Wow Chris Rock must be a terrible driver, or something.

The actor, who's been posting selfies each time he's stopped by a cop, apparently got pulled over at least three times in the last two months. The settings vary—day, night, driver's seat, backseat—but the message is the same: "wish me luck."

Rock hasn't commented publicly about his traffic stop Groundhog Day, but he has told Jerry Seinfeld he feels unsafe on the road—despite his fame.

"It'd be such a better episode if he pulled me to the side and beats the shit out of me, don't you think? Now here's the crazy thing: If you weren't here, I'd be scared. I'm famous, still black. Right now, I'm looking for my license right now," Rock said last year when the duo got pulled over on an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

Stopped by the cops again wish me luck. pic.twitter.com/6t0wlgwkrJ

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) March 31, 2015

I'm not even driving stop by the cops again http://t.co/yTPPPjcKEO

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) February 28, 2015

Just got pulled over by the cops wish me luck http://t.co/pey2XAp6uu

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) February 13, 2015

Stop by the cops wish me luck http://t.co/GKE2oKnAYR

— Chris Rock (@chrisrock) April 18, 2014

Seems a little much! Equally surprising is that the DMV haven't revoked his license based on the multitude of traffic infractions he appears to be incurring on such a regular basis. (Based on the unbruised selfies, however, it's assumed he didn't run any stop signs.)

Still, could the solution be fully within Rock's control? You're a successful movie star, maybe you should drive a crappier car. Didja ever think of that?

I sold my $90,000.00 Mercedes G500 and bought 3 Prius's, because I got tired of being pulled over by Police. #Adapt @chrisrock

— Isaiah Washington (@IWashington) April 1, 2015

Good luck Chris Rock.

[image via AP]

The New York cop caught on camera insulting and yelling at an Uber driver who dared to suggest he use his blinker is being transferred from his current position on an elite joint terrorism task force, officials said Wednesday.

One of the passengers in the car told reporters the incident began when the driver gestured at the officer, who was apparently attempting to back into a parking spot without using a blinker.

Within a day of the footage going viral, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton announced Detective Patrick Cherry had been temporarily stripped of his gun and badge and placed on "modified duty." Reports the Post:

Detective Patrick Cherry has been removed from the department's elite Joint Terrorism Task Force and will be doing desk duty until he is officially transferred out of the prestigious division.

"No good cop should watch that video without a wince," Commissioner Bill Bratton said at a Wednesday press conference. "Because all good cops know that officer just made their jobs a little bit harder."

"In that kind of encounter, anger like that is unacceptable," Bratton reportedly said. "In any encounter, discourtesy and obscene language like that is unacceptable.

Contact the author of this post at gabrielle@gawker.com

One in ten Americans takes an anti-depressant drug like Zoloft or Prozac. But these drugs are designed based on a theory that's already been roundly disproven: the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression. Why haven't our drugs kept up with the science of depression?

Image Credit: Tom Varco | CC BY-SA 3.0

The number of people taking antidepressants has increased by over 400% since the early '90s. In a certain light, this could be perceived as a success for public health; it is clear, for example, that tens of millions of people have found antidepressants to be effective. What's less clear is why these medications work, but decades of research on the subject suggest that an explanation parroted in ad campaigns and physicians' offices alike – that depression boils down to a "chemical imbalance" – is wrong.

This is the story of how pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists convinced the public that depression was the result of a simple chemical imbalance – and how scientists, patients, and psychiatrists are working to piece together the more complicated truth.

Better Thinking (And Feeling) Through Chemistry

Flickr user spike55151. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Psychiatry in the 1950s was a field in transition. Mental disorders were often believed to be the direct result of social circumstance, and many psychiatrists relied on talk therapy to treat their patients. The few drug therapies that did exist were rarely well-suited for treating particular maladies. Morphine and opium were sometimes used to treat depression, while insulin shock therapy was used to render uncooperative schizophrenic patients comatose.

By the end of the 1950s, Thorazine, a new psychiatric drug, had become the treatment of choice for schizophrenia. Thorazine simplified the problem of safely keeping aggressive patients calm and docile, and was seen as far less cruel than putting those patients in a coma.

During the 1960s, researchers confirmed that neurotransmitters, like dopamine or serotonin, served as the chemical signals that allowed neurons to communicate, underpinning much of the brain's function. Thorazine was soon found to inhibit dopamine receptors in mice, blocking the normal effects of dopamine, and potentially explaining its sedating effects in humans. [Image Credit: Dan Century | CC BY 2.0]

Drugs similar to Thorazine were then developed on the premise that excessive dopamine in the brain could be responsible for certain aspects of schizophrenia. These drugs quickly demonstrated that the chemical manipulation of neurotransmitters could be effective in treating mental disorders.

Psychiatry had lagged behind other medical fields for decades, in large part because it lacked treatments tailored to treat specific conditions. Thorazine helped accelerate the acceptance of biological psychiatry, which focused on the biological basis of mental disorders. Biological psychiatry also provided a welcome opportunity for psychiatrists to work directly with pharmaceutical companies to develop targeted, drug-based treatments for mental disorders. Change was in the air.

Framing Low Serotonin As The Culprit Behind Depression

Psychiatrists in the mid-20th century were also keen to develop drug therapies for more common mental disorders, like depression. Case reports had documented mood changes in patients being treated with various drugs for non-psychiatric illnesses. Iproniazid, used to treat tuberculosis, seemed to improve patients' moods, while reserpine, originally used to manage high blood pressure, appeared to mimic depression. Just why either of these drugs influenced mood remained anyone's bet.

Thorazine's documented effects on dopamine receptors raised the possibility that iproniazid and reserpine might be influencing mood via their effects on some neurotransmitter. Remarkably, this appeared to be the case. Iproniazid increased serotonin levels in the brain, while reserpine decreased serotonin levels. Other drugs which had similarly shown promise as anti-depressants in the 1950s, like imipramine, were also shown to raise serotonin levels. [Image Credit: Kevin Dooley | CC BY 2.0]

These examples suggested that low serotonin might be responsible for depression's symptoms, and that boosting serotonin's levels might alleviate these symptoms. In other words, they indicated that depression could be due to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that this imbalance could be corrected through the targeted use of proper drugs.

Based on rodent studies, researchers could reasonably surmise that the drugs would increase serotonin levels. What they couldn't assume was that a boost in serotonin levels would be of benefit to people suffering from depression. And yet, at least for some patients, the therapeutic effects of these drugs were undeniable. But these early anti-depressants caused severe side effects, and psychiatrists were skeptical that patients would agree to take them. Pharmaceutical companies saw a major (and, potentially, majorly lucrative) opportunity: A drug that could increase serotonin levels without causing severe side effects could revolutionize the treatment of depression.

These companies began hunting for new chemicals that met these criteria.

SSRIs Top The Charts, To The Tune Of The Chemical Imbalance Theory

In the early 1970s, pharmaceutical chemists struck gold with the invention of drugs like fluoxetine (Prozac) and sertraline (Zoloft). These compounds were part of a new class of anti-depressants, called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), that raised serotonin levels by preventing neurons from recycling serotonin that had already been released. Promisingly, SSRIs were about as good at treating depression as their predecessors, but they caused milder side-effects.

Left: Prozac prevents serotonin from being reabsorbed, increasing its concentration in the synapse. Wikimedia Commons/vtvu. CC BY-SA 3.0

It took about twenty years for the first SSRIs to pass through clinical trials and receive FDA approval. Psychiatrists and drug companies alike were happy to trumpet a biological explanation for depression (low serotonin), and an appropriate, relatively safe remedy (SSRIs).

"Why am I depressed, and what can I do about it?" a patient might ask. "Well, there's research indicating that depression is related to low levels of serotonin," a psychiatrist might reply. "And here's a pill that will increase your serotonin levels, and alleviate your depression."

Television commercials soon parroted the same ideas. (It's worth noting that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only Western countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise to the general public). In 1997, the FDA shifted its rules and made it easier for companies to run infomercials about pharmaceutical drugs. Ads like the one below, for Zoloft, suggested to TV viewers that they might be suffering from depression and not even realize it.

The ad, like many pharmaceutical commercials, was careful not to make absolute claims about Zoloft's effectiveness. Instead, it prefaced a definitive statement (that Zoloft works to correct an imbalance) with an inconclusive one (i.e. that while its cause is unknown, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals). But couched in this careful language was an implication, that psychiatrists not only had a good idea of how depression worked, but had figured out how to treat it.

The effects of this and other direct-to-consumer marketing campaigns soon became starkly evident: By 2006, anti-depressants in the U.S. represented the most popular category of prescription drug.

Chances are, though, that you might know a few people who have struggled to cope with depression, in spite of seeking treatment. Not every depressed patient can be helped by anti-depressants that are said to "correct" a supposed serotonin deficit.

The Myth Of The Chemical Imbalance Theory

The chemical imbalance theory may have spurred chemists to invent modern anti-depressants, but the task of proving that low serotonin is to blame for depression – and that boosting serotonin levels is the key to its treatment – has turned out to be impossible.

To start, it is impossible to directly measure brain serotonin levels in humans. You can't sample human brain tissue without also destroying it. A crude work-around involves measuring levels of a serotonin metabolite, 5-HIAA, in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which can only be obtained with a spinal tap. A handful of studies from the 1980s (like this one) found slightly decreased 5-HIAA in the CSF of depressed and suicidal patients, while later studies have produced conflicting results on whether SSRIs lower or raise CSF levels of 5-HIAA. These studies are all circumstantial with regards to actual serotonin levels, though, and the fact remains there is no direct evidence of a chemical imbalance underlying depression. [Left: The only way to measure brain serotonin levels in living people is to take a sample of cerebrospinal fluid, via spinal tap. Credit: Blausen.com staff, Wikiversity Journal of Medicine | CC BY 3.0.]

The corollary to the chemical imbalance theory, which implies that raising brain serotonin levels alleviates depression, has also been hard to prove. In fact, the serotonin-depleting drug reserpine was itself shown to be an effective anti-depressant in the 1950s, the same decade in which other studies claimed that reserpine caused depression-like symptoms. At the time, few psychiatrists acknowledged these conflicting reports, as the studies muddled a beautiful, though incorrect, theory. Tianeptine is another drug that decreases serotonin levels while also serving as a bona-fide anti-depressant. Tianeptine does just the opposite of SSRIs – it enhances serotonin reuptake. Wellbutrin is a third anti-depressant that doesn't increase serotonin levels. You get the picture.

If you prefer your data to be derived more accurately, but less relevantly, from rodents, you might consider a recent meta-analysis carried out by psychologist Paul Andrews (McMaster University, Ontario) and colleagues. This meta-analysis revealed that, in rodents, elevated serotonin was usually associated with depression. While Andrews argues that depression is therefore a disorder of too much serotonin, it's clear from decades of conflicting literature that any chemical imbalance theory, serotonin low or high, will be exceedingly difficult to prove.

