A shooting near a demonstration in Ferguson, Missouri Tuesday night was followed by additional gunshots hours later and reports on social media of a man shot in the neck.

Shooting reported in Ferguson RT @AntonioFrench More gunshots. pic.twitter.com/0jtXMmHEhs

April 29, 2015

In the earlier shooting, a man was shot in the leg before retreating into a nearby restaurant. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports the victim was then picked up by an ambulance and police took a suspect into custody, recovering a gun.

Sometime after midnight, additional shots were fired near the protest. According to St. Louis alderman Antonio French, witnesses said a second victim was shot in the neck.

Witnesses say someone (not police) shot the man in his neck on Canfield. He got himself in the truck to the hospital. Hopefully will be OK.

April 29, 2015

It was not immediately clear whether the shootings were related to each other or the protest.

[Image via KMOV]

What anime could you see Obama watching? Kill la Kill? Sailor Moon? Swimming Anime?

I bet he loves Attack on Titan. “Eren Yeager is my boy” - Obama, probably.

The reason that I’m speculating about this is because Mashable has a clip of President Obama thanking Japan for things he thinks young people are fond of—like emoji. Hilarious!

I’m glad Obama said this. Now I can tell people to lay off whenever they make fun of my body pillows. “Obama’s got my back,” I’ll say. That’ll show em.

Then I’ll pull this.

Contact the author at patricia@kotaku.com.

After losing her legs in a tragic rat attack, a Welsh tortoise was transformed into a living math book doodle this month thanks to a set of prosthetic wheels that are fly as hell, the BBC dopely reports.

“She can get a good speed up,” Mrs. T’s owner Jude Ryder told the broadcaster, “much faster than before,” which is, like, so goddamn slick.

According to Ryder’s son Dale, Mrs. T is about 90 years old, making her both the freshest and the oldest skateboard-reptile hybrid in the world.

[h/t Digg]

Yesterday, police arrested a woman who allegedly set a car on fire at a Jerusalem gas station after she was reportedly refused a cigarette. Security footage from the station shows the woman talking to a man pumping gas. After apparently asking him a question—several Israeli news outlets report she asked for a cigarette—she walks away, pauses, and walks back to set the man’s car ablaze.

Israel National News and The Marker report a suspect was arrested shortly after setting the fire, though she’s reportedly denied any wrongdoing; the News says she’s due to be arraigned sometime Wednesday.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Fifty-two-year-old Michael Kneitel is a man of principle. He will not rest until the $75 ticket he received for using the door between subway cars to escape a pissing passenger is overturned.

Kneitel encountered an all-too familiar scene when he a boarded a Coney Island-bound F train this past February, he tells DNAinfo: the doors had already closed when he realized that a man, apparently homeless, was peeing in the car. Desperate, he fled to through the car’s door to the next subway car, where he was greeted by a police officer. Kneitel was ordered off the train and ticketed by the officer at the Jay Street-Metrotech station.

But the peeing man, Kneitel said, “constituted an emergency” and was “hazardous to his health.” While a dubious scientific claim, allow him to explain further:

Kneitel had to have surgery a few years ago after he suffered a bacterial infection in his heart. His physician has since told him to steer clear of bacteria-carrying fluid or particles, he said.

“I didn’t want to be subjected to his urine even for one stop because you can be infected in a heartbeat,” Kneitel said.

He tried to get the ticket and its $75 fine rescinded at the MTA’s Transit Adjudication Bureau, but the officer hearing his case was not having it.

“[Kneitel’s] desire to safeguard his health by separating himself from a passenger using the train car as a urine receptacle may explain his conduct, but it neither excuses it nor constitutes the type of emergency requiring immediate evacuation through the end doors to avoid imminent danger,” Rosanne Harvey wrote in her decision.

(As Gothamist reminds us, the $75 fine for walking between cars has been the standard now for years.)

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t Kneitel’s first run-in with the law, having previously served a three-year prison sentence. From Daily Intel:

He was arrested in 2001 after an off-duty cop out for a run in Brooklyn noticed Kneitel firing a pistol at what later was revealed to be a photograph of his girlfriend’s mother. A search of his home and a storage facility turned up five rifles, 15 semiautomatic pistols, lots of ammunition, an S.S. uniform, a Nazi flag, blueprints of a vacant lot near Bill Clinton’s then-new office in Harlem, and a photo of Kneitel’s infant daughter covered in said S.S. uniform and with her finger on the trigger of a pistol.

(The Nazi memorabilia, he explained to DNAinfo, “was to fund my daughter’s college fund when she got older.”)

His only remaining method of recourse is a May 8 court date at the Brooklyn Supreme Court. “I’m going to stand up to the MTA and say, ‘You know what? You messed up,’” Kneitel told DNAinfo. “I’m going to take this ruling and stick it so far up their a-hole until it reaches the back of their teeth.”

Image via Wikimedia. Contact the author at aleksander@gawker.com .

Jerome Robinson only got to live in the home of his dreams for five years before he was told to leave.

The 72-year-old had spent his life doing his small part turning Detroit into an economic powerhouse: Working the assembly line and spot welding cars for Chrysler and Ford. Robinson saw Detroit blossom into a bustling city of two million, and has experienced its decline into what it is now: A city that is hemorrhaging residents and struggling to retain those who’ve endured its toughest times. A recent survey found 40 percent of Detroiters planned to leave in the next five years.

Robinson isn’t one of those people. He was happy in Detroit. So when a Section 8-funded apartment in a Downtown building for the elderly opened up in 2007, he jumped at the opportunity.

“I thought, This is where I’m going to live until I die,” Robinson said. “I have bad eyes. I can’t drive. But I could go anywhere in the city I wanted from there. The bus was down the street, my bank was around the corner.”

Downtown Detroit is home to dozens of vacant buildings, but in 2013 developers set their eyes on 1214 Griswold, where Robinson and more than 100 other seniors lived. The developers, Broder & Sachse, wanted to convert the building into luxury condos. They told the residents they had to be out within the year.

As Detroit’s government has been hollowed out by forces beyond its control—emergency management, a fleeing tax base, cuts to federal funding—a small group of rich investors have descended on the city, filling in public sector gaps with personal funds, and remaking Detroit in their image. On top of this, local politicians—like Democratic Mayor Mike Duggan and Republican Governor Rick Snyder—as well as national media, have become enamored with these men, painting them as philanthropists on a mission to rescue Detroit.

Dan Gilbert, billionaire chairman of the mortgage company Quicken Loans, owns over 70 buildings Downtown and has been heralded as Detroit’s “new Superhero” and “missionary.” Mike Ilitch, the billionaire owner of Little Caesars Pizza, convinced the state to give him hundreds of millions for a new hockey arena because he has the “boldest” and “most innovative” plans for Detroit in decades (not because he’s grifting a poor state for personal profit).

If you read these stories, and only these stories, you’d be convinced that just months after emerging from a bankruptcy in which city workers had their pensions slashed and city department budgets were cut even further to the bone, Detroit is back. But beyond the new and restored gleaming skyscrapers of Downtown Detroit, and the puff pieces they inspire, is a grimmer reality.

