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After its University of Oklahoma chapter got kicked off campus for singing a racist song, Sigma Alpha Epsilon would very much like you to believe that there is no racism engrained in the organization itself. That probably explains why SAE would no longer like to happily inform you that nearly all of its original members fought to defend slavery in the Civil War.

Prior to this week, SAE's official website was open and proud about its deep connection to America's confederate states. Here is how the site's "History" page opened prior to this week:

Sigma Alpha Epsilon was founded on March 9, 1856, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Its founders were Noble Leslie DeVotie, Nathan Elams Cockrell, John Barratt Rudulph, John Webb Kerr, Samuel Marion Dennis, Wade Hampton Foster, Abner Edwin Patton, and Thomas Chappell Cook. Their leader was DeVotie, who wrote the ritual, created the grip, and chose the name. Rudulph designed the badge. Of all existing national social fraternities today, Sigma Alpha Epsilon is the only national fraternity founded in the antebellum South.

That is pulled from the Wayback Machine, which last archived the page on Feb. 3 of this year. If you visit it now, you'll notice that the final sentence—which touts SAE as the only one of America's fraternities formed in the antebellum South—has been lopped off completely.

After that graph, the original history page continued on:

Founded in a time of intense sectional feeling, Sigma Alpha Epsilon confined its growth to the southern states. By the end of 1857, the fraternity numbered seven chapters. Its first national convention met in the summer of 1858 at Murfreesboro, Tennessee, with four of its eight chapters in attendance. By the time of the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, fifteen chapters had been established.

If you look at it now, you'll notice that the entire first sentence—which essentially describes the period of American slavery as "intense sectional feeling"—has been deleted.

The third paragraph—about DeVotie, one of its founders, who died after he... fell off a boat—remains, but after that three whole paragraphs detailing SAE's involvement in the Civil War have be completely removed. Here is what they said:

The fraternity had fewer than 400 members when the Civil War began. Of those, 369 went to war for the Confederate States and seven for the Union Army. Seventy-four members of the fraternity lost their lives in the war.

While many Sigma Alpha Epsilon Chapters today claim that Noble Leslie DeVotie was the first person to die in the Civil War, DeVotie is not recognized by reputable sources as the first death. DeVotie lost his footing while boarding a Steamer on February 12, 1861, purportedly becoming the first casualty of the war.

After the Civil War, only one chapter survived – at tiny Columbian College (which is now George Washington University) in Washington, D.C..

You can understand, of course, how SAE might think this paragraph explaining that 369 of its original members fought for the Confederacy would complicate its assertion that the fraternity is not racist. Especially when you consider that SAE's chapter at Oklahoma State currently has a confederate flag hanging on one of its walls.

In light of OU SAE controversy, photo shows visible confederate flag hanging from OSU SAE house. Story to come soon. pic.twitter.com/hmJ3TRSSDD

— O'Colly (@OColly) March 9, 2015

Unfortunately for SAE, it can't completely erase the history of its connections to the Confederacy.

Websites like Think Progress, for instance, had pulled out some of the pertinent paragraphs before someone got around to deleting them. Word also has yet to trickle out to individual chapters that they're supposed to be keeping all this shit under the radar now. You can pretty easily find SAE's original accounting of its history on some websites of its individual chapters—Marshall and Evanston are ones I found in Googling for half a second—and its Miami of Ohio chapter even provides detailed historical bios of its founders, several of whom fought and died for the Confederacy or went on to own plantations.

Still, anything can be deleted from the internet. What's harder to remove is, say, someone's gravestone.

Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery is a burial ground in St. Louis that was established after the Civil War as part of a network of graveyards meant for the remains of the war's veterans. Though Jefferson National eventually began to accommodate upstanding but dead citizens of all stripes, it contains a large number of graves of Civil War soldiers and is overseen by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.

If you were to take a stroll among the cemetery's Civil War graves, you might stumble upon the headstone of Samuel Marion Dennis, one of SAE's eight founders, who died of pneumonia after being captured by the Union.

You'll notice that Dennis' gravestone boasts that he helped found SAE, and also carries the SAE badge. You'll also notice that it's pointed, because when Civil War veterans were buried, Union soldiers were given rounded gravestones and Confederate soldiers were given pointed ones. (The VA's website notes that the old rumor is that the point came about "to prevent 'Yankees' from sitting on Confederate headstones.")

In any event, one thing SAE has chosen not to excise from the internet is when and where it was started. The first sentence of its current website notes that the fraternity was "founded on March 9, 1856, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama," and, well, there's only a certain number of conclusions you can draw from that permanent piece of history.