Though the dubious chemical imbalance theory provided psychiatry with dozens of somewhat-worthwhile anti-depressants, depression still afflicts many of us. Ditching the chemical imbalance theory, and possibly weaning society off SSRIs, will not be easy for the millions of Americans who currently depend on them. Any changes, we can expect, will be slow – but the time has come to move beyond the chemical imbalance theory of depression.

Bringing The Public Up To Speed With 50 Years Of Brain Science

To spur psychiatry forward, we need an improved public understanding of depression, and new forms of treatments. To learn more about the former , I contacted Jeffrey Lacasse – an assistant professor in the College of Social Work at Florida State University who specializes in mental health and psychiatric medications – and neuroanatomist Jonathan Leo of Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee. In 2007, Lacasse and Leo published research on the media's propagation of the chemical imbalance theory. In their investigation, the researchers followed up on every mention of the chemical imbalance theory they could find over a one-year span, turning up zero hard evidence to substantiate the theory in the process. I wanted to know the extent to which the public dialogue about depression has shifted since their investigation was published.

In a joint e-mail, Lacasse and Leo told me that the public portrayal of the chemical imbalance theory has dropped off noticeably in the past few years. Though TV commercials promoted SSRIs using the chemical imbalance theory in the early 2000s, "we noticed these advertisements came to a screeching halt around 2006-07," they said. It's not entirely clear why these advertisements disappeared, but the researchers speculate it's because the underlying science had failed to corroborate the theory, and finally come to the attention of advertising execs who had knowingly skipped their homework.

Flickr user pasukaru76. CC BY 2.0.

But Lacasse and Leo say depressed patients are still routinely told by their GPs and psychiatrists that they have a chemical imbalance, in spite of criticisms from prominent academic psychiatrists like Ronald Pies, who "states that no knowledgable, well-trained clinician would say such a thing."

"If patients search the internet on these issues," Lacasse and Leo say, "we would expect them to be very confused."

The two researchers are concerned "that the story most patients have been hearing from their clinicians for the past 25 years simply has never lined up with the actual scientific data," raising the question of whether patients have had the opportunity to give fully-informed consent.

There is no question that antidepressants can be very beneficial for some people. But the effectiveness of these medications has been shown to vary widely. As noted in a meta-analysis of antidepressant drug effects published January 2010 in The Journal of the American Medical Association:

The magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo increases with severity of depression symptoms and may be minimal or nonexistent, on average, in patients with mild or moderate symptoms. For patients with very severe depression, the benefit of medications over placebo is substantial.

Some psychiatrists vehemently disagree with the way journalists and other psychiatrists have pushed back against the chemical imbalance theory, and anti-depressants in general, noting that these therapies are effective, even if we don't fully understand why they work.

For what it's worth, the sudden cessation of televised versions of the chemical imbalance theory still perplexes Lacasse and Leo, who are continuing to study how the public portrayal of depression influences patients. Thankfully, the chemical imbalance theory now seems to exist solely in the lay audience's mind, and potentially in the offices of less-than-responsible psychiatrists. It seems there exists opportunity for change.

The Science Of Depression Advances – With Luck, Psychiatry Will Follow

To get a sense of where an expert in depression felt the study and treatment of depression was heading, I contacted Poul Videbech, a professor of psychiatry at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark. He was frank with his assessment of the field: " The truth is, the chemical imbalance theory has been immensely fruitful, as it has inspired us to develop new drugs," he said.

"At the same time," he adds, "it has probably been wrong, or at very least partially wrong. Depression – which is several disease entities – is much more complicated than this simplistic theory assumes. "

Videbech says depression's wide range of symptoms can be linked to myriad overlapping factors, from genetic vulnerability, to deficiency of certain neurotransmitters (chemical imbalance theory - lite), to disruptions in circadian rhythms, to factors that can alter the survival and growth of neurons. The birth of new neurons, for example, is a hallmark of a healthy brain; a prominent new theory about how SSRIs work has connected elevated serotonin levels to the elevated birth of neurons. But the science still has a ways to go.

" It is also obvious that psychological stress and so-called early lifetime stress can cause depression," he says. That's not to say that depression's social underpinnings are distinct from its biological ones, Videbech adds. "The dichotomy of depressions being either 'biological' or 'psychological' disorders," he says, "is thus false, and not justified by scientific literature."

This dichotomy, he says, is upheld in large part by lay people, who may think that treatment with anti-depressants implies a biological origin for the disease. "It is a major pedagogical task for doctors (and journalists) to eradicate these old fashioned beliefs. They are so beautifully simple to explain," says Videbech, "but nevertheless wrong."

Videbech also mentioned several new therapies that could gain traction in coming years. Ketamine, for example, shows promise, but must be given at regular intervals; transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which magnets are used to non-invasively manipulate brain activity, and wake therapy, in which patients are kept awake for prolonged periods, are two other options backed by reams of scientific evidence. In the future, we may even see psychedelics return to the psychiatric clinic; a number of psychedelic compounds – including psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms – have shown promise as antidepressants in recent years, a fact that has led many to call for an end to bans on psychoactive drug research.

Psychiatry has been slow to actively correct the myth of the chemical imbalance theory of depression, and SSRIs remain the therapy of choice for millions of patients, but scientists and psychiatrists seem eager to improve our understanding of depression and its treatment. Big Pharma may have led the public to believe that drugs alone could cure a singular cause of depression, but evidence-based reasoning and experimentation stand to put us back on track.

Update: This piece originally stated that "studies have shown that much of [antidepressants'] effect is likely due to placebo." In fact, meta analyses have concluded that the magnitude of benefit of antidepressant medication compared with placebo tends to increase with severity of depression symptoms. The piece has been revised to clarify this point.

Three KKK members who are current or former employees of the Florida Department of Corrections were arrested Thursday for allegedly plotting to kill a black inmate.

Thomas Jordan Driver, David Elliot Morgan, and Charles Thomas Newcomb allegedly plotted the murder in retaliation for a fight between the inmate and one of the correctional officers. The planned murder was to take place once the inmate was released from prison, according to Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“Driver and Morgan are employees at the Florida Department of Corrections, and Newcomb is a former DOC employee,” Bondi said in a statement published in the Orlando Sentinel. “The defendants plotted the murder as retaliation for a fight between the inmate, who is African American, and Driver.”

Driver, Morgan, and Thomas are each facing one state count of conspiracy to commit murder.

Image of random KKK guy via Getty.

As part of a longterm, undercover FBI operation, federal authorities arrested two women allegedly planning to detonate a bomb in New York City on behalf of the Islamic State, ABC News reports.

According to the New York Times, the women, Noelle Velentzas, 28, and Asia Siddiqui, 31, are roommates living in Queens, and were apparently plotting to build an IED for an undisclosed location in New York.

In the criminal complaint, Siddiqui—apparently the editor of Inspire, the online magazine published by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula—is noted as “in possession of multiple propane gas tanks, as well as instructions for how to transform propane tanks into explosive devices.” The complaint also details an anecdote in which Velentzas pulls a knife from her bra, mimes stabbing someone, and tells Siddiqui, “Why can’t we be some real bad bitches?”

Investigators have not said whether the weapon was ever actually assembled, but told ABC News they “are convinced ISIS propaganda and their alleged online activities contributed to their ultimate shift toward violence.” The woman were apparently being “radicalized” by ISIS, messaging with with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula agents and watching beheading videos online.

[Image via AP]

Only yesterday did we say goodbye to Misao Okawa, the 117-year-old woman who was formerly the oldest person alive, and her runner-up is already out here staking claim to the top spot, making demands and getting fired up. Damn, girl—Okawa’s body isn’t even cold.

Gertrude Weaver, who is currently 116 years old and lives at a nursing home in Arkansas, said on Wednesday that she’d like Barack Obama to come to her 117th birthday party. He was also allegedly invited to her 116th birthday party, but he was a no-show. Rude.

Weaver is certain that she is in good enough health to make it to July 4, the birthdate her family adopted for her due to her lack of birth records. She claims they likely chose this date because they were a patriotic family—wink wink Barack Obama, if you’re reading this. How does Weaver stay so old? CBS News has her secret:

Weaver is in good health, Langley said, and attributes her longevity to treating others well.

Weaver enjoys “sittercising” - exercise classes she participates in three times a week from her wheelchair - as well as weekly church services and daily talks about cooking, Langley said. She also visits almost daily with her son Joe Weaver, who is in his mid-90s.

Treating others well and sittercising. Sounds like this could be a fun birthday celebration, Barack Obama. What’ll it be?

After supremely powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was questioned by the NYPD this week about whether he groped the breasts and crotch of a 22-year-old model, the attitude among journalists and film industry insiders seemed to be that accusations that once existed only as loud whispers were finally being dragged into the light.

New York magazine writer Jennifer Senior and conservative commenter John Podhoretz, to name two, took to Twitter to briefly discuss what Senior called the "despicable open secret" of Weinstein's behavior with women:

At some pt, all the women who've been afraid to speak out abt Harvey Weinstein are gonna have to hold hands and jump: http://t.co/cYRZxE7HZV

— Jennifer Senior (@JenSeniorNY) March 30, 2015

@jpodhoretz It's a despicable open secret.

— Jennifer Senior (@JenSeniorNY) March 30, 2015

Senior and Podhoretz aren't the only people to have heard stories of despicable behavior from Weinstein. A New York-based tabloid journalist told me recently that a model friend of his encountered Weinstein at a North American film festival a few years ago. According to her story, Weinstein told her that if she wanted to act, she should come to his office—at which point he proposed a threesome between the two of them and Olivia Wilde. (The model declined both the threesome and the meeting, and, fearing retribution from the famously vindictive Weinstein, has so far declined to go on the record with the story.)

Another journalist we spoke with had heard similar stories, all secondhand—an indie film producer had told her that stories of Weinstein's behavior will "make Bill Cosby look like a monk." People in the film industry, she said, understand Weinstein's M.O. to be the following: he holds "casting sessions" at his office on Friday evenings when he can be alone, and that he greets women in his bathrobe.

But while stories of Harvey's manipulative bullying and violent aggression are widespread (here's a quick bullet-pointed rundown), rumors of the powerful producer leveraging his industry power for sexual satisfaction—consensual or otherwise—have tended to remain unaired, confined to hushed conversation and seedier gossip-blog comment threads.

Much of that gossip centers on circumstances eerily similar to those recounted by Ambra Battilana, the model whose accusations put Weinstein in the NYPD's sights. Here's The New York Times' version of Battliana's account:

"They did not know each other," said one of the law enforcement officials, who agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing. "She didn't know him and he didn't know her; there is no indication she knew who he was."

