Eddie Murphy's servicey appearance on SNL last week was historic in nature but ultimately bland—though not for lack of trying, says an especially chatty Norm Macdonald.

Macdonald, who wrote the Celebrity Jeopardy segment for the anniversary show, said today on Twitter that Eddie Murphy actually came thisclose to playing Bill Cosby before ultimately declining the role.

Even so, Murphy did return to the stage for his first show in 30 years—for a minute, following a four-minute introduction from Chris Rock.

SNL would later edit the segment to make it appear less awkward online.

But hey, it was almost something:

Among many other things, this show was to be the return of Eddie Murphy.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Eddie, the man who, in Lorne's absence, kept the show alive. Singlehandedly.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

To every comedian who ever performed on SNL, what Eddie accomplished was unthinkable.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Every Saturday Night at 11:30 Eddie Murphy, a kid, would fill 90 minutes with comedy.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Impossible.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

The last anniversary was the 25th. Eddie did not attend due to a remark by David Spade. David is a very kind man, but his remark was not.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

So Eddie never came back.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Until last week.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Higgins had the idea. A video daily double.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

The category would be potent potables, a common one on Jeopardy, but one we somehow had never done.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

And the idea was that it would be a bar set. And the idea was that Cosby would be mixing a drink in a video that was taped 6 months ago.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

At the end of the sketch, Darrel would choose potent potables. Homebase would be dressed as a bar.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

The iconic doors would open and on to home base would step Eddie Murphy. The audience would know what to do.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Why is Eddie wearing a multi-colored sweater?He steps behind the bar, begins mixing a drink. The audience covers the fact he has not spoken.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

When he speaks, he is Cosby. Eddie Murphy doing a perfect Cosby impression. The audience does not let him finish. The sketch ends.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

The middle man to talk to Eddie was @BrettRatner, a cool guy who knows a great deal about comedy. He was with Eddie somewhere.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

So, the talks were underway. "Brett says Eddie doesn't feel comfortable", "Eddie says 'maybe it's ok since he's doing pre-allegation Cosby"

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

And on and on it went. I had not spoken to Eddie or @BrettRatner. I was dead sure Eddie would do it. Most others were not.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

And chaos seemed ready to sink it all. So I went to Lorne.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

And Lorne was in his office,which overlooks 8H,which overlooks 40 years of memories.And he was looking out the window, down on to the floor.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

And I was very nervous and he was perfectly calm. "Perhaps it would help if you called Eddie", and that was that.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

And then comes Eddie.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

It's my job to talk him in to doing Jeopardy.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

We talk in his dressing room a good hour. When it's over, I'm convinced he'll do it.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

He doesn't.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

He knew the laughs would bring the house down. Eddie Murphy knows what will work on SNL better than any one.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Eddie decides the laughs are not worth it. He will not kick a man when he is down.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Eddie Murphy, I realize, is not like the rest of us. Eddie does not need the laughs.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Eddie Murphy is the coolest, a rockstar even in a room with actual rockstars.

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) February 19, 2015

Keenan Thompson ended up playing the role:

Nor was Murphy the only celebrity Macdonald journaled about Wednesday. Sayeth Macdonald: Alec Baldwin and Tom Hanks are the best at playing dumb, the Celebrity Jeopardy sketch was stolen "note-for-note" from an SCTV skit, Sarah Palin is "gorgeous" and "irresistible," and a Rolling Stone writer hurt Macdonald's feelings :(

[The entire story, which is well-worth reading in full, pieced together from Macdonald's twitter]

It was some week. I got in early, Monday, so I could write. It was a massive undertaking, a 3 hour show. People were exhausted. I worked with Lori Jo Hoekstra and Steve Higgins,who was always in a suit, because he had to go be Jimmy's sidekick, every day, round 5. I saw Lorne, thanked him, congratulated him, and shook his hand as Canadians do. He accepted. Got that out of the way early. Mood was too relaxed. I was confused as to who exactly was to be in charge of this thing. It was to be Lorne Michaels. Of course. It was to be Lorne. They wanted Celebrity Jeopardy. Higgins had two funny categories already figgered. I came up with the idea of Celebrity Jeopardy years ago by stealing it, note for note, from an SCTV classic, Half-Wits. Higgins and I co-wrote the first one years ago and I waited for Martin Short to host so I could ask permission to steal. He said that Eugene Levy had written the original. We received permission and beside Darrel and I,the talented Mr. Short played Jerry Lewis. It was always difficult to fit in that final celebrity. We never wanted a celebrity to be dumb, although many, even within the show, thought that was the idea. The idea was for Connery to be abusive and Burt to be dismissive. Sometimes people ask me who the funnier character is, Connery or Burt. The funniest character in Celebrity Jeopardy, by far, is alex Trebek as played by Will. Without Will's perfect take on Trebek,maddened by the outright hostility of Connery, the faraway uninterest of Burt, the sketch is nothing. Nothing but Rich Little nonsense. It was always the third podium that was hard to find a man to stand behind. It would inevitably only be an impression, nothing but an empty showcase. The best to do it was Hanks, playing dumb Hanks. Hanks always got it.And Alec too. So we hunkered down to write it. 40th anniversary and all. Had to be the best one. Tough job. Very tough. Then I was told it was to have a lot of impressions, 10 or 12, so a lot of big stars could be seen impersonating other big stars. This was bad news. Celebrity Jeopardy was never about impressions. In real life, Connery is the opposite of Darryl's take. Connery was the perfect gentleman, Burt was the funniest guy in the room. Celebrity Jeopardy was about hope. It was about the hope of one man, Alex Trebek, the hope that never died. The audacious hope that never let the facts of the past interfere. It was a rhythm piece, as each disaster was signaled by the sound of a buzzer, and each new category signified more, new, hope. And the 3rd contestant was the tough one. The third attitude always just out of reach of Higgins and me. And now we were being told we would have to do a dozen impressions. The rhythm would be gone. It was what it was, though, and what it was to be. How could it be saved from becoming an episode of copycats? And then Higgins had an idea. An idea that would blow the show wide open. Among many other things, this show was to be the return of Eddie Murphy. Eddie, the man who, in Lorne's absence, kept the show alive. Singlehandedly. To every comedian who ever performed on SNL, what Eddie accomplished was unthinkable. Every Saturday Night at 11:30 Eddie Murphy, a kid, would fill 90 minutes with comedy. Impossible. The last anniversary was the 25th. Eddie did not attend due to a remark by David Spade. David is a very kind man, but his remark was not. So Eddie never came back. Until last week. Higgins had the idea. A video daily double. The category would be potent potables, a common one on Jeopardy, but one we somehow had never done. And the idea was that it would be a bar set. And the ide a was that Cosby would be mixing a drink in a video that was taped 6 months ago. It was perfect. It was all Steve Higgins idea. At the end of the sketch, Darrel would choose potent potables. Homebase would be dressed as a bar. The iconic doors would open and on to home base would step Eddie Murphy. The audience would know what to do. Why is Eddie wearing a multi-colored sweater?He steps behind the bar, begins mixing a drink. The audience covers the fact he has not spoken. When he speaks, he is Cosby. Eddie Murphy doing a perfect Cosby impression. The audience does not let him finish. The sketch ends. The show, for all intents, ends. All the impressions are forgiven. The first thing to do is cut down the number of contestant/impressions and the second is to contact Eddie and to convince him to do it. The middle man to talk to Eddie was @BrettRatner, a cool guy who knows a great deal about comedy. He was with Eddie somewhere. So, the talks were underway. "Brett says Eddie doesn't feel comfortable", "Eddie says 'maybe it's ok since he's doing pre-allegation Cosby". And on and on it went. I had not spoken to Eddie or @BrettRatner. I was dead sure Eddie would do it. Most others were not. Still, there was so much work to do. Mike and Dana showed up. They were going to do Wayne's World. I joined the writer's room, which Mike helmed, and tried to help. Mike Myers has an incredible work ethic and no joke is ever good enough and must be beaten, must be beaten. This is what makes him so good. This is why he has created a half-dozen perfect comedies. Work ethic, remarkable taste, and never taking no for an answer. I Higgins would stick his head in the room from time to time, tell me another celeb had been cut and make me happy.I kept trying to help Mike. I didn't get a single joke into Wayne's World. It was a great sketch, and he did a top ten list, best things about SNL. When, on air, he announced, "number 1, the crew", the studio audience, unprompted gave a standing ovation. I'd never seen this in 8H. Jim Downey, the best writer who ever touched pen to paper, showed up Wednesday, with a copy of Rolling Stone in his fist. The magazine had listed all 141 sat members and raked them, best to worst. "Guess where you ranked", he laughed and I knew from the laugh it was low. "As long as I beat…."and I mentioned a girl who lasted 4 episodes. The joke was that I really hoped I would beat a girl who nobody had ever heard of. The bigger joke is that I hadn't. My mind searched for an even more obscure cast member. I remembered the first year SNL hired an older man because they didn't think all kids could play characters of age. "As long as I beat George Coe", I said, making a fine joke. Again the truth was a finer joke. Coe had easily outranked me." And on it went. I should say that it was not the magazine that ranked us, but a single writer. I looked him up and found a book he had written. He doesn't deserve to be named and his book was sentimental nonsense meant to look like something Dave Eggers would write. But, in all fairness, it was not the magazine who did the ranking. At least I think. Anyway, it made for a very funny running joke. The idea of jokes approved by a writer the caliber of Jim Downey being called lame by some sappy "writer" was a great joke. Downey was in charge of the political pieces, the best of which he had written, and nobody knew what was going on with Update. At least that's what I was told the dozen or so times I was asked. Who was in charge of Update, i asked and eyes would get shifty. Was it the guy that wrote the Rolling Stone thing? Still, had to write Jeopardy. Higgins, Lori Jo, and I would stay late into the night, then go to PJ Clarks and end the nights at 3. It was like the old days. The old days. We worked straight through, me with my Winnipeg Jets jersey, Lori Jo in a beautiful dress, Higgins in his Tonight Show suit. Downey had remembered a thing Bill Murray used to do around the office, the theme from Jaws, and thought that would be perfect. But there was a problem. Bill Murray was in Carmel for the Pro-Am, which he had won a couple of years back with DA Points. With Bill Murray, golf always comes first. And so it was Saturday and Bill Murray may not make it and Eddie Murphy may not do Jeopardy and who was in charge of Update? And chaos seemed ready to sink it all. So I went to Lorne. And Lorne was in his office,which overlooks 8H,which overlooks 40 years of memories.And he was looking out the window, down on to the floor. And I was very nervous and he was perfectly calm. "Perhaps it would help if you called Eddie", and that was that. My son got in on Saturday and wandered as the stars became bigger and bigger around him. I'm talking to Lori Jo and Higgins and Fred and my son and suddenly Paul McCartney is there. And he is in the circle of us and Lori Jo talks of being a vegan and he says his daughter works for Gucci and is a designer, but no leather. My son and I look at each other. Very cool. And the 4 of us follow McCartney in to 8H and he sits behind the piano and does 6 songs. I take a video on my phone of Fred Wolf, striking a Dylan pose, with McCartney in the background at the piano, singing. I get all filmmaker and go over Fred's shoulder and get real close to Paul and when he finishes he is looking directly in to my camera. Then, as he finishes one and goes in to another I feel a hand on my back. The hand of security. Solid hand. There is Sarah Palin, gorgeous, and you can understand the charisma. She is irresistible. Too many superstars to take in all at one time. So happy my son could see them all. And then comes Eddie. I'm standing with my son, Lori Jo, and Chris Rock. We see Eddie from 100 yards away. Rock says, "There he is. Like Ali in Zaire." Eddie, Bomaye. It's my job to talk him in to doing Jeopardy. We talk in his dressing room a good hour. When it's over, I'm convinced he'll do it. He doesn't. He knew the laughs would bring the house down. Eddie Murphy knows what will work on SNL better than any one. Eddie decides the laughs are not worth it. He will not kick a man when he is down. Eddie Murphy, I realize, is not like the rest of us. Eddie does not need the laughs. Eddie Murphy is the coolest, a rockstar even in a room with actual rockstars. Quite a week.