[top photo of brothers moving out of SAE via AP, photo of grave via a tipster]

The two Wisconsin tween girls accused of stabbing a friend 19 times and leaving her in a park—because they believed doing so would protect their families from the mythical internet horror known as Slender Man—will be tried as adults for first-degree attempted homicide, a judge ruled Friday.

The girls were 12 at the time of the incident, as was the victim, who ultimately survived the attack.

Their attorneys claimed the girls' apparently sincere devotion to Slender Man—a gaunt, creepy figure with long arms and a blank face—was a mitigating factor that should have lessened the charge to second-degree attempted homicide, the AP reported. That could have kept the trial in juvenile court—the first-degree offense must be tried in the adult system.

Prosecutors say the killing was premeditated, and the two only stabbed their friend after formulating a months-long plot to kill her. The teens said they believed they would be able run away to Slender Man's mansion in the woods, where they would live as the demon's "proxies."

Police picked them up in Wisconsin's Nicolet National Forest, where they were allegedly searching for Slender Man's home.

One of the two girls was initially found mentally unfit to stand trial as a result of her Slender Man delusions, but that decision was later reversed after psychologists found her mental condition had "improved."

Both girls' attorneys have requested hearings to argue the case should be moved back to the juvenile system. Those will take place in May and June.

If convicted of first-degree attempted homicide, they face up to 60 years in prison.

[Photo: AP Images]

As you're sitting there in a poorly lit office in front of your MacBook Air screen, perpetually hopscotching from one text-filled vessel for banner advertising to the next, absorbing the media, so is ContentBot. As you're socially sharing the most compelling images, videos, and personal essays that you find, in service of furthering your personal brand, so is ContentBot.

ContentBot—developed by the artist Alex Taylor—is just like you, in that it is boring, and dark, and spends all its time surfing the internet, occasionally clicking its mouse. ContentBot is also like you in that it occasionally reads Gawker.

Here's how Taylor describes it:

Contentbot is a relentless virtual player in the attention economy, seeking out Hot New Content to engage with & share on a 24/7 basis. Meaningful tweets are occasionally constructed via rudimentary sentiment analysis.

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h/t Prosthetic Knowlege. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not been seen in public for more than a week, The New York Times reports. Is he sick? Is he dead? Is he in Switzerland with his pregnant Olympic gymnast mistress for the birth of his third, unconfirmed child? Certainly not. (But maybe!)

Since his last public appearance on March 5th, with the prime minister of Italy, Putin has cancelled a trip to Kazakhstan, a treating signing with South Ossetia, and failed to make an appearance at an annual meeting of top intelligence officials. Naturally, rumors abound.

According to the Times, a Swiss tabloid reported that Putin had accompanied his mistress, Olympic gymnastics medalist Alina Kabayeva "to give birth in a clinic in Switzerland's Ticino canton favored by the family of Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister." Andrei Illarionov, a former presidential advisor, reportedly wrote a blog post theorizing that Putin was being held after a palace coup endorsed by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Or maybe it's an intentional distraction from the tensions coursing through Moscow after the mysterious death of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov.

The Kremlin has not offered an explanation for Putin's disappearance from the public eye, although state television did air footage of the president working from his office. They did, however, appear to have doctored his schedule to make it seem as though he made appearances on days that he had not, a move with Soviet overtones:

The daily newspaper RBC reported that a meeting with the governor of the northwestern region of Karelia, pictured on the presidential website as taking place on March 11, actually occurred on March 4, when a local website there wrote about it. A meeting with a group of women shown as March 8 actually happened on March 6, RBC said.

Very weird!

The simplest explanation is that he's sick—there is a particularly virulent strain of the flu going around the Russian capital right now. But the Kremlin denies that Putin has taken ill: asked by Reuters to confirm that the president was healthy, spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, "Yes. We've already said this a hundred times. This isn't funny anymore."

[Photo credit: AP Images]

According to governmental officials, "about 50 people" are believed to have died after a crowded ferry capsized off the western coast of Myanmar Friday night. AFP News reports that the bodies of four men and 29 women have been recovered so far, with at least 12 people still missing.

"We suspect that the boat sank because it was overloaded with goods," a police officer told the news agency.

169 of the ferry's registered 214 passengers were rescued successfully, but local sources estimate nearly 100 more were onboard without official tickets.

According to the Associated Press, such disasters have become troubling common in the area after sectarian violence between Buddhists and Muslims displaced as many as 140,000 people in 2012:

In recent years, Rakhine state has been the departure point for thousands of desperate Rohingya Muslims, who crowd on to small and dangerously overcrowded boats to escape persecution, often aiming for Thailand and Malaysia. [...]

