Is the world flat enough for you yet? Do you require more flattening? 'Cause it can be arranged. Nay, it should be, according to Tom Friedman, who—and he's just spitballing here—wonders, in the New York Times, where he is paid to spitball for Pulitzers: "Should we be arming ISIS?"

Everybody phones it in at work sometimes. Some people work on geopolitics. Sometimes, geopolitical strategy gets phoned in. Here's Tom Friedman holding for you on line one:

As the saying goes, "to err is human, to forgive is divine," to which I'd add: "to ignore" is even more human, and the results rarely divine. None of us would be human if we didn't occasionally get so wedded to our wishes that we failed to notice — or outright ignored — the facts on the ground that make a laughingstock of our hopes.

Fortunately, there is a curative for this myopia: Facts On The Ground, as related to you in the newspaper by Tom Friedman in a column he cobbled together this morning after scanning other parts of the newspaper:

Only when the gap gets too wide to ignore does policy change. This is where a lot of U.S. policy is heading these days in the Middle East. Mind the gaps — on Iran, Israel and Iraq.

Let's skip ahead, shall we?

Let's start with Israel...

Just... a bit further.

It would be wrong, though, to put all of this on Netanyahu...

Keep going.

It is a more simple fact: In the brutal Middle East, the only thing that gets anyone's attention is the threat of regime-toppling force. Obama has no such leverage on Iran.

It was used up in Afghanistan and Iraq... Had those wars succeeded, the public today might feel differently. But they didn't. Geopolitics is all about leverage...

Almost there...

Have I ruined your morning yet? No? Give me a couple more paragraphs.

Go on.

Now I despise ISIS as much as anyone, but let me just toss out a different question: Should we be arming ISIS?

Um. Come again?

Obviously, I abhor ISIS and don't want to see it spread or take over Iraq. I simply raise this question rhetorically because no one else is: Why is it in our interest to destroy the last Sunni bulwark to a total Iranian takeover of Iraq?

Why, indeed, should we not tolerate a murderous neo-medievalist regime of dead-end theology dropouts with global ambitions in the hopes that it might slow down an antagonistic but largely rational regional power? Doesn't it make sense for the U.S. to prop up a gross totalitarian Sunni regime in Iraq that can bleed the Iranians dry? Hasn't that idea ever occurred to anyone before?

Hey, we're just asking questions here.

Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: FD97 D50A DE57 3943 4534 1A49 FA8B 74B4 A7A0 07BE

As we do every year, we recently submitted a FOIA request to the FCC for all the complaints it received from viewers upset by something aired at the Super Bowl. There were 34 of them, ranging from disgust toward the Katy Perry/Missy Elliott halftime show, offense at commercials that featured sex or profanity, and outright anger over Nationwide's "dead kid" ad.

A document containing every viewer complaint can be found at the bottom of this post. But first, some highlights, which fell roughly into one of three categories.

Complaints about the halftime show

Complaints about indecent commercials

Complaints about that Nationwide dead-kid ad

That Nationwide commercial was pretty fucked up.

Here is the full batch of complaints received by the FCC from Super Bowl viewers.

A common nightmare for New Yorkers came true yesterday evening when a woman walking in Greenwich Village died after being hit by a large piece of plywood blown from a nearby construction site.

The New York Times reports that the 37-year-old woman was talking on her cell phone while walking in front of 175 West 12th St. when a four feet by eight feet piece of wood struck her, knocking her into a wall. The wood was blown from the security fence of a construction site on Seventh Avenue, according to the NYPD.

From the Times:

A caller to 911 reported that the woman had suffered trauma and head injury after wood from a building hit her, a city official said. The city's Emergency Medical Service responded at about 5:56 p.m., the official said.

The caller to 911 told dispatchers the woman was lying on the ground and appeared to be confused, the official said.

The woman, whose name has not been released, was rushed to Bellevue, where she was pronounced dead just after 9 pm.

Image via Google Maps. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Look at this shit. North West clutching a Frozen suitcase so that she could be dragged through the airport by an anonymous, bald, burly security guard. Her boots gliding across the floor like roller skates. Tiny, custom-made YEEZUS tour jacket her royal robe. What a life!

Some people will definitely be mad at this, but here is a child who is living out every child's simple dream to be carried everywhere at all times. This is innovation.

[video via Khloe Kardashian]

In California, the high cost of housing is hurting the state's economic growth and pushing its citizens deeper into poverty. But there's so much land! Why is it so hard to find somewhere affordable to rent?

The Wall Street Journal's summary of California's new state report on its housing situation is grim: California's average rent is 50% higher than the national average, and its average home price is more than double the national average. Since housing is the first cost that most people pay, that means low-income Californians have less money left over for everything else. The negative impacts of high housing costs tend to cascade down the economic food chain in ways that high prices of less necessary goods do not.

What is California's problem, specifically? "That high cost is largely driven by a slow pace of construction in the state's major coastal markets, where demand for homes is highest and prices are bid up, the report said. Between 1980 and 2010, for instance, new home construction in the state's coastal metro areas increased by 32%, compared with 54% nationally, the report said. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the supply of new housing grew even more slowly, by about 20%."

The most desirable cities make it the hardest to build new housing. Therefore prices for existing housing skyrocket, and middle and lower class people begin to get priced out of cities altogether. Endless material has been written on how San Francisco, in particular, has erected a wall of local regulations that make it difficult and expensive to build there, which has the effect of protecting the beautiful city inhabited by people who already own, at the expense of everyone else who wants to live there now.

Though figuring out how to make more affordable housing is one of the most complicated public policy tasks in the world, the basic outlines of the problem are not that hard to see:

1. If you remove regulations and make it easier and cheaper to build new housing in desirable cities like LA and SF, prices should eventually fall, at least somewhat. Fortunate people who already have nice places to live in these desirable areas may argue that this could bring down their quality of life. This is true! It may not be important, though.

2. Don't want to deregulate and throw it onto the mercy of the free market? The government can also build affordable housing, especially subsidized housing for low income people. The problems are A) This has to be funded with tax dollars, and everyone will bitch about it, and B) Even if successful, if you still don't allow for more market-rate housing to be built along with it, you can end up with a situation where there is only low-end and high-end housing available, and nowhere for the middle class.

3. Alternately, you can direct public and private investment towards other areas of the state in order to make them more attractive for people to live, in hopes that they will draw off some of the demand that currently goes to LA and SF. Barstow—there's a nice public swingset there, now. Think about it.

4. You can leave the situation just how it is. This will lead inexorably towards a situation in which the most desirable urban areas become more and more expensive, until you reach a point when entire cities are only affordable for the upper class. Whether or not you perceive this to be a problem depends on what your concept of a city is, but suffice it to say that the ongoing housing trends of San Francisco do make it that much easier to construct a fence around a discrete urban area for the purposes of imprisonment when the revolution comes, hypothetically.

In other countries poor people just construct huge unregulated slums in and around cities where they can't afford proper housing. This would certainly be in keeping with San Francisco's fancy-free self image.

[Photo: Flickr]

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

Have you ever listened to a song and felt it was missing that special something? Maybe you thought the tune was excessively cheery, and needed more melancholy wailing from the likes of Hozier, the dour Irish dude whose droning "Take Me to Church" is, somewhat inexplicably, a huge pop hit.

Over the past few days, @Midnight writer Demi Adejuyigbe has posted clips of various other pops songs with "Take Me To Church" weaved into them. The results are dumb but funny; the somber closeups of Adejuyigbe's face are the best part.

pic.twitter.com/PYx7uRRIcc

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) March 16, 2015

pic.twitter.com/lIs75eKGuS

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) March 17, 2015

pic.twitter.com/HyxTYvTaWS

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) March 17, 2015

pic.twitter.com/6llsV4Wyoz

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) March 17, 2015

This one's my favorite:

pic.twitter.com/UdkXsE16jH

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) March 18, 2015

pic.twitter.com/dOVmgUytSr

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) March 18, 2015

Mashups are still cool.

Update:

.@Deadspin pic.twitter.com/Rjis9zX0mH

— demi adejuyigbe (@electrolemon) March 18, 2015

Photo: Getty Images

I graduated from Harvard in 2006, and have spent eight of the last nine years working as an admissions officer for my alma mater. A low-level volunteer, sure, but an official one all the same. I served as one of thousands of alumni volunteers around the world—a Regional Representative for my local Schools Committee, if you want to get technical. And, as a Regional Rep, my duties fell somewhere between Harvard recruiter and Harvard gatekeeper.

But now I'm done with all that. For a long time, I believed in the admissions process. I thought that I could use my position to help regular smart people with great test scores and impressive extracurriculars break into an elitist system. After eight years, though, I've learned that modest goal is more or less unreachable. Ivy League admissions are a complete racket, rigged in favor of the privileged and completely impervious to change. So I'm quitting the business.