A Brooklyn cop trying to shoot at a dog took out a slightly more substantial target—his boss.

According to reports, the officers were responding to reports of a loud argument at an apartment complex Tuesday when an "aggressive pit bull" entered the fray. Via ABC:

The officers were in the hallway when a pit bull mix was let out of one of the apartments. The dog charged at them, according to police, and the officer fired a shot at the dog.

The shot grazed the dog, possibly ricocheted off a wall, and then struck his sergeant in the right foot just below his big toe.

"The dog didn't bite the cop or anything, I don't know why he bust a shot," the woman who owns the dog told ABC. "My friend's thinking it's the person she just had the altercation with so she just flies the door open, it was the cops you know? Like [friend] look through the peephole! You don't just open the door. The dog ran out and I heard a gunshot."

Both the sergeant and the pit bull are expected to survive, but the shooter's career is reportedly on life support.

[screenshot via ABC]

Allison Williams, a woman who has not (to the best of my knowledge) ever undergone a DNA paternity test, says you can trust her father.

Williams was speaking at the 92nd Street Y with Seth Meyers when he asked—gently—about how Brian Williams is doing these days.

"My dad has always been there for us, 100 percent of the time," Williams said in response. "One thing this experience has not done is shake my trust and belief in him as a man. He's a really good man, he's an honest man, he's a truthful man, he has so much integrity, he cares so much about journalism."

Okay that's cool, but you got any anecdotes?

In 2003, when he was in Iraq for the war, I was in ninth grade. And there was a father-daughter dance at the end of the year, and before he left, he was assuming he'd be back in time for the dance. And then as the date was coming, it didn't seem like he was going to make it, but he had promised. And so then, a couple of days before, I was so upset, and I got a surprise call from Iraq from my dad. And he was asking if I had a date to the dance.

So that's the kind of guy my dad is.

Williams leaves untold the conclusion of the story—was he calling long-distance just to cruelly drive home the fact that no one wanted to take her to the dance? Was he just curious about who was escorting her in his stead? Did he skip it and blame it on a helicopter crashing?

Or did he come home and take her to the dance after all? Williams' story is unclear.

You can trust my dad. He called me once.

Retail death star Walmart has just announced that it will be giving raises to all of its low-level hourly workers this year, and setting a minimum wage of $10 an hour next year. Walmart can see which way the wind is blowing.

Walmart, the largest company in America, with a value of $270 billion and sales of half a trillion dollars per year, does not do things to be nice. Its business model, in fact, is to squeeze suppliers and workers for every last cent in order to drive down prices to their lowest possible point and sell huge volumes and drive local small businesses to bankruptcy. They are the very embodiment of ruthlessness in business.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon wrote that the company decided to give employees raises to $9 an hour this year, and $10 an hour next year, because of corporate conscience: "We're always trying to do the right thing and build a stronger business. We frequently get it right but sometimes we don't. When we don't, we adjust... When we take a step back, it's clear to me that one of our highest priorities must be to invest more in our people this year."

Doug McMillon is lying. It is true that the Walmart corporation and its executives are always trying to build a stronger business, but it is clearly not true that this faceless machine for selling enormous quantities of manufactured good is "always trying to do the right thing." In fact, Walmart is so committed to holding down the wages of its workers—keeping them in poverty—that it consistently fights any attempts of employees to organize, even as the company's owners have grown to become some of the richest people in the world. Dozens and dozens of current and former Walmart employees have explicitly described to us how Walmart is a bad place to work. The Walmart corporation does not do things for its workers in order to help its workers, out of kindness. To the Walmart corporation, workers are tiny gears grinding in a very large global machine.

Walmart is giving raises to its workers for one simple reason: it has to. The company is smart enough to see that the ongoing protest campaign against it by its own poor employees demanding a living wage will not end. It will not end, just like the similar campaign by fast food workers will not end. Not only will the cries of low-paid workers not end; they will be heard. Walmart knows that these demands must, eventually, be met. Because they are eminently reasonable. And more to the point, because America is a nation that is starting to realize in a very public way the the economic inequality that has been choking us for three decades now is unsustainable. The Walmart corporation and its well-paid executives and fabulously wealthy owners understand this simple truth: there are many, many more people who identify with Walmart workers than there are people who identify with the richest family in America.

Walmart is giving its workers raises. It is doing so because it doesn't have a choice. This is a good example of rising public anger accomplishing something. Just a couple of dollars an hour, for now. More, soon.

[Photo: AP]

The 20 stars nominated for Academy Awards this year represent some of the most talented (or, anyway, famous) actors on screen today. At one point, however, they were slack-jawed, blank-eyed, no-name novices. They'd probably like to forget their often humiliating early work, but thanks to the magic of technology, they can never escape it. From Ed Norton's educational ESL VHS to Emma Stone's completely mortifying renditions of pop songs on an American Idol knock-off show, so much of the early work of these nominees is jaw-droppingly bad.

Below are clips from the larval stages of each nominee's career. Whenever possible, we've presented the actor's first on-screen appearance (exceptions noted).

Actress - In a Leading Role

Julianne Moore, As the World Turns (1985-1988)

Moore got her start on TV at 23, during the final season of the soap The Edge of Night. She played Carmen Engler, a Swiss-French girl. "She was Swiss-French because they couldn't decide where she was from. First, I was French, then they said, 'Well, if her father is Swiss, maybe she's Swiss.' So, the accent would kind of go back and forth," she told James Lipton. That sounds amazing, and I am very sorry to say that I don't have a clip of that to show you. I just couldn't find one. Please accept instead this dizzying clip from Moore's next gig on As the World Turns, on which she played half-sisters Frannie and Sabrina Hughes. In the clip above, Julianne Moore meets Julianne Moore.

Reese Witherspoon, Man in the Moon (1991)

Witherspoon was about 14 when she attended an open casting call for Man on the Moon, in which she plays Dani Trant, who experiences her first kiss and gets hit with a belt by her father.

Marion Cotillard, Highlander (1993)

Cotillard made her debut as a fairy described as "electric" on IMDb in the French TV series Étude sur le Mouvement. That episode is nowhere to be found online, but the year after, the 17-year-old Cotillard appeared on the cult U.S. TV series Highlander. On it, her character was raped.

Felicity Jones, The Treasure Seekers (1996)

Jones was around 13 when she made her screen debut in the TV movie The Treasure Seekers. I skipped around this movie for a while and I still don't know what it's about, except a group of kids on the verge of adulthood who are quite precocious.

Rosamund Pike, A Rather English Marriage (1998)

In Gone Girl, Pike seems American as hell, but she's actually British. That's good acting. She was 19 when she first appeared on screen in a bit role in the BBC movie A Rather English Marriage, which seems to be about how rather boring it is to be British. Coming over to this side of the pond was the right choice :).