The rest of Detroit has become a wasteland. Areas like Jefferson Chalmers, Delray, and 8 Mile have been ravaged by foreclosures on houses with mortgages that banks should’ve never made; pockmarked by foreclosures on houses owned by people who owe just a few hundred dollars in taxes to the county, which is just now beginning to clamp down on past-due bills, threatening residents with evictions; and slowly left to rot by corporations who couldn’t figure out how to pay people a living wage and remain in business.

As Downtown and Midtown gleam and bustle, residents of Detroit’s outer neighborhoods are fleeing. And instead of helping these people, the city seems to be courting those who need help the least—the Gilberts and the Ilitches, moneyed barons who can afford to buy up Detroit without regard for the people who made the Motor City what it is.

What Detroit is doing is not about indifference to the poor, but to the active support of projects that stand to benefit the rich the most. Detroit is perpetually short on cash—emerging from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in December in which it began making deals to pay down its $18 billion in debt—but the city is spending what little they have on projects that, in all likelihood, will empower the rich and do little for everyone else. Meanwhile, people like Jerome Robinson have been left to figure out how to survive without much at all.

Last spring, Robinson left 1214 Griswold for an apartment further north in Cass Corridor, which he secured with the help of a coalition of nonprofits. There’s nothing around the corner from where he lives now: no pharmacy and scant transit options. It takes Robinson an hour of bus trips to get to and from the library.

His old apartment, 1214 Griswold, has been rechristened “The Albert.” Apartments now start at $1,200 a month, an astronomical sum for a city where the average income for a resident is $14,000, half of what developers Broder & Sachse received in a 10-year-tax abatement from the city for restoring the building. Representatives from Broder & Sachse did not return our calls for comment.

“These guys come in and start buying up stuff, tearing down and rebuilding stuff,” Robinson said, sitting in his new apartment and swigging a beer. “I was comfortable down there. I wanted to stay there. And they kicked me out.”

If you take a walk or drive through Downtown Detroit, you’re likely to see large signs written in a faded-urban font that read, OPPORTUNITY DETROIT. The signs are everywhere—on buildings, buses, billboards. And they’re all part of an attempt by the man most synonymous with Detroit’s recovery to rebrand the city as a place where wealth, jobs, are recovery are in arm’s reach. That man—Dan Gilbert—is not a politician, a community leader, or an activist, but a billionaire who has a personal economic interest in seeing the city comeback in a very particular way.

Quicken Loans is the country’s largest online lender, and Gilbert moved the company’s headquarters from the suburbs to Downtown Detroit in 2010, bringing thousands of young, mostly white professional workers with him. The state gave Gilbert’s company a $50 million tax break for the move. Since then, he has taken advantage of the city’s emptiness, buying 70 buildings at rock-bottom prices, including property from the city. One, the Bates Garage, sits on prime land in the heart of Downtown. It’s now likely to become a mixed-used development worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The city sold it to Gilbert for $1.5 million.

Gilbert bought another building, the iconic Art Deco One Detroit Center, after Mayor Duggan called him and asked him to convince Ally Bank to move its headquarters downtown.

“I’m excited that somebody successful is acquiring all these properties,” Duggan said at a joint press conference held against a backdrop emblazoned with Opportunity Detroit’s logo. The local press cooed over the deal, calling it a “major coup” for Gilbert.

The press is so over-eager about Gilbert’s grand plans for Detroit that when his company released a proposal to take over a half-finished, county-owned jail in the middle of the city (which the county has already spent $300 million on) for the bargain price of $50 million, the press misreported that he’d already bought it. As local writer Anna Clark pointed out, the fanboys let their expectations to get ahead of the facts.

Gilbert has also coordinated the acquisition of public services by his private companies. His private security force now patrols and monitors via a network of security cameras Downtown. His company has also spearheaded the M-1 Rail, a streetcar that will run from the “Gilbertville” section of Downtown (as some residents call it), to the city’s rapidly-gentrifying Midtown.

The M-1 was originally pitched by the city as a sorely needed public transit project that would connect Detroit’s northern suburbs to its core. Slowly, it was whittled down from a planned 20-plus miles to about 3.3. It’ll now cost $179.4 million to build, funded almost completely by corporations like Quicken, Ilitch Holdings, and nonprofits backed by Detroit’s richest, such as the Kresge Foundation.

“Corporations and foundations contributing the money to create public infrastructure—I take that as a great credit to our community and something we should be proud of,” said Matt Cullen, the head of Rock Ventures, the umbrella group for companies owned by Gilbert. “It doesn’t happen in other places.”

But even though the city has been happy to hand over the responsibility of designing and running public infrastructure to people like Gilbert, even M-1’s biggest backers acknowledge that it is more a real estate development tool meant to enrich those who have a stake in the neighborhoods surrounding it than it is a viable public transit option for the majority of Detroit’s residents.

“It’s a circulator to get people in Midtown and people in Downtown circulating in a bigger marketplace,” said Sue Mosey, the head of Midtown Detroit Inc., a neighborhood economic development organization that works closely with Gilbert. “It isn’t the responsibility of M-1 to do the public sector job to get transit for the region or the rest of the city. That isn’t M-1’s job. That’s the city’s job. That’s the regional government’s job, the federal government’s job, the state’s job. Our jobs are not to solve everybody else’s problems in the city.”

Maybe the hundreds of millions Detroit, Wayne County, and the state of Michigan are handing out to the city’s richest would be less infuriating if there weren’t so many other areas of the city begging for an infusion of cash.

As many as 100,000 people could lose their homes as the county cracks down on people who owe as little as a few hundred dollars in back taxes. The county had for years allowed taxes to pile up, choosing not to go after tens of thousands of properties. It allowed people to go further into debt, increasing the likelihood they would not be able to pay off such large sums.

“Is that fair?” Wayne County deputy treasurer Dave Szymanski asked recently. “It’s the reality of the situation.”

The city’s water department is also planning on shutting off over 70,000 past-due accounts to make up its own budget shortfalls. That means 43 percent of Detroit homes could be without water in the coming months.

One might call what’s happening the product of a government focused on austerity: Slashing wherever they can to ensure it doesn’t slip back into economic free fall. But that would ignore the fact that the city, county, and state seem eager to open their purse strings for the rich as they shut off water for the poor.

Marathon Petroleum, for example, received a $175 million tax break to expand their mammoth refinery in one of the city’s poorest and most polluted neighborhoods, Delray, to process tar sands oil. That tax break only brought the area 15 new jobs. And perhaps the most egregious example of this public-private-profiteering is the new Detroit Red Wings stadium. Mike Ilitch, the pizza billionaire, received an estimated public subsidy of $284.5 million when he decided to build the new stadium and “entertainment district” up the block from their old arena. The area will be demolished at the cost of $6 million, paid for by the city. The city will then hand over that land to one of its creditors as part of its bankruptcy deal.

The local press, of course, praised Ilitch for his “amazing vision.”

“The Ilitches and the Gilberts, the foundations they back, they wield tremendous power in the city even though they’re not elected,” said George Galster, a professor of urban studies at Wayne State University. “We’re going toward the privatized city here.”

Marathon and the Red Wings stadium are far from the only examples of the government’s lavish incentives: A New York Times investigation found that 30 cents of every dollar of the state’s money goes to subsidies for corporations.

Local activists in Detroit have accepted that these kinds of blockbuster, budget-busting deals will be made. But, they believe, they should at least have a say in how they’re done. Detroit’s various governing bodies seem to not only want to give away millions to the rich, but ensure democratic development is reserved for them as well.