And because I'm quitting, that means I can tell you, the reader, all the secrets of being a Harvard admissions representative, and what it really takes to get in.

But first, I'm going to tell you a bit about why I wanted to be an admissions representative for my alma mater, and what that job entailed.

I signed up for the job because it felt like the best way to give back to an institution that had given me quite a lot. I'm from the rural West. My father was a postal worker; my mom stayed at home. Thanks to the Common App and a little bit of urging from my parents, I applied to Harvard—and got in. And so I had a mission in signing up for all of this: I wanted to help students like me find their way into the Ivy League.

In my years working in admissions, I met with prospective students from all over the place. Technically, we're supposed to make these kids come to wherever is convenient for us to do their interview. But since I don't have a fancy office or house, and I don't want to place a huge travel burden on them, I tried to meet them someplace mutually convenient. I convened with prospective students in seemingly neutral territories: in high school cafeterias on the South Side of Chicago and in Gary, Indiana; in Starbucks in wealthy suburbs like Shaker Heights, Ohio and Bellevue, Washington. Once I even met a prospective in the boardroom of his father's company in a downtown Portland skyscraper (though that was his dad's idea, not his own). That also means I paid for my own travel costs (gas, parking, etc.), and I usually picked up their coffee or tea as well. Typically, the expense of being an admissions representative was no more than $200 every year, but still—that's more than I spend on renter's insurance.

Every winter, after meeting with students, reading over their admissions packets, and reviewing their test scores and transcripts, I've finally—most importantly—sent a recommendation to the full Admissions Committee as to whether to admit or reject them. I'm not the one who makes the ultimate decision to open the doors of upward mobility to these teenage hopefuls—or to slam those doors shut in their face—but I have been complicit in the process nonetheless.

What is it that I have looked for in prospective students, you may ask? Well, as the Harvard Interviewer Handbook rather sniffily puts it, "part of the general public believes 'best' ought to be defined by standardized tests, grades, and class rank." The admissions committee, however, "holds a more expansive view of excellence," and uses us to help discern excellence in forms that might not be so apparent on paper.

Which is important, because on paper most of these students look quite similar. To take some anonymous examples:

• White female, suburban private school. 4.0 GPA (unweighted), 95th percentile SATs, three AP tests, two SAT IIs. Interested in community service, photography, travel. Excellent letters of recommendation from her teachers and pastor. Legacy, both parents.
• White male, urban private school. 4.8 GPA (weighted), 92nd percentile SATs, four AP tests, two SAT IIs. Interested in creative writing, entrepreneurship, community service. All-State Debate Society. Glowing letters from his choir director and the school principal.
• White female, suburban boarding school. 3.9 GPA (unweighted), 92nd percentile SATs, three APs, three SAT IIs. Interested in social justice, travel, painting. National Merit Scholar. Great letters from her resident tutor and teachers. Legacy, one parent.
• White male, suburban public school. 4.25 GPA (weighted), 96th percentile SATs, two APs, three SAT IIs. Interested in entrepreneurship, community service, creative writing. Superb letters from the local Humane Society director and teachers.
• White female, rural private school. 3.9 GPA (weighted), 95th percentile SATs, three APs…

Every year there are a few literally perfect standouts, whose stats alone are so good that no interview will keep them from acceptance: 2400 SAT I, three 800 SAT IIs, at least two 5 APs, 4.0 GPA, and the usual signs of non-academic life. The mass of more traditionally excellent humanity, however, has had to go through people like me.

(And for the record: applicants 1 and 2 got in; the rest were rejected).

Every single applicant to Harvard is supposed to get an interview. My most recent regional committee had about a hundred active interviewers for three hundred applicants every year. The others where I worked have had closer to two hundred interviewers for nearly a thousand applicants. So everyone could expect between three to six interviews per person per year, split between the fall (early action) and winter (regular applications).

Each of these interviews lasted for about an hour of in-person time. To prep, I would contact the applicant for their basic info: GPA, test scores, and any additional material they want to send. Most people sent me a resume and a sample application essay or two. Toward the end of my tenure, I also started to see more exotic types of supplements: headshots, scripts and short stories, musical recordings.

The end goal of each interview was to rate the prospective in each of three areas: academics, extracurriculars, and personal qualities, plus an overall rating to judge the candidate's overall "suitability for admission." These ratings were "absolutely superior," "strong candidate," "acceptable but perhaps not competitive," or "not recommended."

But distilling a developing young mind into four numbers was an impossibly cruel task. And an increasingly difficult one. They were there to be evaluated for one of the most important opportunities of their lives. How could you possibly hope to get at the genuine person when there's so much pressure?

Which is why the interview process has devolved into more of a pageant.

First, in the purest sense. Seven years ago, most students would opt to wear something dressy but tasteful to the interview. In the last two years, though, I've seen the entire spectrum of fashion paraded in front of me. From the students who opt for shutter shades and muscle T's to the ones who wear bow ties and (exactly once) Louboutin pumps.

After the formalwear portion of the evening, we moved on to Q&A. Which was where each candidate launched into their prepared speech to show that they personally bucked the popular image of the Millennial as a smartphone-obsessed, Ritalin-addicted egomaniac with no work ethic. In fact, they mostly went on to question whether such people even existed outside the minds of East Coast media commentators. Sure, each of them liked their iPhones and maybe they did struggle a bit to understand other people's worldviews, but that's also why they needed to take that trip to Tanzania or volunteer for Habitat for Humanity or take a field trip to an inner city school or…

You get the idea. The only thing that told me was that either everyone under 18 reads New York Times Op-Eds and The Atlantic cover stories religiously, or—much more likely—that they were coached by someone who actually did.

There were other red flags to look out for, too. How they sat straight up when it was time for the open-ended questions. How their eyes glazed over and they looked right past you once they started to recite their canned answers. How their outrage, their compassion, their conspiratorial asides seemed just a bit too…performative.

What do you want out of your college experience? Ever since I was little, I knew college was for me…

What is your favorite subject and why? I love them all, I can't choose! That's exactly why I want a liberal arts education…

How do you balance your studies and your extracurriculars? I don't sleep much! Ha, ha. But seriously, if you love something as much as I do, you make time for it…

You're going from a place where you're one of the smartest people in the room to a place where you're one among equals. How are you going to deal with that? Well, I've thought about that a lot, and being the best is less important to me than being in a challenging environment…

At my day job, I've interviewed mid-career professionals who struggle with interview questions more than these high schoolers generally do. And I'm sure there are a few teenagers who really are that self-possessed.

Sometimes I think about my own application process. Would I have gotten into Harvard today? The only thing I remember about it, especially the interview, was an all-consuming anxiety, a paralyzing sense of doubt, and most of all, the desire to please the unknowable masters of my future. I recall talking about watching Star Trek and selling hot dogs and nachos at the concessions stand during high school basketball games. At times, I babbled for minutes on end (I'm a bit of a nervous talker) and I know I cut off my interviewer more than once. I'm not sure whether I would have written a nice report if I had been on the other side of the table.

To be fair, the interview is not much more than an in-person version of the application essay. It's meant to be a relatively quick, standardized way to assess a candidate's personality—an emotional biopsy, if you like. And as with any other foray into the teenage personality (especially one done by volunteers in non-laboratory conditions), it's more an art than a science.

The thing is that these personality tests won't even matter for the majority of candidates. If your scores aren't good enough, you could write like James Baldwin and interview like Richard Nixon and still not get a second look from the Admissions Committee in Byerly Hall—the ones with the real admit/reject power. Conversely, if you are a pre-Nobel laureate, you could talk only about last week's New Girl and not endanger your place in the next class.

For the few hundred or so in the middle, you have to take a calculated risk, and you have one of two places to do it: in the essay, or in the interview.

One of the least helpful pieces of non-advice that you will get about interviewing or essay-writing is this: "be yourself."

This is stupid and wrong. The "self" of the average 18-year-old comes out the best in things like GPAs and SATs and extracurricular tests: it's easiest to measure how sharp someone is, how quickly they will respond to new ideas, and how much of a work ethic they have in calculated, standardized measures.

But the vast majority of elite school applicants are a long way from becoming a whole, self-actualized person. It's not their fault; only they've never faced real threats to their existence, had people depending on them for food and shelter, or lived in actual poverty for any amount of time.

Yet for the last few years, it's felt like the normal, inquisitive, relatively unfiltered teenager of the early 2000's has been replaced by dozens of little Russell Wilsons. Gone are the hard edges and the unintentional flashes of personality that made it seem like I was actually getting something accomplished in the course of (most) of these interviews. Nowadays, I've gotten layers of carefully constructed defenses, designed to reveal only the most admission-friendly parts of the student.

Just once I would have loved to get an applicant who called out a stupid, predictable question for being what it is instead of dutifully reciting an impossibly trite, hand-wavingly general answer that cannot apply to all that many people. Someone who didn't sound like Mitt Romney when trying to relate to the challenges faced by people without blue blood.

