A recent multi-year study of German gamers might cast doubt on the idea that sexist content in video games can affect sexist attitudes in gamers. But the researchers behind the study caution that their findings shouldn’t be oversimplified.

“There are often discrepancies between what a study actually found and how people interpret it,” the two lead researchers, Johannes Breuer and Rachel Kowert told me in an e-mail interview this week after I contacted them about their 824-person study which compared gamers’ and non-gamers’ responses to a trio of questions about women’s place in society over the course of two years.

“We found that the amount of overall video game use at time 1 was not predictive of sexist attitudes/beliefs about gender roles at time 2 (i.e., 2 years later) and that (sexist) beliefs about gender roles at time 1 were equally not predictive of video game use at time 2 (for sample of German players aged 14 and older).

“Some people seem to think that this is proof that sexism is not an issue in games and gaming culture, which is something that we neither found, nor say (nor examined, really) in our study.”

The researchers would go on to tell me that they think sexism in gaming is still a potential problem in terms of excluding female gamers, influencing thoughts about body image and other factors. They also suggested that people might overestimate the impact that games have on people while underestimating the impact that gamers may have on each other.

Breuer and Kowert’s work had caught my eye last week, first from the press and social media attention the release of their study got and then from Kowert’s reaction to that attention on her website.

I saw claims from the usual Gamergate quarters that this disproved anything gaming’s feminist critics have said about games. And I saw claims that this research surely had to be flawed or didn’t apply because of the age and nationality of the people studied or because it was too general. And so on..

The study is called “Sexist Games=Sexist Gamers? A Longitudinal Study on the Relationship Between Video Game Use and Sexist Attitudes.” (Longitudinal means it was done over an extended period of time, rather than a cross-sectional study that’d be taking one statistical snapshot). A summary of the study laid out both the context for the research and the key finding, bolded by me for emphasis:

From the oversexualized characters in fighting games, such as Dead or Alive or Ninja Gaiden, to the overuse of the damsel in distress trope in popular titles, such as the Super Mario series, the under- and misrepresentation of females in video games has been well documented in several content analyses. Cultivation theory suggests that long-term exposure to media content can affect perceptions of social realities in a way that they become more similar to the representations in the media and, in turn, impact one’s beliefs and attitudes. Previous studies on video games and cultivation have often been cross-sectional or experimental, and the limited longitudinal work in this area has only considered time intervals of up to 1 month. Additionally, previous work in this area has focused on the effects of violent content and relied on self-selected or convenience samples composed mostly of adolescents or college students. Enlisting a 3 year longitudinal design, the present study assessed the relationship between video game use and sexist attitudes, using data from a representative sample of German players aged 14 and older (N = 824). Controlling for age and education, it was found that sexist attitudes— measured with a brief scale assessing beliefs about gender roles in society—were not related to the amount of daily video game use or preference for specific genres for both female and male players. Implications for research on sexism in video games and cultivation effects of video games in general are discussed.

Later in the week, here’s what Kowert wrote on her blog:

This article has received quite a bit of buzz from the press and Twitter, as some believe that this study is evidence that sexism is not a problem within the gaming culture. This could not be further from the point. As described by succinctly by Wai Yen Tang of the VG researcher blog:

“this study is analogous of taking photographs from a tall skyscraper down into the streets at three different time periods. You get a beautiful view of a lot of things, but not very clear if you try to focus on a single thing. This means we need a high resolution camera focusing on the most relevant aspects for sexist attitudes.”

There’s a continuum for this research. Scientists have studied the potential effects of games on gamers for many years, though they’ve primarily focused on the question of whether violent games make kids violent.

In 2010, the State of California tried to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that the research was there to justify banning the sale of games to kids, treating games less like art and more like alcohol and tobacco. The court was unconvinced and the preponderance of video game violence studies have not found any strong evidence that playing violent video games will make you more violent.

The arguments about the impact of sexism in games—be it sexist imagery, sexist interactions, and so on—has been more complicated and subtler. Sure, some people may think that simply playing games makes you more sexist, but you’ll see plenty of other arguments: that sexist content can alienate some girls and women from even playing games, may reinforce negative societal values or may simply result in less interesting games and game stories.

To make things even a shade more confusing, Breuer and Kowert had noted that their own study might appear to conflict with some other gaming and sexism studies, though there are key differences among the research. In their own paper, they wrote of their results:

“These findings conflict with the results of previous cross-sectional and experimental work that found some evidence for links between sexist video game content and benevolent sexism and tolerance for sexual harassment. However, these studies were either cross-sectional or looked at short-term effects. They also focused on very specific games and types of sexism, whereas the present study was longitudinal and looked at general beliefs about gender roles in society and overall use of video games. Both the design of the current study and its main findings are more in line with previous cultivation studies on violence in video games that found no or only very limited evidence for cultivation effects.”

So what to make of this new study and how it fits into these arguments? I e-mailed Breuer and Kowert to get their take. This is what we discussed:

Stephen Totilo, Kotaku: What arguments would you say the study is debunking?

Rachel Kowert (Dept. of Communication, University of Munster) and Johannes Breuer (Dept of Psychology, University of Cologne): We would be careful in saying that the study debunks any arguments. It provides some evidence that there are no broad cultivation effects of games, meaning that video games alone do not make anyone (more) sexist (in terms of endorsing traditional gender roles; see also our comment about the quote above).

Totilo: What arguments is it not debunking?

Kowert and Breuer: Again, we would probably not say “debunk” here. However, we want to make clear that our study does not show that sexism is not an issue in/for games and gaming culture. There are many content analyses of popular games that show that female characters are underrepresented or presented in an overly sexualized manner and there is also ample evidence that many players, particularly female, have experienced sexism in their interactions with other players.

Totilo: What impact do you think sexism in games actually has on gamers?

Kowert and Breuer: At the very least, we would say that it can be off-putting to many players (especially female players) and, therefore, can cause exclusion. While sexist game content can sometimes just be ignored or players can choose to turn to other games, personal experiences with sexual harassment or strong (sexist) insults by other players can have a serious negative impact on players, such as emotional distress. Over time, it can also drive players away from certain games or gaming altogether.