The two exchanged emails, and on Friday the woman went to meet Mr. Weinstein at his offices at the Tribeca Film Center, at 375 Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan, the official said.

It appears the two met in private, according to the official, and it was during that meeting that she claims he touched her inappropriately.

After the meeting, the official said, the woman immediately went to the police.

Though neither the Times nor its police source is explicit about it, the situation being described here appears to be an informal "casting" session between Weinstein and Battilana, with the producer inviting the model over to his office to size, and feel, her up in private. A Daily News report that police set up a phone call between Battilana and Weinstein in which the producer did not refute the accusations would seem to indicate that the characterization provided by the Times is indeed true.

A Weinstein spokesperson, for their part, has said that the producer is "cooperating fully with the authorities" and will be "fully vindicated." Someone described as a "movie industry source" told Page Six that "we"—perhaps referring to Weinstein's friends, or maybe the film industry at-large—"believe this is a blackmail attempt, and that he did nothing wrong."

Surely, that source would say the same about years-old rumors that Weinstein likes to get inappropriately close with aspiring actresses, but those rumors persist nonetheless. It's widely believed around the internet's sleazier entertainment gossip blogs that Weinstein spends a lot of time on the casting couch. Here's a portion of a 2009 blind item from Lainey Gossip that has been popularly attributed to Weinstein:

LaineyGossip – It was mystifying several years ago why she was hyped the way she was hyped. Just another starlet with no real significant starring vehicles somehow ending up with a prestigious magazine cover proclaiming her as the next It. Well It never happened. And after all this time and a string of failures, she's been trying to change the course. So she's gone back to the major player who tried to make it happen for her the first time. There was an arrangement back then – her sexual services for his professional services – and apparently the same arrangement was resurrected recently in the hopes that she'll finally confirm a juicy role to kickstart a stagnant career.

Never mind that he's married. His wife benefits handsomely from his generosity and while he may not fulfill her with fidelity, he certainly makes up for it through client exchange. Probably better that way. And given what he looks like, it totally makes sense. But he is a legend in the business both for his accomplishments and for the way he leads these ladies to their accomplishments, counting a couple of award winners and a few box office heavyweights on his resumé…which is why he quickly tired of our poor girl and discarded her.

In the comments of that post, Weinstein is a nearly unanimous guess as the "major player" in that story, and Gretchen Mol, onetime cover star of Vanity Far, as the initial starlet.

But just as popular as a guess was Blake Lively in the role of the younger actress displacing the original "starlet." The story that, level of talent aside, Weinstein pushed Lively as a budding superstar simply because she would sleep with him has followed her across the internet for years. A 2010 post on a pop culture site called Pajiba titled "Harvey's Girls" used Lively's arguably puzzling buzz as a way of noting that a score of Hollywood actresses seemed to be of particular interest to Weinstein. The writer, Courtney Enlow, observed:

The Harvey Girls are easily spotted. They are all very pretty, often in a rather generic sense. Their instant fame and the push behind them comes seemingly out of nowhere and without any justification in terms of resume or skill set. Most obviously, at least as of 2007, they are clothed exclusively in Marchesa on the red carpet (the fashion line of Weinstein's wife, Georgina Chapman).

She concludes:

Rumors of Harvey's casting couch ways are legendary. As a minor Midwestern blogger, I can't know their validity. But I do know for each of these girls, there was an enormous PR push, proclamations of "it-girl" and "the next big thing" and then a fairly daunting silence that had to be devastating to these young women who really believed this was their "it."

The rumors about Weinstein's "casting" methods continue on from there, even on gossip items that had nothing to do with him. Here, on a blog called Blind Items Exposed, a little rumor about Glee devolves into another conversation about Weinstein, Lively, and his other "girls:

Says one commenter:

Jamee are you talking Harvey Weinstein? Again if only my integrity (and wallet) would/could allow me to break my NDA from 'way back when' I could tell you a story of just how gross that man is - then again if you read BV you probably already know as I wasn't the only person at that showbiz event who saw what he did and others most likely told Ted.

A commenter on an Oh No They Didn't post about famous Hollywood "casting couch" stories, put it the most succinctly in 2012:

Everone associated with Harvey Weinstein.

Even fluffy news about Weinsten—like this Oh No They Didn't post about the conception of his second child—can turn into a digression about his reputation for taking advantage of young actresses.

But until this weekend, it's remained confined to comment sections and gossip boards. The late David Carr, in a New York feature about Weinstein's monstrous reputation, declined to touch allegations of sexual impropriety, instead focusing solely on his image as a bully. Still, weird stuff bubbled up, like in this quote from Gwyneth Paltrow, who is considered a good friend of the producer's:

When Talk magazine launched, pal Gwyneth Paltrow ended up posing in S&M garb that didn't fit either her career arc or any of her personal needs. Paltrow says that "there were certain favors that he asked me to do that I felt were not exploitive but not necessarily as great for me as they were for him."

So here's the question: If Weinstein's behavior has reached the level of "despicable open secret," who's going to crack it truly open? If you have any stories of sexual assault or harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, you can email us at tips@gawker.com or me personally at jordan@gawker.com, anonymity guaranteed. (You can also, if you're so inclined, use our SecureDrop service.)

[image via Getty]

Pope Francis longs for many things in life, surely: World peace, the Parousia, the latitude to say that women can be priests...you know, stuff like that. The one thing he wants for himself? Pasta. And now Vatican doctors are telling him he can’t have it, because he’s gained a little weight since moving to Italy.

I know. I didn’t know it was legal to be a huge B. to the Pope, either.

The Telegraph reports:

The 78-year-old Argentinian pontiff has appeared noticeably more upholstered during public appearances over the last few months, with doctors ascribing the weight gain to too much spaghetti and ravioli and not enough exercise.

Vatican doctors told Ansa, Italy’s national news agency, that the Pope needs to adopt a more “disciplined” regimen in order to try to combat the stress and strain that he is under as the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

They have advised him to eat pasta no more than two times a week.

No more than two times a week! Is this a joke? Perhaps someone should remind these “doctors” that the Pope lives in Rome, where the only thing you can buy is little raviolis (I imagine). What’s he going to eat? Dirt?

Telling a 78-year-old man who has himself admitted that he thinks he might die soon to go on a diet is rude. The Pope is not going on spring break. He does not need to acquire a “bikini body.”

Furthermore, by making the Pope the Pope, we have already removed him from his first love: Pizza. In an interview earlier this month, the Pope said sadly, “The only thing I would like is to go out one day, without being recognized, and go to a pizzeria for a pizza.” The situation is so dire now that devoted Catholics are trying to sneak him pizzas on the Popemobile.

This is insane. Jesus would want us to have a happy pope, I think. And in this case, a happy pope is a pope who can eat carbs without being subject to insensitive comments.

Your Holiness, I think you look great. Please eat as much ravioli as you want.

Hollywood loves a fairytale, and on March 29, 1993, it got one all to itself.

That night, at the 65th Academy Awards, a young underdog with a handful of bit roles in movies, one soap opera, and one sitcom under her belt beat out her four fellow nominees in the Actress in a Supporting Role category—for a role in a comedy. The category's four other nominated actors—Judy Davis, Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave, and Miranda Richardson—all had more experience and critical respect. Their movies ( Husbands and Wives, Enchanted April, Howards End, and Damage, respectively) were decidedly heavier and more Oscar-friendly than the crowd-pleasing sleeper hit, My Cousin Vinny, for which the Oscar was awarded to Tomei. Maybe worst of all, Vinny had been released over a year before the 1993 ceremony—and the Academy has a notoriously bad memory for anything released before Q4's "Oscar season."

But against all odds, Marisa Tomei won. On the way up the stairs to the podium, she nearly tripped. It was a bad omen. Within a year, her fairytale night had been overtaken by fiction: a rumor circulated that Marisa Tomei wasn't the intended winner of the Oscar she took home.

It started, ironically, as a correction. On Tuesday, March 22, 1994, the day after that year's Academy Awards ceremony, The Hollywood Reporter printed an item called "And the loser is: bad Oscar rumor," which detailed an alleged word-of-mouth conspiracy theory:

A rumor is currently making the rounds in Manhattan, fanned by no less than the former son-in-law of a distinguished Academy Award winner, to wit that last year Marisa Tomei received her Oscar statue by error, with a resultant scandal about it soon to be exposed, much to the shame of the Academy. (All of this quite erroneous, I hasten to add, but do read on.) According to the rumor, it happened because Oscar presenter Jack Palance hadn't been able to read the name written in the secret envelope when he was on stage announcing 1992's best supporting actress winner. Instead of asking for help, so sayeth the tale, Palance arbitrarily called out Tomei's name instead of the actual winner. (Since the story is bunk, there's no need to reveal the name of the lady who was/is being bandied as the "real" winner of that specific prize.) It makes for provocative gossip, all right, but it didn't happen. And for a good reason: When the Oscar ceremonies first went public on television back in 1953, Academy officials were aware of the possibility that one day some presenter might make such an error, either accidentally or for some mischievous purpose. So ever since then, at each and every Academy ceremony — including last night's event, and the preceding year's — two members of the accounting firm of Price-Waterhouse, the company that has tabulated the final Oscar ballots since 1935, are present in the wings during each Oscarcast. In the event a presenter should err in naming the correct winner in any category, said P-W official has been instructed to immediately go to the podium and announce that a mistake had been made. So Marisa, stand assured that Oscar is adamantly yours, no matter what rumor may sayeth to the contrary.

Virtually every item that has been written about this theory (its snopes entry, for example) names the Hollywood Reporter item as its printed origin. It only spread from there—in the April 8, 1994 issue of Entertainment Weekly, the rumor crossed over from the trades to a consumer rag with a much wider circulation. EW's piece further twisted the "nasty-and-totally-unfounded little tidbit":

As the rumor goes, award presenter Jack Palance inadvertently read the name of the final nominee off the TelePrompTer, instead of the name in the envelope. And depending on who tells the story, the winner was either Judy Davis for Husbands and Wives or Vanessa Redgrave for Howards End.

The EW piece repeated the bit about a Price Waterhouse official being authorized to interrupt the ceremony, and implied that the rumor spread because Tomei had "made a few enemies" since winning the Oscar. It also included a quote from her publicist at the time, Gina Rugolo, who said, "It's not even worth commenting on."

Later that year, Tomei disregarded Rugolo's words when she hosted SNL. During the opening monologue of the Oct. 1, 1994 episode, Tomei addressed the gossip seconds after walking out on stage:

Before we start, I wanted to say something, just wanted to clear the air. There's this crazy rumor, some of you may have heard it, some of you may have not, that when I won the Academy Award for My Cousin Vinny, that I didn't really win the Oscar, that because Jack Palance accidentally read the wrong name off the teleprompter. But that's just absolutely not true! I won the Academy Award, fair and square, and I was just the happiest I'd ever been, since, um, since I was named Ms. Teenage America, thank you, back in 1987, the year it was hosted by Jack Palance. Or three years later when I stepped up on stage to receive—though I didn't think I was eligible for it—the Heisman Trophy from Jack Palance. Anyway, the only award I ever felt slightly guilty about was when I was 16 and I was named Employee of the Month at Roy Rogers restaurant by the assistant manager, Jack Palance. Anyhow, that's out of the way...