Instead, I've seen a boringly predictable, on-trend parade of general excellence, like eating a dozen cronuts for dinner. It's interesting in the abstract, but the palate needs cleansing after a while. Hearing the liberal-upper-middle-class consensus view of the world (but with a twist, like backpacking through Southeast Asia!) certainly does not hurt an applicant. On the other hand, if I wanted that I would just sit on the toilet and listen to NPR.

And now for a little bit of advice.

First of all, there are a number of small factors that can move the admissions needle in small amounts: location, economic background, race. You can just accept that these exist and don't really count for much—a slight counterbalance to the general advantages that wealthier folks tend to enjoy as a rule. Or you can spend millions of dollars on lawyers and consultants, and hundreds of hours fighting in court in order to claw back this tiny little potential advantage from those in the lower half of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Either way, these are things beyond your control, and I'd recommend not worrying about them. Frankly, it's the cheaper and quicker option.

Otherwise, the official party line, as taken verbatim from Harvard's longtime Dean of Admissions, William Fitzsimmons (class of 1963, dean since 1986) is that Harvard selects for "academic excellence, extracurricular distinction, and personal qualities." And that sounds good—who doesn't love excellence?—until you think about it.

What Dean Fitzsimmons really means is that he isn't going to tell you anything substantial (that's why he's lasted for so long in his job). So I will tell you that in this context, measuring "academic excellence" really boils down to two things: Will this applicant graduate on time and happy?

Pure intelligence is one part, hence the focus on scores and GPAs. Harvard is difficult, and someone who has never seen a differential equation will probably struggle in the basic required math courses; someone who has never read a Steinbeck novel or a Shakespeare play will probably feel excluded from general English Lit.

But so is extracurricular activity. You might be smart, but do you have the discipline to keep going for four years? How do you respond to setbacks, challenges, opposition? Do you show signs of life in the wider world? In short: are you of sound mind?

The 4.0 student who just works the ball-washing station at the country club does not necessarily demonstrate great time-management skills. On the other hand, we'll take the person who has an A-minus GPA but spends most of her free time in a research lab breeding generations of flies for genetic tests, thank you very much. This is why admissions officers will say "well-rounded" until they're blue in the face. There's nothing wrong with plain old eggheads—but let's try and get out there once in a while, too.

And when the committee selects for the mysterious and ephemeral "personal qualities," well, we want to know how much of a jerk the candidate is, and how well they'll respond to a campus full of jerks.

Let's be honest: Harvard and its affiliates will inflict some kind of damage (academic, emotional, occasionally physical) on everyone who lingers there. It is a place where everyone is out to get everyone else. In a place where no one can be the best at everything, everyone takes any chance they can get to measure up to their peers. It is a mob of ruthless young overachievers with a taste for blood.

Ayn Rand, eat your heart out. Your Objectivist paradise is alive and well, and its name is Harvard. Here, people believe that each of them is a "heroic being," that their individual happiness is a moral absolute, that their own reason is ironclad and incorruptible. Just look at what four years of that does to a person. Never mind the outliers like Mark Zuckerberg and Ted Kaczynski. You just need to look at the offices of Wall Street investment banks (where half of the graduating class of Harvard ends up every year). Or the op-ed pages of New York newspapers. Or the halls of Congress (one shudders at the thought).

So, as far as I'm concerned, you may as well start toughening up as soon as you can, because the world isn't going to wait for you.

Sometimes this toughness comes through in the application proper. Were you an award-winning debater? Did you write snippy op-eds in the paper? Did you muscle out people with Ph.D.s to get a second author on a scientific paper? Have you had to endure a lifetime of pressure from your legacy parents, warning you that if you don't get in, you'll be disinherited? Congratulations. You're in.

But if the force of your pushy little personality fails to shine through in the rest of the application, then I have to try and draw it out in the interview. It's not psychoanalysis by any stretch. I just want to hear that you like certain things and dislike others, that you've run into obstacles and heard the word "no" on occasion. Don't tell me everything is great, because it's not. Don't tell me everything is terrible, because it isn't. And most of all, prove to me that you've spent some time thinking about a big brand-name in education, and what it can do just for you.

Then I can give you a strong recommendation.

In my admissions tenure, I've learned to understand the process as the soft con that it is. On the one hand, it's utterly opaque and more than a little arbitrary. On the other hand, it has huge consequences for the tens of thousands of young people who get sucked into it every year, and for the multi-billion-dollar institutions that live off of those students' money. And throughout the whole process are the unpaid, underappreciated, probably not impartial people like me, who get to make a lot of questionably appropriate, marginally legal, rational-until-it's-totally-arbitrary decisions. It makes very few people look good, but makes a lot of people pretty rich.

I've endured year after year of privileged sameness, with no sign of the non-millionaires whom I wanted to help. Exactly once I was assigned a candidate who came from the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. But his GPA and SAT scores were close to the cutoff for "not recommended," and when I asked him questions—about school, sports, family, TV, whatever—his answers lasted barely five seconds. When I asked him why he wanted to go to Harvard, he shrugged and said, "Dunno."

In spite of all that, I made good on this one chance I had been given to help someone who didn't have all the advantages of his applicant peers. I put him in the "acceptable but perhaps not competitive" category and gave him a tentative thumbs-up.

Weeks later, when the acceptance lists came out from our region, I didn't see his name. Later, in June, the interviewers from my region got a gentle reminder from my Schools Committee chair: as much as we might like to give a boost to underprivileged (if less-competitive) candidates, it was our job to evaluate, not advocate. Best to leave that sort of adjustment to the professionals.

So in the grand scheme of things, I realized I was powerless to say no to those who were only marginally deserving of an Ivy League spot, and completely unequipped to find those who could make the most of a top-shelf education but who never even thought to ask for one. Instead of giving people a boost on the ladder to upward mobility, I felt that I was simply there to make sure the children of the upper class stayed in the virtuous cycle that would keep them in the upper class. And there's no point in staying in a volunteer job that brings you nothing but frustration.

True, I could always parlay my "expertise" into a college counseling business. After all, people with thinner credentials than mine do it all the time—why not make a buck myself? But that would be crossing the Rubicon. The point at which you use applicants as sales leads—your "in" to thousands of dollars of their parents' money—is the point at which you can no longer claim any pretense of helping applicants, period.

So instead, I'm hanging up my admissions-representative blazer and trying not to make anything actively worse. I hope to succeed.

Anonymous is a 2006 graduate of Harvard College.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Above, you'll find a video of the most incredible day of my life.

Kristen Doute is a cast member on Vanderpump Rules, which just wrapped up its third season following a group of amoral, sexually indiscriminate friends who work at Real Housewife Lisa Vanderpump's West Hollywood restaurant, SUR. Kristen is the unofficial "villainess" of Vanderpump Rules, and in an average scene she can generally be relied upon to be either sobbing, scheming, or telling someone to "walk the fuck away."

The idea for this interview, since I had a cold, was to somehow get Kristen drunk without drinking too much myself, but this gal was going sip for sip and I couldn't back down. Since Kristen is something of a racehorse in terms of alcohol tolerance and I am closer to, say, a hamster, this plan resulted in me getting wasted and saying things like "samesies" out loud, on camera.

I was hopeful that at some point during our conversation Kristen would confront me, Bravo-style, over the extremely unflattering ode to her crazy that I wrote back in December, but no—this amazonian reality star (she wore 8-inch heels with "Las Vegas," "New York," and "Miami" emblazoned on the straps) was nice as hell. She doesn't know what Brooklyn is and her favorite descriptor is "ratchet"; I immediately felt a deep, confusing sense of kinship.

The author with her new mom; Kristen's shoes.

After the interview, I invited Kristen back to the Gawker offices, which was, in retrospect, a bad idea; nobody got up to say hi to her except a very flushed Kate Dries, but someone did start playing Kristen's baby-voiced co-star Scheana Marie's hit single "Good As Gold" over the office sound system.

"Who the fuck is playing that song?" demanded Kristen, finally giving me the confrontation I craved—but, tragically, saving it for after the cameras were gone. "I know one of you assholes is playing this!" she yelled wildly at a silent room of cowardly nerds typing furiously at each other. I was too drunk to deal with this alone and just sort of swayed back and forth, making sympathetic noises. "I'm going to call Scheana," she announced, which seemed to be a questionable choice, considering Kristen had recently described their relationship as "not chill."

Kristen put Scheana on speaker. "I'm at Gawker, and some asshole is playing your song," Kristen yelled. Then she handed the phone to me. "Hi Scheana," I gurgled. "Hi Ellie," Scheana sighed. "I have to go."

I stared blankly at my computer screen for the rest of the day, too drunk and excited to blog.