Totilo: Maybe even more fundamentally, what actually do you even consider to be examples of sexism in games?

Kowert and Breuer: As we said before, there are two main levels on which sexism can happen: in the content of a game (e.g., hypersexualized representations of female characters, such as the infamous “jiggle physics” in Ninja Gaiden) and in the interactions with other players. The latter can be expressed in various ways, such as exclusion, active discrimination, and/or active harassment (such as those documented on the aforementioned websites; e.g., Fat, Ugly, & Slutty)

Totilo: What do you make of people who are comparing both the arguments and studies regarding the impact of video game violence on gamers to research about the depiction of women in video games on gamers? Are they the same thing? Fundamentally different?

Kowert and Breuer: We would say that there are parallels here: In both cases, people seem to overestimate the effects of video game content. There are other, much more influential factors that impact aggression and sexism - most notably, family and peer influences.

We would also say that for any kind of media effects research (e.g., sexism, violence/aggression, etc) we should be starting to focus on the interactions between players rather than the content of the games themselves. That is something that has already begun for research on aggression with studies, e.g., looking at differences between cooperative and competitive play (there is a really good article by ICA Game Studies Interest Group Chair James D. Ivory (Virginia Tech) about the need to focus more on interactions between players).

Totilo: Do you plan to do more research on this topic? And, if so, what are you planning?

Kowert and Breuer: This article came out of a larger panel study on the uses and effects of digital games in Germany, which ended in December 2014. Since then, the members of the team have moved on to new projects and jobs. As such, there is not much more that can be done in terms of this particular dataset and sample. Although, we have composed a theoretical article discussing the potential cyclical nature of sexism and exclusion in video games content and culture, which should be published in an edited volume later this year/early next year.

We are also currently running a somewhat related project - a cross-cultural experimental study with partners from the US, Germany, and the Netherlands, assessing players’ evaluation of “problematic” content in games (namely, violent and sexual content). The assumption here is that there are cultural differences in how violent and sexual content are perceived and evaluated and that personal moral views also play an important role in this process.

I’m intrigued by Breuer and Kowert’s desire for people to study how players interact with each other. I look forward to seeing what researchers come up with.

What good is any one study? Depends on what you make of it, and, most likely, how much it conforms to your expectations. This new one adds to the discussion about how women are portrayed in video games. It both pushes against a certain model of cause and effect and exposes the limits of scientific study in a cultural debate. Even as it argues against gaming generally making people more sexist, it tells us nothing about, say, what gaming reflects about our society or how games influence how we think of women’s bodies. There’s certainly more to argue about. Lucky us!

Be suspicious, of course, of any simple conclusions—a handy motto to utter at least once a day.

To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. Illustration by Sam Woolley.

Selena Gomez showed off her new curvy body recently in a sexy Instagram photo in which she is seen lying on a pool lounge chair in a swimsuit, enjoying a vacation in Mexico. But is she happy with her new curves?

She has!

Previously in Hey, Does Anyone Know: Hey, Does Anyone Know What FKA Twigs and Robert Pattinson Bonded Over?

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

“It so happens that I have been ganged up on online, and I have also been beaten up by actual gangs of men on the street,” writes ancestral Gawker editor Choire Sicha in the New York Times Book Review, locating the true shame in Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Three zebras with a cool Friday feeling escaped from a ranch and nonchalantly hit the streets of Brussels today.

“It is thought that they used the Van Praet tunnel to walk to the centre of Brussels, where they enjoyed a casual stroll along the canal,” the Guardian reports.

Trois zèbres en liberté à #Bruxelles (photos) http://t.co/u7Z9celbcK #zebragate pic.twitter.com/LcFcLKDOss

— Le Soir (@lesoir) April 17, 2015

The trio was eventually apprehended in a leisurely chase involving five police cars, and everyone was pretty cool about the whole thing and really feeling some posi vibes about the weekend.

The Iowa caucuses aren’t for another nine months, but Kristin Cavallari needs your vote—now. She posted the photo below to Instagram yesterday along with an appeal to the female electorate.

In the caption, Kristin wrote:

Ladies, I need your help! I’m beginning to work on my Spring 2016 shoe collection and I need to know if you’re into the low heel? What do you think about these low stalked [sic?] heels? Which is your favorite, 1, 2, or 3? Or NONE?!! Thanks!

Please cast your votes in the comments below, and I will pass them along to the proper authorities (cops). Thanks!

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

The huge, hemorrhaging Sony leak went down late last year, but even now we’re still discovering new tidbits. Since it’s now very easy and very safe to peruse the archives on your own, let’s see what we can can find together.

WikiLeaks has made looking for words, phrases, and people amid the email rubble almost as easy as searching your own inbox, and the internet has found a renewed interest in Sony, months later. Capitol New York found a nepotistic attempt at landing a BuzzFeed internship, and the Daily Dot unearthed talks about a “Doctor Who” movie. The Intercept found a peek at GOP fundraising. Gawker readers have been finding plenty of interesting stuff, too.

We’re taking this opportunity to enthusiastically dig through Sony’s cybertrash, and will keep updating this post as we revisit the source material. For now, here’s what we’ve got:

New York Times Hollywood reporter Brooks Barnes is a big sniveling kiss-ass

Email messages from Barnes to Amy Pascal in 2014 show the scribe acting way too familiar:

On Dec 18, 2013, at 3:55 PM, Barnes, Brooks wrote:

> supporter and advocate of yours — so glad to have heard it. and wonderful to bump into you. hoping you manage to squeeze in some true rest over the two holiday weeks. XX brooks

Thank you, but zero apologies necessary.All I saw today was an executive working her guts out, trying to be in two places at once, making the correct decision to keep her eye on the prize.Keep up the good fight, will work with your office to reset and XX

Love ya, Amy! These are our industry watchdogs.