Two years later, SNL revisited the rumor in a skit called "The Joe Pesci Show," during which Cheri Oteri played Tomei and Jim Breuer played Tomei's Vinny co-star, Joe Pesci. In the skit, Pesci and Robert De Niro (played by John Goodman) mock Tomei by suggesting that she received her Oscar in exchange for sex and that her "fair and square" claim was a lie.

It didn't matter that the story was presented to the public in the form of a denial (with Academy Awards officials repeatedly weighing in) or that Tomei herself addressed it and attempted to laugh it off—it persisted. In a Los Angeles Times article that ran on March 23, 1995, columnist Steve Harvey reported "the rumor still hasn't died" and said it had been invoked at the recent Southern California Sports Broadcasters Assn. Awards. During a 1997 episode of Geraldo, the quintessentially bitchy critic Rex Reed is said to have deemed the supposed truth behind Tomei's win "Hollywood's best-kept secret." A reader named James Berg wrote in to Roger Ebert's "Movie Answer Man" column asking him to shed light on Reed's allegations, reporting what he'd seen on Geraldo:

According to Reed, a blunder by presented Jack Palace erroneously resulted in the awarding of the statue to Marisa Tomei for My Cousin Vinny, instead of Vanessa Redgrave. Reed explained a "stoned" or "drunk" Palance read the last name on the Teleprompter and did not properly open the envelope and name the winner as Redgrave.

Ebert referred back to a column he'd written just months before on the matter and then quoted Academy Executive Director Bruce Davis, who said, "There is no more truth to this version than to any of the others we've heard." Davis also repeated that Price Waterhouse officials would take to the podium in the case of an error, adding, "They are not shy."

From the start, all evidence explicitly pointed to bullshit, and yet enough people believed the story to keep it alive for years. Maybe it was selective exposure, the psychological theory that people will believe what they want to believe, regardless of the actual information being communicated. (When I thought back to this rumor, I remembered that Entertainment Weekly printed it—I did not remember that EW ran it in the form of a correction. That such a fuck-up could occur and be allowed to stand is a tantalizing prospect.)

Can you blame them? The setting for Tomei's win was a perfect storm: She was a dark horse newcomer nominated for a comedy that was by then over a year old. Presenting her the award was a 74-year-old wild card who'd done one-armed pushups during his Oscars acceptance speech the year before (incidentally, he also won for a comedy: City Slickers). Before naming Tomei in 1993, Palance called Judy Davis "Joan" and said that Davis was British (she's Australian). If any presenter at the Oscars could be called unreliable, it was Palance. Just believable enough to be spread, spread just enough to take hold, it was the kind of Hollywood rumor that would be impossible to kill.

Would be, if you didn't have access to the video.

What makes the rumor particularly fascinating in retrospect is that it occurred before the rise of instant video online. If Tomei had won this year, there would never have been a question about the integrity of her Oscar—just a few keystrokes would allow you to disprove the story to all but the blind and very dumb. Search YouTube and you'll see that Palance clearly reads Tomei's name off the card in the envelope—there's no second consultation of the teleprompter, he's not making it up as he goes along.

(If nothing else, the Tomei rumor will go down as one of the last great Hollywood conspiracy theories of the pre-internet era. It was much easier to miss things, much harder to retrieve what you'd already read and remembered just a bit of; in the '90s, if you missed SNL, you were out of luck. Sure, maybe you recorded it on VHS, but if you didn't, you had no blogs to rely on to report on what happened the night before. You can see how easy it was to say, "I heard on SNL they said Marisa Tomei didn't win her Oscar...")

In any event, it quickly became clear that the rumor was only one of Tomei's problems. Worse than the whispers was the actual direction of her career. She'd fallen victim to the so-called "Best Supporting Actress Curse"—the same one that afflicted Geena Davis, Mercedes Ruehl, Mira Sorvino, Kim Basinger, Marcia Gay Harden, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Hudson, Penélope Cruz, Mo'Nique, and Melissa Leo, who all saw their acting careers slump or cease existing after their wins. Getting an Oscar, of course, isn't a bad peak to anyone's career. But no one wants to peak that early. This quote from a 2001 profile in Australia's Sunday Telegraph says it all:

"After My Cousin Vinny...I expected my career to be bigger than it is now," [Tomei] said as she celebrated her 36th birthday.

Soon enough, it got bigger. The following year, Tomei was nominated for another Oscar (for In the Bedroom); seven years later, she was nominated again, for 2008's The Wrestler. She didn't win either time, but inevitably the Vinny controversy came up in press regarding both nominations. She was asked to explain the rumor repeatedly ("hurtful" is how she put it)—at least the continued reporting on it included her voice. Tomei was allowed to reclaim her story.

Tomei is now one of only 21 people to be nominated for the Actress in a Supporting Role trophy three times or more; she's appeared in several movies that have grossed over $100 million (including Anger Management, Parental Guidance, and Wild Hogs); and she was recently cast as Gloria Steinem in HBO's upcoming Ms. miniseries. That Marisa Tomei ended up doing pretty well for herself.

Now that Tomei's career is ascendant again, the most pernicious effect of the rumor might be the implication that she didn't deserve the Oscar in the first place. She did. Out of all of the movies nominated in her category, My Cousin Vinny is the only one that remains relevant today through cable and broadcast reruns (thanks to it being, you know, entirely enjoyable). And a big component of its charm is Tomei's sparkling performance as one of those tough-broad East-Coast Italian roles loved by actors and audiences alike. Playing a broad comic part with depth and nuance is a difficult feat, and Tomei nailed it. She earned her Oscar just as much as Vinny earned that acquittal.

[Photo via AP]

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. So goes the old axiom, apparently taken to heart by Melissa Jacobson—a woman whose current occupation is unknown, but who evidently aspires to the title of “lady who poops and pees inside cardboard boxes at Kmart.”

Jacobson was arrested in Racine, Wisconsin, this week after allegedly pooping and peeing inside a cardboard box at Kmart, wiping with paper towels, and calmly approaching the customer service desk and making a return—all while proudly advertising her intention to do so on her shirt. The criminal complaint against Jacobson, obtained by The Smoking Gun, reads in part:

“LPO Volkes reported that he entered aisle #1 to report for his shift and detected a ‘funky’ odor, so he looked down and observed a box containing...both urination and defecation...Upon arrival, Officer Lewis reports that he observed Jacobson’s shirt, which had a picture of a dump truck on it, as well as the phrase, ‘Dropping a Load.’”

“Public bathrooms...were located approximately 50 feet from the customer service desk,” the complaint continues. “LPO Volkes reported that Jacobson shops at Kmart frequently, so she should know where the public restrooms are located.” According to another employee, the pooper did not appear to be drunk or under the influence of drugs, “nor did she appear to be in distress.”

Jacobson is currently out on bond, the conditions of which stipulate “no contact with victim store, Kmart.”

[h/t Death and Taxes, Image via CafePress]

L. Ron Hubbard began Scientology’s “Project Celebrity” in 1955, offering a list of 63 high-profile targets and a “small plaque” as a reward to anyone who successfully brought the likes of Bob Hope and Ernest Hemingway into the church. “There are many to whom America and the world listens...” Scientology’s blustery founder wrote in a newsletter announcing the plan. “It is obvious what would happen to Scientology if prime communicators benefitting from it would mention it now and then.” Sixty years later, was Project Celebrity a success?

That Hollywood is overrun with adherents to the religion of Xenu is generally taken for granted as fact. Everyone knows about Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and Beck; casual followers of Scientology or celebrity gossip may also know Kirstie Alley, Giovanni Ribisi, Juliette Lewis, and recent apostate Leah Remini. But who else? Below, you’ll find a list of every known celebrity who claims membership with the church, as well as lists of those who have dabbled in a few courses but never enlisted and of those who were once members but have since renounced their affiliation. Our definition of celebrity is relatively broad: you’ll find actors, mostly, but also a handful of musicians, screenwriters, directors, businesspeople.

The list is intended to be comprehensive, so if there are people we’ve missed, please let us know in the comments or email me at andy@gawker.com. We’ll keep rolling updates as celebrities join, defect, or go public with their affiliation.

Confirmed Scientologists

All of the Church’s active, dyed-in-the-wool celebrity members, and those who were members at the time of their deaths.

Kirstie Alley [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Anne Archer (center) with David Miscavige (left). Image via Church of Scientology. [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Lynsey Bartilson [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Beck: Perhaps the highest-profile Scientologist this side of Cruise and Travolta, Beck kept quiet about his lifelong involvement with the church—both his parents are Scientologists—until 2005. When New York mag asked about his involvement with the church in 2012, Beck was equivocal, acknowledging his lifelong affiliation but saying “It’s just something that I’ve been around.”

Catherine Bell [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Karen Black [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Sonny Bono: Bono began a relationship with the church in the 1970s, his assistant told the New York Post in 1999, “because Cher wanted him to go”—odd, considering that Cher, who is not a Scientologist, once told Access Hollywood that she “didn’t understand” her ex-husband’s religion. In the same Post article, Sonny’s widow Mary Bono said that Sonny “did try to break away [from the church] at one point,” in the early ‘90s, “and they made it very difficult for him.”

Stephen Boyd: Ben-Hur actor Boyd, who died in 1977, was an OT IV, according to George Malko’s book Scientology: The Now Religion. According to Fantastic Voyage co-star Raquel Welch, Boyd was also gay and closeted.

Grant Cardone: Cardone, an author and motivational speaker who hosted the short-lived Kitchen Nightmares-style reality show Turnaround King, is an OT VIII—Scientology’s highest auditing level— and enthusiastic L. Ron Hubbard disciple. According to longtime Scientology chronicler Tony Ortega, ardone once embarked on an email campaign to slander Milton Katselas, another high-ranking Scientologist, at the behest of megalomaniacal church leader David Miscavige. (Katselas, a well-known acting coach, was punished for not being “loyal enough to the new Miscavige regime and way of doing things,” Ortega writes.)

Nancy Cartwright: The voice of Bart, Nelson, Todd Flanders, and Ralph Wiggum on The Simpsons has been a Scientologist since 1989. In 2007, Cartwright made a $10 million donation to the church. Two years later, she drew fire for using the Bart voice in a Scientology-promoting robocall, which is just as unsettling as it sounds.