Shot & edited - Nicholas Stango

Sound - Chris Person

Producer - Devin Clark

A passel of racist, homophobic text messages sent between at least five San Francisco police officers were released last Friday as part of a motion by the U.S. Attorney's office to deny bail to Ian Furminger, a former SFPD sergeant recently convicted on federal corruption charges and a primary actor in the series of bigoted texts.

The texts, from 2011–2012, initially implicated four current officers and Furminger—but by Monday, 10 more cops were placed under review by the SFPD's internal investigation for their alleged involvement. On Tuesday, San Francisco Dist. Attorney George Gascon announced a review of approximately 100,000 convictions for "potential bias."

The following is a sampling of the texts sent and received between the five officers, as compiled in the government's motion against Furminger (you can read the full document here):

• "We got two blacks at my boys [sic] school and they are brother and sister! There cause dad works for the school district and I am watching them like hawks."
• In response to a text asking "Do you celebrate quanza [sic] at your school?" Furminger wrote: "Yeah we burn the cross on the field! Then we celebrate Whitemas."
• "Its [sic] worth every penny to live here [Walnut Creek] away from the savages."
• "Those guys are pretty stupid! Ask some dumb ass questions you would expect from a black rookie! Sorry if they are your buddies!"
• "The buffalo soldier was why the Indians Wouldnt [sic] shoot the niggers that found for the confederate They [sic] thought they were sacred buffalo and not human."
• "Gunther Furminger was a famous slave auctioneer."
• "My wife has 2 friends over that don't know each other the cool one says to me get me a drink nigger not knowing the other is married to one just happened right now LMFAO."
• "White power."
• In response to a text saying "Niggers should be spayed," Furminger wrote "I saw one an hour ago with 4 kids."
• "I am leaving it like it is, painting KKK on the sides and calling it a day!"
• "Cross burning lowers blood pressure! I did the test myself!"
• In response to a text saying "All niggers must fucking hang," Furminger wrote "Ask my 6 year old what he thinks about Obama."
• In response to a text saying "Just boarded train at Mission/16th," Furminger wrote "Ok, just watch out for BM's" [black males].
• "I hate to tell you this but my wife friend [sic] is over with their kids and her husband is black! If [sic] is an Attorney but should I be worried?" Furminger's friend, an SFPD officer, responded: "Get ur pocket gun. Keep it available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its [sic] not against the law to put an animal down." Furminger responded, "Well said!"
• In response to a text from another SFPD officer regarding the promotion of a black officer to sergeant, Furminger wrote: "Fuckin nigger."

The four officers, identified as Michael Robison, 46; Noel Schwab, 49; Rain Daugherty, 40; and Michael Celis, 47, have all been placed on desk duty for the course of the internal investigation, NPR reports. All four have served the SFPD for at least 10 years.

"We pride ourselves on being a progressive city, yet we have active officers who are engaging in not only racist banter, but they were talking about killing people, referring to an African American as a 'savage,'" Jeff Adachi, San Francisco's Public Defender, told the Los Angeles Times. "A person does not become a racist overnight. These were officers who in some cases had over a decade of service. We need to look at all of them."

Meanwhile Furminger granted an exclusive interview to the San Francisco ABC affiliate where he insists he is not racist, telling the station, "My best friends and closest friends are all black, gay, Chinese or Asian, and Hispanic. That's who I socialize with. That's who I spend my time with." He goes on: "These were supposed to be funny, not to be broadcast on the news."

Both San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr and Mayor Edwin Lee have called for the officers' termination. (SFist has a comprehensive roundup of their, and other San Francisco public officials, statements.)

[Image of Furminger via ABC7]

Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

In Wednesday's New York Times, Nick Bilton, a Styles columnist who writes about technology as you might expect a Styles columnist to, makes a foray into science journalism, questioning if "wearable tech" could be harmful to our bodies—Could wearable computers, like the AppleWatch (onsaleApril24atyournearestAppleStore) be as dangerous to us...as cigarettes?

As with most Bilton columns, the first response to the question posed is a deep and disappointed sigh. But something more sinister than tediousness lurks in this column. While Bilton cites evidence from the International Agency for Research on Cancer and a "longitudinal study conducted by a group of European researchers" that suggests a link between cellphone usage and cancer, one of his star sources is a man named Dr. Joseph Mercola, a Shorty Award-nominated physician of alternative medicine.

Mercola runs perhaps one the most-visited natural health sites on the web, and is a complete quack. According to Chicago Magazine, Mercola is anti-vaccine and pro-tanning bed (I know, it makes no sense). He sells tanning beds for $2,997 on his site, Mercola.com, which has been given an "F" by the Better Business Bureau. Still, the site rakes in about $7 million per year selling vitamins and miscellaneous snake-oil cures.

A doctor named David Gorski slams Mercola in Chicago Mag's article:

In the opinion of David Gorski, a doctor who runs a site similar to Barrett's (ScienceBasedMedicine.org), the problem is that Mercola either vastly exaggerates preliminary research or cherry-picks studies that bolster his point of view. Gorski believes that Mercola also ignores data that prove him wrong or pushes far beyond what is scientifically sound, using scare tactics to make his point. For example, his site includes an article by a California doctor titled "HIV Does Not Cause AIDS." Mercola posted a comment at the end of the article: "Exposure to steroids and the chemicals in our environment, the drugs used to treat AIDS, stress, and poor nutrition are possibly the real causes."

Gorski lists a litany of Mercola's beliefs that he says fly in the face of good science. "It's all there," says Gorski. "He's antivaccine. He has promoted [someone] who believes cancers are caused by fungus. He has promoted fear-mongering about shampoo. He digs up the hoary old myth that anti-perspirants containing aluminum cause breast cancer. Just this month he is pushing this nonsense that somehow recombinant bovine growth factor in milk causes breast cancer, something for which there's no evidence.

And yet, here is how Nick Bilton quotes him in the Times:

Dr. Joseph Mercola, a physician who focuses on alternative medicine and has written extensively about the potential harmful effects of cellphones on the human body, said that as long as a wearable does not have a 3G connection built into it, the harmful effects are minimal, if any.

"The radiation really comes from the 3G connection on a cellphone, so devices like the Jawbone Up and Apple Watch should be O.K.," Dr. Mercola said in a phone interview. "But if you're buying a watch with a cellular chip built in, then you've got a cellphone attached to your wrist." And that, he said, is a bad idea.

When you google Mercola, the third result for him is an article from quackwatch.org. His writings on his site are indeed prolific, but fairly obviously have no grounding in scientific fact ("Heavy Cell Phone Use Can Quadruple Your Risk of Deadly Brain Cancer," one article's headline reads). As for sourcing, articles on Mercola.com tend to link out to... other articles on Mercola.com.

It boggles the mind that Bilton and his editors saw it appropriate to quote Mercola as scientific source in an article about wearable tech and cancer. Sure, it's the Styles section, so standards might be a little loose, like the wide-leg pants that are so fashionable for fall. But besides Bilton not writing at all, which is the best option going forward for the paper, perhaps they should limit his topic choices to ones that don't involve actual scientific facts.

[Pic via Getty]

Thanks to tax breaks like the mortgage interest deduction that overwhelmingly benefit the affluent, the top 1% of earners received more in government tax breaks than the bottom 80% of earners combined in 2013. The solution, as always, is to tax the rich.

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

In July 2007, the artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan ended their own lives. Both had grown erratic and paranoid in the preceding months, and on the 10th, Blake found his longtime romantic partner dead in their East Village apartment, overdosed on a lethal cocktail of whiskey and Tylenol PM. One week later, he drowned himself in the Atlantic Ocean at Rockaway Beach.

The official story, forwarded in a flurry of media coverage of the so-called "golden suicides," tells of folie à deux—a shared delusion, brought on perhaps by career-related stress and a lot of bourbon and champagne, and manifested in abruptly burned bridges with formerly close friends, bizarre "loyalty oaths," and an increasingly monomaniacal preoccupation with conspiracies, especially those related to the Church of Scientology. But alongside this, there exists a second vague narrative: that the shadowy forces that so captured the imaginations of Duncan and Blake in their final years were not merely a troubling obsession, but an active player in their deaths.

This conspiracy theory, put forth mostly by an army of amateur bloggers, points to an array of organizations, but mostly to Scientology, and specifically Blake's very real working relationship with one of its most visible members: Beck, whose 2002 album Sea Change was adorned with cover art by Blake.

The Artists

Duncan and Blake first met in D.C. in 1994, but didn't hit it off until the following year in New York, where they began a famously devoted relationship that would last until their deaths 12 years later. A former curator at D.C.'s Corcoran gallery called the pair a "dynamic force" to the Los Angeles Times, adding that Duncan once told him that she and Blake "had basically never spent a night apart" after becoming a couple. New York magazine's David Amsden writes that the artists' closest friends could not recall a single instance in which Duncan and Blake argued, or even disagreed; he also recounts an anecdote about Blake driving to a party across town to confront a guest who was making Duncan uncomfortable.