Amy Pascal’s emails to herself are fucking crazy

But only if you think this is crazy (it appears to be a draft version of a speech):

Date 2014-05-07 07:34:42

From amy_pascal@spe.sony.com

To amy_pascal@spe.sony.com

a few weeks ago i drove over to cedar sinai hospital and enter4d a small rom packed with teenaerr talking on phones

when i say ttenagers i man kids cuz most of tehm wree even driving yet

but there energy and enithisam and tenson was palable

slmeof tees boys and girls ere from privled priate schools in brewnttwod and some of her were workkng class kids from around the city

wht unites them is there sense of concern aobut teenaggers in Los Angeles in our occtnrrya nd aorund the world

and their concerrn is this there is a nepidemic of teensucicd htaking place rright brore our very eeyes

aw all know the causes rape and ambuse nand humiliationa dn sexaylaidentity

the tena gers taht all in to teen lne from arouund the works are desperate and alone oan on the precipice of despare

they need somone to talk to that underrsttns what they are going throughllon the other end of hte line ae teenagers who have been trained to talk to them to wtxt with them and let them know that there is someoneo there who wants to listten to thm

someone who is thereage but alsoan guide th4m to the resources ath are out there for them to help themeslves

tht is tteenlinel and that is what my sister does. tttain these amazing kids ewho volenteer their simply simoly becsase the y car about other kids

that undertstnad that on one but nnother teenager makes a kids feel ocmfortable

it is a mind blowing thig to witness and i can barely unnderrstnnd how there kis have the strengh and fortitude nand deside to spend time giving this wahy aat tsonh a young age

and weqyally mind blowing is my sister jenny who plays an major role at teen line and devotew wherwor to tteaching these kids how t0 be there for another human bing at such a tvery dangerous moment

jenny uis an expert on teenline nand i am going gtolet her talk about it uin just a minute

but i am an expert on jennny so i am gonnna talk aboaut her becauw w in supporting teenine i actually get a chance to celebrate ny sister’’’i that

everyone needs someboy to tal to tannd i have uenny

sheis my faily and my rtherapist and my bestt friends all roleed into one spectuacular perspn

which is not to say tath she isnt a bit of an oddity but i thik that is what makes her commplere brilliant at ]what she does’’’i have always found jenny to be quitee mysterious

when we were kids i owuld follow hwe aaround trying to figure out alll her seretts...she always seeed so at peace

why was ash so onttent to spend long afternoons sitting underneath her bed reading

maybe——-perhaps whret she was reading givves it away

sheused to love these english books from the 40s called the fammos five they took place in doreset and wwas aboutt a bunch of kids and a dog who whould meett yo on h[school holidays and have wonderrfull adventurres in the rural english country side....on the totger thand her other favoirite book was a book popular in the 70s called go ask alice mostt of you are too young to know iti but ite eas a obut a very roublede 15 year ypd girls who dabbles with drugs and dies of an over dose

naybe tht is henny to a tee,,,,from an early age whe was both a cozy romantic and fun but att the some time having a giant interedt in and great compasssion for thooes who are in pain

jennuu was never a yak yak yers, shw]]] didttn need to talk abouut evertthing se was thinking and going thrroug

she still is a bit of a steel trap i actually found it quite infuriating at the tiem and lets b honest i stil do .....try and get jenny to talk about herself its freaking impossibe

she did go throufgh a wild perios though a kind of glam rock thing when she worked at f in rbeverly hills theis jobs requited long hours of make up application ,,,,becinubgaslost totallly unnecbiable woething id did not apppreciage since we shaed a bathroom

lets see what telse caan i tell you abouut yennny she is afraid of birs she shays it has something to do with their beaks and scaley talonds.....actually wiif you think bout bird beaks and tallns....uk’’’

jenny makes a fiercesnowangeland snt about mmiing a little fresh snowin a bowl with ccram andsuger aas a lovely desert

sheis a very dertereind person,,she came tovisitime in college.,,,she wasintroduced to alex or met him

she decided shwe was gonna marry him and that was that’’’’

jenny woreries oer her two brilliant kids izzy and chrle....jenny hello they are ffine stopyy worrying

she is very judggementtal about very odd hiangs like whey did you hand make yur party invitations of why dont youlike to hitke or how can younot love my towo pug dosg lforansa a]fauna r whatever theirr namems are

i confess as an older sistere there are things about jenny taht deeply iupset me, she is a far betterr cook tahtn i am. in fict she is quite ecvellent at it and very conceited abouut it t. but her bossiness int he kitchen does s]hanve a pot because se really do beliee that her jucie concotion or her vegan dest witll actually make you life beete

i will tell you a secret about hjennnh....that is very embarrrsing one of her favorite mvies is the weedning planner i kids ouuu no a

and dont even try to be friends wth her if yu dont agree with withnil and i is a perfect movie

jenny is the oyalest person i know

and althout she makes friends at a dzzing pace.....im constantly running into tpeople who claim to be her best freinds lets face it everyone wasntt to be with with jenny ,,,,,,no friends ever gets left behind

she met joill at university synacoge preschool when she was two.....andlathough they went to different schools and collges and get married and had kids snand ove in differnet states they remaindearest friends

thats jnennny

i know its that steadfassts ffqualitu taht she hopes to instill in her teen linne trainees

tant heh is the point her lpoyalyt her strenth her ]the way wsh lights up every room she walkd into ,,,,,and although she is qyickto anger she is even quicker to forgive she 9is]]]] she had boundless capacity for ffjoy and loves jokes and laughing and cries by lifes sad oents....allof this her wart and compassion and self posession and everythig that she isa re the kinds that make her brilliant at hterr hn

Everyone needs someboy to tal to tannd i have uenny.

It was very nice of Deborah Needleman—editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine—to help Michael Lynton’s daughter with a job:

> On Oct 8, 2014, at 11:09 AM, Deborah Needleman wrote:>

> Send her my way!! Xx> >

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 8, 2014, at 11:05 AM, “Weisberg, Jacob” wrote:>> >>

Michael, I talked to Deborah and she’d love to help if she can. The trick might be coming up with some kind of project that wouldn’t run afoul of employment rules. And for that, it might help her to have a little more idea about what Eloise is most interested in. Or perhaps Eloise can come see her. Hoping something works out.

Jacob

On 10/7/14, 12:14 PM, “Lynton, Michael” >> wrote:>

hey you available to talk a second?>>>> On Oct 7, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Weisberg, Jacob wrote:

Just as well - it was going to be busy night. See you Nov.