A city ordinance being pushed for by the Detroit People’s Platform was floated in City Council last year. It would require developers to enter into community benefits agreements if they want more than $300,000 in subsidies for any one project. The ordinance would give community organizations a voice in the planning of the city’s biggest projects—possibly guaranteeing employment opportunities remain local and setting minimum wages for specific projects. But the ordinance was met with a swift backlash from the corporate community, and then squashed by the council.

The ordinance’s failure wasn’t enough for some. State legislator Earl Poleski now wants to make sure such a law never passes. Poleski, who is republican, introduced a bill twice, most recently in January, that would ban every city in Michigan from requiring developers to enter into a community benefits agreement, even though Detroit seems to be the only city considering one.

“We won’t get it right all the time, but we should be able to work through developments without having formal ordinances that make our environment less attractive for outside investors,” said Eric Larson, a prominent private developer whose company is remaking the former Tiger Stadium site into condos and high-end shops (the Tigers, owned by Ilitch, also moved thanks to a slew of tax breaks and other public incentives). “We can’t make the city too restrictive.”

As Gilbert and Illitch pave the streets of Midtown and Downtown Detroit anew, the neighborhoods where the vast majority of the city’s residents still live are falling apart, one dilapidated home at a time.

Lauren Hood navigates both Detroits. She’s the community engagement manager at Loveland Technologies, a local tech firm with a mission to map every parcel of land in the United States, starting with Detroit. The company’s technology has been used by the city to find blighted properties, by community organizations to better plan neighborhood development, and by developers to find property to buy on the cheap. Gilbert is one of Loveland’s biggest funders, but Hood isn’t a supporter of Gilbert.

Hood’s own parents were part of the black middle class that held the fabric of Detroit together for so many years. They stuck it out in their rapidly deteriorating neighborhood near 7 Mile for decades as trash pickups got worse and as police took longer and longer to arrive after a break-in on the block. Finally, after being held-up in broad daylight two years ago, they decided to call it quits.

Ida and Lawrence Hood don’t set foot in Detroit anymore. They’ve moved, like so many, to the suburb. They now call Farmington Hills home.

Hood usually drives past her childhood home once a week to see how it’s doing. Right now the paint is chipped and the grass needs to be trimmed. The house is occupied, rented out to someone by its new owners. It’s a little beaten up, sure, but at least there’s someone in it, unlike the dozens of vacant properties that pepper the block.

“The [Downtown core] is turning into the Hunger Games,” Hood said on a drive between her parents’ old house and her apartment, a block away from the new Red Wings arena. “They might as well put a barbed wire fence around it, and everyone else can fight for scraps.”

Peter Moskowitz is a writer based in New York. He’s writing a book about gentrification.

[Photo via the author]

Baltimore City Paper writer Caitlin Goldblatt and Buzzfeed News report that many of the 235 protesters arrested Monday night—including 34 juveniles— in Baltimore remain in jail without formal charges nearly two days later.

The State’s Attorney’s office and the courts were closed on Tuesday because of the protests, depriving many of those arrested without a chance to appear in court.

Maryland law requires all detainees to have a court appearance within 24 hours of their arrest, though Katie D’Adamo, a Baltimore public defender, told Buzzfeed that the state of emergency declared Monday night by Maryland governor Larry Hogan might supersede those laws.

D’Adamo claims none of the hundreds arrested Monday night were charged until Wednesday morning; according to Rochelle Ritchie, Director of Communications for the State’s Attorney’s office, 93 people had been charged by midday Wednesday.

Goldblatt reports that many of those charged have been ordered held on bails of hundreds of thousands dollars.

"If you're poor, that's being held with no bail."

April 29, 2015

There is no limit on how high judges can set cash-only bail.

April 29, 2015

Among those being held, according to Goldblatt, is Vice reporter Shawn Carrie, who was arrested Monday night after being injured by a rubber bullet fired by police.

Hearing @shawncarrie has been told he's "fine" by police, even though he has been dizzy & believes he has a concussion. No medical help.

April 29, 2015

[Image via AP]

Welcome to All This Nothing, a new column on Gawker Review of Books that explores how we talk, text, and write about love, loss, and desire in the digital age.

The first time I’d ever seen the word “sapiosexual” was on Tinder. It had become quite popular as a descriptor on many women’s profile pages—not quite as ubiquitous as the vaguely suggestive yoga pose photo or the guess-which-one-I-am group shot but common enough for me to notice and wonder if I was it. The word was often accompanied by an intimidating reading list, a double-digit tally of exotic countries visited, or as many deeply-held political beliefs as can be enunciated in five hundred characters. Turns out, it is widely deployed by both men and women. Over five thousand OKCupid users list “sapiosexuality” among their interests. Search the popular kink community website Fetlife, and you’ll find a half dozen groups with names like “Sapiosexual Vampires” and “Sapiosexuals of New England (a.k.a. Brains are Hot!).”

In parsing this trending term, I figured I first had to distinguish it from—or place it among—all the other Latin-based and clinical-sounding divisions along the sexuality spectrum. So, I started calling around. “There’s no such thing as a bisexual act,” said Dr. Shara Sands, an associate professor and practicing psychologist in New York City. “You’re either having sex with someone of this gender or that gender, but sex acts are sex acts.” It was at about this moment in the telephone conversation that I began to feel like my curiosity had gotten me in over my head. When I pitched this column, it was with the intention of investigating and writing about how we write, chat, and post about relationships. I hadn’t even completed researching my first installment on sapiosexuals and already I was running into trouble with the language.

Merriam-Webster’s has yet to acknowledge the neologism at all. But Wiktionary defines a sapiosexual as a “person sexually attracted to intelligence or the human mind.” My first reaction to reading this was that it was essentially pointless and redundant rhetoric if not complete horse shit. Collins’ online dictionary offers a slightly more flexible definition of the word: “One who finds intelligence the most sexually attractive feature.”

In this case, I suppose, the most strident and devoted boob man might insist on being excluded from the categorization. But other than such a purist, who among us, given the chance to petition Santa for any romantic partner under the sun, isn’t a sapiosexual at heart? At the risk of sounding like a snob, don’t we all want to connect with someone at least as smart as us, someone who can keep up? Certainly, there are those sincerely hoping to saddle up with one of 30 Rock’s infamous sex idiots. But I would think DTF as a craving is the relative anomaly, not Someone I Can Talk To (SICTT).

I set out to uncover why so many swipers and likers suddenly felt the urge to declare their desire so explicitly and was pleased to immediately find those in the scientific community supportive of my cynicism.

“It’s sort of the hip profile term,” said Dr. Wendy Walsh, Psy.D, “But it’s mostly designed to showcase the intelligence of the owner.” Walsh, a popular television personality and published author on the subject of relationships, had to remind me of the obvious: A dating profile, intentionally or otherwise, speaks more about what a person wants people to believe about that person than what they themselves want.

It’s true, I suppose. My own OKCupid profile, under the heading “You should message me if,” it reads “you make things.” (Sometimes my own pretension makes me wince.) “If people use big words,” said Walsh, “We think they’re smart, right? So, they use a word that nobody understands. In fact, one person wrote in his Tinder profile, ‘I’m a sapiosexual,’ and then he writes, ‘Look it up.’ It’s like saying, I’m smarter than you.”