Kate Ceberano [Wiki] [source]

Erika Christensen [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jeff Conaway: Conaway, who played Kenickie in the film version of Grease, joined after co-star and Scientologist poster boy John Travolta “introduced him to the church, giving him an auditor and a library of Scientology books,” according to Business Insider.

Chick Corea [Wiki] [source]

Tom Cruise with David Miscavige. Image via AP.

The smiling, shrink-hating, spy-hiring, motorcycle-riding, and couch-jumping mascot of Scientology, Cruise has been the church’s biggest star since joining at the behest of then-wife Mimi Rogers in 1990. Since then, his exploits in the name of Scientology have been too numerous to recount here; in 2012, he and Katie Holmes divorced in part because Holmes didn’t want the couple’s daughter Suri to become involved with the church.

Sky Dayton: EarthLink and Boingo Wireless founder Dayton attended the Scientology-affiliated Delphian boarding school in Oregon. He is identified as a Scientologist in Lawrence Wright’s “The Apostate,” the New Yorker article that became the book that became Going Clear, HBO’s Scientology documentary. According to Fox News, Boingo was named after the band Oingo Boingo, whose founder Richard Elfman is also a Scientologist.

Eddie Deezen: Like Jeff Conaway, Grease actor Deezen began to pursue Scientology after meeting Travolta. “Seeing what an extraordinary guy [Travolta] was, just such a nice person, such a kind human being, did make me think, but it was probably my first impulse of curiosity concerning Scientology,” he told Vice in 2012, adding that he hasn’t “been very active [in the church] lately.”

Jason Dohring [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Robert Duggan [Wiki] [source]

Bodhi Elfman [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jenna Elfman at the opening of Nashville’s Scientology church and Celebrity Centre. Image via Church of Scientology. [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Richard Elfman: Father of Bodhi and father-in-law of Jenna, Richard Elfman is identified by Tony Ortega as “an avid member of the church” “to this day.” It should probably be noted here that Danny Elfman, the film composer and Richard’s brother and partner in Oingo Boingo, is not a Scientologist, despite the family ties.

Doug E. Fresh: The ‘80s rapper/beatboxer has a track on “The Joy of Creating,” an L. Ron Hubbard-tribute album. Fresh’s contribution is truly a joy.

Peaches Geldof: The late daughter of rock-star/activist Bob Geldof went public with her Scientology membership shortly after Gawker posted one man’s account of a heroin-fueled one-night stand with Geldof that ended at Scientology’s Hollywood Celebrity Centre.

Isaac Hayes onstage at a 2005 Celebrity Centre gala. Image via Getty. Soul legend Hayes famously left his gig voicing South Park’s “Chef” after refusing to participate in an episode that skewered Scientology.

Gary Imhoff [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Mark Isham [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jocelyn Jones [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Kimberley Kates [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Milton Katselas: Katselas, who coached everyone from Burt Reynolds to Giovanni Ribisi—also a Scientologist—is called “the best acting teacher in the world” in a 2007 New York Times profile. he same profile alleges that some actors have left Katselas’ classes “because of the unspoken pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology.”

Vivian Kubrick [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jason Lee: Lee, star of mid-aughts sitcom My Name Is Earl, is a Scientologist, as is Earl co-star Ethan Suplee. Frequent Earl guest Giovanni Ribisi is a Scientologist, and so is Juliette Lewis, who appeared in one episode. According to a TV critic at the Guardian, the plot of the entire series has shades of Hubbard-inspired allegory.

Geoffrey Lewis [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Juliette Lewis: Musician and actress Lewis, who was raised in the church, told a Daily Beast reporter last year that the public is unkind to Scientology because “The mainstream media is funded by pharmaceutical companies, so when you have the biggest movie star in the world at the time—Tom Cruise—coming out against anti-depressants and Ritalin and just saying, ‘Hey, why don’t you put a warning label on there?’ The thing about Scientology is it is anti-drug in that you’re seeking relationship or communication tools—simple basics on how to live better.”

Christopher Masterson [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Danny Masterson onstage at a 2005 Celebrity Center benefit event with fellow Scientologist Laura Prepon. Image via Getty. [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jim Meskimen [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Julia Migenes [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Sofia Milos [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Elisabeth Moss [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Floyd Mutrux [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Haywood Nelson [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Marisol Nichols [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Judy Norton-Taylor [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Eduardo Palomo [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Michael Peña [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Priscilla Presley: Elvis, Priscilla’s ex-husband, was no fan of the church, according to the book Elvis Aaron Presley: Revelations From The Memphis Mafia. “Fuck those people! There’s no way I’ll ever get involved with that son-of-a-bitchin’ group. All they want is my money,” Elvis allegedly shouted after a meeting with Scientologists in Hollywood.

Bijou Phillips [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Laura Prepon [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Kelly Preston [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jeff Pomerantz [IMDb] [source]

Lee Purcell [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Giovanni Ribisi [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Marissa Ribisi [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Michael D. Roberts [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Ruddy Rodríguez [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Billy Sheehan [Wiki] [source]

Dror Soref [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Frank Stallone: Watch Sly’s brother belt out “The Evil Purpose” and “Road to Freedom,” two songs penned by Hubbard, live in concert right here.

Ethan Suplee [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Greta Van Susteren [Wiki] [source]

John Travolta holding an E-meter, the polygraph-like device used during Scientology’s auditing sessions. Image via Going Clear.

According to ex-Scientology executive Marty Rathbun in the HBO documentary Going Clear, Travolta is “Scientology’s captive” because of all the dirt he’s given the church during auditing sessions. “There were rumors that he was threatening to leave,” adds New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright. “And another Scientologist told me that he was delegated to create a “black PR” package—all the damaging material that they could use against Travolta, which came from his auditing sessions.” Perhaps that “damaging material” contains information regarding the widespread rumor that Travolta is gay.

Manu Tupou [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Edgar Winter [Wiki] [source]

Michael Wiseman [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Rumored/Dabblers

The celebrities who have “taken a couple courses” or “done some studying” on Scientology, but are not actually members of the church.

Mikhail Baryshnikov: Travolta introduced the dancer to the church, according to Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear, but Baryshnikov didn’t stick with it.

Brandy [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

David Carradine: A student of Scientologist acting coach Milton Katselas, Carradine told the New York Times Magazine in 2007, “I went down and took a couple of classes. I’m no kind of Scientologist, but I’ve been around it enough to know it’s a very intelligent thing.”

Leonard Cohen: Going Clear cites Cohen as having “passed through” one of Scientology’s Celebrity Centres, and the song “Famous Blue Raincoat” contains an apparent reference to the church.

Russell Crowe [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Anne Francis [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Chaka Khan [Wiki] [source]

Ernest Lehman [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Charles Manson: According to Manson biographer Jeff Guinn as excerpted in LA Weekly, while in prison, “Charlie adopted those aspects of Hubbard’s teachings that lent themselves to manipulating others. “His September 1961 report [by prison officials] noted, ‘He appears to have developed a certain amount of insight into his problems through the study of [Scientology]. Manson is making progress for the first time in his life.”

Gordon Lightfoot [Wiki] [source]

Ricky Martin [Wiki] [source]

Katherine McPhee [Wiki] [source]

Van Morrison: An auditor told Morrison biographer Steve Turner that the singer once had a “basic involvement” with Scientology, according to the Rolling Stone. Morrison gives Hubbard “special thanks” in the liner notes to his 1983 album Inarticulate Speech of the Heart.

Lou Rawls [Wiki] [source]

Brad Pitt: According to writer and former Scientologist Amy Scobee, Pitt completed two courses in the early ‘90s while dating Scientologist Juliette Lewis, but decided that the church wasn’t for him.

J.D. Salinger [Wiki] [source]

Jerry Seinfeld: “I last really studied [Scientology], oh, it’s almost 30 years ago...In my early years of stand-up, it was very helpful,” Seinfeld told Parade in 2008. “I took a couple of courses. One of them was in communication, and I learned some things about communication that really got my act going.”

Jada Pinkett Smith: In 2008, Jada Pinkett Smith and her husband founded a now-defunct school that used L. Ron Hubbard’s “Study Technology” and “ideas from Scientology ‘ethics,’” Scientology expert Tony Ortega writes. According to Ortega, Jada was “the dedicated Scientologist in the family,” but both Smiths have since ended their connections with the church.

Will Smith: Rumors about Smith’s connections with the church are rampant, and the New York Daily News reported in 2008 that he was actively recruiting for the church on the set of Hancock. But according to Ortega and former church executive Mike Rinder, the rumors aren’t true. “Will Smith is not a Scientologist,” both men told the Daily Beast in March.

Patrick Swayze: The late actor is also among those who Travolta briefly introduced to the church.

Forest Whitaker with John Travolta in Battlefield Earth, a film based on a book by L. Ron Hubbard. Whitaker also had a short Scientology dalliance inspired by Travolta, according to Going Clear.

Former Scientologists

Celebrities who were once full-fledged members of the church, but have since exited.

Larry Anderson [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jason Beghe [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Tom Berenger [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Nazanin Boniadi: Boniadi, who dated Tom Cruise in 2005, was allegedly groomed by the church to be Cruise’s wife. Cruise apparently broke up with her after she insulted Scientology chief David Miscavige. When she complained about the break-up, a friend reported her to the church, and she was allegedly forced to clean toilets with a toothbrush as punishment.

John Brodie [Wiki] [source]

William S. Burroughs’ book Ali’s Smile: Naked Scientology, published in 1970 after the writer denounced and was expelled from the church in 1968. Image via Wikipedia. [Wiki] [source]

Diana Canova [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Michael Fairman [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Neil Gaiman [Wiki] [source]

Paul Haggis [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Katie Holmes: Holmes, of course, is another of Tom Cruise’s ex-Scientologist exes.

Leif Garrett [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Nicole Kidman: Kidman, too, terminated all Scientology affiliation when she divorced Cruise. Ex-Scientology exec Marty Rathbun said in 2012 that David Miscavige was “central” to the split.

Carmen Llewelyn: “Scientologists followed me down the street. They took pictures of my kids. They’d stake out my house, wait until we came out and follow us,” the actress said after her divorce from Scientologist Jason Lee and exit from the church.

Vince Offer [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Lisa Marie Presley [Wiki] [source]

Christopher Reeve [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Leah Remini [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Mimi Rogers: Rogers, Tom Cruise’s first wife, introduced Cruise to the church in 1990. Miscavige also played a large role in their divorce, according to Rathbun. “[Rogers] no longer seems to be active in the Church of Scientology, but refuses to confirm it,” the Telegraph wrote in 2001.

Don Simpson [Wiki] [IMDb] [source]

Jeffrey Tambor: The Arrested Development and Transparent actor, who took classes with Scientologist acting coach Milton Katselas, told LA.com “I have nothing against it, but I am no longer a Scientologist” after the New York Times Magazine identified him as such in 2007.