On 10/7/14, 11:59 AM, “Lynton, Michael” wrote: Turns out Eloise needs to see me on Wed night. teenage angst. v sorry to have to cancel, but get the sense she needs to talk. I will see you in november at the Century!

Drop your own in the comments and I’ll give you a big kiss on the cheek.

Photo: Getty

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”

Image via Imgur

FORWARD

This viral image (recently shared by the Facebook group “Did You Know?”) might seem like an obvious fake, but the picture comes from a real stunt performed by two of America’s most famous sideshow entertainers.

Charles B. Tripp (born without arms or hands) and Eli Bowen (born without legs) were touring with P.T. Barnum in the late 1800s when they took their memorable bike ride, captured in the photo seen above. From Carny Folk: The World’s Weirdest Sideshow Acts:

Bowen and Tripp posed on a tandem bicycle. Tripp “pedaled” while Bowen “steered,” and, both typically good-natured chaps, they joked the whole time. Tripp would chide his legless friend to “Watch your step.” Bowen would retort: “Keep your hands off me.” Both working with Barnum at the time, they made it into a hugely successful skit and are generally remembered as a team because of it.

Image via Imgur

DELETE

This cute historical photo, on the other hand, is exactly the Photoshop job it appears to be, a fact that became pretty obvious when Twitter debunker @HoaxEye tracked down the unaltered original earlier this week.

Dated January 1927, the photo’s caption on Getty Images reads: “A young visitor and her toy elephant finds that the elephant house at London Zoo is closed for their winter holidays.”

Images via Twitter/Fox Photos/Getty Images//h/t @HoaxEye

DELETE

Not really. As Nashville’s WSMV-TV explained on Wednesday, the photo actually comes from the Tennessee Highway Patrol’s #MoveOver safety campaign, which had police holding up signs bearing the hashtag after the roadside death of a fellow officer.

Last year, the photo was altered to have the text read “Police Lives Matters” [sic]. This year, it’s “DON’T MAKE ME SHOOT YOU IN THE BACK.” Both, however, make a compelling case for not being photographed holding up a white piece of paper.

Image via Twitter//h/t The Intersect

FORWARD

Bogus space photos are some of the most common fake images online, but this picture that blew up on Reddit on Sunday is the real thing, the work of celebrated French astrophotographer Thierry Legault. In 2012, Legault explained to Universe Today how he gets his seemingly one-in-a-million shots:

Legault studies maps, and has a radio synchronized watch to know very accurately when the transit event will happen.

“My camera has a continuous shuttering for 4 seconds, so I begin the sequence 2 seconds before the calculated time,” he said. “I don’t look through the camera – I never see the space station when it appears, I am just looking at my watch!”

Image via Twitter

DELETE

Of course, there is one kind of fake photo that’s even more prevalent than astrobogosity: color-manipulated animal pics. The original version of the above photo is perfectly stunning on its own, but features a standard, yellow-eyed leopard and a more reasonable level of color saturation.

Image via Twitter//h/t @PicPedant

Yesterday’s New York Times features an A1 article written by science correspondent Sabrina Tavernise about the rise in popularity of vaping among teenagers. The story quotes at least four teens, one of whom is saying on Twitter that his entire interview was a hoax.

Three days ago, for some reason, the Twitter account @nytimeswell solicited teens who vape for input on the forthcoming article.

If you’re a teen that vapes and want to talk to a reporter twice your age about why you love it contact @stavernise sabrinat@nytimes.com

— NYTimes Well (@nytimeswell) April 14, 2015

The tweet is so inherently absurd and ripe for trolling that literally the first reply was from our own Alex Pareene saying “it me. I’m the vaping teen.” And yet, it appears as if the Times indeed ended up getting suckered by one of many Twitter users looking to pull the rug out from under an old, stodgy news periodical doing a trend piece on a cool new teen thing.

that turned into me giving someone a fake interview under an alias. that interview was used in a web article. this article is in print now.

— LeVar Burzum (@drugleaf) April 17, 2015

THE RAPPER LIL UGLY MANE pic.twitter.com/pt6U9TUaGa

— LeVar Burzum (@drugleaf) April 17, 2015

As you can see in @drugleaf’s Tweet, he alleges to have posed as an 18-year-old named “Joe Stevenson.” Here’s the full relevant section from the Times:

Joe Stevonson, 18, a senior at a high school in Jackson, Miss., said he used e-cigarettes to quit smoking, after the habit started affecting his ability to play sports. He prefers a flavor called Courtroom, endorsed by the rapper Lil Ugly Mane, which is described on websites where it is sold as “a medley of things you might want while waiting for the jury to convict.”

As for whether he still craved cigarettes, “the only thing that’s really missing is feeling like your entire mouth is coated in dirt,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t smoke pick them up because it looks cool. But for every person I’ve met like that, I’ve met another using it like it’s a medicine against cigarettes.”

It’s hard to digest this passage without immediately feeling like someone is trying to put one over on the Times. From the wonky spelling of “Stevenson” to the citation of meme rapper Lil Ugly Mane’s bizarro vape infomercial to the punchline-y “the only thing that’s missing is feeling like your entire mouth is coated in dirt” quote, the entirety of these two graphs should have screamed “THIS PERSON IS FUCKING WITH YOU” to Tavernise and her editors.

Alas, the Times seems to have fallen into a trap that it had to have seen coming before it was even set by a kid who preemptively bragged that he was gonna do exactly this. In a tweet from two days ago, @drugleaf revealed that he had been able to set up a phone call with Tavernise. The tweet has since been deleted, but here’s a screenshot:

That said, another one from the day prior that includes the phrase “troll the new york times’ is still up.

my mom, from three rooms over, just yelled "please do not troll the new york times" at me

— LeVar Burzum (@drugleaf) April 14, 2015

@drugleaf is just one of Twitter’s many jesters, but he also has nearly 17,000 followers, many of whom work in media. It’s not insane to think that someone at the Times should have maybe run across either of those two tweets before the paper printed quotes from a fake teen named “Joe Stevonson.”

We’ve reached out to both the Times and @drugleaf and will update if we hear more.