Traditionally, historically, anthropologically, men, in particular, have always tried to showcase their intelligence as a way of demonstrating to women their value as a provider. “If it is a harsh winter,” says Walsh, “If there are no wooly mammoths, if the stock market crashes, this guy better be smart enough to figure out how we can all survive.”

Sex therapist Chris Donaghue maintains that labeling yourself a sapiosexual is a lazy, limiting, and potentially detrimental marketing ploy. “Attraction and chemistry happen on psychological and physical levels,” he said. “It’s just not realistic to think that one is going to ignore physical attraction or lack thereof due to an intensive psychological attraction—as though that intellectual interest overpowers everything else. At some point, [couples] end up in my office: Great conversation. No physical attraction. No sexual chemistry.”

There are those who find the notion of sapiosexuality not only shortsighted but discriminatory—particularly ableist. The argument goes like this: By desiring only the, um, intellectually well-endowed, so-called sapiosexuals are somehow rejecting the intellectually and developmentally disabled. This logic is, at best, flawed if not deeply problematic in its own right since it implies that the developmentally disabled possess no form of classifiable or viable intelligence—or that there is any such thing as universally understood intelligence.

“I have a partner who is learning disabled and gets certain concepts confused,” Dr. Sands told me. “I’m much more intellectual than she is, but she’s so smart and funny and creative and thoughtful. She’s incredibly intelligent. She just presents with a different kind of intelligence than my intelligence. I’m sure If we took IQ tests, I’d outrank her greatly, but that’s not actually what matters.”

Here’s where it gets murky: Dr. Sands, who was recommended to me by a representative of The American Psychological Association, believes sapiosexual to be a sexual identity like bisexual or transgender, not a sexual orientation. “I think of sexual orientation as activity,” she explained, “’This is who I like to have sex with.’ And I think of identity as ‘This is who I am in the world.’” Chuckling on the end of the line she adds, “You can’t really have a sapiosexual act. I mean, what would that look like?”

But according to the APA website, bisexuality is one of the three-ish sexual orientations recognized by the organization: heterosexuality, bisexuality, homosexuality and sometimes y(asexuality). Furthermore, the site describes sexual orientation as “an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic and/or sexual attractions to men, women or both sexes,” which is sort of the opposite of how Dr. Sands defines it.

I don’t point this out to highlight dissension in the ranks of the medical establishment so much as to acknowledge this: The more open and accepting we become of differing sexualities, the more complicated the permutations become and the more the language around them becomes fluid. As a writer, I love words and specificity, and—sorry Tinder-ers—I don’t believe “sapiosexuality” merits the distinction of either sexual identity or sexual orientation. It seems like more of a preference—an impractical and narrow one at that. But, so what? In setting out to discredit the term, I was needlessly denying a method by which people find compatibility and each other. One can always choose his or her words more carefully, but maybe the lesson here is: whatever works.

My good friend Matt is a film producer, married eleven years, and jointly in possession of two mind-numbingly adorable children. Back in the day, though, he was an aspiring novelist, and I’m still waiting for a peek at the unfinished manuscript that he obsessed over in his twenties. I told him I was trying to write about sapiosexuality, and he laughed. “That’s the only reason I have a pretty wife,” he said, in his typically self-effacing Matt kind of way. “I like books and she found that out.”

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

All This Nothing is a monthly column on Gawker Review of Books that explores how we talk, text, and write about love, loss, and desire in the digital age. Neil Drumming will be your guide.

“The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.” —from You’ve Got Mail

“You here for the fight?” said my cab driver, who looked like a less successful Guy Fieri. “I used to work for referee Jay Nady, the highest grossing boxing referee of all time.” He gestured out the window at a stoplight. “See that cab? That’s Jay Nady’s cab company right there. The ones with the ‘A.’ The ‘A’ is for asshole. Fuck that guy.”

When the conversation hit a lull, he made a call on speakerphone. An answering machine picked up. “Thank you for calling [xxx] Gentleman’s Club. Where all your fantasies come true. Visit us online at [xxx.com]. Please leave your message after the tone.”

*BEEP*

“Hi. It’s your son. I need to talk to you. Call me.”

On the weekend before the big fight, they announced that the city was running out of water.

The drought has been going on for decades. It’s nothing new. Just a mileage marker on the road to the abyss. Lake Mead sits at a record low level. Engineers pointed out that a teeny bit more of a decline would cause the mighty Hoover Dam to stop working; authorities responded by digging another water pipe, deeper, anticipating more drought ahead.

The city of Las Vegas gets almost all of its water from that drying-up lake, and any smart gambler would bet that it’s only a matter of time before this ungodly oasis of neon dries up right along with that lake and blows away in clouds of dust back into the desert from whence it came.

That doesn’t matter now. The unavoidable doom that sits in this city’s path comes later. The riots in Baltimore, the tear gas clouds, the Nepalese earthquake, the presidential elections... these things are meaningless entities, forms from another world. What matters is the fight. It is fight week. The biggest fight. And here, in Las Vegas, America’s most timeless city, it is time to fucking fight. Almost.

“Thank you for your credential request to attend the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight card May 2 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena,” said the email I got just six days ago. “It is not always possible for the Public Relations teams representing the promoters to provide media access and credentials to all journalists who apply. We are sorry to say that after reviewing the media applications for this event, we are unable to accommodate your request and will not be able to provide you a credential.” This was unfortunate. It could be something sinister—one friend behind the scenes told me that Floyd Mayweather’s people are handling the press credentials, and they hate Deadspin, and had probably frozen us out. Or it could be something mundane, like the fact that thousands of reporters around the world who never cover fights are now clamoring to cover this fight, and some of us are getting cast aside as a result. Either way, it was not too unfortunate. My flight was already booked. My room was already booked. The Biggest Fight of My Lifetime is happening on Saturday and there was simply no way that something as trifling as a total lack of access will stop me from covering it. Baltimore may burn. Nepal may crumble. But here in a doomed and parched metropolis, it is Fight Week.

From the air, Las Vegas is a forest of squat tan-roofed housing development homes dwarfed by the bushy green trees that constitute Nevada’s only shade. These housing developments stretch out in a vast plain, ringed by mountains. These mountains are the border of the real world. Inside of those mountains, real world concerns like politics and jobs and climate change are replaced by fantasy world concerns, like which day party to attend, or which PG-13 rated topless burlesque comedy variety show to go to with all the fellas from the office, or which gambling addiction therapy program to enter. Vegas is indeed “a fertile spot in the desert where water is found,” but I hesitate to call it an “oasis” for the same reason that I hesitate to call the Duck Commander Musical at the Rio a “play.”

I am staying at the Excalibur, the shabbiest and most distasteful of all of the big hotels on the Strip, conveniently located directly across from the MGM Grand, where the fight is being held. The MGM Grand currently has a plush blue and red boxing ring holding a golden lion set up in its large, opulent rotunda of a lobby. The Excalibur has a basement video arcade called the Fun Dungeon, a name that is at least half accurate. The Excalibur’s rooms offer showers, but not bath tubs, which I choose to see as a gracious gesture of concern for water conservation. For a mid-priced Las Vegas room with a view of a fake castle tower and the hallway decorating sensibility of the hotel from The Shining, may I recommend to you: The Excalibur.