Actor - In a Leading Role

Michael Keaton, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (1975)

In his early 20's, Keaton worked at the public television station WQED in Pittsburgh. That led to some on-air appearances, including the one above on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. He doesn't say shit, though. Back then, he was still known by his birth name Michael Douglas. Can you even imagine calling him that now? What would the real Michael Douglas think? ("Who me?" probably.)

Steve Carell, Curly Sue (1991)

Carell was 30 and credited as "Steven Carell" when he appeared as waiter Tesio in Curly Sue. He had no lines; he only had to show up and be pretty. Hubba hubba, vintage Steve Carell.

Bradley Cooper, Sex and the City (1999)

Cooper was around 24 when he made as on-screen debut as a nicotine addict/fuck interest of Carrie's on Sex and the City. His hair was prettier than hers, that's how you know it wasn't going to last.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Heartbeat (2000)

Cumberbatch's first on-screen work happened when he was about 24. He guested on the long-running British police drama Heartbeat, which was also about how rather boring it is to be British.

Eddie Redmayne, Elizabeth I (2005)

Redmayne's first on-screen work was on a 1998 episode of a British show called Animal Ark. The episode was titled "Bunnies in the Bathroom." I am so ashamed that I could not provide that clip in this space. I just couldn't find it, nor could I find footage of his next role in a 2003 episode of the British soap Doctors. I did find his turn in Elizabeth I, which was his first work viewable by an American audience (it ran on HBO). In it, he donned the popular Elizabethan hairstyle the mullet.

Actress - In a Supporting Role

Laura Dern, White Lightning (1973)

Dern was 6 when she made her debut via an uncredited cameo in White Lightning. In the movie, as in life, Dern played the daughter of Diane Ladd. They'd go on to remind us of their familial affiliation again in Wild at Heart, Rambling Rose, and Enlightened.

Meryl Streep, The Deadliest Season (1977)

Streep was about 28 when she made her debut in a TV movie called The Deadliest Season. It was about hockey and argued that hockey season is the deadliest season.

Patricia Arquette, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors (1987)

Arquette was around 19 when she starred as a troubled teen made more troubled by the presence of Freddy Krueger in her dreams in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors. The role required her to attempt suicide and almost get swallowed by a hilariously phallic Freddy. Usually it's the other way around when it comes to swallowing penises. At so young an age, Arquette was already proving to be a maverick.

Keira Knightley, Royal Celebration (1993)

Knightley was around 8 when she appeared in the British TV movie Royal Celebration. It looks particularly boring, even for a British movie—even for a British movie that is excerpted in this post.

Emma Stone, In Search of the New Partridge Family (2004)

This is absolutely the best clip in this post or any post. In it, a 15- or 16-year-old Stone (then known as Emily Stone) sings Meredith Brooks's "Bitch" with a cheeky/serious spirit that rivals the original. She is terrifically atrocious. Look at this move!

In Search of the New Partridge Family was an American Idol-esque competition on VH1 in service of casting a Partridge Family reboot. Stone actually won the role of Laurie (she won by doing what you see in the clip above!), but the series only lasted one episode.

Here's a bicurious duet of Pat Benetar's "We Belong" that's also from the series and even worse than "Bitch":

Actor - In a Supporting Role

Robert Duvall, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1962)

Before his breakthrough in 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird, Duvall had a handful of featured roles on TV, including spots on Playhouse 90, Armstrong Circle Theater, and the "Bad Actor" episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. On that he played an actor so bad that he's murderous. He's around 30 in the clip above.

Ethan Hawke, Explorers (1985)

Hawke was 14 when he and his squeaky voice starred alongside some plastic alien puppets in Joe Dante's Explorers. Now there's a boyhood.

J.K. Simmons, Popeye Doyle (1986)

J.K. Simmons was 31 and known as Jonathan Simmons when he made his debut in Popeye Doyle, a TV movie spin-off of The French Connection. His character was listed as "Patrolman in the Park" and there wasn't a single good shot of his face during his 45 seconds of screen time. And yet he persevered.

Mark Ruffalo, American Nuclear (1989)

A 22-year-old (or so) Mark Ruffalo was shirtless during his very first on-screen appearance. Twenty-two-year-old shirtless Mark Ruffalo, what the fuck else do you need to know? (In case the answer is "something," you can watch the entire episode of this unsold pilot on YouTube.)

Edward Norton, Only in America (1994)

Edward Norton was about 25 when he appeared in Only in America, a VHS release intended to help teach adults English. It sounds sooooo good, but the only footage online is the trailer above, which is missing sound. The educational movie was described as the "unicorn of Edward Norton movies" by edwardnortonblog. Here's a supposed transcript of some dialogue:

Duane: Wow! We're here! This is New York!

Donna: New York! Oh, hi. Urn, I'm Donna, and he's Duane.

Duane: Hi. I'm Duane. And she's Donna. We're from Minnesota. This is our first day in New York City.

Donna: Our first day! Come on!

Duane: Hey, the Trump Tower.

Donna: Wow!

Duane: Wow! This is an excellent hotel.

Doorman: Can I help you, sir... ma'am?

Duane: How much is a room here?

Doorman: Six hundred dollars.

Duane: A week?

Doorman: A night.

Duane & Donna: Ouch!

If anyone has footage of this (or any of the other first appearances we're missing), kindly let us know in the comments below and/or via email (rich@gawker.com).

The residue of the past fades more quickly as I get older. Small and ordinary moments that I used to summon with ease are harder to find year after year. But May 13, 2009 is different. The day has remained whole, like a blood-stained memory that won't wash out.

I'm living in small studio apartment in Brentwood. The television is on for background noise as I sit working on a paper for a graduate course. A snippet of sound reaches my ears: "A local music teacher shot to death on his daughter's birthday," begins ABC 7 news anchor Mark Brown. An image of a young girl crying appears on the screen; her hair is adorned with a crown of colorful barrettes. She's hysterical and the few words that manage to escape her mouth are mostly incomprehensible. Her father has been shot and nothing, in the moment, makes sense. It's just past 6 p.m.

It's odd, looking back, that the story affected me the way it did. I didn't know the victim; I'd seen plenty of tragic news reports about young black men shot to death before. I didn't know his name, or that he was a drum instructor at the school where he received his high school diploma—George Washington Prep. I didn't know that he felt a certain civic duty and thus wanted to give back to the students and the neighborhood that had given him so much. I didn't know that he would die just minutes away from the church where, at the time, I attended service regularly. I did not know he would die on the same street he was born. Or that he would die in the arms of his heartbroken mother.

There's nothing remarkable about the way Robert Rodwell died. He died like most people who've been murdered in South Los Angeles, lost to the static of the city. The narrative is familiar: A young-to-middle-aged black man shot to death in an economically fractured neighborhood where liquor stores dot every other corner. It is the story about the disposability of black life; the story of the moment when, as poet Claudia Rankine puts it, "the night darkens and the time shortens between where we are and where we are going."

This is death by percentages.

In May 2009, when 28-year-old Rodwell was shot, LAPD statistics highlighted a substantial decrease in homicides citywide when compared to 2008 numbers (there were 95 fewer homicides in 2009, totaling 796 for the year). But despite the dip in killings, a disproportionate number still stemmed from the southwest and southeast districts—which include neighborhoods like South Los Angeles, Inglewood, Compton, and Watts.

According to the Los Angeles Times, since 2007, Latinos—who total nearly five million across LA County—make up almost half of all homicide victims. Blacks, who account for only eight percent of the county's residents, make up 32 percent of all homicides.

This is death by disgrace.

Police reported that Rodwell was "shot several times" while "pulling out of his driveway in the 1400 block of 105th Street in Westmont." The shooter, who is still at large, fired "without provocation, then ran off."

Los Angeles was, and in many ways remains, a war zone for black men. In 1993—fifteen years before Rodwell was gunned down in the driveway of his home—black men in LA County "died by a homicide rate of 368 per 100,000 population: similar to the per capita rate of death for U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion." There were 9.1 million residents in LA County in 1993, which would amount to over 330 homicides among black men.

That was during the apex of the Big Years, a period in Los Angeles when crime and homicides were at an all-time high and disproportionately ravaged the lives of South LA residents. Crime and homicide have declined significantly in Southern California since these bad days. Yet "no matter how much crime dropped, the American homicide problem remained maddeningly, mystifyingly, disproportionately black."

So begins Jill Leovy's 366-page account in Ghettoside—a book that asks, Just how much do black lives matter, and to whom?

Leovy is a seasoned reporter for the Los Angeles Times who has covered crime and urban policing since 2001. Her book, released in late January, takes us inside the walls of the Los Angeles Police Department and onto the streets of South LA where we meet the detectives and grieving families that orbit this disparaged world. Early on Leovy makes it clear that Ghettoside—a term coined by a Watts gang member to describe his hood and those similar to it ("It was both a place and a predicament...")—is about a "very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic." And because black men are at the center of this systemic failure, Leovy says this is the "reason for the nation's long-standing plague of black homicides."

"Society's efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic were inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of idealogical, political, and racial sensitivities. When homicide did get attention, the focus seemed to be on spectacles—mass shootings, celebrity murders—a step removed from the people who were doing most of the dying: black men."

Blacks make up 14 percent of the country's population but account for 40 percent of homicide victims nationwide. And, according to a 2010 report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, homicide remains the leading cause of death for young black men ages 15-34. It is from this cultural malaise that Leovy unravels how "our fragmented and underfunded police forces have historically preoccupied themselves with control, prevention, and nuisance abatement rather than responding to victims of violence."