Update (6:20 p.m.) @drugleaf, whose name is not Joe, provided us with emails that confirm his interactions with Tavernise. He tells us that he was prepared to play a character in his interview with Tavernise, but backed off because he was “disarmed” by how nice she was and eventually told what amounted to half-truths. Here is a condensed version of his story, as told to me via Gchat:

i originally wrote a solid 3 pages before the interview, basically wrote down this fake person’s entire life. I was gonna give a fake history of Vaporwave, saying the genre of music stemmed from two dudes who loved Too Vape

then she calls and she’s really nice, it dissarms me, so I just kinda stick to what I really wanted to do

which was get lil ugly mane’s name in the new york fucking times

@drugleaf also told me that some of the biographical information provided to Tavernise was true—for instance, he did quit cigarettes through vaping—but that nobody at the Times fact-checked his story beyond asking him to specify his location. Here is the full text of the first email @drugleaf sent to Tavernise, which, again, should have been a very visible red flag.

Tavernise also tweeted @drugleaf after he revealed on Twitter that he hoaxed her, and says she sent him an email asking him if he told the truth.

@drugleaf This is @stavernise, the journalist from NYT. Please contact me: sabrinat@nytimes.com

— Sabrina Tavernise (@stavernise) April 17, 2015

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Zayny baby! Let’s rap. First you quit British boy band One Direction; then you blithely go on vacation with your fiancée Perrie Edwards; then you let some rumors fly about possibly getting married at Disneyland. And now, a major haircut and a nose piercing? You wanna tell us what’s going on?

Zayn, who has not appeared in public since he announced his split from 1D, walked the red carpet at the Asian Awards in London with his mama on Friday. Cute. And while it seems like a lot is changing for Zayn, we know one thing for sure:

He’s definitely still hot.

Nice.

Images via Getty. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

Subway hero? More like subway hoagie! A man walking in a SEPTA station in Philadelphia on Wednesday fell right onto the tracks. From the video it looks like he was looking at his phone when he slipped. Who came to the rescue in the nick of time? A hero, man, a hero in an Eagles jacket.

Video from the event was captured by a surveillance camera at the Market-Frankford El station at 15th Street. The man can be seen stumbling off the yellow platform onto the tracks below, while everyone reacts either by yelling or running away. But who came through when a fellow citizen was in need? A loyal Iggles fan in dad jeans. That’s the stuff.

According to Phillymag.com and SEPTA police, the man survived with non-life-threatening injuries. Go Eagles and god bless Philadelphia.

A suicide bombing in Jalalabad on Saturday killed at least 33 people and wounded another 105, the Associated Press reports. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said that the Islamic State had taken responsibility.

According to the New York Times, the attack took place as a crowd of people waiting to collect their pay at a branch of the Kabul Bank. Police said all the victims were civilians.

This was only the second of three bombs that exploded in Jalalabad on Saturday morning, the Times reports. The first—a planted bomb, not a suicide attacker—detonated at a religious shrine, wounding two; the third was found by police in a motorcycle outside a branch of the Central Bank of Afghanistan. It was detonated under controlled conditions.

The BBC reports that a spokesman claiming to represent ISIS said the group had perpetrated the attack, although the British news agency was very careful to distance itself from the claim:

Shahidullah Shahid, who claims to be a spokesman for Islamic State (IS) in Afghanistan, said the group was behind the attack on the bank.

He also named a man who he said was the attacker. The BBC cannot confirm either claim. If confirmed, it would be Islamic State’s first major attack in Afghanistan.

Mr Shahid was a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban until he was fired for pledging allegiance to IS last year.

The Taliban, meanwhile, has disavowed the attacks, denying their involvement in three different languages, the Times reports. “On ISIS we don’t comment,” the Taliban spokesman for eastern Afghanistan, Zabiullah Mujahid, told the paper.

“We haven’t commented on them in the past and we will not say anything now. We are responsible for the war in this country, and that is all we can comment and give views on.”

The Taliban would investigate the attack, Mujahid said: “Then I will comment and say who was behind it.”

Update, 11:40 a.m. – The Associated Press has video of the bombing’s aftermath.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

As a guest on PBS genealogy program Finding Your Roots, Ben Affleck discovered one of his ancestors owned slaves and asked producers to suppress that fact, hacked Sony emails uploaded by WikiLeaks this week show.

The censorship—an apparent violation of PBS rules—is revealed in a July 2014 email thread between Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton and Finding Your Roots host Henry Louis Gates Jr. In it, the two discuss the unusual request of an unnamed “megastar” later referred to as “Batman.”

“[C]onfidentially, for the first time, one of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors—the fact that he owned slaves,” Gates writes to Lynton. “We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?”

In his reply, Lynton recommends removing the material as long as “no one [else] knows,” before writing “all things being equal I would definitely take it out.”

Eventually, Gates acknowledges that fulfilling the request “would be a violation of PBS rules, actually, even for Batman” and “would embarrass him and compromise our integrity,” concluding, “Once we open the door to censorship, we lose control of the brand.”

Nonetheless, the episode aired without the information.

In a statement released by Gates on Friday, the Harvard professor denied removing the material at Affleck’s request, saying it was ignored so as to focus on “the most interesting aspects of his ancestry”:

We are very grateful to all of our guests for allowing us into their personal lives and have told hundreds of stories in this series including many about slave ancestors—never shying away from chapters of a family’s past that might be unpleasant. Ultimately, I maintain editorial control on all of my projects and, with my producers, decide what will make for the most compelling program.

In a parallel statement, PBS praised Gates’ “editorial integrity” and repeated his claim that “he and his producers made an independent editorial judgment to choose the most compelling narrative.”

On Thursday, WikiLeaks unveiled a searchable archive of the complete Sony hack, making it easier than ever to browse the company’s inconvenient executive emails.

[ Image via AP Images//h/t NY Daily News]

After conducting an analysis of more than 10,000 bicycle tickets issued by the Tampa police over the past 12 years, the Tampa Bay Times has found that 79 percent of those ticketed are black. Blacks make up about a quarter of the city’s population, the Times reports.

According to the Times, Tampa police have written 2,504 bike tickets—more than Jacksonville, Miami, St. Petersburg, and Orlando combined—in the past three years:

Tampa police are targeting poor, black neighborhoods with obscure subsections of a Florida statute that outlaws things most people have tried on a bike, like riding with no light or carrying a friend on the handlebars.