Across the street, the MGM Grand is buzzing. Then again, it always is. The TV news warns of dangerous congestion on the Strip on fight night; how this will be distinguishable from every Saturday night on the Vegas Strip remains to be seen. Directly facing the MGM’s lobby is the OFFICIAL FIGHT MERCHANDISE STORE, with all manner of Pacquiao and Mayweather t-shirts ($35) and hats (“$40-NO DISCOUNTS AVAILABLE”) and posters and travel mugs and branded scarves and other detritus available, up to and including a $150,000 original work of art that looks like something a prison inmate spent several years drawing with a pencil.

If you wander deep, deep into the bowels of the MGM Grand, past the table games and the David Copperfield Theatre and the CSI: The Experience tourist attraction, you will come to the entrance to the MGM Grand Garden Arena. This is where the biggest fight of my lifetime so far will be held, this Saturday. The very worst tickets are going for about $3,500. But you can stand here, right outside the entrance, for free, and stare slack-jawed across the rope line and into this chasm of history. Several small clusters of fans were doing just that. Some of them were holding fresh new boxing gloves and Sharpies, as if Floyd Mayweather himself might leap off the Tecate ad on the wall and start signing autographs if only everyone closed their eyes and wished upon a star.

On one side of the arena entrance is the official media room. That is a place for neither me nor the gaping autograph seekers. On the other side of the arena entrance is a Jeff Mitchum Photo Gallery. There you can purchase a big, garish photo of a flower or a fucking moose for more than the price of a ticket to the big fight. That is not for us, either.

For us—for me, and you, and the people trying to scrape together money to order the $100 pay-per-view, and the sad moms sitting in slot machine chairs at 6 o’clock in the morning dreading returning home—is all of the rest of Las Vegas. An endless series of blinking caverns, connected by moving sidewalks, a slow-motion monument to human tranquilization. Trying to be in “the center of it all” in Vegas is a sucker’s game, anyhow. It’s like trying to find the center of the curved surface of space-time. Through every wormhole, a new buffet. To find the center of this town, you don’t have to get past the security guards and enter the exclusive, polished inner sanctum. Anywhere will do. Not in the center of the ring in the center of MGM Grand Garden Arena in the center of the richest boxing match the world has ever seen. Anywhere. Right here, a few hundred paces away, in the MGM Grand food court, where tired middle-aged women in white shirts ceaselessly pick up discarded Nathan’s Hot Dog containers left behind by businessmen in lanyards. The Queens and Kings of Las Vegas.

The fight is three days away.

[Photo via AP]

It’s often said that you can’t pick your family, and the 2015 corollary is “and you can’t pick the insane bullshit they post on Facebook.” Like your idiot cousin’s receipt for $71 from Joe’s Crab Shack with the hilarious joke “find sour cream” scrawled in the tip line.

That is unfortunately not a hypothetical example. Last week, Oklahoma City resident Dustin Clark caught his cousin Jon bragging that he and his wife had stiffed a waitress because the restaurant was out of their favorite condiment. This was apparently such a proud achievement that it warranted posting a photo of the receipt.

When Dustin confronted Jon to ask why he had acted like such a dick, he found out there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. Just kidding! It was, “They had sour cream last time we ate there.”

Nice, nice. By the way, Oklahoma is a tipped minimum wage state, so their server was being paid $2.13 an hour to put up with their shit.

Dustin decided to teach his cousin a lesson with a good-old fashioned public shaming, posting the receipt on the Joe’s Crab Shack Facebook page and apologizing to the waitress for his family’s disgraceful behavior. He announced he would stop by the restaurant to leave her the appropriate tip, plus a little extra for her trouble, and encouraged anyone reading to do the same.

In a later comment, he reported he’d followed through:

Just left joes crabshack and got to meet Samantha (the waitress) and was able to give her a nice card and her $20 well deserved tip. And she seemed like the nicest person in the world, like one of those super nice waitresses that are nice,bubbly and energetic and makes sure everything is perfect, idk how anyone could have been so rude to her. She remembered her interaction with the rude people , and was very thankful and appreciative of the tip that we gave her. Since it was dinner rush and she had a few tables we didn’t stay very long. I think we made her day.

The story has since made the local news and gone viral in OKC, so the couple of shitty tippers can be considered duly shamed.

[h/t Opposing Views]

According to a report leaked by a (now suspended) United Nations aid worker, French peacekeeping troops in the Central African Republic have been accused of raping and sodomizing the same “starving and homeless young boys” they were supposed to have been protecting.

The abuse, which allegedly took place between December 2013 and June 2014, is a particularly egregious example of the sorts of abuse UN peacekeepers have been accused of for years. From The Guardian:

The children described how they were sexually exploited in return for food and money. One 11-year-old boy said he was abused when he went out looking for food. A nine-year-old described being sexually abused with his friend by two French soldiers at the IDP camp when they went to a checkpoint to look for something to eat.

The child described how the soldiers forced him and his friend to carry out a sex act. The report describes how distressed the child was when disclosing the abuse and how he fled the camp in terror after the assault. Some of the children were able to give good descriptions of the soldiers involved.

Anders Kompass, the aid worker who leaked the report, gave the gruesome document to the Aids Free World advocacy group, which is now seeking an internal inquiry into how the UN handles abuse cases. As the group’s co-director, Paula Donovan, explained to The Guardian, “The UN’s instinctive response to sexual violence in its ranks – ignore, deny, cover up, dissemble – must be subjected to a truly independent commission of inquiry with total access, top to bottom, and full subpoena power.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is expected to address the situation later tonight from Paris. [The Guardian]

Image via AP

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

There is a crisis at Princeton University. This Sunday, the rapper Big Sean is scheduled to perform at one of those school events where bored underclassmen gather to watch a semi-famous musician they don’t actually like that much. This bit of the college experience should be numbingly routine, but instead it’s making a bunch of people at the school lose their minds.

In early April, two Princeton students—Rebecca Basaluda and a particularly opportunistic chap named Duncan Hosie—began circulating a petition in protest of Big Sean’s performance. Here is a summary of their grievances from the petition:

USG [Undergraduate Student Government] Should stop promoting rape culture and misogyny by rescinding the offer to Big Sean to headline Lawnparties Spring ‘15. In the future, USG should strive to bring non-misogynistic acts to campus

Big Sean is one of the most openly harmless rappers in recent memory. He is not a groundbreaking artist. He is a dumb goofball who dated Ariana Grande. He’s a typical rapper in that, among other things, he raps about sex and women in terms he likely wouldn’t use in front of his mother. This misogyny is a problem, but it’s one that rap music and its fans—female ones especially—are constantly discussing and policing.

Most people who listen to rap music learn how to navigate around, and within, the misogyny and homophobia that seep into so many tracks. The people who used to want to ban rap didn’t understand it, and some 20 years later, the people who want to ban rap nowadays don’t either. Those people are Bill O’Reilly, basically, plus assorted racists who think that every single black rapper is dangerous, and apparently, hundreds of young people on the campus of Princeton University.

It’s a bit distressing that our most active and ambitious young people (Hosie, one of the lead organizers against Big Sean’s performance, has appeared on MSNBC and blogs for Huffington Post) think that they can—and, worse, should—just protest away every little thing they dislike. That sounds like a terrible, suffocating and unsustainable future—especially if it’s a future built on fallacies like the one Hosie told The New York Times:

“His language provides the ideological basis for gender-based violence against women,” said Duncan Hosie, 21, a junior from Belvedere, Calif., who created the petition with Ms. Basaldua.