To do this, Leovy shadowed Detective John Skaggs as he went about solving the murder of Bryant Tennelle (the son of veteran LAPD cop Wally Tennelle). Skaggs—a smart, no-nonsense kind of guy—has devoted his career to making "black lives expensive" and "worth answering for." He applies a very simple set of rules when faced with a new homicide, regardless of the victim's color: utilize every resource possible, approach the case from every angle, and treat each investigation like the biggest celebrity murder in Hollywood. These weren't just names destined to be forgotten, each body deserved to tell its story. Over time, Skaggs' unconventional approach earned him trust within South LA homes, where residents are often, if not completely, distrustful of law enforcement (especially white men like Skaggs). It was because of this continual lack of accountability fellow officers, and the larger system, had towards black-on-black crimes that motivated Skaggs to operate the way he did.

"Forty years after the civil rights movement, impunity for the murder of black men remained America's great, though mostly invisible, race problem. The institutions of criminal justice, so remorseless in other ways in an era of get-tough sentencing and "preventive" policing, remained feeble when it came to answering for the lives of black murder victims. Few experts examined what was evident every day of John Skaggs working life: that the state's inability to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers in black enclaves such as Watts was itself a root cause of the violence, and that this was a terrible problem—perhaps the most terrible thing in contemporary American life. The system's failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap."

Ghettoside has many successes: its complicated portrait of the LAPD, the humanity it lends to the families of murder victims, and its ability to engage readers from a historical and current-day context (the sundry facts Leovy provides throughout the book never overwhelm).

Still, anybody who reads Leovy's work as a case for hyper-policing in communities of color has missed the point. A bigger police presence in areas like Compton or Inglewood doesn't necessarily solve the problem. The solution, perhaps, is the ways in which law enforcement police (Leovy refers to this as finding "the balance between preventive and responsive measures"). For officers, it should be about extending judicious compassion to victims and families, building stronger ties to the community, and believing that all lives—men, women, gay, transgender, Asian, Latino, black, etc—have equal value, and should be accounted for (in the end, Skaggs tracks down the men behind Tennelle's shooting). This might seem obvious—you're probably thinking, Duh!—but as Leovy shows, this is rarely the case.

I went searching for Robert Rodwell on The Homicide Report. It's been five years since his murder, but I wanted to see if any updates were available regarding his case [note: I inquired with LA's homicide bureau but have yet to hear anything back; the detective over the case has since retired]. THR is an online database that records homicides throughout LA County, including killings of civilians by law enforcement. What began as a small blog in 2007 by Leovy and the Los Angeles Times to help balance crime coverage (high profile cases typically only make it into the paper), THR has evolved over the years, and has evolved into a hauntingly immersive experience for users.

I was flooded with the names and stories of murder victims. There was Jose Celeridad, 42, shot in the early tints of a January afternoon on West Olive Street in 2011. And Nathan A. Morgan, 25, who came from Portland to LA only to be viciously beaten to death and left to rot on Venice Beach in 2008. Anita Henderson, 51, was struck in the head by a force greater than herself and found lying in her driveway. That was November 2012. Taalib Pecantte, 7, was gunned down on South Corning Street in 2013 while walking with his mother. Elsy Molina, 36, was found with her throat cut open in South LA, clothes smeared in blood. She was discovered in the stillness and solitude of her truck.

In Los Angeles, in the alleyways of Downtown and the grand avenues of Westmont, unseen bodies litter the streets. The memories of people who once were hang in the air, thick as smog. 2Pac named it in 1996. "It's the city of angels and constant danger," he warned on "To Live and Die in LA," just months before his legend was cemented in a haze of gun fire on the Las Vegas strip. In the American subconscious, and for as long as I can remember, Los Angeles has served as a fantastical dream city for many. All that glitters. And yet the city has also served as a terrain marked by constant violence: in the last 12 months more than 540 people have been killed across LA County. Despite Leovy's mention in Ghettoside's final chapters that we are much safer "on the whole," she reminds us that we must still operate with great urgency. Though today it is slow moving, the "plague of black homicides" continues to spread.

The last comment on Rodwell's profile, written in December 2013, was left by a person identified as Peace. "This was mistaken identity. Hoovas went into ug crips hood and shot a guy they thought was slangin but only had dvd's. Sad but its the world we live in today in Los Angeles."

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

Gawker Review of Books is a new hub for book, art, and film coverage. Find us on Twitter.

On Monday, retired local politician Charlie Parker was shoveling snow in front of his Nova Scotia home when he noticed a small dark figure crawling across the road in the distance. Figuring the creature for a lost seal, Parker went to investigate. As he walked closer Parker realized the seal was actually an old man, who by now was lying face down in the road.

Hours earlier, Gerald Whitman left his home to go for his dialysis treatment. Road closures forced him to take a detour and eventually his car ended up stuck in the snow. Not wanting to be trapped, Whitman left his car and struck out for nearby house. After taking a break and sitting down, the 73-year-old found he couldn't stand up and decided to crawl instead.

"After about an hour, I thought, "Well, if this is what it's going to be - I made peace with the Lord and said 'If it be your will, so be it," he told the CBC. "And I just stopped. Apparently it wasn't his will."

Not long after, Parker found a body lying in the road. To his surprise—and perhaps disappointment—it turned out not to be a new seal friend but instead a gentleman he knew.

"I turned him over," Parker told the CBC. "It turned out to be a gentleman I knew — he had been my former banker."

From the CBC:

He slung Whitman's arm around his shoulders and pulled him along. For the last bit, Parker tried to fetch a toboggan, but couldn't dig it free. He returned and told the elderly man to get up.

The two men managed to get to Parker's house where the former politician's wife, Marilyn, and their dog warmly received the visitor. Whitman was covered in heaps of blankets and Parker spooned him coffee, as he couldn't grip a mug.

Forty-five minutes later, once a snowplow had cleared the roads, an ambulance arrived and Whitman was treated by paramedics. Later, he made it to his dialysis treatment.

"[Parker] thought I was a seal. On behalf of all seals, I'd like to thank him for his interest," Whitman said.

The seal-loving accidental hero, meanwhile, remains humble. "I'm sure I didn't do anything different than anyone else would have," Parker said.

[h/t Daily Mail/Image via CBC]

Kristin Cavallari has revealed to us the secrets of bone broth, the foibles of agave, and the number of calories in one scoop of sour cream (too many). Today, 475 days before the publication of her debut book Balancing on Heels, she reveals the most important bit of diet advice she's picked up on the Occupy Monsanto message boards so far: "eat fermented food."

In a post on her eponymous app titled "Fermented Food," Kristin implores us: "If you only pick up one tip from my app, have this be the one: start eating fermented food. I would argue that it is the most beneficial thing you could put into your body."

Pity the man of such little time he is only able to pick up one tip from Kristin's app. But O.K., Kristin. Why?

Since fermented food is a probiotic power house it balances out the gut which makes you able to absorb nutrients better. [...] With fermented food you will have improved digestion and a boosted immune system.

Which makes you able to absorb nutrients better—sure. And beautifully phrased. So what are the top fermented foods, Kristin?

The top fermented foods are sauerkraut, kimchi, different veggies, miso, and drinks like kombucha and kefir.

Different veggies.

Finally, Kristin reveals that not only are fermented foods suitable for adults who have downloaded and then closely read the Kristin Cavallari app; they can also be used as a substitute for a child's EpiPen®. She explains:

Next I'm going to ferment vegetables and puree them for Jax..he has a few allergies which makes me think his gut bacteria is thrown off.

Kristin Cavallari did not vaccinate her kids.

[Photo via Getty]

No.

Manhattan "Boutique Fitness Boxing" studio ShadowBox NYC is the latest god damn thing.

In addition to the 40-bag studio, they hand-built a "vintage" boxing ring from aged wood, which will be used for one-on-one training sessions, and are decorating with thematic artful photography, like a very cool vintage print of Muhammad Ali in action.

There will also be locker rooms stocked with C.O. Bigelow products, with four showers for women and two for men, and a juice and coffee bar stocked with a still TBD cold-pressed juice partner and Intelligentsia coffee.

It's not boxing unless it makes you uglier, not prettier.

[Photos: Shutterstock, AP]

Under the chandeliers of NBC's glittery Rainbow Room, a who's-that of New York society celebrated the newest iteration of the New York Times Magazine (now on better paper stock!) last night. The party appeared to be 1 percent celebrity (Lance Armstrong, Martha Stewart, James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem), 8 percent miscellaneous media, and 91 percent advertisers. Maureen Dowd held court near the front of the room, wearing a lacy see-through dress.

The bevy of men in charge of the new new magazine gave speeches. Advertisers were thanked many times. Jake Silverstein, the magazine's editor, thanked the Times' executive editor "Dean Bock-ay." He described the magazine's design as "classic and modern all at once." But more so than his new publication the charmingly elfin Silverstein was excited to introduce the night's musical guest, Will Butler of the Arcade Fire, performing songs from a solo album. (Will Butler? some in the crowd wondered. Isn't the frontman's name Win Butler? No, Silverstein had it right: Will Butler, Billy to Win's Alec, was the entertainment.)

Unfortunately, by this point in his address, no one in the crowd was listening. Silverstein futilely tried to explain the significance of Butler's presence—Butler being from a swanky suburb of Houston, The Woodlands, and Silverstein having lived in Austin—to no avail. It was perhaps the saddest Bar Mitzvah speech I've witnessed.