Referred to by the government as Bengali, they are largely seen as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even if many can trace their ancestry in the country back for generations.

In October, Rohingya rights group the Arakan Project estimated that 100,000 people have fled the area by boat in the last three years.

[Image via AP Images]

Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has not been seen in public since March 5 and is feared in some panicky circles to have died or worse, has the flu, a CIA source tells Gawker. Or at least that's what the CIA thinks.

Get well soon, Vladimir!

Contact the author at john@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 364F A5D5 ABEC C230 E40F 39FC 49FA 7D14 EAA7 110D

In this week's Sunday Book Review, Zoë Heller and Adam Kirsch weigh the importance of an author's intended meaning versus a reader's interpretation of the text. Which is more important, they ask. "If a text can mean anything the reader wants it to mean, then why read it in the first place?" Kirsch argues. "Isn't literature supposed to help us achieve contact with other minds, rather than trapping us in a hall of mirrors, in which we can see only our own distorted reflections? Surely there must be limits to a text's ­interpretability." I instantly thought of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man—the 1952 epic that confronts America's twisted legacy of identity politics, race, black nationalism, and class disillusionment. "I am an invisible man," it begins. And depending on the reader, the ensuing 500 pages present a multitude of revelations, answers, or questions (or a mix of the three). Yet, no matter which way you interpret the book, its true essence is found, time and again, in the first sentence—all conclusions roots back to Ellison's opening line. "Great works of literature are like stars," Kirsch concludes, "they stay put, even as we draw them into new constellations."

"Why Did This Movie Starring Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper Go Straight to Video?" by Adam Sternbergh

Spoiler: Serena is not an interesting or particularly enjoyable movie, and I cannot in good conscience recommend that you watch it. But it is a useful object lesson in moviemaking in the 21st century — and an improbable tale of how something can go terribly wrong even when everything seems to be going wonderfully right. Set during the Depression in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, Serena is the tale of an ambitious timber baron named George Pemberton (Cooper), his troubled and ruthless rise to power, and his even more troubled and ruthless marriage to a difficult and remarkable woman named Serena (Lawrence), who emerges as a kind of backwoods Lady Macbeth. You can easily imagine the elevator pitch: It'sWinter's Bone meets There Will Be Blood, with a dash of Cold Mountain and meaty dramatic roles for both leads. Sounds good, right? Who wouldn't green-light that?

http://www.vulture.com/2015/03/how-di...

"How Do You Say 'Kosciuszko?' Updating the MTA Announcements" by Mike Sheffield

Hopkins has been the subject of a recent surge of public interest after profiles by The New York Times, NPR, and CBS. She's the female voice of New York City's subway system, guiding you from station to station, borough to borough, with her friendly announcements. Working out of a home studio in Hampden, Maine, Hopkins recites travel information for a number of public transportation departments, from the Paris Metro to the Incheon in South Korea. How did she get this international gig? "Right place, right time," Hopkins told Hopes&Fears. "I was working in Louisville, Kentucky as a writer/producer for an audio/video production company when the sister company next door, Innovative Electronic Designs, invented computer-controlled announcement systems. I could do the voice that they wanted and… since 1984 I have been doing the female English voice at airports and subways like NY's MTA and Chicago's CTA."

http://www.hopesandfears.com/hopes/city/tra...

"Was Selma Worth It?" by Amy K. Nelson

What is your identity when a large part of your life is defined by someone being murdered during one of the most important and infamous civil rights moments in history? How do you measure that loss today, in 2015, when the movement around it seems to have stalled? What, for that matter, do you do with your life after history has claimed someone close to you?

https://medium.com/matter/was-sel...

"Mirror, Mirror: The Costume Designer Behind Cookie" by Elizabeth Wellington

Those furs Cookie dons? They belong to McGhee's mother-in-law, Janet Bailey - first wife of Philip Bailey, Earth, Wind & Fire's lead singer. (How is that for authentic 1970s, trending hot on the runway right now?) Other notable pieces - namely, the Christian Louboutin shoes and black-and-silver Balmain evening dress - are from the personal collection of Monique Mosley, the wife of the show's executive music producer, Timbaland.

http://www.philly.com/philly/living/...

"Meet the Hardest Working Man in Porn" by Paige Ferrari

Japanese porn, more often referred to here as AV (adult video), and there is essentially nothing he won't do or hasn't done while getting busy with more than 7,500 different female costars, including a former teen pop singer, Hungarian exchange students, and a pair of 72-year-old twins. In 18 years and more than 7,000 films, Shimiken has refused only one scenario: having sex with an actress after she had sex with a dog. (He agreed to a rewrite in which the dog merely licked butter off the woman before their scene.)

http://www.details.com/culture-trends...