In justifying an attempt to disinvite a rapper from performing at his school, Hosie has, under the guise of progressivism, aligned himself ideologically with people who think video games and death metal cause school shootings. It’s a very anti-intellectual stance, but hey, it’s Princeton.

Hosie, Basaluda and those who have signed their petition aren’t the only people at Princeton flying off the handle over Big Sean. The night before the Big Sean petition was started, a group of white Princeton swimmers and divers performed at a school dance competition under the name “Urban Congo.” As Urban Congo, which was recognized last year by the school as an official organization, the men dressed up in crude loincloths, painted their bodies and faces, and banged arrhythmically on buckets.

Here is one of their performances:

A bunch of waspy schmucks mocking some vague notion of African people is something worth calling out, and plenty of people did, to the point that the group quickly disbanded. This is fine—there’s no harm to free speech in telling white airheads reveling in quasi-blackface to go away. But the ensuing fallout was equally as absurd as the Big Sean petition it predated.

Perhaps sensing a moment on his campus in the twin uprisings against Big Sean and Urban Congo, Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber sent an email to students addressing the controversies. Here is how the email was summarized by the Times:

The controversies prompted an email to the entire campus from the university’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, in which he referred to Urban Congo as “offensive” and to Big Sean’s lyrics as “vile and demeaning.” But he also denounced the vitriol of the debates, especially online, and invited the campus community to “come together in a fuller, more human, and more personal way” at a gathering at Princeton’s chapel.

Even ignoring the call to “come together” at a place of religious worship, the main point of this email—that Urban Congo and Big Sean have fractured Princeton equally, and that fracture must be repaired—is pragmatic in a way that only a Democrat who sincerely adores his Republicans colleagues could love. A historically racist caricature and rap music do not carry the same weight, and do not have an impact on society in the same way. Conflating them is lazy—a perfect stance for a college president looking to please everyone at once.

This exact point was made by another group at Princeton, called the Black Justice League, though they, too, proved to be far from perfect. Here is the Times describing the scene at President Eisgruber’s chapel gathering:

But the tension was manifest at the gathering, too, which was held on April 12. When Mr. Eisgruber began to speak, about 20 students stood up and turned their backs to him. The protest was organized by an activist group on campus, the Black Justice League, which said that Mr. Eisgruber’s email inappropriately conflated the two debates and should have been more forceful in condemning Urban Congo. They left the chapel chanting “Hate speech is not free speech.”

When weighing how to voice their opposition to their school’s president conflating Urban Congo with Big Sean, this activist group itself conflated a poor logical argument about school performances with something actually worth staging a real, live protest against.

College, of course, is a place where kids get to exercise their impulses, so that when they enter the real world they have, say, exhausted their desires to argue for hours about Nietzsche. But what if the desire to petition and protest every last thing is no longer exhausted in college, but strengthened?

Here’s an even more terrifying thought: what if Jonathan Chait was right?

Chait’s anti-PC jack sesh from earlier this year was needlessly pathetic and ultimately self-defeating, but it’s hard not to see Princeton’s ongoing saga involving Big Sean—who is undeserving of being a free speech martyr—as a symptom of the ills Chait diagnosed, especially as it pertains to college campuses.

Hope, though, is not completely lost. At the end of the Times article, writer and Princeton student Spencer Parts quotes a junior named Kyle on his thoughts about the Big Sean performance.

“You don’t get the opportunity to challenge these things all the time,” Mr. Dhillon said, but he still wanted to see the rapper perform. “I’ll probably still go see him,” he said, “just because I do like listening to his music.”

My man.

[image via Getty]

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Woody Allen, still standing accused of sexually abusing his adoptive daughter, still making movies with Academy Award nominees. In his next film, Irrational Man, Emma Stone, his latest muse/obsession, plays a college student who falls for her professor (Joaquin Phoenix). Gotta love those relevant power dynamics.

The film’s official log line, from IMDB:

On a small town college campus, a philosophy professor in existential crisis gives his life new purpose when he enters into a relationship with his student.

According to the trailer, Phoenix plays former hotshot philosophy professor Abe Lucas, who joins some college’s faculty and first attempts to bed Parker Posey. But! Abe hasn’t been able to “perform” in a “nearly a year.” Also: “I can’t write, I can’t breathe, I couldn’t remember the reason for living...”

No worries, Abe, cause here comes along Emma Stone—the young, impossibly smart for her age Emma Stone, who is young and looks like Emma Stone.

Just spend more time with her...

At some point in the movie, the two find themselves alone against this idyllic seaside background. And you just know when two people look into each other’s eyes like that atop a beachside cliff that something sexy is gonna happen.

“Life’s ironic, isn’t it?” Abe ponders in voiceover. Sure is. It sure is.

Welcome to Midweek Madness, where we fly to London, put up a tent outside St. Mary’s Hospital, drape ourselves in the flag, and keep making signs that say things like “HERE COMES NUMBER 2!” and “KATE, YOU’RE DOING GREAT!” and “KEEP CALM AND PUSH ON!” until someone in the Royal Family buys us breakfast. Today we’ll be discussing the Maddens and the women who married them, Brad hot tubbin’ with women who are not Angelina Jolie, Kylie and Kendall’s war, and Scott Disick’s cocaine addiction.

The seatbelt sign has been turned on, so let’s get started.

Star

CAMERON AND BENJI: DIVORCE SHOCKER AFTER ONLY 108 DAYS

I just don’t know what to do with myself. I thought she’d finally found the man of her dreams, but Camji is over after just over 100 days of marriage. The fate of Camerdden has been looking rough since April 22, when they were seen NOT holding hands while leaving a talent agency. Apparently the tension between Beneron is because Benji thinks Cameron should “focus on more serious roles” as opposed to “her typical romantic comedies.” A source, presumably a friend of Maddiaz, says “she used to think it was cute that he was taking an interest in her work, but now she’s finding it increasingly annoying.” Meanwhile, Cameron is going to be alone for a “few months” while Benji “[works] as a coach on [Australia’s] iteration of The Voice.” Make sure your marriage doesn’t go down under too, Cambenj!

Harrison Ford isn’t grateful for wife Calista Flockhart’s kindness, and she’s sick of it. Not as sick as Harrison, who’s seemingly always sick or injured, but close. “She cared for him when he broke his leg on the set of Star Wars...and now she’s helping him with the broken pelvis and ankle and head injuries caused by his March 5 small-plane crash.” So she’s chilling at his hospital bed and taking care of their home and family, and all he cares about is whether or not he’ll be able to wear an earring again. Dr. Karen Ruskin told Star, “If the person in need is typically an independent type, it is quite difficult to show appreciation.” Looks like Han needs to get used to the fact that he’s no longer Solo. B-)

Here’s why you should always believe every single thing that’s written in Star:

AND ALSO:

• Chris Soules, a person, and Whitney Bischoff, a person, are breaking up because of Witney Carson, a person.

• Carey Mulligan is pregnant and Marcus Mumford is the father and I hope it’s twin girls so I can say “Mumford and Daughters” one day.