The new magazine, as the people in charge of it have pointed out many times in many ways, is very long, thanks to the more than 100 pages of advertising it contains. Its editors seemed to be obsessed with the book's granular details—the fonts, the amount of space between each letter, the way the logo looks in winter's pale afternoon light. "We have used the hammer and the tongs but perhaps not the blowtorch; we sought to manufacture a magazine that would be unusual, surprising and original but not wholly unfamiliar," Silverstein wrote in his introductory editor's letter. Sure.

He also wrote this, of the magazine's brave leap into online media: "This isn't an obligatory exercise in multiplatform brand leveraging, as the marketing types might put it, or the beginning of our descent into soul-deadening content farming. (To be honest, we grimace a little even saying the word 'content.' When was the last time you said, 'I can't wait to read this Sunday's content'?)" Hey, you said it, guy!

What's odd is that in all this talk about the New New York Times Magazine there hasn't been much talk about its stories. Hugo Lindgren, Silverstein's predecessor about whom basically no one at the Times has a good word to say, gnawed the magazine apart with his incisors, but he was a story guy. His stories were manly, and for manly men, dripping desperately with bourgeois testosterone, but they were stories, at least.

I have read the new magazine's well, and it is something of a mashup between Foreign Policy (this is the global issue, after all), The Believer, and Newsweek: We have Gary Shteyngart, our generation's Yakov Smirnov, watching Russian television; an unimpressive article on Hong Kong's umbrella revolution; the always-great Susan Dominus, but on France's National Front; a first-person piece about using Airbnb in Japan; and an article that I couldn't bring myself to read because it carried the subhed: "Can amateur journalism bring justice to Rio's favelas?"

It's always fun to join with industry colleagues and celebrate something they are contractually obligated to do but act as if they have done out of their own goodwill, such as rework a failing magazine. Such was the ethos of the party for the New New York Times Magazine, which has alternated between "crown jewel" of the Times and deep dark moneyhole. Last night it was clearly back to jewel status, as everyone swilled their champagne cocktails and tried to discuss the new fonts of the magazine over the blaring songs of 1/4 of the Arcade Fire (I can't confirm if that last part actually happened).

So Jake's party was more or less a success. No one got too drunk and everyone was in and out in two hours, with the door prize of a tote bag and a leather-bound journal. Silverstein has many issues to prove himself in the eyes of the magazine world, but he's already been ordained as the Next Thing. Last night he became a man. Lindgren's magazine was, ultimately, an exercise in onanism; at the end we all seemed to be laughing with him as he published insanely self-serving personal essays about that time he got in a fight at that Lower East Side Bar. Silverstein is on a much tighter leash. He is under the watch of two publishers, Arthur Sulzberger and Andy Wright, and, of course, Dean Bockay. But really, as long as the advertisers are pleased, who even cares what's in the magazine?

This week the Vice President and Social Chair of the United States groped the wife of Ashton Carter as he was sworn in as Secretary of Defense. This was funny—Joe Biden, he's wacky!—but also sort of not funny and indicative of a creepy, creepy trend.

Biden's questionable "hold your shoulders from behind while I whisper in your ear" maneuver might've been merely funny if it were a one-off, or prom:

But it wasn't either of those things: it was Joe Biden acting in his capacity as veep, and just the latest installation in a long collection of Groping Joe Moments:

He's creeped on a senator's young daughter.

He's creeped on a congressman's wife.

He's creeped on a biker.

He's very fond of the touching from behind—generally frowned upon with strangers.

He clutched two elderly woman at once.

You're not supposed to touch children like that if they aren't your children.

He was very affectionate at a soldier's funeral.

He touched this other little girl who was in turn touching her stuffed dog (that last part is OK).

Did he really need to kiss this elderly supporter on the lips while touching her with both hands? I can't be certain but probably not.

Hm.

Senator Chris Coons' daughter looks uncomfortable in this clearer view.

Joe Biden went in for the kiss with an usher at the Little League World Series.

Maybe he's just a very warm man. Maybe he's more affectionate than almost all other adults. But ask yourself this: if this were any other male politician, would we be so quick to add it to the meme pile? Try this: look at all of those photos and imagine, say, Paul Ryan's face instead of Biden's.

All photos via Getty and AP

Across the vast and teeming wilds of the Instagram comment sections of popular celebrity accounts, certain questions echo: "Follow back?" "Like my pic?" "Can I eat your pussy?" For years, scholars and scientists of the celebrity Instagram have wondered: Are these requests ever fulfilled? Let's find out.

I've written before about the thriving culture of celebrity Instagram comments, in which seekers of truth and wisdom and validation and pussy attempt to garner attention from celebrities and institutions whom they follow. But I have never myself participated. Until now.

On Monday, it was my birthday. Happy birthday to me. Rather than spend the anniversary merely scrolling through my feed, I decided to take my once-a-year shot at being seen—truly seen—by a celebrity, or the person in control of the Instagram account of a popular soccer team.

So I undertook an experiment. Could I get a shout-out from a celebrity on my birthday? Almost certainly, I thought. How about one hundred—could I get one hundred shout-outs from celebrities on my birthday? Hey, you never know. How about four hundred, then—could I get four hundred JK I stopped at one hundred.

On each of the most recent Instagram photos from the one hundred most popular Instagram accounts, based on follower count, I set out to comment: "Can I get a shoutout for my bday?" (I also asked Britt Daniel of the band Spoon, for personal reasons. I'll tell you now that he has not yet gotten back to me, most likely because he is very busy.)

I wanted to know if this seemingly futile quest, repeated dozens of times a day across hundreds of Instagram accounts, had the possibility of fulfillment. I wanted to know what it felt like to scream into an electronic void, at the bottom of which was Katy Perry. But most of all, I wanted a shoutout for my bday.

The First Attempt

It was my birthday, and I was illuminated from within with a bright, bold, birthday glow. My coworker Dayna Evans had made me a cake, and it was delicious. I was ready to set out on my task: Commenting the same comment over and over and over on popular Instagram accounts, many of whom were owned by people I've never heard of (Nina Dobrev? Shay Mitchell? Bethany Noel Mota?) (Canadian actresses and a vlogger, respectfully—now I know), and more than one of which served to showcase photographs of nail art.

I asked Kim Kardashian and Ariana Grande for birthday shout-outs, hoping that Kim Kardashian's motherly instincts and Ariana Grande's ponytail and childlike sense of wonder would propel them to tell me what's up happy bday:

I asked JUSTTTEEEEEN Bieber and Taylor Swift, who was SO GOOD ON SNL:

I asked Nicki Minaj, a #queen, and Vanessa Hudgens, a young woman whom I believe I could pick out of a lineup but am not sure if I can be honest:

And so on. It was my birthday, and I was having fun.

The Block

That is, until I received this "no" from an incredibly rude Dan Bilzerian fan.

Soon after I was blocked from commenting on Instagram.

On. My. Birthday.

Incredible.

This was disrespectful and unreasonable and I have very little doubt but no proof at all that it was the work of that incredibly rude Dan Bilzerian fan, (I imagine he must have reported me, that piece of shit), (who would have thought, a piece of shit Dan Bilzerian fan), (of course that was sarcastic).

Dan Bilzerian, if you are unaware, is an Instagram celebrity known for kicking a woman in the face and throwing another woman off of a roof. "All right, but what is he known for, like, for real?" you're wondering. I don't know. Instagram? Poker, and then also having a lot of guns, but mostly the thing of where he kicked a woman in the face and threw another off of a roof.

Now, did a Dan Bilzerian fan report me, or was I simply banned for posting 54 of the same comment in the span of roughly ten minutes? We'll never know. What I did know was: I had 46 Instagram shout-outs left to request. Instagram provided me with a form to fill out if I felt my blocking was unreasonable, which, of course, I did:

The form did nothing. I waited a day and the blocking still held. The Internet told me that it could last anywhere from 24 hours to one month, which seemed, no offense, like a wild guess. I had to think of an alternate plan.

A Backup Plan

By this time it was February 17th: Michael Jordan's birthday, as you may know.

Thiswas my way back. I set up the account mjbday69 and set out to comment "Can I get a shoutout for Michael Jordan's bday?" on the remaining 46 popular Instagram accounts. In order to fool any celebrities who might want to verify the fact that I truly desired a shout-out for Michael Jordan's birthday, I populated the account with seven photos, alternating between photos of Michael Jordan and photos of "Happy Birthday."

I asked Lady Gaga, who had just gotten engaged, congratulations, and Jessica Alba, who had just had an Epic #dinner, for a shout-out for Michael Jordan's birthday, for example:

I asked Ellie Goulding, a blonde woman, and Adriana Lima, a brunette:

In what was perhaps the most exciting moment of the entire experiment, I asked the NBA's Instagram account for a shout-out for Michael Jordan's birthday while they were having their own celebration for Michael Jordan's birthday:

Happy birthday, Michael Jordan.

Though I was terrified throughout this leg of the experiment that my account would again be blocked (if I were forced to make a third Instagram account it would have gone to Billie Joe Armstrong—happy birthday, Billie Joe), I made it through to the other side unscathed, with all one hundred popular Instagram accounts solicited. Eat my dirt, Dan Bilzerian fan.

What I Learned From My Journey

When all was said (commented) and done, I have to say—I got it. The thrill of leaving your mark on a celebrity's life, however small, and the anticipation of awaiting their response added up to an experience that—JK again, I don't know why people do this!