"Barack and Me" by Rembert Browne

Still tinkering more than an hour into the flight, we were alerted that we would be taken to a conference room in two minutes, and that we should get ready. The chase was back on. For a moment, I'd gotten so comfortable that I'd forgotten what the stakes were. I was just hanging out with my new friends. But just like that, we were walking through the cabin and into a conference room, and there was the president, ready to shake our hands. Once we sat down to talk, I was positioned at President Obama's four o'clock, set to ask the third question, with Jarrett right over my shoulder. I stared at my question, wondering if I should have worn a tie, desperately trying to figure out what to do with my elbows. Leaning on the table feels sloppy, but I need to lean in to listen and the table really helps with that. But what do I do with my hands? And is my mustache curling into my mouth?

http://grantland.com/features/barac...

"Why America's Internet Is So Shitty and Slow" by Adam Clark Estes

In the US, the last mile of internet infrastructure is an enormous problem. There are two reasons for this: technical restraints holding back the bandwidth needed to support modern-day internet traffic, and a lack of competition between the major carriers selling internet service to the end user.

Most of America's telecommunications infrastructure relies on outdated technology, and it runs over the same copper cables invented by Alexander Graham Bell over 100 years ago. This copper infrastructure—made up of "twisted pair" and coaxial cables—was originally designed to carry telephone and video services. The internet wasn't built to handle streaming video or audio.

http://gizmodo.com/why-americas-i...

"Ultimate Breaks & Beats: An Oral History" by Robbie Ettleson

Between 1986 and 1991, 25 volumes of the Ultimate Breaks & Beats series were distributed worldwide, providing producers and DJs the sonic tools that served as the foundation for countless rap and dance tracks. Eventually this production style migrated from hip-hop to other genres, and the songs featured on UBB were incorporated into some of the biggest pop hits on theBillboard charts, including work by Prince, George Michael, Mick Jagger, Mariah Carey, Ariana Grande, Linkin Park, TLC, Justin Bieber, Calvin Harris, Katy Perry and many more (see details below). Even smooth jazz saxophonist Kenny G sampled a piece of Ultimate Breaks & Beats.

https://medium.com/cuepoint/ultim...

This story is a few weeks old, and it slipped under my radar somehow, but when veteran journalist Tom Robbins writes something, you read it.

"Attica's Ghosts" by Tom Robbins

Unlike Rikers Island, the huge New York City jail complex that has been roiled by scandals over the mistreatment of inmates in the past year, what occurs in the toughest state prisons has garnered little public notice. One reason is that most violent encounters between inmates and guards are handled internally. Charges are filed against the offender, a hearing is held and then a sentence is imposed, usually a hefty term in the Box. Inmates are invariably convicted. Of the 228 cases at Attica in which inmates were accused of assaulting corrections employees between 2010 and 2013, only one prisoner was found not guilty of all charges. Everyone else was sent to the Box for periods ranging from two to 16 months, records show.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/28/att...

[Image via Getty]

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

At least eight people are dead after Cyclone Pam struck the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu on Saturday, The Guardian reports. The death toll is expected to rise significantly.

According to The Guardian, Vanuatu is composed of 83 islands populated by 267,000 people. About 47,000 people live in the capital, Port Vila.

"We do anticipate that there'll be higher numbers [of casualties] on remote islands, because they have less sophisticated shelter," Colin Collett van Rooyen, director of Oxfam in Vanuatu, told the British newspaper, "but we have no indication of what's happening there because we have no communications to the islands."

A video posted to YouTube on Friday appeared to show widespread destruction caused by the storm in Port Vila.

"The sheer force of the storm combined with communities just not set up to withstand it, could have devastating results for thousands across the region," Vivien Maidaborn, executive director of UNICEF in New Zealand, told The Guardian.

According to CNN, UNICEF spokesperson Alice Clements said that the entire country is still without power or water.

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

Try as he might, 44-year-old Kevin Fant couldn't get off. The former transit officer was sentenced to two months in jail this week, punishment for masturbating in a Philadelphia subway car while off-duty last year.

Authorities first learned of Fant's abnormal passion for his job in October, when transit police were forwarded a video of their colleague working his beat off-hours. Fant was suspended immediately and later fired.

In court, Fant's defense attorney argued that it may have been the video, not his client, that was grossly manipulated. Municipal Judge Karen Yvette Simmons was not persuaded, convicting Fant of open lewdness and indecent exposure on Thursday.