Duncan, whose ascent to fame began shortly before the start of her relationship with Blake, was known for creating Chop Suey, Smarty, and Zero Zero—three pioneering CD-ROM games for girls that told whimsical and exploratory stories with a distinct lack of princesses and shopping malls. Chop Suey, about two girls who enter a hallucinatory dream-world after binging on Chinese food, featured voiceover work from a pre-fame David Sedaris. (The three games, long out of print, will soon be playable online thanks to an archiving effort by the digital arts organization Rhizome.)

Her short animated mockumentary The History of Glamour, also a significant work, showed at the 2000 Whitney Biennial.

Blake was known for meditative digital artworks that, it has often been said, fused the techniques and aesthetics of video art with those of abstract painting. His work made an impact both within the insular art world and without—in addition to the Sea Change album art, Blake created the dreamy interstitials for Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 film Punch Drunk Love. At the time of his death, he was preparing for a solo show at the Corcoran.

The Suicides

The immensely charismatic couple moved from New York to Los Angeles in 2002; this, according to most accounts, is when their descent into psychic disarray seemed to begin. As Nancy Jo Sales writes in the posthumous Vanity Fair profile that is the most enduring document of the suicides, Duncan had inked a two-movie deal with Fox Searchlight on the strength of The History of Glamour; one of those movies was to be Alice Underground, a film about a rock musician in which Duncan claimed that Beck had agreed to star.

At some point, Beck made it clear that he wouldn't be acting in Duncan's film—he told Vanity Fair that he'd never agreed to do it in the first place—and Duncan, Sales writes, "blamed the Church of Scientology." Without a real-life rock star attached, Alice Underground languished at Fox and eventually made its way to Paramount, where it fared no better.

Later, in a 27-page document prepared in advance of a never-materialized lawsuit against the church, Blake alleged that an even higher-profile Scientologist was to blame for failure at Paramount: Tom Cruise. From the Los Angeles Times, which in August 2007 first published excerpts of the document:

In the chronology, Tom Cruise is accused of having used his clout at Paramount, where his production company was then based, to personally derail "Alice" because it offended "his profound loyalty to Scientology." Several sources close to the project said the allegation is baseless. Cruise's spokeswoman said: "The Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan suicides were a terrible tragedy. However, Tom did not know them and had absolutely no connection to their project or Paramount's disposition of it."

Blake's "chronology" also alleged misconduct on behalf of the church by Miranda July, Paul Thomas Anderson, Beck, and then-Viacom COO Tom Freston. Of the group, only Beck is a Scientologist.

The Alice Underground snafu "was not an unusual story in Hollywood, where most projects languish for years before colliding with the voodoo necessary to transform a script into a film," writes New York's Amsden. But for Blake and Duncan, it was not tinseltown business as usual, but the crown jewel of a vast Scientologist plot against them.

In spring 2006, shortly after it became clear that Alice Underground was not going to be produced, Blake was accused of throwing pee on the neighbors' backyard barbecue because he believed they were Scientologists. Friendships were terminated; those who stayed by the couple were asked to sign the aforementioned oaths. "Others," writes Amsden, "Were bombarded with vicious e-mails that had little connection with reality." According to Sales, Duncan took "hundreds of pictures" of out-of-state license plates in the couple's neighborhood, sure that their home was being surveilled.

In the years before her death, Theresa Duncan ran a popular blog called The Wit of the Staircase. Reading posts from 2006, it is difficult to square the erudite and breezy writer with the Duncan who was evidently wracked by paranoia and doubt in her personal life. On the page, she is omnivorous and sharp, near-virtuosic in her ability to pull snappy insight from pop and high culture alike: here she is lovingly contextualizing Julian Casablancas within "the decline of of colonial imperialism;" there she is meditating on media saturation and plagiarism.

But away from the keyboard, things were turning dark. The plagiarism post was written in response to allegations that Duncan had lifted from another writer in a piece about perfume she'd written for Slate. Laurie Winer wrote what happened next in C California Style magazine:

In March 2006, Duncan penned a piece about perfume for Fortini, who, at the time, was an editor at the online magazine Slate. After publishing Duncan's piece, another editor there noticed that Duncan's opening sentence was almost identical to one by a blogger named Victoria Frolova, who also frequently wrote about perfume. Duncan's explanation: The Scientologists had pre-dated Frolova's piece on the Internet to make Duncan and Blake look bad. At this point, Fortini and Aslan, like many who knew the couple, began to distance themselves.

Then-Slate editor Amanda Fortini and the writer Reza Aslan, her fiancé at the time, were friends of Duncan and Blake's. About a year after the plagiarism dustup, in the comments section of a post that has since been scrubbed from her blog, Duncan was alleging that Aslan—an agent with the Department of Homeland Security who also had ties to Scientology, she wrote—was part of the conspiracy, too.

Duncan and Blake were eventually evicted from their L.A. home—neighbors told the landlord that they would "seek police protection" from the couple if necessary, Sales writes—and moved back to New York in 2007, living in the rectory apartment at St. Mark's Church in the East Village. There, they befriended Frank Morales, a radical leftist Episcopalian priest whose version of leftism included both advocating for squatters' rights and hosting weekly meetings of a 9/11 truther group. Morales is a friend of the wingnut media entrepreneur Alex Jones, according to Sales, and Blake began familiarizing himself with trutherism through Jones' radio show. The artist wanted to do a show with Jones about Scientology, Morales says, and "was talking about doing art around 9/11 truth."

Sales, Amsden, and other reporters who covered the suicides generally agree that escaping L.A. and returning to the city of their relationship's genesis was good for the couple, but the dark cloud didn't entirely lift. Duncan was drinking champagne "by the bottle," according to Sales, and Blake sometimes brought a flask of Maker's Mark to his day job at Rockstar Games. Amsden's recounting of their deaths opens on a fundraiser for the St. Mark's Church, organized by Duncan, that the couple ultimately refused to attend, staying holed up in their apartment instead. "Without apology they explained that they could not come down, no, they were experiencing a 'collective vision' that the grill was going to explode, somehow harming Duncan," Amsden writes. "It would have been a more troubling exchange were it not, by this point, almost expected."

A week later, Duncan committed suicide, and Blake followed a week after that. "I am going to join the lovely Theresa," he wrote on a business card he left behind him on the beach.

The Conspiracy Theory

Perhaps spurred by Blake and Duncan's own convictions that real truth was hiding somewhere beneath the fabric of bureaucracy and religion, some conspiracy theorists refuse to believe that the lovers took their own lives. Others believe in the suicides, but are sure that the all-consuming paranoia that preceded them was rooted in something very real and very menacing.

Duncan- and Blake-centric blogs abound, though many are now dormant. Theresa Duncan Central billed itself as "a one-stop source for budding Duncanologists"; The Wit Continuum was apparently titled in honor of Duncan's own blog. In an excellent survey of the mainstream and amateur media coverage of the suicides, freelance writer Ellen Killoran links to a post by an unhinged blogger named Alex Constantine, whose pet theory extends far beyond a handful of Hollywood Scientologists. A representative excerpt:

Bottom line, simple answer: Warren Buffett's CIA/GOP friends murdered Duncan and Blake. Disgraced former Omaha police chief/accused Mormon pedophile Robert Wadman, who recently put my publisher through a nuisance suit in Ogden, Utah, is Buffett's CIA-pervert lieutenant - Wadman hoped to silence me with his - alas - dismissed "lawsuit," have my books recalled, and - not incidentally - my investigation of Duncan-Blake taken off the Internet.

MediaBistro.com, a CIA/GOP front, was the core of a smear campaign waged against the "paranoid conspiracy theorists" post mortem to discredit Theresa's research on Buffett's CIA/GOP pedophile network buds, and send a "message" to "conspiracy" researchers aware of the "Sage of Omaha's" role in 9/11.

Constantine's blather surely represents the pinnacle of incomprehensibility here—MediaBistro.com, a CIA/GOP front!—but other questions put forth are murkier. Accepting that Duncan and Blake really did end their own lives, and that much of their paranoia was unfounded, can we wonder whether their fixation on Scientology didn't arrive ex nihilo? When the target of your obsessive fear is an organization with a long history of alleged harassment—an organization that runs a secretive compound known by staffers as "The Hole," where members say they've been interrogated and beaten—the idea that friends are conniving behind your back and strange cars are surveilling your house isn't an enormous stretch.

The Scientology bug seems to have bitten Duncan and Blake sometime during their interactions with Beck. While Beck acknowledges that he was acquainted on some level with the couple—and Blake's work on the Sea Change album art is an uncontested fact—the musician maintained in interviews after the fact their relationship wasn't particularly close, that he had never agreed to act in Alice Underground, and that he had never discussed Scientology with either of them.

But as Killoran notes, he sounded excited to appear in an awfully familiar-sounding film in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in 2003. A translated excerpt was published here:

What about [your debut] movie?