• Kesha is partying too hard, but no one’s yelling ‘Timber!’

• Tori and Dean are broke as hell.

• Patrick Dempsey’s life is bleak as hell.

• Brad Pitt and Ryan Gosling think Christian Bale’s Method acting is annoying as hell.

• Nicole Kidman’s next movie will premiere on the same channel that premiered the Grumpy Cat movie.

• Amanda Bynes wants to be on Dancing With The Stars next season, but I don’t want a reason to finally starts watching Dancing With The Stars.

WRONG ANSWER:

Grade: D- (Marcus Mumford gets you pregnant.)

inTouch

BRAD CAUGHT NAKED WITH ANOTHER WOMAN!

Brad Pitt, according to a source, “enjoys smoking post, and hot tubs in the nude.” Cool! Isn’t he cool? “A few weeks before” his August 23 wedding, he invited people to his home to have a friendly naked tub ‘n’ puff. After he “casually told Angelina...as if it was no big deal,” she lost it, and their relationship hasn’t been the same since. “She alerted their staff that she wants full reports on Brad she she’s not around” and is “livid that Brad is smoking marijuana and cigarettes again,” despite the fact that she sneaks “the occasional cigarette, too.” Sounds like they both need to chill! Light up a joint and have a soak in the tub together, you two! OK, maybe not that. I don’t know what they should do, actually. Go see a movie? Age of Adaline is romantic? See that, I guess.. Split a coke and popcorn. Or a water and popcorn. At least a box of Buncha Crunch?

Kate Middleton is scared of superbugs. I’m scared of superbugs! We have so much in common. After St. Mary’s Hospital, “where she was set to deliver a sibling for Prince George, had been closed because of a dangerous superbug outbreak,” she freaked out. “Everyone was worried that Kate or the baby could still catch the bug.” I’d be scared, too! So now the world has one more thing to worry about in addition to: Will it be a boy or a girl? What will it be named? Will Kate catch a superbug? Will the baby catch a superbug? Will superbugs take over the world? Is antibiotic resistance going to kill us all? Come on and give us the baby, Kate! We can’t take the worrying!

Miley Cyrus is “a wreck.” After breaking up with a Kennedy, it seems as if their family curse has been passed on to Cyrus in an It Follows kind of way. She’s “spiraling and is headed for a new low...she’s gone on a crazy tear.” The crazy tear has included “hooking up with random people,” “partying almost every night,” and making out with “men and women.” She’s grown up so fast! It feels like just yesterday the most shocking behavior she was capable of was simply nodding her head like yeah.

People still text Michelle! Or, at least Kelly Rowland does!

AND ALSO:

• Nikki Reed and Ian Somerhalder got married and I dare you to make me care.
  
• Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel want another baby already because their current baby wasn’t the right shape for the void.
  
• Rihanna and Leonardo DiCaprio are dating again and I want them to stay together for life without marrying like Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.
  
• Kris Jenner knew about Bruce’s gender identity “all along.”
  
• Zosia Mamet changed her hair color again.
  
• Kim Richards “preplanned her ‘spontaneous’ walk-off” from Dr. Phil’s show.
  
• Nicole Richie and Joel Madden are getting a divorce because they love copying Cameron and Benji.
  
• Kerry Washington and Nnamdi Asomugha are getting a divorce and they don’t even know who Benji Madden is.
  

WRONG ANSWER:

Grade: D+ (You give birth to Marcus Mumford’s baby in a hotel known for superbugs.)

OK!

KENDALL VS KYLIE: SISTERS AT WAR!

Read that headline again. Kendall vs Kylie: Sisters at War! That, my friends, is how you title a YA series. Not Rebels: City of Indra. But enough about my career advice, let’s discuss their imploding relationship! Just listen to what insiders say they’re fighting about:

• Kylie is jealous
  
• Kylie thinks Kendall is “sleeping her way to the top”
  
• Kendall thinks Kylie is “trashy”
  
• Kylie’s “mania for surgery”
  
• Bruce “talks fashion with Kendall” and not Kylie, even though Kylie thinks she’s the more stylish one

And now let’s all take a moment to thank our lucky stars that we weren’t born into this family.

Don’t believe what you read about them a few paragraphs ago, because Angie and Brad are A-OK and it’s all thanks to marriage counseling. “Angie’s friend recommended this amazing therapist, and they’ve been talking everything over with her...she’s the third person in their marriage right now, and it’s been life-changing.” Topics allegedly include Angie’s health issues, their children, and their careers, how Angie is disappointed that the movie she directed last year, Unbroken, kinda underperformed. Normal couple stuff, really.

Speaking of celebrity marriages that are sailing smoothly according to one source but not another, Tori and Dean are happy and in love and ready to have a fifth kid! Despite everything you’ve been told about the long-term effects of hibachi grill injuries, I guess falling onto a grill at Benihana can save a marriage! “They’ve been through a lot,” says a source. “Honestly, no one thought they’d make it, but they’ve proved everyone wrong.” Go ahead and just use the actual “Still the One” lyrics, source. You’re close enough already! But remember, Shania and Mutt still ended up breaking up in the end. And I’m still not over it.

This pie looks gross. Look at it! Nasty nasty nasty. Unreal, even! Like something the Lost Boys created with their minds during a food fight.

AND ALSO:

• Selena Gomez will be proud of her curves until our Sun dies.
  
• Courtney Cox and Jennifer Aniston will be best friends until our Sun dies.
  
• Kelly Osourne is going broke.
  
• Renee Zellweger’s “very cute” boyfriend is going broke.
  
• Ryan Gosling is cheating on Eva Mendes with Sandra Bullock.
  
• Jason Statham is “ring shopping” for Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and I hope she changes her name because writing “Rosie Statham” would be so much less of a pain in my ass than “Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.”
  
• OK! thinks Julia Roberts and Anne Hathaway are “unlikely enemies,” but I always thought the possibility for them to be enemies was pretty likely? Like, certain?
  
• Brandi Glanville is “terrified” of going broke after Housewives, so she’s “putting a lot of effort into her podcast.” :-\
  

Grade: F (You’re pregnant with Marcus Mumford’s baby and the only thing you crave is Sandra Lee’s nasty pie.)

Life & Style

SCOTT’S BEST PAL TELLS ALL: COCAINE OVERDOSE

Who had the cocaine overdose, Scott’s best pal? Was it you? Was it Scott? Did anyone have a cocaine overdose or do you just like saying “COCAINE OVERDOSE”? Let’s check inside to find out. Ah, yes. Scott had the cocaine overdose. It’s just one of the “huge number of secrets” that Disick’s “former manager and longtime friend David Weintraub has revealed.” There’s the COCAINE OVERDOSE, the sex tape Kourtney made with someone who isn’t Scott Disick, and the mistress Scott paid $200,000 to keep quiet. When asked why he thinks the two are still together, Weintraub told Life & Style, “there’s stability in their situation.” OK, man! Er, Life & Style, man!

One Direction? More like DONE Direction! Before you angrily close the tab and never read another Midweek Madness again, hear me out. When Zayn left, the band fell apart. He was like the glue holding them all together, or, the hair product. Zayn was the styling wax holding them all together, and now that he’s out, everyone else is going to follow. An insider says “the others have known for a long time that Harry would go solo...it had always been the plan,” and everyone is getting ready for the inevitable split. Louis, Liam, and Niall are all working on their next moves, “but Harry is most in-demand.” Meanwhile, Zayn has “never felt more in control in [his] life.” So happy one of them was able to squeeze themselves through the hole behind a Raquel Welch poster and crawl the hell away from that band!