According to the Philadelphia Daily News, the dependably self-reliant ex-cop will begin serving his jail time on weekends and was told to turn himself April 17.

[Image via SEPTA/CBS Philly]

Few young creative writers in our world write so curiously and honestly out of our varied black American literary tradition as Andrew Elias Colarusso. The biracial son of an Afro-Puerto Rican mother and an Italian American father; Andrew writes, "Because I did and do have a loving relationship with my (white) biological father I cannot dismiss the whiteness he has come to represent without dismissing a part of who I am."

Andrew, who is equally adept at poetry, speculative fiction, and literary nonfiction founded The Broome Street Review, an independently published literary journal founded in 2009. When I heard he was interested in being a part of the Times Six series, I knew Andrew would give us wonderfully odd-shaped shards of memory, incisive critique, and an ability to imagine a future for our country that most of us had yet to consider.

Two of the questions in this series focus on memory, love, misogyny, and blackness. Two of the questions place us at 12 years old, the same age Tamir Rice was when he was gunned down by police in Cleveland Ohio; and the same age Davia Garth was, who was killed by her stepfather in the same city. One of the questions asks us imagine two incredibly needed national policy proposals. The final question ponders how black lives can actually matter in 2015.

Laymon: Tell me about the first time you remember your love for black folks being threatened?

Colarusso: This is an especially difficult question for me as a biracial man. The answer invariably implicates (and estranges) my family and my self as one with filial ties to both blackness and its inverse. As a child coming of age, as a superhero in training, I needed to understand my origin. I needed to know why my black mother and white father (if you'll pardon my reductionism of both identities) never married. Certain truths were made clear to me, truths that even today I am glad to parse through. It was strange to know that cultural customs allowed in my mother's house were shunned in my father's house. Wearing a du-rag, for example. This was something that my father was ashamed to see on my head one morning after picking me up in Flatbush, Brooklyn and driving me over to his house in New Springville, Staten Island. It should be mentioned that nearly every person in my nuclear family (except my step-mother) has worked for the New York City Department of Corrections. What my father saw on my head that morning was, for him, a criminal garment—racialized contraband.

Let me further delve into the complexities of a liminal subjectivity. Because I am, and have been, allowed so intimately into both white and black spaces I have felt the estranging sting of race so many times I've lost count. In fact, I have difficulty pin-pointing one situation—as Dr. Prescod-Weinstein said, "I can't remember a time when my love for black folks wasn't being threatened." It is a profound reality of black life that we are constantly threatened. But because I did and do have a loving relationship with my (white) biological father, because I have come to understand him as a man who loved, but loved incompletely, my mother, because I recognize myself in him and am proud to say so—I cannot dismiss the whiteness he has come to represent without dismissing a part of who I am.

And perhaps we all know this feeling in some way—that a love for black people, our people, is always radical in the face of a patriarchal authority that, whether conscious of it or not, seeks to suppress the imaginative impossibilities made possible by acts of black love and life.

I should say finally that some of the best memories I have of Dad are in the car, driving from Brooklyn to Staten Island singing along to Sam Cooke's Portrait of a Legend 1951-1964. Something I might never have lived without.

When you were twelve years old, can you describe for me what a perfect day would look like?

At twelve I was a consummate dreamer with a rich (see: perverse) fantasy life. I suppose this hasn't changed. The year was 2001. Everything changed after I turned twelve. Especially as a New Yorker. It was also the year following the release of Pokemon Gold and Silver. The perfect day for me would have been succeeding in class, coming home to my grandmother's carne empanada (which I shamelessly drenched in hot sauce and ketchup), playing ball with my cousin, resting my head before sleep to fantasize about everything.

If twelve-year-old you, could describe the most exciting thing you did last night, what would she say?

The most exciting thing I did last night either involved the Frederick's of Hollywood catalogue or evolving my Eevee into an Umbreon. #SoftcoreNerd. Frederick's of Hollywood is still racy. Lord.

Can you describe your first memory of misogyny and anti-blackness colliding?

Because I am literal minded, the first instance that comes to mind is in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. The vitriol in a term like "nigger bitch."

"White man's bones," Macon said. He stood up and yawned. The dark of the sky was softened now. "Nigger bitch roaming around with a white man's bones." He yawned again. "I'll never understand that woman. I'm seventy-two years old and I'm going to die not understanding one thing about her."

This was said by Macon Jr. regarding Pilate. That has stayed with me for a long time as I've come to see the myriad ways we subjugate and suppress the subjectivities of black womanhood.

If you could concretely propose any two new national policies, what would they be?