Photos via Getty, AP, IMDb, and Wikipedia. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Representatives from six countries reached a tentative agreement today in Lausanne, Switzerland, that, if finalized, would limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the end of U.S.-led sanctions. The deal is set to be completed by June 30, though there are reportedly still important details to be settled.

According to Reuters, Iran would suspend two-thirds of its current uranium enrichment capacity under the agreement and allow foreign monitoring for a decade. The New York Times reports that the “giant underground enrichment site at Fordo – which Israeli and some American officials fear is impervious to bombing – will be partly converted to advanced nuclear research and the production of medical isotopes.” At least one foreign scientist will work at Fordo, according to the Times, and no fissile material that could be used to make a bomb would be allowed in the facility.

Big day: #EU, P5+1, and #Iran now have parameters to resolve major issues on nuclear program. Back to work soon on a final deal.

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) April 2, 2015

HUGE thanks to our terrific team of U.S. diplomats and experts. Simply could not do #IranTalks without them.

— John Kerry (@JohnKerry) April 2, 2015

UPDATE 3:13 pm: President Obama praised the deal at a press conference this afternoon.

After many months of tough principled diplomacy, we have achieved the framework for that deal, and it is a good deal,” Obama said, according to Bloomberg. “It is our best option by far.”

Iranians, meanwhile, celebrated the deal, or at least Obama’s discussion of it.

lol, Iranians are taking selfies with Obama after Iran TV aired his speech live for 1st time. RT @pedi سلفی با اوباما pic.twitter.com/UgRS1WQ3Cf

— Arash Karami (@thekarami) April 2, 2015

Image via AP.

Some powers are so terrible and vast that they should be denied to humankind, for we would not know how to wield them responsibly. For example: Kamil Hismatullin, a Russian hacker and security tinkerer, briefly had the ability to delete everything on YouTube.

Smart tech firms like Google and Facebook routinely pay hackers and miscellaneous security geeks to find (and report) security flaws. This way, companies can plug the holes before someone less scrupulous can use them to mess with our data online. It’s a good system, and as Hismatullin, one such geek, details in a personal blog post, he recently landed a whopper: the ability to instantly delete any video on YouTube. All it took was sending a very, very short string of text to the site, and no matter whose video you’d targeted, it’d vanish as if the owner himself had trashed it.

He uploaded a video of the attack in action, if you’re curious:

What’s more surprising than the fact that it only took Hismatullin several hours to find this vulnerability is that he didn’t go wild with power, insane with cyberstrength and video bloodlust. He could’ve nuked Gangnam Style and its 2.2 billion views. He could’ve erased Rickroll, Rihanna, Macklemore, Minecraft, and Charlie Bit My Finger. Surely he could’ve automated the process and just wiped YouTube into a big vacuum. No more videos, no more Kimmel Pranks, no more content. He could have been a God. We would’ve submitted to him, given him our clothes and coins and fealty. But instead he handed it all over to Google for a $5,000 bounty, which really seems very low!

In general I spent 6-7 hours to research, considering that couple of hours I’ve fought the urge to clean up Bieber’s channel haha.

Although it was an early Saturday’s morning in SF when I reported issue, Google sec team replied very fast, since this vuln could create utter havoc in a matter of minutes in the bad hands who can used this vulnerability to extort people or simply disrupt YouTube by deleting massive amounts of videos in a very short period of time. It was fixed in several hours, Google rewarded me $5k and luckily no Bieber videos were harmed :D

Already in the comments, he’s realized he got lowballed: “Yes, I agree with you, this bug is worth more than $5k. To be honest I expected $15k-$20k.”

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.

Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

This is the first item in what will become a regular feature on Phase Zero. We'll be posting previously unpublished codenames that refer to secret programs, organizations, and activities. And we'll try to divine from limited information what they might be. If you have new information (or codenames of your own) to share with us, you can email us or use Gawker Media SecureDrop.

They don't have their own television show and they suffer from a congenital air force inferiority complex to Army criminal investigations (or CID), but the Air Force Office of Special Investigations is a $300 million a year, 3,300-strong law enforcement and security organization that not only spans the globe sniffing out crimes and spies, but it is also the premier techno-cyber investigatory arm of the Pentagon. And online undercover sleuthing is hot right now, with AFOSI leading the defense march.

Reading AFOSI press releases, one might think it's all to catch Air Force sex predators and the occasional foreign spy, but buried in hyper-secret fine print are a set of special access programs, known in the biz as SAPs, that focus on "insider threats." We hear that Covenant Guard is just such a program, and that its focus extends to defense contractors and others "affiliated" with the U.S. Air Force who are suspected of Middle Eastern terrorism connections. Catching homegrown extremists or prying into the private lives of Muslim Americans? If it's just the former what's the point of the hyper-secrecy?

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

When the first Fast and Furious movie was released, I was a 14-year-old in ruby-colored Roxy shorts who didn’t think about anything but Paul Walker, Blink-182, and surfing. I’d obviously never been surfing or even seen the Pacific Ocean, but I really identified with the laid-back SoCal beach vibes sold to me in the Alloy catalogs delivered to my suburban Philly home.

The closest I’d gotten to shredding the gnar was in the Pacific Sunwear in our local mall, where I felt at ease around hemp chokers and Hawaiian print shirts. My people, I thought, entering the store in a heavy coat, stuffing gloves into my pocket. When in doubt, paddle out.

Paul Walker was the ideal partner to my chill vibes lifestyle. He was the most beautiful man on planet earth: He had the vocal fry of a native Californian (Glendale—exotic), the tanned body and blonde hair of a sun rat, and that smug popular-boy attitude that a girl like me—uncool, puffy, and anxious—found irresistible. His last role, as the cruel-hearted Dean Sampson in She’s All That had me practically swooning.

Cars were dead last on my list of things to care about—I didn’t bother to get my driver’s license until I was 18—but if Walker was in a film driving one, I’d be there, no questions asked. Going to see The Fast and the Furious, I told myself, would be an exercise in patience: car, car, car, HOT BOY, car, car, explosion, HOT BOY SHIRT OFF, car, fire, car.

Instead, together with a horde of my teenage friends at a theater near the mall, I sat transfixed. It wasn’t only that Paul Walker, California Bra of My Dreams, was beautiful. The movie was perfect, a deeply gratifying dopamine delivery of intense action, hyphy soundtrack, and exotic location (Los Angeles). It was a movie about cars, and you didn’t need to know a single thing about them to enjoy it. Like pouring a bag of Skittles down your throat, The Fast and the Furious was a youth-friendly sugar high worth the choking risk.

In retrospect it may have been more than the adrenaline and SoCal location that pulled me in. Though—or maybe because—The Fast and the Furious was a movie about a street-racing gang of ruffians, it placed a premium on loyalty, family, and acceptance, and it pulled off its (literal) family-values message without sacrificing a single close-up shot of Paul Walker’s baby blues in a crystal clear rearview mirror. While my preoccupation with surfing dictated that I covet no possessions but chillage and a hot-bodied man, I was unconsciously internalizing the movie’s value system: respect, loyalty, openness, work. By the 2003 release of 2 Fast 2 Furious—still without a driver’s license—I excitedly hitched a ride to the theater on the day that it came out.

In the 14 or so years since I first fell for Paul Walker, the Fast and Furious franchise has grossed over $2 billion dollars worldwide. The films are beloved by people of all stripes for their high-octane, over-the-top stunts, diverse and intensely loyal cast, the endlessly one-upped locations, and the rambunctious soundtrack choices.

In 2011, film critic Wesley Morris called the series a product of “accidental genius,” arguing that by blithely presenting a Utopian post-racial America without marketing to any particular audience, the then five-movie series was one that was casually unifying its disparate viewers. The diversity of the cast is never directly acknowledged and neither is race inequality; everything speeds by too fast for anyone to notice, which, as Morris put it, “distort[s] reality to create the illusion of revolution.” Several months after Fast Five came out, it was announced that there would not only be a sixth installment, but a seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth film as well. At the release of the seventh film this Friday, that so-called accidental genius will be put to its most extreme test yet, attempting to pull off another risky job without an essential and original member of its team. By penning “Fast Forward” in 2011, Morris squared a neat bookend onto the franchise, presciently writing the perfect final words on the Fast and Furious films not long before they would become permanently marked by tragedy.

I recently rewatched the first of the six films. There is a heart-stopping scene—before the audience learns that Walker’s character is not a street-racing vagabond but a cop—in which he and Vin Diesel race each other in an unspoken but electric moment in bonding. Walker drives so fast that a panel in the floor of his car explodes out, spitting nuts and bolts all over the pavement and emitting plumes of smoke from the hood. Watching this scene in 2015 is difficult. Two years ago, Walker died while riding in the passenger seat of a car that was pushing 100 miles per hour in a 45-mph speed zone, and I mourned him like I would have if he were a former flame. Walker’s death came during the filming of Furious 7, an obstacle director James Wan tackled by substituting in Walker’s brothers, Cody and Caleb, as his replacements and in post-production, a CGI stand-in. Walker had been in every FF movie but one (the criminally overlooked Tokyo Drift) and he would now torment the seventh movie as a ghost composite of himself.

In the second film, the locations had changed, new loyalties emerged, and more “family” members were brought into the fold. The top-bill pairing, Paul Walker (still in my heart as my future husband) and goofy everyman Tyrese Gibson, was more exciting than I could have hoped for. Ludacris, Devon Aoki, and Eva Mendes—the FF casts were always hodgepodge mixes of great-looking marginal actors playing car-obsessed geeks. And in a way that I couldn’t have articulated as a 16-year-old, they felt a great deal like my friend groups: a bunch of idiot chuckleheads looking for a little excitement in this world. I could turn my brain off and momentarily forget about fitting in with a cool crowd that demanded I subdue the parts of myself that were vastly interpreted as loser-y.

Tokyo Drift and Fast and Furious, films three and four, were released when I was 19 and 22. I finally had my driver’s license and drove a cherry red Ford Aspire, the exact same car that Deandra Reynolds buys on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. (You might be more familiar with its street name, The Crappiest Car You Can Imagine.) The “Ass-Fire,” as we called it behind its back, seemed to have been manufactured to not exceed 60 m.p.h., and in turn, I treated it like garbage. Inspired by the audacity of Bow Wow’s disgustingly over-the-top “Hulk” car from Tokyo Drift, I wasn’t careful about the Aspire’s longevity. I drove it to hell as if it were flashy and exciting, when really its only value was locomotion. On a beach vacation in my early 20s, when my friends and I had had too much to drink and were floating dangerously away with the currents, we would yell, “Tokyo drifffttttt! Everyone back to the sand! Tokyo driftttt!” That memory still hits me any time I’m tipsy in the ocean.

