressive as a Broadway show. Their stages were the pride of Philadelphia, built by electricians, contractors, and other blue-collar workers in their limited free time from their everyday lives.

I'd been born in England, but with family in Philadelphia, and when I moved to the US at age eight, I fell instantly in love with the Americanness of the parade. Here was the home of pancakes for breakfast, throwing a softball around in the backyard, unwavering love for regional sports teams, and the mummers in all their joyful strangeness.

Yet behind the promise of good things to come in the New Year, what the revelry conjured over the years was an ever-receding history. My grandfather, who was raised in a house on Mifflin Street in South Philly, right near the Italian Market, used to play banjo in one of the string bands, though his memory of it is murky and unreliable. It used to be hard to find anybody in or near the city who wasn't affiliated with or connected to a mummer, but that isn't always the case anymore.

"In Southwest Philly, we had 60 comic brigades," Pellegrino said. "Five of the top ten were from Southwest Philly. It was bragging rights. We'd make bets."

The parade has begun to look noticeably smaller, the crowds thinner, the costumes more or less unchanged. There's a cultural atavism that goes beyond the dustiness of the outfits—though blackface routines were banned in 1964, the comic brigades' idea of satire can still be aggressively retrograde, alienating the nonwhite majority of the city's population.

For 2015, the parade was being rerouted and shortened. The number of participants was down to about 8,000, from 12,000 in 2001. "The people say they support us but they don't come out to see us," Jinks said. The new route—starting at City Hall and marching South on Broad—would only cause a further loss of interest, he feared.

"Shorter parade, less police, less money, less trash cleanup. It's all about money. We haven't had prize money in ten years," one of the club's captains said.

What was at stake, Pellegrino told me, was an entire community that had grown up around the tradition. "It's not the parade," he said. "It's being here, we're like a family. Everybody here has been in everybody's wedding. There's christenings, birthdays; unfortunately, funerals. It's family. It's not just about the one day."

Members of the Cara Liom N.Y.B.

By the time I made it to the garage at 7:30 a.m., in the freezing cold of New Year's morning, the Murray Club had been buzzing for hours. While the rest of the city slept off its headaches, I'd dressed in thermal underwear, two pairs of socks, and two pairs of gloves.

The garage door was open. "Happy New Year, Jinks," I said.

"Well it's not so happy right now," he said, and then his phone rang. He growled into it as I watched a man in workman's boots toiling away at fixing a stalled-out loading ramp on the back of a huge truck. A multicolored train made of light wood and vinyl festooning needed to get up onto the truck, and several of the captains were brainstorming ways to get it there without the ramp. They could all lift together. Or they could wait for the ramp to be fixed. They could utilize a different truck.

In the middle of this, two yellow school buses showed up to pick up the club's parade participants, blocking traffic on the narrow street. Outside, the neighborhood was quiet but for an occasional mummer, walking in full decorative gear and face paint down the empty streets toward one club or heading off toward the parade's beginning. It was like getting to see Disney World before the gates opened.

As Jinks mulled the truck-loading issue, a full brigade of comics started marching backward up Twelfth Street, accompanied by a loud brass band. For a fleeting minute, everyone arranged outside of the garage stared intently in their direction.

Jinks had agreed to station me at his right hand for the day of the parade, which meant riding in his black Dodge sedan while he organized his 2,000 people at the new starting point, down the street from City Hall. In the driver's seat, he looked harried but determined.

"You want a behgel?" he asked.

"Oh, a bay-gel. I'm okay, thanks."

The excitement begins to grow

Have you ever seen an action movie where the main boulevard of an entire city is magically blocked off, and the heroes can fight the villains on a street that is free of cars? That's what Broad Street and Market Street in Philly looked like on New Year's Day before 9 a.m. Jinks, happily bullshitting and charming police officers, was given permission to drive up and down, backward and forward, along any area in the vicinity of the parade, as long as he stayed dutifully with the Murray Club. Without notice, he would throw the car in park and jump out to yell at someone or direct a truck toward its proper location.

Every minute, people would lean into his open window and shake his hand, kiss him on the face. By my count, there was not one person in Philadelphia who didn't know Jinks, and he treated everyone with good-ol'-boy decency, throwing in a few jabs and jeers here and there to assert his power. I sat in the passenger seat, a proud companion.

As the brigades set up and congealed, the mummers made final adjustments to their routines, touched up their costumes, added liquor to their drinks. They danced and smiled and said hi to one another. They stopped in Starbucks for coffee where many a mummer stood patiently waiting, attempting to not look nervous or preoccupied while in full costume. A select few comics brigades were undertaking the task of downing an indeterminate amount of alcohol before the 10 o'clock showtime. The sun was coming out; it was a beautiful day in Philadelphia and the one hundred and fifteenth annual Mummers Parade was about to start.

I said goodbye to Jinks and he handed me a ceremonial camouflage walkie-talkie as I got out of the car.

"You can get in touch with me on there, if you need me," he said. "I probably won't be able to hear my phone." I wandered off down Market Street toward the back of City Hall, taking in the very first performers of the day. Camera in one hand and a coffee in the other, I marched toward William Penn with the mummers, capturing their ageless garb on camera and raising my cup to cheers them. By the time a brigade of comics dressed like Yellow Submarine-era Beatles appeared, I was laughing and whooping like an idiot, standing all by myself.