One: National and international policy is important to me as a Puerto Rican. Puerto Rico is arguably (one of) the last colonial entities in the modern world. Despite being taxed without representation—the same thing American colonists rebelled against—a sense of cultural pride and integrity has not been extinguished. Is it fundamentally a culture which has come to phagocytically incorporate and exorcise the influence of its successive occupations? I think this is a fascinating measure of Puerto Rican resistance and resilience.

Puerto Rico has voted for Statehood in the most recent (2012) referendum, but the U.S. has failed to acknowledge this. The decision rests entirely on U.S. mainland government. We have to recognize the effects of this liminal/invisible state on those of us who live in the diaspora. Our relative freedom as citizens of the U.S. has allowed us to travel to the states (and back) since the turn of the American century. In the states we frequently occupy the lowest rungs of economic well-being and labor tirelessly in pursuit of the American dream. But we are statistically worse off on the island. I would like to see decisive political action regarding Puerto Rico. I would like to see America honor my island nation's desire to reap the full benefits of their labor and citizenship. But, more than that, I would like to see grassroots political movement spring from my people. I believe that Puerto Rico can exercise decisive political action that would allow for its sovereignty and, moreover, its success as an independent nation.

Two: "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." —Muriel Rukeyser. I believe that a history of suffrage is also a history of visibility. This nation operates on both a democratic ideal and a republican ideal. If individuals were polled on which ideal they most identified with, we'd all be a little surprised. I say this only because what has stopped us from implementing pro-choice policy is the pseudo-religious morality of a democratic ideal, and the exclusivity of a white/male republican elect. Justice for women means allowing women the right to choose what is done to their bodies—but the idea appeals to and feeds a masculine (emasculated) fear. I am a born-again Christian, but I believe in justice. I believe that a mother is the primary executor of the life of her unborn child, not the state. I would implement pro-choice policy—with the caveat that we radically reimagine sexual education and our framing of sexual paradigms.

How can black lives really matter in these United States of America?

Black life, as Fred Moten would elegantly suggest over black lives, is invaluable. Black life constitutes the horizon of possibility in this country. The fact that we have to say "Black lives matter" is evidence of a (national) structural flaw and a valuation that enters black life into a precarious (fluctuating) economy. My reaction to this expression is one of awakening, then re-awakening, to the reality that this country has failed its own imagination and has succumbed, again, to the perverseness of its fantasies. Still, I believe in progress. To believe otherwise is to spit in the face of my ancestors, who've sacrificed their lives for my present. This is exactly why the expression "Black lives matter" as a sign of democratic agency is invaluable. The expression itself is evidence of political awakening. Our agency in this country is always threatened, over and above the individual—who can be handsomely and forgetfully incorporated into the system. Value can be placed on an individual within a system, but how does the system account for individuals whose collective awareness and agency threatens the fundamental machinations of its governance. I support the efforts of thinkers and leaders like Jesse A. Meyerson and Mychal Denzel Smith who are engaged with constructive political change. We need leadership, significant vision, and sacrificial courage to galvanize the forward movement of our various agencies because, at the end of the day, we have taken for granted the reality of black life in these United States of America.

Andrew Elias Colarusso received a B.A. in comparative literature from NYU and an MFA from Brown University in literary arts. This year, he completed a novel, The Sovereign, and a collection of poems titled, Gentile; or, Bellwether for the Goliard.

Previously for Times Six:

• Reckoning With America's Legacy of Anti-Black Love
• Finding a Language for Borders, Theft, and History
• Why True Justice Won't Come Without Sacrifice

[Photo via AP]

If you'd like to be considered for the Times Six series, please send your thoughtful responses to kiese@gawker.com.

Kristin Cavallari, whose debut book Balancing on Heels drops in 452 days, has been hard at work researching...new conspiracy theories, apparently. She posted an article from InfoWars.com titled "Factory Farm Antibiotics Making Children Allergic to Fruits and Vegetables" on her app yesterday.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Five patients at Via Christi St. Francis hospital in Wichita, Kansas developed listeriosis after eating ice cream products from the Blue Bell creamery in Brenham, Texas, the Associated Press reports. Three are dead.

The five patients were hospitalized between December 2013 and January 2015 for unrelated causes, hospital spokeswoman Maria Loving told the AP. Information was available for four of the five on what foods they had eaten in the month before infection. The CDC found that all four had ingested milkshakes made with a single-serving Blue Bell product called "Scoops."

Bacteria isolated from the patients matched strains from Blue Bell products obtained in Texas and South Carolina. The FDA said that the bacteria had been found in samples of several Blue Bell products, including Blue Bell Chocolate Chip Country Cookies, Great Divide Bars, Sour Pop Green Apple Bars, Cotton Candy Bars, Scoops, Vanilla Stick Slices, Almond Bars and No Sugar Added Moo Bars.