The Results

What follows is a complete record of my birthday shout-out winnings and failures:

Not one shout-out.

Thank you.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]

"When hard news people deceive their viewers and readers to advance a political agenda, that's when the nation gets hurt," Fox News Sith lord Bill O'Reilly complained last week, after Brian Williams' high-profile face-plant. But a new report suggests O'Reilly's been similarly flogging a bogus story of military bravado for years.

Since at least 2001, O'Reilly has bragged about "having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands war" in 1982. But Mother Jones editors David Corn and Daniel Schulman report that Bill's claims aren't supported by any facts, and are disputed by his ex-coworkers.

It started simply, with a one-line mention in a memoir that O'Reilly had worked "on the ground in active war zones from El Salvador to the Falklands." But by the time the Boston Marathon bombing happened in 2013, he was regaling Fox viewers with visceral details of being in the shit:

I was in a situation one time, in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us. I had to make a decision. And I dragged him off, you know, but at the same time, I'm looking around and trying to do my job, but I figure I had to get this guy out of there because that was more important.

The problem with that account, Corn and Schulman say, is O'Reilly had just managed to get into Buenos Aires before the quick war between Argentina and Great Britain ended. That didn't leave him much time to get downrange where the action was, across 1,200 miles of ocean. And it didn't make much sense to O'Reilly's CBS colleagues at the time:

American reporters were not on the ground in this distant war zone. "Nobody got to the war zone during the Falklands war," Susan Zirinsky, a longtime CBS News producer who helped manage the network's coverage of the war from Buenos Aires, tells Mother Jones. She does not remember what O'Reilly did during his time in Argentina. But she notes that the military junta kept US reporters from reaching the islands: "You weren't allowed on by the Argentinians. No CBS person got there."

That's how Bob Schieffer, who was CBS News' lead correspondent covering the Falklands war, recalls it: "Nobody from CBS got to the Falklands. I came close. We'd been trying to get somebody down there. It was impossible." He notes that NBC News reporter Robin Lloyd was the only American network correspondent to reach the islands. "I remember because I got my butt scooped on that," Schieffer says. "He got out there and we were all trying to get there." (Lloyd tells Mother Jones that he managed to convince the Argentine military to let him visit Port Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands, but he spent only a day there—and this was weeks before the British forces arrived and the fighting began.)

Schieffer adds, "For us, you were a thousand miles from where the fighting was. So we had some great meals."

The Mother Jones editors note that O'Reilly did witness a street protest that turned violent in the streets of the Argentine capital, but that he split the scene after losing out to Schieffer for the marquee coverage. "I got the hell out of Argentina fast, landed in Miami, and raised a major ruckus at the CBS offices there," O'Reilly wrote in his memoir.

The Miami area also happens to be where O'Reilly taught history in what he's called "a relatively poor school" in "the shabby, tough Florida town of Opa-Locka." That school was Monsignor Edward Pace High, a private prep that's been recognized as one of the top 50 Catholic high schools in the United States.

Update:

Bill speaks to Dylan Byers; emphasis added:

Bill O'Reilly says a new Mother Jones report alleging that the Fox News host made false claims about his Falklands War experience is "a piece of garbage" and that its principal author, David Corn, is "a liar."

In a telephone interview with the On Media blog, O'Reilly called Corn a "despicable guttersnipe" who has been trying to take him down "for years."

"It's a hit piece," O'Reilly said. "Everything I said about what I reported in South and Central America is true. Everything."

...In the interview, O'Reilly said that he never claimed to have been on the Falkland Islands.

"I was not on the Falkland Islands and I never said I was. I was in Buenos Aires... In Buenos Aires we were in a combat situation after the Argentines surrendered."

I'm just gonna leave this screenshot from the above post... here:

Meanwhile, Mother Jones has added a video supercut of O'Reilly's Falklands claims; we've swapped it in above. Enjoy.

Las Vegas police are now one step closer to figuring out what really happened during the bizarre road rage encounter that led to Tammy Meyers—a mother of two—getting shot in the head while standing in her own driveway.

According to initial reports, the incident began when Meyers' daughter—who was behind the wheel, learning how to drive—accidentally swerved into the path of another car. Meyers and the occupants of the other car got into an argument, and the other car followed them home, where someone inside the vehicle shot Meyers in the head. Somehow, Meyers' adult son was able to return fire as the car sped off.

By the second day, the theory had changed. Police now believe the incident began when the other car sped past Meyers, who honked her horn at them. Investigators say Meyers then dropped her daughter off at home, picked up her son and his gun, and went out looking for the other car—all before she was ever followed home.

It's still unclear how she and her son were able to find the other driver.

Now cops say they have an unnamed suspect in custody. According to the Washington Post, he was arrested in a residential area a "few dozen" miles off the Las Vegas strip.

"Are you all happy? You made my wife look like an animal. And my son!" Meyers' anguished husband, Bob, shouted at news reporters on the scene. "There's the animal. A block away. Are you happy?"

[image via Reuters]

Harris Wittels, a writer, executive producer and apparent inventor of the term "humblebrag," was reportedly found dead in his California home Thursday. According to TMZ, police are treating it as an overdose.

According to law enforcement sources ... Wittels was pronounced dead around 1 PM. We're told the 30-year-old was found lying on his couch ... and there was drug paraphernalia in the house. There were no signs of trauma to his body.

Wittels spoke openly about his battles with drug addiction. He'd gone to rehab twice.

"I'm still trying to figure out how to really just like, value my life," Wittels said in a November podcast interview. "I've done drugs recreationally since I was like, 12. And it's always been fun and it's always been my identity, hey, the drug guy."

Wittels, a Phish fan, stand-up comedian, and writer for Parks and The Sarah Silverman Program, gained notoriety with his Humblebrag Twitter account, which he parlayed into a book deal.

He eventually became a producer on Parks and produced several episodes of Eastbound & Down.

But despite a 2012 production deal with NBC, Wittels was never able to get his own show off the ground. (We engaged in a brief angry back-and-forth on the subject with Wittels in 2013.) He recently completed his first short film and made a guest appearance on last week's episode of Parks.

Say what you want about #brands, but one thing's for sure—cable companies are more than just "not your friend." Cable companies are public enemy No. 1 and if you piss one of their overworked, underpaid employees off enough, they're liable to call you a cunt and cancel your service.

Take, for example, Time Warner Cable. According to Ars Technica, a female customer whose first name isn't actually "Cunt," messed with the wrong representative while troubleshooting a cable box problem online.

"I am a current Time Warner Cable customer, and I just received a letter today addressed to 'Cunt' Martinez (my last name)... stating I requested to disconnect my service, which I never did," [Cunt] Martinez tells Ars. "The only information they could provide was that the name change was made on 2/12/15, which happens to be the same day I used their 'live chat' feature online and called in and spoke to a representative regarding an issue with my cable box. I was not upset even when they could not resolve my issue and had to send a technician out. I have no idea why a TWC employee would do this and risk losing their job."

Time Warner Cable, a company not exactly known for its fast response time, "immediately" apologized and offered [Cunt] Martinez one free year of service.

""We are truly sorry for the disgraceful treatment of Ms. [Cunt] Martinez and have reached out to her to apologize directly. Our investigation showed that this was done by an employee at a third-party vendor. We have terminated our agreement with this vendor and are changing our processes to prevent this from happening again," a spokesperson tells Ars.

Mo'Nique was featured in this week's Hollywood Reporter claiming she's been blacklisted from Hollywood, in large part because of how she handled the 2010 Oscar campaign for the movie Precious.

Mo'Nique ended up winning the best supporting actress award for her role in the Lee Daniels film. But after spending the better part of a decade putting out multiple projects a year, she abruptly stopped acting—a five-year hiatus, according to her IMDB profile.

Now she's back, focusing on an independent film. And as she tells it to THR, that's not exactly her choice—she's been told she's too difficult and too expensive to book.

What I understood was that when I won that Oscar, things would change in all the ways you're saying: It should come with more respect, more choices and more money. It should, and it normally does. Hattie said, "After I won that award, it was as if I had done something wrong." It was the same with me. I thought, once you won the award, that's the top prize — and so you're supposed to be treated as if you got the top prize.

I got a phone call from Lee Daniels maybe six or seven months ago. And he said to me, "Mo'Nique, you've been blackballed." And I said, "I've been blackballed? Why have I been blackballed?" And he said, "Because you didn't play the game." And I said, "Well, what game is that?" And he gave me no response. The next thing he said to me was, "Your husband is outbidding you." But he never asked me what [salary] we were asking for.

The crux of the issue seems to be the fact that she declined to campaign for her Oscar, calling it "an award [she] didn't ask for," and, it would seem, wasn't paid to promote.

And though she ended up winning anyway, it seems execs are done with Mo'Nique professionally—she tells THR Daniels offered her several roles she couldn't ultimately book, including Oprah Winfrey's part in The Butler, a spot on Empire and a part in Daniel's Richard Pryor biopic.

"Each of those things that he offered me was taken off the table. (Laughs.) They all just went away. But that's just part of the business, you know?"

Daniels generally confirmed the story to THR, saying in a statement that "Mo'nique is a creative force to be reckoned with."

"Her demands through Precious were not always in line with the campaign. This soured her relationship with the Hollywood community. I consider her a friend. I have and will always think of her for parts that we can collaborate on. However, the consensus among the creative teams and powers thus far were to go another way with these roles."