Officers use these minor violations as an excuse to stop, question and search almost anyone on wheels. The department doesn’t just condone these stops, it encourages them, pushing officers who patrol high-crime neighborhoods to do as many as possible.

Bikes, Tampa Police Chief Jane Cantor said in a statement, have “become the most common mode of transportation for criminals.”

“This is not a coincidence. Many individuals receiving bike citations are involved in criminal activity,” the statement reads.

However, the paper found that only 20 percent of those adults ticketed in 2014 were arrested; moreover, those arrests were “almost always for a small amount of drugs or a misdemeanor like trespassing.”

“Florida is one of the leaders in bicycle and pedestrian fatalities and Tampa is not immune to that,” Cantor’s statement reads. “Our goal is to make the roads safer for everyone.”

Image via Shutterstock. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Hillary Clinton has a date with history. It was all but inevitable: The former Secretary of State officially announced her candidacy for president this week. Other hopefuls include Republican senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio. I’m stating the obvious here: but Cruz, Paul, and Biggest Idiot™ don’t have a real shot at winning; it will, however, be entertaining to watch them fumble all the way to wherever it is losers go when they don’t win presidential elections.

“Two Confessions” by Andrew Cohen

What gets far less notice, however, is how wrongful convictions stay that way, even after evidence of injustice appears to bubble to the surface. This is why the already well-chronicled saga of Davontae Sanford, a 14-year-old boy convicted of a 2007 quadruple murder in Michigan, is worth following closely again as it enters its latest and most bizarre phase.

Later today, Sanford’s lawyers will ask a Michigan judge to grant their client a new trial based on evidence and arguments that state judges and county prosecutors have never before addressed. The defense team essentially will be asking Michigan’s criminal justice system to finally make a choice between two confessions to the same crime; one by a boy whose story was contradicted by independent evidence, the other by a professional killer who accurately told the police where to find the murder weapon.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/14/two...

“Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” by Choire Sicha

Charming Jon Ronson has always made me think of a Kurt Vonnegut character, and not just because his name calls to mind the maddening refrain, from “Slaughterhouse-Five,” of “My name is Yon Yonson.” Vonnegut ranks among the most moral of male novelists writing in English. His work was a life-or-death struggle to make sense of our stupid, dreadful, hilarious world. It has fallen to Ronson to carry Vonnegut’s project from fiction to reality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/boo...

“Teach and Frisk” by Leighton Woodhouse

Yet the man running this class, a forty-two-year-old former public interest lawyer named Vitaly, may be on the brink of being fired. For the last four years, he has refused to conduct mandatory in-class weapons searches of his students—which the district argues keeps classrooms safe—because he believes that the policy is unethical and would destroy everything that makes his classroom successful.

http://www.theawl.com/2015/04/teach-...

“Blue Chips: An Oral History of Shaq, Penny, and the Orlando Magic’s Lost NBA Dynasty” by Jonathan Abrams

The Shaq and Penny Magic are in an unfortunate class similar to the ’70s Blazers, ’80s Rockets, or 2000s Kings — a story of unfulfilled potential and a dynasty that never was. “We were just having so much fun playing the game,” Scott said. “We weren’t really thinking about making history or understanding how good we really could be. All that stuff was happening so fast.”

Penny and Shaq. Shaq and Penny. For a brief time — they played only three seasons together — most of the NBA believed no one could stop them.

http://grantland.com/1990s-orlando-...

“The Myth of Police Reform” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

African Americans, for most of our history, have lived under the power of the criminal-justice system, not its authority. The dominant feature in the relationship between African Americans and their country is plunder, and plunder has made police authority an impossibility, and police power a necessity. The skepticism of Officer Darren Wilson’s account in the shooting of Michael Brown, for instance, emerges out of lack of police authority—which is to say it comes from a belief that the police are as likely to lie as any other citizen. When African American parents give their children “The Talk,” they do not urge them to make no sudden movements in the presence of police out of a profound respect for the democratic ideal, but out of the knowledge that police can, and will, kill them.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archi...

“Susan Miller, Your Internet BFF” by Devon Maloney

Much has been made over the past few years of the astrologer’s meteoric rise to fame, thanks to (among other things) her ardent fashion-world coterie and all the press that comes with it. Her horoscopes — not only those notoriously prolific monthly essays for her own website, AstrologyZone.com, but now also for 10 other international fashion magazines, from Elle to Vogue Japan — offer intimate, personalized readings while still pulling millions of eyeballs. At this point, her chatty, practical delivery is just as important as the forecasts themselves. The resulting readership is an often-rabid crowd that boasts VIPs like Gloria Vanderbilt, Rihanna stylist Adam Selman, and even will.i.am.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/15/8400...

[Image via Getty]

Last year, a Tibetan mastiff reportedly sold to a Chinese businessman for $2 million. Now, the New York Times reports, surplus mastiffs are being sold to slaughterhouses for $5 each.

Earlier this year, Beijing animal rights activists stopped a truck carrying more than 20 Tibetan mastiffs—including one named Nibble—and 150 other dogs to a slaughterhouse, the Times reports:

The rescuers who saved Nibble and the others from an ignominious fate said the conditions of the transport were appalling. Several of the mastiffs had broken limbs, and they had not been given food or water for three days. By the time the dogs were released from their cages — the volunteers eventually paid the driver for their freedom — more than a third of them were dead.

“Fads are a huge driving force in China’s luxury market,” Liz Flora, editor-in-chief of marketing research company Jing Daily, told the Times. “Han Chinese consumers have been willing to pay a premium for anything associated with the romanticism of Tibet.”

About half of Tibet’s 95 breeders have folded since the height of the craze, in 2013. (In August of that year, a zoo in the eastern Chinese city of Luohe was caught trying to pass off a particularly large mastiff as a lion.)

Keeping the dogs fed properly costs $50-60 a day, one veteran breeder named Gombo told the Times. “If I had other opportunities, I’d quit this business,” he said.

Photo credit: Shutterstock. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Sleep easy, shrub lovers: After years of terror, authorities in Boston have finally nabbed the infamous arboreal assassin known as the “Brighton Tree Ninja,” The Boston Globe reports.