By Tokyo Drift’s release, I’d begun to feel more solidly accepted by the world. I had (mostly) shed the stigma of wanting to be cool, and was content with the people around me. I gave up the surfing gag, and my taste in men became slightly more adult: while my love for Walker would never—will never—fade, the allure of the pretty boy shifted into a taste for muscleman Vin, who returned in the final scene of Tokyo Drift with a coy smile and a race challenge in his Plymouth Road Runner. Vin wore tight tank tops and spoke with a deep, handsome voice, and when he showed up once more, I knew I would follow both Walker and Diesel dutifully into the fast, furious future.

A lot has been written about Vin Diesel’s love for Paul Walker, mostly by Vin Diesel himself. His Facebook page, which he refers to colloquially as Vinbook, is a fluid stream of Tumblr-aesthetic macros of inspirational quotes attributed to the actor, combined with low-grade Photoshops of Diesel wishing his fans a Happy New Year or affirming that he is “All Love.” In almost every photo, Diesel is grinning his toothy smile. The outpouring of grief from Walker’s costars after his death was, and continues to be, enormous, but Diesel, a social media mastermind, tops them all. More than half the images Diesel posted after Walker’s death are of the pair together. He affectionately refers to the deceased actor as his brother, Pablo. Last week it was announced that Diesel named his newborn daughter Pauline.

Could all of this public gesturing really be genuine? There is nothing surprising about an actor as well-known as Diesel attempting to tackle social media in order to “connect to his fans.” But Diesel—who in size and rumbling voice is as close to a cartoon character as any working action star besides maybe The Rock—has actually managed to humanize himself to thousands of people who would never otherwise have been interested. Besides his Fast and Furious credits, Diesel is not often enough on the press circuit for anyone to really care about what he is up to, and yet his Facebook is nearing 90 million loyal followers.

He rarely posts photos of lavish celebrity life (cars, watches, private jets). He doesn’t share many photos of his young children or his hot wife (whom he refers to as The Mayan Queen). He instead, perhaps unwittingly, turned himself into a shareable meme, a destiny he was bound for the minute he adopted Vin Diesel as his name. The simplicity in Diesel’s social media presence is that he is self-aware in what he is promoting: the church of Vin Diesel, and occasionally the prayer groups of those he holds dear. It was telling when a video of Diesel singing Rihanna’s “Stay” seemingly alone at a karaoke bar went viral; he responded by recording more of the same, and obliged karaoke requests during junkets for his other films. For a jacked-up tough guy with a gravelly bad boy voice, he appears to be living his happiest life, albeit one he must now face without his brother in arms. If there were any Diesel detractors out there, Vin seems like the kind of guy who would be oblivious to them.

This somewhat off-kilter, fan-driven personality is a necessary function to the popularity of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Dominic Toretto is a family man: devoted, loyal, protective. He never flinches in the face of trouble. In the first film, he tells Walker’s character Brian O’Conner that if he breaks his sister Mia’s (played by Jordana Brewster) heart, he’d break his neck. To sustain the character over the course of six films and more than a decade of fan obsession, there has to be some bleed between Vin and Dom. The way Diesel publicly and frequently declares his love for his costars in real life, it seems likely he’d say the same to their new flings. Diesel is the series’ foremost advocate and, as of the fourth installment, one of the franchises’s head producers. He is, like Walker, the only actor in the ensemble cast to appear in all but one of the films, and without him, the series would surely have extinguished long ago.

But the Fast and Furious franchise has continued triumphantly, in large part due to Diesel’s goofy accessibility. The famous rich actor who releases karaoke videos, the tough-guy movie star who cries openly and publicly about his dead best friend—Diesel’s ability to blend lavish high and relatable low is exactly what makes the franchise so successful. Fast and Furious movies mix intense super-reality with down-home regular guy stuff; they present a vivid race-blind Utopia while mourning the loss of their lead golden white boy; they invade the slums of Rio and promote the monied nightlife of Tokyo. The movies are categorically unreal on every single level (for Furious 7, stunt drivers dropped actual cars out of an airplane), but the immediacy and recognizability of the cast—and the longevity of the relationships between the characters and actors—somehow turns the outlandish stunts and plots possible, commonplace, the work of a group of normal people who, together, become extraordinary. Vin Diesel just happens to be in the driver’s seat.

Ten years after I first fell head over heels for The Fast and the Furious, I was in the living room of an apartment in a country very far away from Philadelphia. A mattress draped with a yellow sheet was pulled onto a linoleum floor. Two women, close friends of mine, sat on it with a sleeve of crumbly cookies between them. Next to me, on a scratchy orange couch, was another female friend, and the four of us, with the lights off, were laughing through the outrageous lines in Fast Five together.

In our year away together, we watched each of the movies in the empty discomfort of my apartment. The humor, the excitement, the intensity—the goofy, stupid Americanness—of the franchise helped us all stave off homesickness. That night, it was nearing the sixth or seventh time we’d run through this particular disc, which we’d bought bootleg from a DVD stall in the nearby shopping mall. Somehow, it never grew old. When Toretto consults O’Conner about their latest heist, we collectively squealed with anticipation when O’Conner tells him, “Then we’re gonna need a team.”

While other celebrities find social media adds a manipulative layer of value to their power, there isn’t that degree of limitation with the cast of the Fast and the Furious films. In photos of the series’ stars, you get the the feeling that the characters who are so loyal to each other on film are equally as devoted off screen. Inside or outside the press cycle, the ever-changing members of the FF cast generally appear to be real friends. Tyrese, Vin Diesel, The Rock, Gal Gadot, Michelle Rodriguez, Ludacris, everyone. They constantly and unwaveringly reinforce their support for each other, expressing the loyalty of a real family (even using the hashtag #FastFamily). We believe them because the film’s characters are bullshitters, cronies, jokers, loyal confidantes, thrill-seekers. Just like us and our friends.

In the trailer for the seventh movie, Dom tells the latest supervillain, “I don’t have friends. I got family.” The shot almost immediately cuts to an image of Brian. Disregard the cars being dropped out of planes, The Rock ripping a plaster cast from his arm, a bus nearly collapsing off a cliff. This hokey mise-en-scène reveals the beating heart of the franchise: The relationships. The family. And when we watch them tackle even riskier jobs with each new film in the series, we become part of that family, as well.

The #FastFamily is the apex of #SquadGoals: they love each other, they stick together, and, unafraid, they launch cars off of bridges, into trains, and parachute down from the sky, all while wearing dirty t-shirts and Vans, sharing a few Coronas to celebrate victory. It’s only ever barely addressed in the FF series how a bunch of mechanics and petty car thieves wield the skills to unseat evil leaders and lawless mobs in any number of foreign countries. You don’t need to be a super-trained martial-arts expert to save the world. The team is all of us, if we could just get behind the wheel of a fast enough car.

Image via Furious 7/Tara Jacoby. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

If you are a working woman who has read anything about the Ellen Pao discrimination case, your reaction has likely been one of unease and disappointment. Turns out that soft sexism—something very real, likely something you’ve experienced personally—is a slippery thing to prove in a court of law. But that doesn’t mean we should stop talking about it.

To recap, Pao lost a gender discrimination suit last week (filed in 2010, and the four-week trial just wrapped in San Francisco) against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. In this suit, she alleged that, after filing a complaint about sexual harassment, that she was retaliated against for speaking up and held back from a rightful promotion. The jury disagreed. But as Ann Friedman notes in a piece at New York magazine about the case, it wasn’t because Pao did anything wrong. In fact, she went about things exactly as corporate practices dictated she should:

When one of her co-workers made unwanted sexual advances, she reported the behavior to her supervisor. She asked that her bosses bring in sexual-harassment educators and outsiders to investigate her claims. After experiencing what she felt was retaliation for her reporting the harassment — such as not being invited to certain events, or being poorly evaluated in a performance review — she sought the advice of an outside human-resources consultant. The consultant told her “she would not be successful at [Kleiner Perkins] because she complained and that going forward she should drop her complaints, because no one would do anything about them.” And so, when that prediction proved true, she filed a lawsuit. And then she was fired.

Pao’s loss in court happened because the sorts of things Pao accused the firm of fell under the gray zone of soft sexism, that ever-so-slightly tainted smudge of ball sweat on the lens of your career that has kept you out of meetings, decisions and promotions that at best you can fantasize about, because they aren’t happening to you. It’s those moments in your working and personal life that are just nagging enough that you notice them and feel the burn of unfairness, but equally subtle enough that you can’t exactly prove it as sexism.

In a more recent piece at NYMag on the Pao case, Annie Lowrey recalls a recent avatar of soft sexism, who she calls Cocktail Party Guy. Lowrey writes:

It happens all the time when my husband and I are at work events together. Cocktail Party Guy asks my husband about how things are going at his news site, and he answers. Then Cocktail Party Guy asks me how our dogs are, and I answer, before pivoting the conversation back to work — and later rolling my eyes as we walk away. It is not impolite. It is not inappropriate. But it is still, at least in my mind, sexist. Both me and my husband love our work. Both me and my husband love our dogs. One of us gets asked about our work. One of us gets asked about our dogs.

It is a form of soft discrimination that I fear might be all too familiar to all too many women — and often I find it hard to explain to my male friends and colleagues. Occasionally, I even find myself struggling to convince them that it is discrimination, and that it has consequences.

In the Pao case, there were many examples of this kind of discrimination-or-not, Lowrey writes:

Exhibit A: Pao’s performance reviews knocked her for her “sharp elbows.” There were similar negative comments in Pao’s male colleagues’ reviews, but they were nevertheless promoted. Does that demonstrate that Kleiner Perkins treated Pao differently because she was a woman? Might they have interpreted her assertiveness as “bitchiness,” and her male colleagues’ assertiveness as “strength” or “conviction”? Maybe she really did have sharp elbows, hurting her relationships with clients? Can’t women ever be criticized for being caustic?

Exhibit B: Some of Pao’s male colleagues were invited on a skiing trip. Pao was not. “The issue is that we are staying in condos, and I was thinking that gents wouldn’t mind sharing, but gals might,” Pao’s colleague wrote in an email. “We can add 4-8 women next year.” But it was a social event held outside work hours. Does it really demonstrate anything about the culture of the firm?

“It went on and on like that,” Lowrey writes. “The trial dredged up dozens of messy incidents that could be interpreted as sexist, or not.” Pao’s legal argument was discrimination based on gender. The counterargument was that it had nothing to do with her being a woman; she just wasn’t promotable. And, while we’ve all seen middlingly competent men be promoted while ambitious women are passed over, how can you really prove that women aren’t seen as leaders because of innate bias that precedes them? You can’t, it turns out.

I’ve never worked at a powerhouse VC firm, but I’ve worked in enough corporate environments to know which end of an ace is up. (Answer: whichever end a dude is holding). The soft sexism of my work life has typically boiled down to the same thing over and over again: a dismissiveness that seems to undercut or reduce female contributions, while men seem inordinately credited or praised with brilliance, great ideas, or saving the day.