[image via AP]

The Hollywood Reporter is running a great series right now called "Brutally Honest Oscar Ballots" in which a real life Academy voter is granted anonymity in exchange for full candor in evaluating this year's nominations. The pieces are good if you would like to know what films might win awards this year, but even better if you would like multiple examples showing why Academy voters are fucking crazy.

Let's start with the race stuff, first, because the two voters are very, um, passionate about the subject, and it's also its own special brand of crazy. Here's Anonymous Voter 1—described only as a woman working in public relations—on Selma:

What no one wants to say out loud is that Selma is a well-crafted movie, but there's no art to it. If the movie had been directed by a 60-year-old white male, I don't think that people would have been carrying on about it to the level that they were. And as far as the accusations about the Academy being racist? Yes, most members are white males, but they are not the cast of Deliverance — they had to get into the Academy to begin with, so they're not cretinous, snaggletoothed hillbillies. When a movie about black people is good, members vote for it. But if the movie isn't that good, am I supposed to vote for it just because it has black people in it? I've got to tell you, having the cast show up in T-shirts saying "I can't breathe" [at their New York premiere] — I thought that stuff was offensive. Did they want to be known for making the best movie of the year or for stirring up shit?

This is the first thing she says in the interview.

Here's Anonymous Voter 2 (a man who works in short film and animation):

I didn't think Selma was a particularly good film, apart from the main actor [David Oyelowo], and I think the outcry about the Academy being racists for not nominating it for more awards is offensive — we have a two-term president who is a black woman [Cheryl Boone Isaacs] and we give out awards to black people when they deserve them, just like any other group

In these two passages, you may recognize several strands of very familiar racism: a (presumably) white person loudly proclaiming that they don't see race, a plea for black people to not be so uppity and, naturally, "we have a black friend." The tonal implication that the white people who vote for the movie awards are the truly prosecuted in this equation is, of course, crazy, but it's a sad, wheezing sort of crazy.

The rest of each interview is a more hilarious sort of crazy. For instance, Anonymous Voter 2 had an extremely negative reaction to Whiplash that allowed him to imagine himself as the brave hero of his own life:

Whiplash is offensive — it's a film about abuse and I don't find that entertaining at all. My kid would have told me if he had an abusive teacher. I would have sat in on the class, talked to other kids in the class and then said, "This asshole has to go."

This guy sounds like a real cool dad, arranging meetings with his son's classmates so that he can snitch on his behalf. A regular Liam Neeson out there.

Anonymous Voter 2 also thought Boyhood was lame, except when he didn't. Here he is on whether he would vote the film for Best Picture:

I admired Boyhood and it didn't bore me, but it doesn't totally work.

But when it comes to Best Director he said:

What he [Boyhood's Richard Linklater] did is amazing.

Okay! The director did an amazing thing that... didn't work. The film was so disjointed that Ethan Hawke's performance was worthy of Best Supporting Actor:

The one who stood out to me was [Boyhood's] Ethan Hawke — to sustain a performance over a decade is no easy thing.

Basically, this guy is really impressed by the act of making a movie over the span of 12 years, even if that movie wasn't actually that good, and also even if he felt like Richard Linklater spent over a decade pulling a story out of his ass.

Boyhood was a very good film but I feel like they came up with the story as they went along.

The internal logic throughout both interviews is consistently nonexistent. Anonymous Voter 2 seems to be basing his votes on small events that happened in his own life. For instance, he's supporting Eddie Redmayne—well, he doesn't appear to his name, but whatever—because he was introduced to Stephen Hawking once:

I've met Stephen Hawking and this guy [The Theory of Everything's Eddie Redmayne] got him just right.

He also bought Steve Carrell's performance in Foxcatcher because he went to school with the family of the wrestling coach he portrayed:

Steve Carell was interesting — I went to school with some of the du Ponts and I believe it [the film's story] — but the movie wasn't great.

Unfortunately for Bradley Cooper, Anonymous Voter 2 never clinked glasses with the real American Sniper. Better luck next year, though—try to land a role in a biopic about an old guy.

Anonymous Voter 1 seems to care mostly about how each film relates to film industry bullshit. Here's possibly the whitest thing you could say about movies in 2015:

American Sniper is the winner of the year, whether or not it gets a single statuette, because for all of us in the movie industry — I don't care what your politics are — it is literally the answer to a prayer for a midrange budget movie directed by an 84-year-old guy [Clint Eastwood] to do this kind of business. It shows that a movie can galvanize America and shows that people will go if you put something out that they want to see.

If you were to accidentally barge in on Rudy Giuliani jacking off you would hear him softly muttering "American Sniper is the winner of the year" under his breath.

She's casting her Best Actor vote for Michael Keaton for reasons that seem to have nothing to do with Birdman:

I'm voting for [Birdman's] Michael Keaton because I love him and for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is he seems like a completely sane person who lives in the middle of the country and works when he wants to work. I've loved every interview that he's done.

For Best Picture she's voting for The Imitation Game, but mostly seems concerned with whether or not people in Hollywood are trying to fuck Harvey Weinstein:

On paper, The Imitation Game seemed to be the one to me. It's a great story, well-crafted, [Benedict Cumberbatch] is really good and it's been a big success. It's what you call "prestige filmmaking." So why isn't it receiving more recognition? I'd like to believe it's karma for Harvey [Weinstein].

If there was one shining light in either of these interviews it was this quote from Anonymous Voter 1:

I'm not sorry that Jennifer Aniston isn't nominated; she was fine

She's fine!

The Oscars voting process is fine!

This summer, a very small council of people you've never heard of will make a very large pop-cultural impact when they release dozens of new emoji. But this crop of tiny phone art had to be narrowed down from a much larger bunch, which means we're likely missing out on what would've been some amazing specimens.

Our lovable eggplants and "100" signs don't materialize out of nowhere—long before they ever appear in your messages, an international technical consortium called Unicode meticulously assesses and selects each new character. It's an esoteric committee that's responsible for virtually all of the letters and characters you see on all of the screens you view and carry. It's also found itself bowled over by the popularity of emojis—for decades, few really noticed or cared which letters got which diacritical marks, or whether the Shwe Palaung language would show up properly on a website.

Emoji have found a life way outside of phones and computers; they're used in breakups, crimes, shirts, and millions of throwaway conversations around the world. For an entire generation, it's hard to imagine casual conversation without these little cartoon blips. I just texted my mom an emoji of the French flag. I don't know why but it felt right, and we're both glad I did.

This is a lot of pressure for Unicode, whose mere three full-time employees have to deal with the new reality that millions upon millions of spastic tweens and other entitled consumers use this smartphone vernacular. So although class of 2015 emoji expansion will bring some long overdue additions—black people!—it'll also make some tough cuts in what is truly an impossible-to-please-everyone situation.

But man, we're really missing out on that hoagie emoji. That, and about a dozen other top-tier would-be emoji choices that were slashed before the unveiling of Unicode's 8.0 emoji set, whittled down from about 80 to a little over 40.

Lost in the deliberation process are the following gems, recreated from Unicode's public records by Gawker illustrator Sam Woolley for your enjoyment and longing:

The "Anonymous Magenta Woman" emoji series is perhaps the most evocative and sophisticated of the whole bunch. The only way it could've better capture the modern condition is with this emoji. We would have used you daily.

Face palm's natural counterpart is "shrug," which Unicode itself says is a nod to the now-ubiquitous ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon. Now that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ has been popularized and ruined, we could have really, really used a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoji.

The baguette emoji would've been useful for the exact same reason the eggplant is so useful.

Consider this: the 8.0 emoji update will include new foods like popcorn, burrito, taco, and—hell yeah—a wedge of cheese. But the omission of the proposed hoagie emoji is a true shame, not just because hoagies are a delicacy of the western world, but for the same reason we need that baguette.

The preggers emoji would have, as Unicode pointed out in its notes, completed the set of family emoji like baby and parents. You don't get a baby without a pregnant woman, and you don't get a damn baby emoji without a pregnant emoji. Open your eyes.

The takeout container is iconic not just of takeout foot, but of a certain set of personal choices—you've chosen to give up for the night, and will be sitting on your couch eating out of a box by yourself. It'd be great to convey the Ahh, fuck it, I'm staying in mindset with a single tap. Or, maybe you just want Chinese.

Stop sign—the anti-100. How many times do you just need someone to fucking STOP? Throw a sign at 'em. Or not, because the best we'll have is the yield sign.

Selfie is an annoying word to say, and it's even worse to write. Better to replace it altogether with an emoji—perfect for when you want to see someone's face but don't want to say "send me a selfie."

Avocados are delicious, nutritious, and very "in" right now. So why did Unicode decide against the avocado?

The arm flex emoji has become a figurative dynamo—but what about lower body strength? Legs are the pillars of the species, our foot-movers, a gradually widening belt of muscle. Sometimes hairy, sometimes not—would the leg emoji have been hairy? We won't know.

With the recession behind us, we'll all start wearing tuxedos again; at least that was the promise of "tuxedo," before it was discarded with other wardrobe emoji like "hijab" and "cap with bill."

Maybe the hardest lost emoji to let go of, "cucumber or pickle." Come on.