“This investigation was part of an ongoing operation seeking to identify and apprehend the individual(s) who for several years has been killing trees in the Brighton area and eluded capture,” BPD said in a statement. “Over the past several years this ‘Brighton Tree Ninja,’ would either chop down or damage beyond saving, young trees that were planted in Brighton.”

Elusive Brighton ‘Tree Ninja’ Captured, Police Say (via @carlwbz) http://t.co/RABxK6iGlA pic.twitter.com/41G8AqlCjA

— WBZ Boston News (@cbsboston) April 16, 2015

According to police, the man described by an area flyer as “a master of evasion” was caught in the act on Wednesday when detectives witnessed him whacking the hell out of a tree with a hammer. From WBZ-TV:

Over the past few weeks, detectives have been gathering video evidence. They set up surveillance in the area of the Brighton Elks Club to try and nab the culprit.

On Wednesday, police say 65-year-old Joseph Rizza showed up and began attacking a tree. As detectives approached him, they say Rizza tried to hide a hammer he’d been using, but it was too late.

Rizza now faces five counts of willful and malicious destruction of property, one count of possession of a dangerous weapon, and zero counts of good old-fashioned neighborliness.

[Image via Motion Picture Corporation of America//h/t NY Post]

Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman are, amongst other things, co-founders of the website formerly known as Rap Genius. They are also best friends. Sometimes it is hard to be these things, and sometimes they have fights. Now, they’re in couples therapy. That’s good!

According to the New York Times, the pair—there used to be three, you know—started seeing a therapist in Brooklyn together on a weekly basis after a big fight they had trying to catch a train to DC. Travel is stressful.

Apparently, Zechory and Lehman are not the only tech entrepreneurs to seek help. “Except for the sex,” (hah) “founders have the same interdependency as married couples,” Peter Pearson, a founder of the Couples Institute in Menlo Park, California, told the Times.

The duo’s dynamic does sound quite complex:

Mr. Lehman usually takes off his shoes at the start of a session, and sometimes he will poke a sock-covered toe into the cactus plant that sits on the coffee table, eliciting worrying noises from Mr. Zechory. Then they start into their latest personal and professional grievances.

“When you have no boundaries and you are totally enmeshed and it gets bad, it can be devastating,” Mr. Zechory said. “So the therapist is trying to work with us on that and figure out what types of boundaries are healthy.”

It’s always heartening to see young men reach out for help.

Photo credit: TechCrunch. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

There has been much ado about the newfound notion of “black gay privilege.” In numerous tweets, blogs, and a certain Huffington Post article, it has been articulated as a special benefit enjoyed by black gay men. This “privilege”— produced by white anxiety and white supremacy—supposedly enables us to evade the traditional economic struggles experienced by straight black men.

The crux of the argument is such: White people are less intimidated by black gay men because they are seen as less of a threat. Therefore, black gay men enjoy greater employment options and benefits than black straight men. Said “privilege” is situated on the assertion that black gay men are less masculine and therefore less intimidating to white men and women, and more likely to be hired and promoted. There are many problems with this belief, but let us first begin with an anecdote.

Last winter I took a job with a large non-profit focused on HIV survivors in New England. Being black, queer, and affected by the HIV epidemic, it seemed a natural fit. My awarded senior thesis had centered on HIV criminalization and was steeped in the work, from Boston to Oakland. My life experiences, my professional expertise and connections all but guaranteed this job as a perfect fit for me. I would be doing the work, the work of saving my people.

However, upon realizing I was the only queer person of color in my department—and one of just two black men on staff—I became a unique type of cultural commodity. My hair was long, my jeans skinny, and my eyebrows marked by the Dominican straight-edge. This was my style—but to my supervisor, it symbolized something more: weakness, access, and power. Routinely, she felt empowered to run her fingers through my locs, grab my waist and inspect my biceps and pecs with a grip that lingered for seconds.

Walking into the office felt like I was on the auction block. I was clothed and free-ish—but my socioeconomic future depended on the presentation of my blackness, the (imagined) invitation of my queerness, and her unfettered, unregulated, and unencumbered access to it. This was the price I paid in order to work on an issue vital to the survival of my people, black people, BlaQueer people. In order to pitch policies, garner grants, and direct funding to black HIV survivors and those at-risk for acquisition, I had to mortgage my body and use the proceeds as license to work on a leash.

In department meetings, I was routinely dismissed and silenced by my white, cis, female supervisor; this, despite her inability to define undetectable and constant markings of us as “blacks” and “the infected.” My ideas were not material to what was happening—unless first filtered through her—and my thoughts were important only insofar as they provided her with cultural-credit, a way of proving that she too was hip, in touch with blackness, and familiar in the high art of shade. I was often summoned to her cubicle, not to speak about policy, but to translate Beyonce memes, answer “is it true about black ____” questions, and discuss why “gay” people act like “that.” In short order, I was transformed from an awarded, published and noted writer, speaker, and activist to simply “hers.” Particularly telling was the ways in which she micromanaged my conversations and work with the other black man in our department—who happened to be her equal in status—climbing over the cubicle to watch and listen, all the while sending him or I irate text messages.

The suspicion of black men “in collusion” is nothing new, and a friendship of black men across masculinities and sexual practices indeed seemed alarming. The flow of my queerness, somewhere left of masculine, combined with the criminality of my blackness provided a logic and pathway of domination and control. I don’t assert anything about her thought process or ethics. I will only state that she felt some need, some yearning to demonstrate her power, her influence through, on, and because of me. This was demonstrated through public yelling, berating and humiliation before funders, colleagues, and community members.

When I finally responded in private, in a calm but stern manner, I was cited for making her feel uncomfortable, out of control, and afraid for her safety. My blackness had gone too far. I was now being marked as a dangerous black man and losing access to the weakness of queerness. The implication: That my role and treatment by her was situated on and created to provide her with (in addition to physical access to my body) a particular access to feelings and notions of comfort, power, and bliss. My supervisor exhibited a yearning displayed in early white feminisms—the desire to access white supremacist, hetero-patriarchies and the power to enact racial-sexual terrors at an equitable rate. She did so with the confidence of a lioness, surrounding a wounded gazelle, pride in tow.