"It will be full of energy and full of characters: some kind of Alice in Wonderland set in the 70s. It still doesn't have a title. The director is a friend of mine and it will be her directorial debut. But I trust her. We will begin shooting in the Fall."

Was Beck talking about Alice Underground? The film would have been Duncan's debut as a feature-film director, and Alice Underground was evidently influenced by Alice in Wonderland.

According to Sales in Vanity Fair, Duncan once emailed friends a handful of 2004 photos of herself, Blake, Beck, and Beck's fiancé Marissa Ribisi relaxing on the beach, seemingly disputing the notion that the couples were only casual acquaintances. (Most of these photos appear to have been scrubbed from the web if they were ever uploaded in the first place; a friend of the couple published one snap of Blake and Beck on the beach to Tumblr in 2013).

In one 2006 email excerpted in Vanity Fair, Duncan claimed that Beck hoped to use Alice Underground, which would shoot in New York, as a means to escape the Hollywood-centric Church. Duncan believed that the Scientologists were harassing her because of her knowledge of the plan:

Duncan e-mailed a friend in late 2006: "[Beck] really, really tried to get away … using going to NY to be in Alice Underground.… He told me he wanted to leave the cult desperately, and this is what they do when someone knows that." She was referring here to her perception that the Church of Scientology had been harassing her and Blake..."They are furious because he valued our way of life far more than Celebrity Center sex trash," wrote Duncan.

Killoran also points to two oddities within "The Golden Suicides," Sales' Vanity Fair profile, itself. The first—that Sales was once married to Frank Morales, the leftist priest, and may have used her relationship with him to get into Blake's private funeral service—is concerning from an ethical perspective, but doesn't shed light on any real or perceived Scientology connection.

The second, however, carries that uncanny is this a real thing or am I just being crazy? feeling that pervades many Scientology-adjacent stories. Killoran writes:

Almost everyone interviewed for this story brought up a minor mystery connected to the authorship of "The Golden Suicides," which the SoMA review first addressed in a post that was picked up by New York magazine's Vulture blog. In it, SoMA's editor Spalding wrote that he was contacted by someone who was familiar with the reporting on the story and who said that she "was stunned to read that Nancy Jo Sales had the byline."

As it turns out, that person was LA Weekly's Kate Coe, who maintains that she always believed Vanity Fair contributing editor John Connolly to be the "author of record" and who shared some of her research with him when he first took on the assignment. Robin, who spoke to both Connolly and Sales, concurred that Connolly was the first to interview him.

Connolly, too, insists that the assignment was initially his and said that he had asked to be taken off the story after Sales became involved, because he felt her relationship with Morales was "too complicated." After Sales completed the story, Connolly had the option of taking an "additional reporting" byline but declined to do so.

John Connolly, as Gawker's own John Cook reported in a 2011 New York Observer story called "Was a Vanity Fair Editor Secretly Working for the Church of Scientology?", has his own bizarre connections to the church. (A Vanity Fair spokeswoman named Beth Kseniak confirmed to Cook that Connolly contributed to "The Golden Suicides.")

From the Observer:

The accusation comes from Marty Rathbun, who ranked so high in the organization before he left that he served as Tom Cruise's "auditor," or confessor, and Mike Rinder, Scientology's former chief spokesman. Both men have defected from the church and accuse its current leader, David Miscavige, of ruling through violence and terror. On February 15, Rathbun posted to his blog a lengthy internal church memo, purportedly written by Linda Hamel, chief of the church's faux-CIA "Office of Special Affairs," revealing Connolly to have secretly supplied intelligence to the church on the preparation of Andrew Morton's 2008 biography of Tom Cruise. According to the memo, Connolly approached Morton in 2006 under the pretense of writing "an article for Vanity Fair about the books Morton has done on celebrities including the one he is writing on Tom Cruise." He proceeded, the memo says, to pump Morton for information about his book and report it back to the church.

And while we have our tinfoil hats on, isn't it interesting that P.T. Anderson—who worked with Blake on Punch Drunk Love, remember, and introduced the artist to Beck—made a movie about Scientology in 2012?

"Never heard of these people," a representative of the Church said when Sales asked about the alleged harassment for her Vanity Fair article. "This is completely untrue."

This is Illuminati Month on Black Bag, in which Gawker locks itself in the woodshed and breaks out the red yarn to explore its favorite conspiracy theories. Photos via Getty. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

I never took an AP course in high school. I'm pretty sure it was because I never qualified for it (I went straight B-minuses throughout my high school career), but it was also because I went to school back when taking AP courses wasn't the dire necessity that it is for today's students. According to this article, taking just one AP course now doubles your odds of getting a college degree; according to this other article, "Approximately 85 percent of selective colleges and universities reported that they looked at whether or not a student had taken an AP course to make their admissions decision."

In other words, if you haven't taken an AP class, you are fucked. Or, at the very least, you will feel as if you are inadequate, dumb, and doomed to a life of washing cheese off of fajita platters at the local Don Pablo's. Students and parents alike know all this by now: They also know that doing well in an AP course gets you college credit (and I like that you can learn so much in high school that expensive colleges will be like, "Yeah, you don't have to learn as much here"). I wonder if there are advanced placement courses WITHIN the AP infrastructure, so that Harvard can only admit kids who have taken AP AP AP AP calculus. I have children in the public school system, and I'm already a bit intimidated by all this potential AP jockeying. It lords over everything.

You may have heard that the state of Oklahoma recently banned AP history from its school curriculum, because the course failed to teach students about "American exceptionalism": a bit of chilling Orwellian language that makes you wonder if we should sell off that entire state for a can of red kidney beans. HOWEVER … I can't say definitively that the AP American History test is anti-American unless I see what the course is like for myself. That would be downright ignorant of me. So, in the spirit of past educational test-taking stunts here at this site, I decided to sit down and take the sample test, to see if the course really DOES teach our kids to hate America. Maybe it does! Maybe the act of taking the test itself is enough to make you want to raze this country and start from scratch.

As before, I took this practice exam cold, with no studying. I also replicated the high school test-taking environment as best I could. I took no breaks. I used a No. 2 pencil (turns out you can use a pen on the essay parts). I stopped when the timer went off. I looked around to make sure no one was watching before scratching my privates. You know the deal. I also had the essay portion of the test graded by a former AP test administrator, who then corroborated his findings with a colleague. Here now are my findings:

* Like any high school student, I found the idea of taking this test daunting. So I put off taking it a few times, circling around the test booklet without ever cracking it open, like a little kid afraid to jump into a cold lake. As I've said before, one of the very few benefits of adulthood is that you never have to take a test again. I remember the anxiety now. I remember what it's like to see a test booklet and think to myself, "Fuck, I'm gonna be here for HOURS."

* Finally, I sat down. As usual, the test instructions were stern, humorless, and intimidating—antithetical to the notion of learning itself. "DO NOT OPEN THIS BOOKLET UNTIL YOU ARE TOLD TO DO SO." That's the first line in the test booklet. I assume if you open the test early, the gates of hell open and the Great Serpent drags you down to its fiery depths.

* There were three sections to the test: multiple choice (55 minutes), short answer (45 minutes), and the DBQ (document-based question) section (1 hour, 35 minutes). You are not allowed to jump around. That results in prison time.

* Multiple choice was the first section, which meant I spent the whole time dreading the idea of turning to the written portions of the test 55 minutes later. Multiple choice should really come at the end. It's the cooldown exercise in the regimen. My hand began to throb simply thinking about the upcoming essay section.

* There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the test that says, "The inclusion of source material in this exam is not intended as an endorsement by the College Board or ETS of the content, ideas, or values expressed in the material." YOU HEAR THAT, OKLAHOMA? The AP History test has its ass covered, throwing down the same kind of legal disclaimer you'd find at the beginning of a Kurt Sutter DVD commentary. They disowned the test before I had even started. My interest was now piqued. There must have been a SHITLOAD of quality America-hating in this source material.

* Are you are fan of the late 1800s? Brother, have I got the test for you. Look at this shit…

Amazing how they managed to stick a scary math-looking thing into a non-math test. Anyway, there should have been a fifth multiple choice answer to this that said, "E) DEY TOOK ERR JERBS!", but no such choice was to be had. Because this period of American history (which represents a substantial portion of this country's lifetime, by the way) is a gaping hole in my intellect, I guessed as best I could. The Northeast! Lots of immigrants there! Ellis Island! Chinatown! I guessed right.

* If you're looking for the sort of thing that might get an Oklahoma senator's dander up about this test, I present you with this excerpt…

You listen to me, Seneca Falls Convention: Back in the day, women were just FINE with their place in patriarchal society! They churned butter and raised the younglings and died at age 36 of dysentery so that the husband could remarry well, and the system WORKED. Don't you go putting these fancy ideas about ladyfolk's rights in them kids' minds!