The other discarded emoji are as follows:

• Beard
• Mustache
• Selfie
• "Fingers crossed" gesture
• Juggling
• Archery
• Sandwich wrap
• Green salad
• Eggs (unbroken)
• Milk
• Yogurt
• Croissant
• T-Rex head
• Fox
• Eagle
• Scooter
• Skateboard
• Butterfly
• Duck
• Lobster
• Skunk
• Bat
• Shark
• Lizard
• Owl

Maybe some of those would've been more meaningful to you than the ones we've recreated—who the hell knows! Unicode relies on a slow, deeply formal system of public comment and private deliberation when deciding which emoji to release to the public, and they don't provide any concrete explanation for why certain ones made it while others did not. (And how could they?) Many of the emoji in the new group were selected after being cooked up by publications like BuzzFeed, Business Insider, and New York magazine, according to Unicode documentation. They're listening. Us ordinary folk are welcome to submit our own formal emoji proposals, but they're subject to a bevy of "selection factors."

So we're not getting everything we want, or even everything we need, to express every pictograph twitch that crackles from head to fingertip. There are just too many of us; how do we represent everything everyone cares about in a way that anyone can understand? We can't, but that won't stop us from wishing and dreaming and hopeful emoji-ing. But god damnit, the fact that the eggplant is our only phallic stand-in is just downright unsustainable.

Illustrations by Sam Woolley

On Wednesday evening, the news began to break on Twitter. Computer security analysts had discovered something nefarious about a piece of advertising software called Superfish, which comes pre-installed on cheap Lenovo laptops like the Yoga 2. Superfish was leaving the laptops wide open to takeover by malicious adversaries. And it was all being done to deliver internet ads.

Lenovo, trusted manufacturer of low-cost, popular laptops like the Yoga series, quickly found itself embroiled in a scandal. The company had done a deal with adware maker Superfish to install its software on its machines for a period of months. Lenovo would get money from Superfish by allowing it to feed ads from its partners onto the web pages that consumers visited. The problem? Superfish's product was turning Lenovo laptops into soft targets for criminals.

Discovering Superfish

The trouble started when Facebook engineering director Mike Shaver commented on Twitter:

Lenovo installs a MITM cert and proxy called Superfish, on new laptops, so it can inject ads? Someone tell me that's not the world I'm in.

— Mike Shaver (@shaver) February 19, 2015

He was referring to a man-in-the-middle attack (MITM), a common form of malicious hack, which allows your adversary to jump right into the middle of your network communications. A typical MITM attack, for example, will monitor your traffic until you, say, query a bank website. Then it injects new data, redirecting you to a fake bank site where you type in your password — and you can guess what happens next. The idea that trusted computer maker Lenovo might be enabling a MITM attack to stick advertising into people's traffic stream was pretty shocking.

Almost immediately, Google Chrome security researcher Adrienne Porter Felt began digging in the Lenovo help forums, trying to figure out what was going on with this Superfish thing. She works on the exact kind of issue Shaver had described, involving an attack where the bad guys put a fake "cert," in this case a self-signed root certificate, into your browser. That fake cert tells your browser to trust a whole bunch of extra sites that Chrome, IE and Firefox would normally warn you to avoid. Basically, this fake cert means that browsers on Lenovo laptops trust any site that Superfish tells them to — including fake banks, fake insurance companies, fake Facebook, whatever.

What Felt discovered was that Superfish had been a topic of controversy for months in the Lenovo forums, causing users no end of headaches. After months of complaints, an official Lenovo spokesperson responded in late January, confirming that Superfish did indeed inject ads into your traffic. The rep called it the "Superfish Visual Discovery Engine," and what it was doing was watching everyone's network traffic, and adding advertising to search results when it figured out that they were shopping.

Above, you can see what your search results would look like with Superfish installed. Those "visual" ads were all injected into this user's traffic in midstream. It's the very definition of a man-in-the-middle attack, where an attacker injects new information into your traffic without you knowing about it. In this case, the new information was ads — but it could have been an entirely fake website.

Felt was appalled, and posted on Twitter:

Lenovo confirms they ship preinstalled software that injects ads into sites including google https://t.co/DIDMrgw62z via @shaver

— Adrienne Porter Felt (@__apf__) February 19, 2015

This set off a night of hacking among Felt's colleagues and other infosec experts, to figure out what the hell this Superfish software was doing — and how bad the MITM attack really was.

It was bad.

By yesterday morning, the news had broken all across the internet: By pre-installing Superfish, Lenovo had left hundreds of thousands of customers vulnerable to MITM attacks that could leave their passwords and personal data in the hands of criminals. And that was on top of injecting annoying ads that often broke various other apps and led to those first customer complaints in the Lenovo forums last year.

But the worst was yet to come. An infosec researcher with Errata Security, Robert Graham, had spent his Wednesday night poring over the code that makes up Superfish, and discovered that the program wasn't just malicious — it was also incompetent. There are a number of legitimate programs that do something like a MITM attack on your computer in order to look at your traffic as it's moving between your computer and the internet. Anti-virus programs do this, for example, in order to detect certain kinds of malware.

Usually when an anti-virus program does a MITM with a fake cert, however, every installation of the anti-virus program generates a unique private key. Having a unique private key on your cert makes it a lot harder for bad guys to hijack your system. But Superfish? Its fake certs, on hundreds of thousands of computers, all shared the same private key. And Graham had found it, using a very quick, simple dictionary attack. Basically, he threw dictionary words at the program until one worked. The word that worked, by the way, was "komodia," the name of the company whose MITM technique powered Superfish.

So let's just step back and marvel at what this means for a minute. Essentially, anyone who has a Lenovo laptop with Superfish in it now has the keys to every other Lenovo laptop with Superfish. An adversary can drop $600 on a computer, crack the password, and now she can do mass MITM attacks on every other Lenovo user. Felt's colleague and fellow Google Chrome security researcher Chris Palmer explained on Twitter exactly what that would mean in a series of pictures.

#superfish pic.twitter.com/g6Q6MrRRpI

— Chris Palmer (@fugueish) February 19, 2015

Once you have the keys to the fake Superfish cert, you can use them to tell other computers that any site they visit is valid and trustworthy — because it has a Superfish cert, too! You know how when you go to a scammy site, Chrome, Firefox and IE will often send you a message that says the site is insecure or that its certificate is questionable? With the help of the Superfish MITM attack, you'll never get those messages again — even when you are visiting a fake version of Bank of America, set up by bad guys to steal your login information.

Above, you can see a picture of a cert signed by Superfish for bankofamerica.com. Normal users would never see this screen, unless they dug down into their cert menus — which, let's face, it none of us do for every single website we visit. But your Lenovo computer sees it, and trusts it, because of that fake root certificate. With Superfish, you have no guarantee that anything you see on the web is what it claims to be.

For their part, Lenovo has acknowledged that Superfish is a problem, and claims that they have stopped shipping it in newer computers. Still, several researchers were able to find Superfish two nights ago, in Lenovo laptops they had just bought. There is hope for people who use Microsoft's program Defender, though: the company announced today that Defender will be destroying Superfish like any other malware.

It's Official: Internet Advertising Is a Weapon

The question is, why would Lenovo do this? For money, of course. Superfish and other companies like it pay for the privilege of having their software pre-installed on your machines. Most of the apps you find pre-installed on your laptops, tablets and phones are from companies that paid to put it in front of your eyes, in the hope that you'd use their services or buy an upgrade. Normally this is an annoyance but not a security risk.

But with programs like Superfish, which affect other programs, users are harmed. You can un-install Superfish, but even when you do that, you don't uninstall that fake cert that Superfish left behind in your browser. And that's by design — Lenovo knew that would happen. But that's also what makes their deal with Superfish so lucrative. Superfish knows it can keep serving ads for its partners for as long as most users have no idea what certs are, let alone that there can be a fake one that undermines their security.

To be fair, Lenovo is in a difficult position. In order to sell laptops in their Yoga line at such low prices, they pretty much have to make deals with companies like Superfish. That's what subsidizes the cost of making the laptop. You'll notice that Superfish is not in any of Lenovo's high-end lines like the ThinkPad. So not only are consumers getting screwed here, but it's the consumers with the least amount of money to spend — students, retirees, and the working class. These are also people who are among the least likely to have the money or time to sue Lenovo for what the company has done to them.

The key takeaway here, though, is that the Superfish scandal is not an isolated incident — it's just the one that has gotten the most attention in the media. Superfish and companies like it have been making malware like this for consumer electronics devices for years, leaving users vulnerable to attack. Over at Slate, software engineer David Auerbach points out that the last highly-public example of this kind of thing was when Sony put dangerous malware on its CDs to prevent unlawful copying.

In the case of Superfish, though, there are other dismaying elements to the story. Komodia founder Barak Weichselbaum, whose MITM technique is built into Superfish, is a former Israeli intelligence agent. Was Superfish also intended to aid intelligence agencies who wanted to spy on people's internet traffic? Or was it merely based on techniques that Weichselbaum and his colleagues had learned while serving as intelligence agents?

Either way, Superfish suggests a disturbing connection between government surveillance and internet advertising. Even if Weichselbaum's connection to Israeli intelligence is purely by chance, there is no denying that Superfish could have allowed the government to engage in MITM attacks — quietly snooping on all your internet traffic — just as easily as it could help criminals steal your passwords.

We've entered a strange time for the advertising industry in the high tech space. When hardware makers have to sell ad-supported devices like the Yoga, they open themselves up to shady deals that expose consumers to a lot of potential danger. We're used to the idea that there are bad pieces of spyware and malware out there, buried inside internet ads — but now it could come pre-installed on the machines you thought you could trust.

If you are worried that Superfish is installed on your computer, you can learn more here about how to spot it and uninstall it.