Blake Shelton’s drinking problem is destroying his marriage to Miranda Lambert. An insider tells Life & Style “Blake has no shame about his love of alcohol” and the top of the spread features a quote from Blake himself that says, “I drink alcohol and always will until I die.” But Miranda is sick of it. They apparently used to turn up together constantly, “but since she shed 20 pounds last year, she’s curbed her drinking and focused on getting healthy.” They have two options for saving their marriage:

1. Go to the same therapist Angie and Brad used.
   
2. Follow in Tori Spelling’s poorly chosen footsteps and intentionally fall onto a grill at Benihana.
   

AND ALSO:

• J. Lo and some man are getting married.
  
• Teresa Giudice has made enemies with nearly every person she’s met in prison.
  
• “Beyonce misses her mom.”
  
• Megan Hilty celebrated Earth Day.
  
• Angelina Jolie is “consulting” with Ellen DeGeneres on her new movie.
  
• Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudekis cuddled in public again.
  
• If you’re not wearing sleeveless jackets and matte lipstick you should probably just fall on a hibachi grill.
  

WRONG ANSWER:

Grade: D (You fall on a hibachi grill and burn your arms because you wore a sleeveless jacket.)

APPENDIX:

Fig. 1, inTouch

Fig. 2, inTouch

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Four hundred and six days until Kristin Cavallari’s debut memoir drops, and she is already shooting the cover photo. It’s of Kristin. She writes on Instagram, “Goofing off getting ready to start shooting for the cover of Balancing In Heels!!! Such an exciting day for me [confetti emoji]”

Here it is:

Here it is:

Here it is:

Here it is:

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield checked in Wednesday afternoon with Baltimore Councilman Carl Stokes for his take on the root causes of the protest going on in the city this week. But before she got to that, she took a minute to chastise Stokes for using “that word” in an interview the night before.

“Just call them niggers,” Stokes told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Tuesday, responding with frustration to the media’s coded characterization of Baltimore protesters as “thugs.”

“No. We don’t have to call them by names such as that. We don’t have to do that,” Stokes said.

A point powerfully made, but it apparently didn’t connect with Banfield, who told Stokes she was “livid” that he had used the word, and snidely thanked him for not saying it on her show:

“I have to say, you’re a leader and so many people have said don’t say it in rap, don’t say it so loosely, don’t assume you can say it because you’re one color and another color can’t. It’s just so painful to hear it no matter what color we are and I’m glad you decided not to use it on this show.”

Then she moved on without giving him a chance to respond to being scolded like a small child. The point is apparently not up for debate. Which makes sense, I guess, because the last time CNN held a debate on who can and can’t say “nigger,” it turned out like this:

The argument that no one should ever be able to use the word under any circumstances because “it’s just so painful to hear it no matter what color we are” is often invoked by the world’s leading experts on black people’s pain, white people, who would just be a lot more comfortable if they weren’t confronted with any hurtful reminders of anti-black racism.

And we definitely wouldn’t have found any such reminders in Baltimore if that councilman had just acted like a leader. Great point, Ashleigh.

[h/t Mediaite]

During a radio interview yesterday, Senator Rand Paul weighed in on the ongoing unrest in Baltimore. “I came through the train on Baltimore last night,” the Kentucky Republican and 2016 presidential candidate told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. Chuckling, he added, “I’m glad the train didn’t stop.” There’s just one problem with Sen. Paul’s account: Every train traveling through Baltimore that night stopped at Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station.

The remark might have been easy to overlook; Paul followed it by urging listeners to understand that “this isn’t just a racial thing,” citing “the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, [and] the lack [of] a moral code” as the non-racial factors that provoked the upheaval.

But Paul, who was traveling from New York to Washington, would have been strictly limited to Amtrak in terms of train-based options. Reached by phone, a spokesperson for Amtrak, the owner of Baltimore’s rail transportation hub, confirmed that all Amtrak routes that travel through Baltimore make stops in Baltimore. “Amtrak continues to operate and make all scheduled stops at Baltimore Penn Station [and] the station remains open to ticketed passengers.”

Why, then, did Paul misrepresent his itinerary? Did he take a train at all? Do trains even exist?

At publication time, Senator Paul’s camp had declined to respond to multiple requests for comment.

Image via AP.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

While protests continued today throughout Baltimore, a police spokesman announced this afternoon that no arrests have been made since last night.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Social media is flooded with fake and misleading weather forecasts created by untrained, uninformed, and often underage individuals we like to call “weather weenies.” We try like hell to curtail their damaging hoaxes, but one country went a step further: beginning on Friday, weather weenies are outlaws in China.

An order from the China Meteorological Administration that goes into effect on May 1 states that all weather forecasts in the country have to flow through (or be approved by) government authorities, including those issued by radio and television outlets. Activities made illegal by the order include disseminating false weather forecasts, failing to include your organization’s name and a time stamp on weather forecasts, and altering existing weather forecasts in a way that causes harm to the public.

People found in violation of the CMA’s order could be fined up to 30,000 yuan (just shy of $5,000 USD) and brought up on criminal charges if their actions result in harm to life or property.

Not only does the order serve to deter well-intentioned amateurs from issuing their own forecasts, but it also effectively outlaws “weather weenies,” or the weather geeks who build inexplicably huge followings on social media by spreading false or misleading information (for example, spreading a “forecast” for a hurricane that doesn’t exist). The most notorious among them is Kevin Martin, who infamously draws up elaborate, viral weather hoaxes and threatens to sue or harm anyone who calls him out for it.

Some folks have tossed around the idea of punishing weather weenies here in the States, or at least finding some way to forcibly curtail their presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Policing weather nerds is neither feasible nor wanted, really, so the best course of action is trying to guide people towards trustworthy sources while shaming or ignoring those that aren’t on the up and up.

The order from the CMA is a step in the wrong direction, but not entirely a surprise given the depth and scope of the country’s censorship. The weather community has almost the exact opposite problem here in the United States, where a rather small but vocal number of private-sector meteorologists are upset that the National Weather Service competes with private companies by doing outrageous things like “issuing forecasts” and “talking to the public.”

In recent years, some countries have taken somewhat similar steps to curtail the amount of weather information the public is allowed to disseminate on its own. In 2013, the South African government passed a law making it a crime for a member of the public to release his or her own false or misleading severe weather warnings; the first offense is punishable by a $424,000 USD fine and five years in jail, while the fine and prison term is doubled for the second offense.

For as much of a stir as it caused when it was introduced, the law in South Africa only applies to severe weather warnings, and we have pretty much the same law on the books here in the United States. It is a violation of federal law (and punishable by up to 90 days in jail) to issue and disseminate severe weather warnings that impersonate those issued by the National Weather Service.

Under the influence of high pressure and clear skies, it’s going to partly sunny and warm in Beijing on Thursday, with high temperatures likely reaching the upper 80s. Dew points will stay relatively low, so it’ll be a dry heat. Gusty winds from the south should curtail the blinding smog, though the air as of right now is still considered “unhealthy” (as usual).

[Image: AP]

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