* At one point, I had too many A's in a row on my answer sheet and got very nervous. Was the AP History test trying to psych me out by making the answer "A" lots of times in a row, so that I'd notice and worry that I got some answer wrong along the way? I put nothing past testmakers.

* I am a filthy liberal cretin, but as I read through every excerpt in the first section, I felt as if the test offered a healthy dose of conservative and libertarian viewpoints. It was FAIR. They had isolationist quotes from George Washington and small-government takes from Thomas Jefferson. They even quoted Reagan at one point! [Doffs hat and puts hand on the heart for the Gipper.]

That's the money Reagan speech, too. That's the one where he freed the Russians or something. But look closer at the options on question 23. "Increased assertiveness and bellicosity"? Is the college board calling Reagan an asshole? That sure sounds like it to me. I guessed B. And you know what? My answer was RIGHT. Maybe Oklahomans were right to be wary of this test. They ain't hearing both sides!

* They also included an olde-timey picture of poor people in the exam…

GET A JOB, LOSERS.

* In many ways, this opening section of the test is simple reading comprehension, closer to an English test than a history test, only they assume you innately know lots of stuff about 18th-century ale tariffs. In some ways, the questions are EXTREMELY subjective, like question 55:

That's Reagan! The answer is Reagan, man. I answered Reagan and got it right. But I'm sure there are Reaganites out there who would urgently disagree with the notion that Reagan and Clinton's interpretations of BIG GUBMINT were one and the same.

* I finished the first section early and twiddled my thumbs waiting for the clock to run out. I stood up to stretch, even though I knew that's probably not a realistic thing to do in a legit test-taking environment. I'd feel like an asshole getting up and stretching the hammies in front of Miss Turdblossom.

But I will say this: No one in recorded history has EVER regretted finishing a test early. No one. You feel like a million bucks sitting there, waiting for all the other puds to finish up. Look at those NERDS, still scribbling away, trying to impress the teacher. What LOSERS. But wait … what if they knew some extra shit about the Teapot Dome scandal that I didn't? Will the teacher notice that I didn't use my full allotment of time? OH GOD HE THINKS I'M A GLORY BOY. SHIT.

* It was time for the short-answer portion of the test. There were four questions, each with at least two separate parts. What horseshit. Did Dr. Phillip Barbay write this thing?

Before you begin, the test warns, "An outline or bulleted list alone is not acceptable." O RLY? How will I get a job at Buzzfeed if I can't condense American history down to an easily digestible list for the masses? HERE'S 37 KRAYZEE THINGS YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT THE EMERGENCE OF THE WHIGS IN THE 1830s.

* In all seriousness, the fourth short-answer question in this test is a fine one…

If Oklahoma legislators had actually read this test (I'm certain that they did not), they would have noticed that the idea of "American exceptionalism" is all over it. The test doesn't endorse it, because that would be stupid. But it certainly presents viewpoints that both favor and oppose it, and then ask students to (GASP!) decide for themselves. They get to decide if America's unique place in history is a sign of its innate superiority, or a sign of its constant, ongoing struggle to be a beacon of freedom to the world while indulging in horrifying, oppressive practices. The test asks you to argue about things, and arguing is good for students. Just don't let them argue near me in a coffeehouse somewhere. I'll punch the little fuckers out.

* It was now time for the essay section of the test: the longest and most arduous portion of the exam, backloaded at the end of the booklet just to ruin your day. For each essay, I was asked to supply a thesis (oh god, THESES … I bet they wanted a topic sentence, too), summon specific historic examples outside of the documents provided (uh oh ...) and "account for contradictory evidence on the topic" (gotta hear both sides). This was the first essay question, which was accompanied by seven documents to read…

The documents provided featured argument for and against America's right to expand. Was it conquest? Was it noble? Whoa, hey, we're arguing exceptionalism again! Goddamn, this test really pokes the bear! I started writing away. After one page, I was already exhausted. Look how sloppy my penmanship got…

There are prescription-refill forms that are more legible. As I was writing, I knew I was failing the test. I was making broad generalizations about America and spewing horseshit talking points without any backing evidence of any kind. I was Tom Friedman, basically. The AP History test makes you Tom Friedman. BURN IT. "Thus, the turn of the century marked the advent of modern capitalistic imperialism." Jesus Christ, I wrote that? I wanna punch myself. The test made me this way, man. It ain't right.

* The final essay gave you a choice (thank God) between two questions. The first one was, "Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions from 1600 to 1763 contributed to maintaining continuity as well as fostering change in labor systems in the British North American colonies." FUCK THAT. No way I was answering that shit. That is the lamest period in American history. It wasn't even America yet. That should be on the AP Pre-History test. It's false advertising to include that Pilgrim shit on the test. I feel like I just got dragged with my parents to Colonial Williamsburg.

* I went straight to the alternate question instead: "Evaluate the extent to which increasing integration of the United States into the world economy contributed to maintaining continuity as well as fostering change in United States society from 1945 to the present." NICE! Yes! The present! You know how great it is to see the present pop up on a history test? I know the present, baby. I LIVE IT EVERY GODDAMN DAY. I went right to work, talkin' NAFTA and Iraq and border disputes.

"You could by [sic] a Coke in South America but you could also find that the entire Coke factory had moved there as well." I don't know what that means. I don't know why I wrote it. I was getting delirious. But I finished on a high note: "That is the big question: Is America still America if it rejects the practices—some evil—that made it so powerful?" BOOM. I TURNED THE TABLES ON YOU, MISTER TEST PROCTOR. See how I made you think? Passing grade, pleeeez!

* At last, I was finished with the exam. I still left a lot of empty booklet pages on the table, and was worried the proctors would notice my penchant for brevity, but I had nothing else to add to my clumsy thesis: no supporting evidence to cite, no little sub-theses, nothing. I was spent. I was sick to death of America. They should give every student a beer when they've finished up. I scanned my answers and then sent them to Eric, a former teacher and test administrator in New Orleans. He then graded the essays and sent me back his assessment. Here are a few of his comments from the essay margins:

* "0: Your response lacks any sort of concrete evidence from the period re: rise of political parties"

* "meh."

* "Evidence? 0."

* "Explicit thesis not found!"

I also got a couple of "good" margin notes that made me pump my fist. Whenever someone redlines your work, you need that. You need that little reminder that you did something good every once in a while so that you don't feel like a complete fucking idiot. You need something to keep you going. You also need a teacher who pities you enough to give your sorry ass a passing grade. Eric emailed me a few days later:

* "Unfortunately there's no calculator for the new test (this is a new format), but I've done my best to convert the sections to weighed portions along the old scale (0-180). Based on that weighed conversion, you'd eke out a 3, which is a passing score."

BOOM. A three. You hear that, Harvard? LET ME IN, BITCHES.

(By the way, I find it amusing that the AP History test has been rejiggered so often that there's no current way to accurately grade a sample exam for students. That's pretty much a microcosm of public education right there. My children are in elementary school, and the state changes the curriculum every four weeks. The teachers just rub their temples all day. Turns out the state is much harder to deal with than 26 screaming little kids.)

To ensure no favoritism, Eric sent my answers to a colleague and told them they were from a real student (my handwriting is useful for this sort of ruse), and his colleague actually made my score higher in the process. I ended up getting a four. Eric told me, "We argued a lot about your initial response and lack of evidence, but apparently lesser responses have earned the points." Shit, yeah! God bless dumber students for pumping my ass up.

I was told I also needed to work on my synthesizing and analyzing. But whatever. I took the test and discovered, as you might have guessed, that AP History doesn't hate America at all. That's too simple a summation of this nation, and it deserves better. It deserves to have its history studied and argued and re-examined again and again and again, because how we talk about that history shapes how we interact with one another NOW. I don't think I even deserved to pass it. They should be even meaner while grading it, frankly.

And while taking any test sucks, I get why the AP history test exists. It's much better than the goddamn SAT, at least. It challenges you to use your knowledge of history in a coherent way, and it sharpens your mind by asking you to argue about very real, very difficult issues on the fly. It's important for kids to learn how to do that. You need a quick mind. It's what separates the geniuses from the regular smart people.

And I would know, because I fucking passed. I'm a genius. Fuck you. That's the real essay I wanted to write: "Fuck you." Sums up American history perfectly.

Drew Magary writes for Deadspin. He's also a correspondent for GQ. Follow him on Twitter @drewmagary and email him at drew@deadspin.com. You can also order Drew's book,Someone Could Get Hurt, through his homepage.

Image by Sam Woolley.

The Concourse is Deadspin's home for culture/food/whatever coverage.Follow us on Twitter.

It was downright gorgeous across the United States and Canada earlier this week. Dozens of towns from Texas to Saskatchewan set record highs during the brief warm-up. Unfortunately, March's gotta act like March, and we've slumped back into that weird winter pattern of a warm west and cool east.