Neither queerness nor same-sex attraction inherently require or guarantee a particular performance of masculinities or femininities. This is equally true for heterosexual black men. Racial-sexual discriminatory hiring, firing, and managing practices are not a function of the sexual practices or gender performances of black men, but instead a display of white anxieties and insecurities. These insecurities and anxieties are rooted in racial-sexual tropes that were imputed on black bodies during slavery. Black male and female bodies–across sex, sexuality and gender performance–were routinely violated in circus-like displays of racial-sexual terrors and power.

These (white) family events included lynchings, penectomies, breast augmentation, and genital mutilations. These events occurred for myriad, sadistic reasons, but most often functioned as violent lessons of racial-sexual comportment. The official word, that black men and women were hypersexual and needed to be punished, eliminated, and made examples of, was held as gospel in the white community–and widely disputed amongst black survivors. The activist and scholar Ida B. Wells noted that most were terrorized not for their sexual proclivities but for their refusal to be used for the sexual pleasure of slaveholders, male and female, gay and straight. In short, black people were killed not for acts of sexual violence, but sexual resistance, interpreted as violence to the system of white (sexual) power and domination. In layman’s terms, they wanted to teach (read: force) black people how to (sexually) act (read: submit). Today’s realities are not as remote in difference or effect as we might be led to believe.

The phenomena of some black gay men accessing professional longevity is not about privilege. Privilege is an unearned benefit, bestowed without merit. This is different. This is ju jitsu. This—the forced circumcision of blackness from queerness, and queerness from masculinities in order to remain employed—is violence. I carry the scars with me in every job that I acquire, hoping that they remain invisible, an old memory, hidden from sight.

Gay, bisexual, queer and same-gender loving black men already exist in a space socially and politically apart from black men: We are the other brothers. Daily we are forced to choose and navigate how we perform maleness, in order to affirm our identity and preserve our safety from a number of violences. We are also called and required to police our blackness in a way that allows us to remain close to home and family, while also allowing proximity to whiteness (as sociocultural capital/property), to avert or lessen white supremacist violences. We must also navigate, customize, and reform our queerness, second by second, to avert heterosexist violences, obscure our seemingly dangerous blackness, and assert our power as men—that is, the power to avert systemic (cis) male-domination, visited on the bodies of women. Put simply, BlaQueerness is about surviving racial-sexual circumcisions, a two-step of terror-evasion.

When we are coerced to perform, mask, and other our personal performances of black “maleness”—not unlike my interaction with my supervisor—we enable ourselves to climb socioeconomic ladders, however frail, to financial stability. However, in doing so, we endorse the work and will of white supremacy and heterosexism/patriarchy through our assent. We compromise ourselves, as well as our rights and abilities, to simply be us—alive.

This isn’t privilege. This is survival. And it’s exhausting.

We are placed in the impossible position of negotiating between survival under white supremacy and hunger within personal black queer authenticity. The notion of black gay “privilege”—aside from erasing the realities of “right of masculine” men, trans men and womyn—positions the BlaQueer man as a buffer between white supremacists hiring practices and their black critics. Buffers exists only to take blows. Because we hired these black men, white supremacists note, we cannot be racist. BlaQueer, and left of masculine, men are weaponized as a bulwark against black truths and records of violence. Lost in translation is requirement of BlaQueer men to mortgage defacto control of their bodies and performances of self to their employer as a condition of employment. Also lost are the implicit messages that either these men are ideal and preferable and/or that other black men are deficient by choice or nature. This enables race, and by extension power, to be evaded as the focal point and instead posits responsibility on the deficiency of black, straight, masculine presenting men.

There is no black gay privilege. There are white supremacist, heterosexist, patriarchal, capitalistic anxieties engraved upon black gay bodies through violent hiring, firing and retention practices. There is violence—psychological and psychosocial terrorisms—in forced, perverted performances of ourselves, in order to find a sweet spot between masculinities and femininities that do not arouse white fear, white guilt, or white notions of equity. We are to be propertied: Seen, heard, and felt as accessible and owned by employers for their pleasure and fulfillment. Our given role then, in this system, is to do what white supremacy believes “straight” or “masculine” black men will not: Take micro-aggressions, violences, and inequity with a smile and a hair-flip. Unfortunately, BlaQueer men and womyn are the kings and queens of subversive existences, politics and liberatory practices.

“If a human chain
can be formed
around missiles sites
then surely black men
can form human chains
around Anacostia, Harlem
South Africa, Wall Street
Hollywood, each other.
If we have to take tomorrow with our own blood,
are we ready?….
All I want to know for my own protection is,
are we ready for whatever,
whenever?” —Essex Hemphill

Yes, yes we are. We must use the insights and lessons, of the scars of oppression, to draw and map our home to collective freedom and liberations. There is no cure, no panacea, no treatment to rage and resolve within the bones of BlaQueer peoples, outside of black and BlaQueer liberations. We are the ones we have been loving for, dying for, and living for. We are ready.

[Image by Tara Jacoby; Photo via Shutterstock]

After almost 40 years apart, an adopted Ohio woman was reunited with her birth mother on Tuesday, discovering she worked in the same office and lived just six minutes away, the New York Daily News reports.

38-year-old La-Sonya Clark’s search began last month, when the state of Ohio released decades of birth records spanning from 1964 to 1996. On Monday, Clark’s records came in the mail. From WYTV:

Her birth records included her mother’s name, Francine Simmons. So, she looked her up on Facebook and found out she worked at Infocision in Boardman. So does Mitchell-Clark. Then, it clicked.

“There’s a Francine that works at my job. She works in VR and she works at the front desk,” Mitchell-Clark said.

She reached out to her friends on social media. And then, a day later, she got the long-awaited phone call from her birth mother.

“She called me and I said, ‘Is this Ms. Francine?’ She said, yes. I said, ‘I think I’m your daughter’,” Mitchell-Clark said.

According to WYTV, Simmons said she always wanted to find her daughter but didn’t know how.

“I got pregnant when I was 14,” Simmons told the station. “I had her when I was 15. I was put in a home, a girl’s home. Had her. Got to hold her. Didn’t get to name her, but I named her myself in my heart all these years.”

[Image via WKBN]