Listeriosis is a life-threatening infection. "Almost everyone who is diagnosed with listeriosis has invasive infection, meaning the bacteria spread from their intestines to the blood, causing bloodstream infection, or to the central nervous system, causing meningitis," according to the AP.

Blue Bell, the third-highest selling brand of ice cream in the country (according to its own website), announced a product recall for the first time in its 108-year history.

"Anytime is one too much," Paul Kruse, the company's president and CEO, told The Houston Chronicle. "This is the only thing we do: We make and sell ice cream. It's who we are and we've got to do it right."

[Photo credit: Shutterstock]

Previously classified letters between Osama bin Laden and a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative reveal that the Afghan government used a secret fund, bankrolled by the CIA, to facilitate the release of a senior Afghan official kidnapped by the terrorist organization in 2010, The New York Times reports.

According to the Times, at least $1 million of the $5 million ransom payment was money that had come from the CIA. The exchange is referenced in letters between Osama Bin Laden and his second-in-command, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, killed by a drone strike in 2011.

The letters were obtained during the deadly 2011 raid on Bin Laden's Abbottabad, Pakistan compound; they were entered as evidence by federal prosecutors in the trial of Abid Naseer, a Pakistani Qaeda operative, convicted this month in Brooklyn.

The Times reports that throughout Afghan President Hamid Karzai's time in power, the CIA made monthly deliveries to the presidential palace, dropping off bags of money. "It's cash," a former Afghan security official told the Times. "Once it's at the palace, they can't do a thing about how it gets spent."

The amounts reportedly ranged from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $1 million:

The money was used to buy the loyalty of warlords, legislators and other prominent—and potentially troublesome—Afghans, helping the palace finance a vast patronage network that secured Mr. Karzai's power base. It was also used to cover expenses that needed to be kept off the books, such as clandestine diplomatic trips, and for more mundane costs, including rent payments for the guesthouses where some senior officials lived.

The $5 million ransom payment was for the release of Abdul Khaliq Farahi, who had been serving as the Afghan consul general in Peshawar, Pakistan when he was kidnapped in September 2008, the Times reports. Farahi—son-in-law to a man who had been a mentor to Karzai—was held for more than two years.

When the payment came through, Rahman complained to Bin Laden that other militant groups wanted to get in on the action. "As you know, you cannot control the news," Rahman wrote. "They are asking us to give them money, may God help us."

[Photo credit: AP Images]

It's been nearly a month since a man in Canada successfully evaded police by riding his motorcycle through a shopping mall, but it was only yesterday that footage of the incident leaked online—and oh man is it some wacky, wild stuff.

Pursued by authorities for reckless driving, the urban off-roader chose to double down on his offense by taking a short detour through the Guildford Town Centre Mall in Surrey, British Columbia.

The Calgary Sun reports that, improbably, no one was injured during the chase and, perhaps even more improbably, the goddamn maniac got away.

Or, as one observing officer succinctly put it: "Holy shittt!"

[Image via YouTube//h/t NY Daily News]

After an email containing racist and misogynist language sent to a campus fraternity by one of its members surfaced this week, the University of Maryland announced that it was opening an investigation into the case. The email's author dissuades his fraternity brothers from inviting women of color to a party and not to concern themselves with issues of consent.

Here is a (presumably edited) version of the email, published by The Huffington Post:

Regardless of the rush shirt let's get rachet as f*** during rush week. My d**k will be sucked and f***ed in compound basement whether you guys like it or not. Don't invite any n****r gals or curry monsters or slanted eye chinks, unless they're hot. Ziggy you're [sic] girl can come she's cool. Remember my n***as, erect, assert, and insert, and above all else, f*** consent ... d**ks untouched.

The email was sent in January 2014. It's not clear why it has come to light now.

The Kappa Sigma Fraternity issued a statement on Thursday confirming that the email's author had been a member of the fraternity's University of Maryland chapter at the time the email was sent. The fraternity also announced that the individual was "immediately suspended, pending an investigation.

"The individual subsequently submitted a letter of resignation from Kappa Sigma," the statement reads. "The undergraduate chapter at the University of Maryland is also presently engaging in proceedings to formally expel the individual from Kappa Sigma."

The school learned of the email just two days after video emerged of a racist Oklahoma University frat singing a racist song.

The Baltimore Sun reports that some students wrote messages in chalk in front of the university library, including one about "racist frats" and another asking university President Wallace Loh, "What are you going to do about it?"