It’s basically having everything you do be treated as less relevant, brilliant, important, or worth consideration. I’ve been called not bubbly enough. I’ve been told my complaint about a coworker was a personal beef and not objective. I’ve been asked to do silent work again and again to prop up the work of men without recognition or credit for it. I’ve had ideas stolen outright by men and watched them garner high praise for them.

I’ve asked friends about their own experiences: one lamented being one of the few women on a team and getting a text that a certain coworker would really like cookies for their birthday. Another remembered just noticing “coincidences,” like how the majority of middle management were women, while all the VPs were men. A woman told me she’d recently been asked to hold someone “emotionally accountable” for a project. The fuck. Another said in meetings she is always assumed to have taken notes, even though it’s not at all part of her job description.

Or perhaps it’s outside of work, like Cocktail Party Guy. A female friend of mine says when her husband introduces her to a male friend, the friend will say “oh hey” to her but then proceed to converse only with her husband, whereas when her husband is introducing another woman to her, the woman will always include both members of the couple in the conversation.

Personally, as someone who has spent a lot of time in rock scenes and dated musicians, I’ve been called Yoko Ono more times than I can even recall. And other women I know who’s dated lots of dude musicians backs this up: Any change the man makes in his life (for the better) is assumed to be the result of haranguing from his ball and chain, who is assumed to be eager to stand in the way of him and his creativity.

It’s hard to prove, but the stakes are high. Lowrey notes:

It’s not your boss hitting on you and then demoting you to secretary when you spurn his advances. It’s your boss describing your assertiveness as too assertive, and suggesting you might be better suited for an operational role. It’s not your being asked to fix the coffees at a client meeting. It’s Cocktail Party Guy forcing you to return the conversation to business, so you have an opportunity to develop him as a source rather than talking about dogs for 20 minutes.

It is pervasive. It is persistent. And it is so, so exhausting, all those subtle hints that you are a little different and that your behavior is being interpreted a little differently.

The consequences are real, too, she notes: Fewer opportunities. Poorer evaluations. Open yourself to hostile acts if you complain. But in spite of the bummer news about the case, Lowrey and Friedman’s pieces insist that drawing attention to the issue is still a hugely positive step and a critical part of changing things. So in honor of Ellen Pao’s bravery, let’s dish.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

Contact the author at tracy.moore@jezebel.com.

[Photo of Kristin Cavallari at the 2013 Junk Food Vintage NFL Fashion Show Curated By Kristin Cavallari via Getty]

Lu Lu the panda and his “roommate” Zhen Zhen the panda have reportedly set a new record for panda sex endurance: seven minutes and 45 seconds.

The impressive feat has earned Lu Lu the very cool nickname of “The Enduring Brother,” according to The People Daily (via The Daily Mail). Good work, Lu Lu!

After six months of dating, attending award shows, bonding over their love of music, and generally seeming like they enjoy each other's company, Robert Pattinson and FKA Twigs have gotten engaged. Congratulations to the happy couple.

T-Pain let the happy news slip in an interview with Vulture yesterday, and today two sources confirmed the announcement to People. Wonderful. Although the news may come as a surprise, and maybe you're wondering what those two even talk about, allow us to assure you that they share at least one thing in common: a love for music.

Us Weekly, September 2, 2014:

Pattinson and Barnett, who bonded over their love for music, were spotted leaving Bowery Hotel eatery Gemma last week.

Page Six, September 3, 2014:

The duo, who reportedly bonded over a shared love of music, was spotted leaving Bowery Hotel eatery Gemma last week.

PopCrush, September 3, 2014:

With their mutual love of music, we think they'd make an adorable couple!

PopSugar, September 4, 2014:

The two share at least one thing in common, as Rob is known for his love of music, and he even performed a few songs for the Twilight soundtracks.

International Business Times, October 30, 2014:

The duo, who were first photographed together in New York City on Aug. 27, reportedly bonded over their mutual love of music.

E!, March 3, 2015:

"There is a special connection between the two of them," a source told us recently. "Music is a big part of the relationship, because it means to much to them. They clicked instantly and they literally have been inseparable."

Softpedia, March 4, 2015:

They met through friends and soon learned that they had a lot in common, their love of music among those things. FKA Twigs is a singer and dancer, and Pattinson too has musical aspirations, even though he once joked he would never consider making a proper career out of that.

Yahoo! New Zealand, March 4, 2015:

The couple reportedly first bonded over their love of music.

Winnipeg Free Press, March 4, 2015:

The couple reportedly first bonded over their love of music.

Daily Mail, March 5, 2015:

The couple reportedly first bonded over their love of music and have been dating for the past seven months.

Mirror,March 5, 2015:

The couple reportedly first bonded over their love of music.

Hello Magazine, April 2, 2015:

The couple are believed to have first bonded over their love of music. "There is a special connection between the two of them," a source said. "Music is a big part of the relationship, because it means so much to them. Rob loves her music."

Elle UK, April 2, 2015:

This isn't the first time that the couple – who have been dating for seven months, having bonded over their mutual love of music – have been the subject of wedding whispers.

However, if you're thinking this is the first time Robert Pattinson has bonded with a significant other over a shared love of music, you would be sorely mistaken.

New York Daily News, June 2, 2009:

Stewart and Pattinson also share a love of music.

Damn. What could have been...

Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Even though the temperature is slowly ticking up across the country, we still can't get over the traumas we suffered this winter. The first half of the winter wasn't all that bad, but that last month or two was brutal. Here's a look at how the season's snow totals stacked up in cities around the country.

The whole story of the winter was record heat and drought in the west paired with near-record cold and heavy snow in portions of the eastern United States. We've previously covered the stark temperature divide between the two halves of the country, but it's interesting to compare snowfall totals between different cities, especially now that the odds of people south of the 42nd parallel seeing snow are pretty low.

The two big snow stories this season was the blockbuster in Boston, along with the winter that didn't happen along the mountain ranges out west. Let's start with Boston.

Boston's Record Snow

Provided they don't see any additional snowfall, it looks like Boston will top out at 110.6 inches of snow for the season, most of which fell in just a handful of storms in January and February. This is the snowiest season ever recorded in Boston, and probably the most snow the city has seen in several centuries. The previous record was busted by the long, brutal winter of 1995-1996, which set snowfall records up and down the megalopolis.

The city's top two seasons couldn't have been more different. The winter of 95-96 was a slow and steady race to the top of the salt heap, while this winter thumped residents all at once, which inflicted a greater amount of psychological and physical pain than the steady build-up seen 19 years earlier.

What's interesting is that both 95-96 and 14-15 saw roughly the same number of days with accumulating snow reported at Logan Airport. The snow that accumulated to 107.6 inches by April 11, 1996, fell over the course of 38 days, while the snow that walloped Boston this past winter fell on 36 different calendar days. Many of these storms occurred over a period that extended past midnight, so one storm could account for two (or even three) days of accumulating snow.

The major difference is that the winter 19 years ago saw a much more gradual buildup to the record total...it was death by a thousand flakes. This past winter started off much slower, but slammed down more than 90 inches of snow over the course of four storms between mid-January and mid-February.

Daily Snowfall for Select Cities

How did the snowfall add up in cities around the country? Well, since most of the snow fell in cities across the east, the majority of the list is populated by cities along the East Coast, as chosen by the biased East Coast pig who authored this post (I'll save you the trouble of writing insulting comments).

The above chart shows the seasonal snowfall total each day from October 30 through April 1, showing the winter's profile for fourteen cities from Salt Lake to New York.

While Boston had it rough, it doesn't come close to what some other cities have experienced. Buffalo, New York, right on the shores of the great lake effect snow machine, saw just a dusting more snow than Boston, coming in at 112.6 inches through April 1. I would have included some more cities up there, but they had such disproportionately high amounts of snow that it would have drowned out the smaller totals and made the above graphic useless.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is, as usual, one of the snowiest regions of the country thanks to the lake effect bands (and snowstorms) that sweep across the landmass. Sault Saint Marie, Michigan, has seen 165.9 inches of snow so far this year, with more possible over the next couple of weeks. As it stands, this total is just shy of 50 inches above average for the year. Marquette, Michigan, has seen 165.4 inches this season, which is actually below their average of 200.7 inches. That all pales in comparison to Marquette's snowiest season on record, when 319.8 inches (26.65 feet) of snow fell during the winter of 2001-2002.

Percent of Average

Elsewhere, cities like New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Greensboro N.C., Chicago, and Dallas all came in with snowfall totals above average for the year. The big winner was Dallas, where DFW airport recorded more than 300% of its yearly average—it sounds like more than it is, though. DFW's average snowfall is 1.9 inches, and they saw 5.8 inches this year. Most other cities west of the Mississippi (save for Denver) saw below-average snowfall for the year.

Speaking of below average...

California Snow

The lack of snow in the Sierras is the elephant in the room when we talk about snowfall this winter. Current snowpack in California is only 5% of normal, which is the lowest level ever recorded since they began taking measurements in 1950. On a survey yesterday, researchers at Phillips Station reported no snow on the ground at a spot where there's usually more than five feet of accumulation at the beginning of April, a first since 1940. The previous record-low measurement at this spot was just over one inch, set back in 1988.

Here's an image slider that lets you compare satellite images from April 1, 2015, and happier times just four years earlier. Not only is the lack of snowpack noticeable, but you can see how much more barren the landscape looks today compared to 2011.

The record low amounts of snow sounds like it only affects skiers and photographers, but more than one-quarter of California's water supply is generated by the yearly snowmelt in the Sierra Nevada. When there's no snow, there's no snow to melt, which strains existing water supplies even further. The situation is ugly, and now that the wet season is over, it's going to keep getting worse.

Eastern Flooding

Switching back from famine to feast, snowmelt is also a major concern east of the Rockies when we see a thick snowpack with spring looming on the horizon. Sudden warm-ups or heavy rainstorms can cause snow to rapidly melt, overwhelming area waterways and storm sewers, leading to some pretty ugly flooding problems.

The good news is that many areas of the northern United States—including New England—have seen days with high temperatures above freezing with cool nights that allow the snowpack to refreeze. This warm/cold cycle is hell on roads, roofs, and gutters, but it allows the snowpack to gradually melt instead of liquefying all at once and causing major headaches for area residents. The crappy GIF above shows the gradual snow melt between March 2 and today.

Overall, it was a pretty interesting/depressing/devastating/meteorologically fascinating winter, with numerous records broken on each side of the spectrum. Enjoy your seven-month break from the cold and snow...unless you're in the Northeast or the Great Lakes, of course. (Sorry.)

[Images: AP, author, MODIS Today/Google Earth, NOHRSC]

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