Temperatures in the 60s are slowly starting to creep back along the eastern foot of the Rocky Mountains, but it's a far cry from what we saw just a few days ago. Midwesterners flooded social media with complaints of "WHAT THE HELL?" when they had to lunge for their coats on Tuesday.

The warmth was no joke. High temperatures crept close to 90°F across Kansas and Nebraska on Monday...

...only to dip more than 40°F colder just 23 hours later, when Canada threw a big, wet blanket of ick over the northern half of the country.

This awesome animation from coolwx.com shows the hour-by-hour fall of records over the past seven days around parts of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Towns set multiple high temperature records last week, but long-standing records began falling in earnest once the weekend rolled around.

Most of you in the Northeast are probably reading this with a scowl, thinking "what warmth?" The ridge/trough setup of the jet stream hasn't allowed the warm air to infiltrate much beyond the Mason-Dixon line, but that's probably a good thing—you want a slow snow melt to avoid flooding and building leaks.

Over the next week or two, the ridge over the middle of the United States will begin to break down, sending us back into that split pattern of above-average temperatures in the west and below-average temperatures in the east.

The Climate Prediction Center releases a medium-range forecasts that show the odds of above- or below-average temperatures and precipitation. While their long-range forecasts leave something to be desired, these medium-range forecasts are usually pretty good at showing trends.

Here's the agency's latest 8-14 day temperature forecast, showing that striking difference between the warmer west and the cooler east.

The good news is that the atmosphere is slowly warming up—whether it wants to or not—so "below-average" doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to grow nosecicles when you go to check the mail. The bad news is that neither side of the country that needs relief is seeing any.

The persistent warmth in the western United States is gorgeous, sure, but each day that passes with above-average temperatures and no beneficial rain worsens the drought, depletes reservoirs, and dries out vegetation just a little bit more, setting the stage for a potentially explosive wildfire season.

When you look at the medium-range forecasts, however, the news isn't good. Here's next week's precipitation outlook, showing a not-insignificant chance of below-average precipitation across the southwestern United States from California through Texas.

Welcome to spring (sort of). The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[All temperature and outlook maps by the author. Record temps. animation by coolwx.com.]

You can follow the author on Twitter or send him an email.

A man who was minding his own business, just drinking in a tree like we all do sometimes, met his fate in a horrible freak accident when he fell from said tree and was impaled on a fence. Good reason not to climb trees.

The man, identified as 30-year-old Edwin Ochoa, was found in the East Hollywood neighborhood of L.A. close to 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday after he'd fallen twenty feet from the tree to his death. Los Angeles police officers on the scene explained that they found over a dozen beer bottles at the base of the tree.

The AP reports that residents told cops that the man was known as a heavy drinker. Even better reason not to climb trees. Sad death.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

There are multiple reports that third-year University of Virginia student Martese Johnson was brutally beaten by police after trying to use a fake ID to enter Trinity Irish Pub Tuesday night, a local bar in Charlottesville.

According to the Cavalier Daily, police said Johnson was "arrested on charges of resisting arrest, obstructing justice without threats of force, and profane swearing or intoxication in public." Johnson, who is black, was held in jail overnight and released on a $1,500 bond Wednesday morning.

Reports circulating around the web, however, allege that, when confronted by police, Johnson did not resist arrest. Students at the scene claim officers proceeded to beat Johnson despite his cooperation and their pleas to stop.

"Martese was talking to the bouncer and there was some discrepancy about his ID," UVA student Bryan Beaubrun told the Cavalier Daily. "[An] ABC officer approaches Martese and grabs him by the elbow…and pulls him to the side... It happened so quickly. Out of nowhere I saw the two officers wrestling Martese to the ground. I was shocked that it escalated that quickly. Eventually [he was] on the ground, they're trying to put handcuffs on him and their knees were on his back."

Crying. pic.twitter.com/yUPW972Wgw

— RŸ (@marytoppdoe) March 18, 2015

@UVA president @terrysulli is still silent on the matter of the assault against her Black male student by police. pic.twitter.com/nuvFi4oRBE

— Danaya: BuyTAAN331 (@danayasworld) March 18, 2015

University PD emails us when a black man allegedly assaults someone So who emails us when the police definitely assaults a black man!? @UVA

— Danaya: BuyTAAN331 (@danayasworld) March 18, 2015

Y'all pic.twitter.com/xiCcMcI7bO

— Ruby-Beth B. (@ruby_beth) March 18, 2015

More info via Jezebel:

No incidents of prejudicial violence on this scale have occurred at the University of Virginia in recent memory, although the racial climate in Charlottesville is what you might expect from a relatively conservative institution founded by Thomas Jefferson. Graduate student Maya Hislop told me, "Black students on grounds are highly familiar with this kind of abuse (denied access to places, checking IDs of black students and not checking IDs of white students), but I do not know that it has ever been this violent."

She added, "We knew that increased police presence for the protection of women would have a negative impact on black students. It sucks that we had to be proven right this way."

Put another way: Johnson was beat for doing something that, as one Twitter user phrased it, "white kids do every weekend faithfully."

And so it goes.

Updated [5:12 p.m.]: There is now video of Johnson's arrest via the Cavalier Daily. At the one-minute mark, Johnson can be heard screaming to the police, "I go to UVA! I go to UVA! I go to UVA! You fucking racists. What the fuck! How did this happen?!"

[Photo via Getty]

Contact the author at jason.parham@gawker.com.

San Francisco's St. Mary's Cathedral is trying to baptize the city's homeless away: the Archdiocese of San Francisco has installed a watering system that floods the steps of the church, KCBS reports.

"They actually have signs in there that say, 'No Trespassing,'" one homeless man, named Robert, told the station. "We're going to be wet there all night, so hypothermia, cold, all that other stuff could set in. Keeping the church clean, but it could make people sick."

KCBS observed the system themselves, filming the video embedded above:

But there are no signs warning the homeless about what happens in these doorways, at various times, all through the night. Water pours from a hole in the ceiling, about 30 feet above, drenching the alcove and anyone in it.

The shower ran for about 75 seconds, every 30 to 60 minutes while we were there, starting before sunset, simultaneously in all four doorways. KCBS witnessed it soak homeless people, and their belongings.

The station also noticed a lack of drainage, creating pools of dirt, syringes, and cigarette butts to soak the homeless and their makeshift shelters.

A church staffer confirmed that the watering system was installed about a year ago "to deter the homeless from sleeping there"—and illegally, KCBS found, after review city records.

"We refer them, mostly to Catholic Charities, for example for housing," Chris Lyford, a spokesman for the Archdiocese, told the station."To Saint Anthony's soup kitchen for food, if they want food on that day. Saint Vincent de Paul if they need clothes."

Lyford claims to have only learned about the watering system from news reports—but he also has no problem defending its installation, saying, "We do the best we can, and supporting the dignity of each person. But there is only so much you can do."

Everyone's favorite alleged murderer Robert Durst was reportedly in possession of a latex mask designed to conceal his identity when he was arrested last weekend. TMZ reports that police found the mask in the real estate heir's hotel room along with $42,000 in cash, a loaded handgun, and a small amount of marijuana.

The mask, according to TMZ, fit over Durst's face and neck. The 71-year-old also had a fake Texas ID with the name Everette Ward—the same name he'd registered under in the hotel.

The $42,000—all in hundreds and stuffed inside several envelopes—is just a fraction of the $315,000 in cash Durst had reportedly withdrawn over the previous 35 days; Durst reportedly confessed that a UPS tracking number discovered in the room was going to be used to ship the cash.

TMZ also reports that four of the five chambers from the recovered .38 revolver contained live ammo; the fifth chamber held a shell casing, though it wasn't clear who fired the gun or when it was shot.

Image via AP. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Deadspin What Happens When A 38-Year-Old Man Takes An AP History Test? | Gizmodo Trying to Arouse My New Sextbot Buddy (NSFW) | Jezebel I Chugged Sauv Blanc With Kristen, the Villain of Vanderpump Rules | Lifehacker The Company You Work For Is Not Your Friend | Kinja Popular Posts

Not only does Kristin Cavallari balance on heels, she also designs a mid-priced line of them for Chinese Laundry, which is available online and in "select Nordstrom stores." According to Kristin, these shoes are "staples."

In an interview with Fab Fit Fun last year, Kristin explained,

With every line I want my shoes to be trendy while still being affordable. I think it's important for girls to know that you don't have to spend $900 on a pair of shoes to look and feel great. Everything in my line, for the most part, is a staple. They're all classic shoes that you'll wear forever.

Trendy, classic, great look, not $900—these heels are just like Kristin.

But you don't have to take her word for it. Here's a look at Kristin's latest line of staples, which bear timeless, feminine names like Raylin, Cai, and Lacee.

Please note: The Layla and the Leila are different shoes. The prices you see here are subject to change, but these timeless classics will only appreciate in value.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Getty, Chinese Laundry site]