"I will of course ensure due process and protect the free speech guaranteed by our Constitution," Loh wrote on Twitter. "Protecting speech, however, does not mean agreeing with it. And quite honestly, I am struggling with justifying this email as free speech."

"The utter disregard for decency, the racist invective, the mindless disparaging of sexual consent, has left me angry and profoundly saddened," he continued. "Where does free speech and hate speech collide? What should prevail? What justification can we have that tacitly condones this kind of hate?"

[Photo credit: Shutterstock]

Since January, over 1,450 sea lions have been found stranded on California beaches, crowding rescue centers past capacity and worrying animal experts, The New York Times reports. According to researchers, this is 5 times greater than the historical average.

"There are so many calls, we just can't respond to them all," said Justin Viezbicke, who manages strandings for the state. "The reality is, we just can't get to these animals."

The reasons behind the increase—largely made up of sick and starving pups—is uncertain, but scientists believe rising ocean temperatures may play a role:

Experts suspect that unusually warm waters are driving fish and other food away from the coastal islands where sea lions breed and wean their young. As the mothers spend time away from the islands hunting for food, hundreds of starving pups are swimming away from home and flopping ashore from San Diego to San Francisco.

Many of the pups are leaving the Channel Islands, an eight-island chain off the Southern California coast, in a desperate search for food. But they are too young to travel far, dive deep or truly hunt on their own, scientists said.

A similar surge in lost pups occurred in the spring of 2013, leading the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to declare an "unusual mortality event" and release this troubling graph:

At that time, Dr. Shawn Johnson of the Marine Mammal Center told the San Francisco Chronicle, "We're hoping it's not the new norm." However, the situation may be even grimmer this year.

"Things are worse than 2013," Marine Animal Rescue's Peter Wallerstein told NBC Los Angeles. "We're doing everything we can to take in as many patients as we can."

[Image via AP Images/NOAA]

Two men believed to be connected to Amedy Coulibaly, one of three gunmen who terrorized Paris in January, have been charged with "terrorist conspiracy to commit crimes against people," The New York Times reports.

According to the Times, the two men—identified by prosecutors as Amar R., 33, and Said M., 25—were detained by French authorities along with two others earlier this week. The other two individuals were released.

The BBC reported this week that one of the four detained was Amar's girlfriend, a policewoman. "She is believed to have looked at Amar's police file after the January attack and sent it on to him," the BBC reported. "She has now been suspended."

Amar has five previous convictions for gang assault, theft, and abduction, the Times reports. Prosecutors said that he met Coulibaly at a prison near Paris. Prosecutors said that Said had also been convicted for gang assault and theft, and that his DNA was found on the strap of a Taser belonging to Coulibaly.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Kurdish authorities in Iraq say that ISIS used chemical weapons in a January 23 suicide attack against peshmerga fighters, the Associated Press reports.

In a statement, the Kurdistan Region Security Council claimed that ISIS used chlorine gas against peshmerga fighting to seize a supply line along Mosul and the Syrian border. The council said that its fighters found "around 20 gas canisters" on a truck used in the attack. An official told the AP that dozens of Kurdish fighters were being treated for "dizziness, nausea, vomiting and general weakness."

According to Reuters, The council said that the fighters took soil and clothing samples after the attack, and that laboratory analysis showed "the samples contained levels of chlorine that suggested the substance was used in weaponised form."

Peter Sawczak, a spokesman for the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, told Reuters, "We have not had a request from Iraq to investigate claims of use of chemical weapons in Iraq, and the OPCW cannot immediately verify the claims."

The council also released a video taken of the attack, which reportedly shows white smoke pouring out of a truck as it raced towards Kurdish fighters.

Last year, Iraqi officials alleged that ISIS militants used chlorine gas in the towns of Balad and Duluiya in late September. ISIS was also accused of using the chemical weapon in Kobani.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Two bombs exploded outside Christian churches in Lahore, Pakistan's second most populous city, today during Sunday services, killing 14 and wounding 78, NBC News reports.

"I was sitting at a shop near the church when a blast jolted the area," said one witness. "I rushed towards the spot and saw the security guard scuffle with a man who was trying to enter the church, after failing, he blew himself up."

According to CNN, the Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings, promising to continue such attacks until Sharia law is instituted in Pakistan.

In the aftermath of the blasts, police say mobs of angry Christians gathered to lynch two suspected Taliban informers, burning one of them to death.

Reuters reports that Lehore is generally considered less dangerous than many other parts of the country, but violence has become more common since last year, when the government launched a military campaign against the Taliban following unsuccessful peace talks.

[Image via AP Images]