A glittery member of the Vaudevillains

A nearly 20-foot tall mechanical cat was lurching toward City Hall. Wild paws outstretched, it chased angrily after a group of "Internet Spirits," dancing and moving in costumes embellished with computer chips and screen-printed 1s and 0s: a net-neutrality allegory, playing out for a boozed-up holiday crowd in a century-old setting. The giant cat and his feline cronies, who wore suits and fur masks—the Comcats—antagonized and threatened the internet spirits, plugging a plug into a giant outlet that read "ABSOLUTE POWER [WARNING: WILL CORRUPT ABSOLUTELY]."

The performance—one part interpretive dance, another part art show—was the most captivating thing I'd seen all day, a direct attack on behemoth cable corporation that dominates Philadelphia's business and civic life. Comcast built a 974-foot skyscraper that altered the Philly skyline forever in 2008, and in 2014, the cable company had announced that it was building another one, more than 150 feet taller than the first.

The Comcats performance was put on by a relatively new brigade called the Rabble Rousers, made up of young artists, and it had people in the stands both laughing and looking confused. "People do a lot of things in the Mummers Parade in the name of satire," Jesse Engaard, one of the Rabble Rousers' captains, told me after the parade. "Satire is supposed to be about making power structures change."

That upstart attitude toward satire was lost on the audience watching the Mummers Parade at home. The telecast captured the fancies' abundance of Native American headdresses and glittered turbans—the standard old-fashioned appropriations—and more open displays of backwardness. One man in a wench brigade carried a sign that read "Wench Lives Matter"; another sported an Obama mask and held a placard that read "Illegal Aliens Allowed."

But when the Rabble Rousers appeared, the live broadcast on PHL17 cut away, and stayed away. Footage of it did not appear on the station's online archive of the parade till five days later, well after the other performances had been posted.

Engaard said he was angry about the situation, but that it would only make him recruit harder for the next parade. "I love it so much that I either want to destroy the whole thing or fix it," he said. "I think the biggest obstacle is convincing the establishment of the Mummers Parade that it has to change and make itself more palatable to Philadelphia in order to survive."

The Rabble Rousers weren't the only thing keeping the parade from feeling like a museum piece. Another brigade, the Vaudevillains, unleashed a performance that felt like something from Burning Man: bright, sparkly jumpsuits and a dance routine with professional finesse. Working on the theme "Mummers in the Stratosphere," they'd dressed up a man like the sun king and sent dancers in tie-dyed rainbow gear to float around him. The sight of the artsier, younger brigades was exhilarating, a vision of a route the parade could take to enter the future after all.

"The parade occupies a weird position," one of the Vaudevillains' captains, Adam Leeds, told me afterward. "On one hand it's a citywide parade, and it's on New Year's Day, which is an important day, but on the other hand, it's also the parade of a specific set of neighborhoods and a specific set of ethnicities in South Philly, and those neighborhoods are continually changing. It needs to change. It needs to include more kinds of Philadelphians."

Or the parade needs to notice the people it already includes: Alongside the comic brigades rolled huge flatbed trucks carrying the brass bands. The band members didn't wear costumes, but were dressed in heavy layers, scarves, and hats like the crowd, their instruments crushed together in a shining array of sousaphones, trombones, trumpets, and more. The bands are made up almost entirely of Philadelphia's black musicians; they see themselves as hired session players, and that's how the brigades regard them. The brass bands do not call themselves mummers.

One group of horn musicians in particular spent all day tirelessly bumping out Macklemore hits in between a certain Meghan Trainor song, keeping the crowd animated and energized. I watched them play, awestruck, as they were hauled slowly in a truck caged in by black bars, leading the charge of a group of mummers.

One of the parade's many brass bands on Two Street

The march down Broad Street was one long party. I ate a three-dollar salted soft pretzel from a cart; I met up with friends. I found my uncle and cousin dressed as Smurfs in the Cara Liom Wench Brigade and took pictures with them. My cousin is 13 and was tired of being a mummer; he looked surly and bored even dressed as a jubilant cartoon character in bright blue face paint. The sun was shining and all my layers were making arm movement almost impossible. Every so often I would get a call from Jinks and we would yell our individual locations to each other over the phone, in the hopes of crossing paths. At one point, he picked me up in his car on Pine Street and we chatted for thirty seconds before I got back out and marched south again.

At the end of the day, the journey culminated in an even bigger party. After all the brigades had been duly judged, many of them ended up at Washington Ave and South 2nd Street, or "Two Street" as it's locally called. The brass bands and their accompanying comics brigades, as well as the amazingly on-point and put-together string bands, performed a condensed replay of the festivities down Two Street. It was drunker, louder, and more fun.

Between performances, one very intoxicated woman attempted an Eagles chant: "E . . . A . . ." She did it so slowly that she forgot to continue, and a group of her friends around her laughed. All of South Philly was out in the street and barely 15 seconds passed without well-wishers offering a Happy New Year to strangers.

An alien-themed string band

Amid the music and the dancing and the beer and the neighbors and the running around on Two Street, pride overcame ambivalence about the tradition. A mummer in Smurf gear came up to me as I marched with a friend and proclaimed, "Oh my God, I've found you. My wife." Then he disappeared. Two neighborhood residents insisted I take a Jello shot, open-faced in a takeout condiment container, a nuclear orange color. I never take Jello shots from strangers. I danced with a mummer friend whose face was obscured by a giant fabric heart and decided, after all, to take the shot. The chilled citrus alcohol mixture burned slightly as it went down.

[Photos by Dayna Evans]