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Missing Person Aaron Shock Reappears in Chicago Wearing Fancy Belt

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Missing Person Aaron Shock Reappears in Chicago Wearing Fancy Belt

Remember Aaron Schock? The Republican Congressman from Illinois’ 18th District resigned on March 31 in response to a cascade of scandals, such as his Downton Abbey-themed office, his use of government funds to pay for tickets to a Katy Perry concert, and his office’s extremely questionable travel reimbursements, all of which are now the subject of a federal investigation. So what’s he up to these days?http://gawker.com/this-is-what-r...

According to the lawyer of a political donor who’s suing him, Schock went into hiding some time after his resignation (though Fox News anchor Greta van Susteren was able to call him on his cell phone). But today a local TV reporter, CBS’ Brad Edwards, spotted him lunching at a steakhouse in Chicago’s upscale River North neighborhood:

We definitely know it’s Aaron Schock because of the fancy belt and watch he reportedly wore:

Confirming an earlier a Wednesday report by the Chicago Sun-Times, Schock’s outdoor meeting appeared to be part of a job interview:

According to Lynn Sweet, the Sun-Times’ Washington bureau chief, Schock is keeping his options open: “Perhaps sales. Or banking. Or something in international trade.”

Ah, best of luck.

Email or gchat the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · Photo credit: Getty Images

Is It Okay To Leave Your Kid Alone In A Car If You're Not An Idiot?

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Is It Okay To Leave Your Kid Alone In A Car If You're Not An Idiot?

Because it involves the possibility of a child dying, this deceptively simple concept is really difficult to discuss rationally. The act of leaving a kid to sit in a car while a parent does some sort of errand has been around since there’s been cars, parents, and kids. There’s been some real tragedies, but is it always wrong?

To be absolutely 100 percent safe, you could make a blanket decision and say that no, it is never, ever okay to leave a kid alone in a car. Some people I respect a great deal have said just that. But I’ll be honest — I’m not so sure it really is always such a horrific idea, and in some cases, the vigilance to find and condemn people for doing this actually make parents and children’s lives much, much worse.

Just in case anyone without kids is wondering why this is such a big deal, it’s probably worth explaining some things: kids, as much as we love them, are more often than not tiny lunatics. They have the remarkable ability to make even the simplest of activities into colossal ass-pains, and when multiple kids are involved, the ass-painery increases exponentially.

Is It Okay To Leave Your Kid Alone In A Car If You're Not An Idiot?

For many kids, sleep time is an important but tenuous thing, and for many parents, if a kid falls asleep in a car, you want to let that sleeping happen no matter what, for the health of the kid, the parent, and probably crucial parts of the Earth’s nitrogen fixation cycle or something.

There’s some real quality-of-life and time management improvements that can happen if a parent is occasionally free to leave a kid in a car for 5-15 minute stretches — situations beyond mere convenience. I think most parents would at least hypothetically agree here.

Currently, the thinking on leaving a kid in a car is zero-tolerance — there’s even whole groups set up to make sure no one thinks it’s okay to leave a kid alone in a car for any length of time, in any circumstance. There’s even campaigns and pressure for people to call 911 if they see a kid alone in a car, regardless of how aware they are of how long the kid has been in there, or even the condition of the child.

Of course, absolutely no one wants kids to die of heatstroke in a hot car. No shit. And if it’s actually hot out, don’t leave your kid in a car — that’s not rocket science. The issue here is that the whole act of letting a kid wait, safely inside a car — where they’re statistically much safer than outside the car — is completely tainted by the idiots who put their kids in real danger.

The stories about moms leaving kids in cars while they go to a bar or a job interview or gamble?Of course that’s horrible — those are terrible decisions, and they have nothing in common with a responsible parent leaving their kid in a car, on a mild day, windows partially open, as they run a 10-minute errand. It’s just not the same thing.

The emphasis on all the tragedies and worst-case scenarios is making many good parents who have left a kid in a car feel like monsters — and, I think, pretty needlessly. They wonder “what if” the car was stolen, or if somehow the heat spiked, or if a meteor hit the car, without ever really considering that, if you’re going to fret over bad, random shit happening, that can happen outside a car, or inside a store with a parent, too. All kinds of horrible shit can go down anywhere, anytime — thankfully, it usually doesn’t.

Sure, the basic players are the same, but it’s like the difference between me taking my kid for a drive in my car and me taking my kid in my car while I drove it in an illegal street race. Same equipment, same players, same fundamental act (driving) but wildly different circumstances. One’s something any parent would do, one is the realm of an idiot who’ll end up killing his kid.

Is It Okay To Leave Your Kid Alone In A Car If You're Not An Idiot?

I was left in cars all the time as a kid, and it was totally fine. And I didn’t have anything nearly as cool as an iPad or something to play with. I think I amused myself watching the blinking red light on the hazard light switch of my dad’s ‘68 Beetle. Sure, it was fun, but I really wanted the Merlin my sister was hogging. Also, I never died in that car.

My kid loves being in cars, and there’s times when I’d love to just let him chill in the car while I run into the hardware store or something. Sometimes I need to buy stuff that takes two hands to hold, and going in a store like that, full of actually dangerous tools and sharp, stabby things without a hand on him is way more dangerous than letting him chill in his car seat for 15 minutes.

If you just use your head, there should be no problem with this. Set some rules — don’t leave them in the car in weather over, say 75 degrees or so, don’t leave them in there for more than 10 or 15 minutes, whatever makes sense — and stick to that. If your errand is taking longer, leave. It’s that easy. Explain you have to get your kid — who’s going to argue? Just don’t use it as a cover for shoplifting.

Is It Okay To Leave Your Kid Alone In A Car If You're Not An Idiot?

The rabid urge to penalize a parent who’s left their safe, non-heatstroking kid in a car I think helps nobody. If the kid is in danger, if they’ve been there a while, of course, do something, but otherwise, give people some space to parent in ways you might not choose to.

A few precautions on the parent’s part — say, a little sign you can hang in the window with your cell phone and a reminder that the kid isn’t abandoned could go a long way to making people relax, too.

I know this is a touchy subject, and rightly so. But I think the trend of blanket condemnation is only hurting many exasperated, otherwise good parents, and there’s far more of those than the idiots locking their kids in cars for way too long in the worst circumstances.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts, of course, child owner/operators and otherwise. Have at it!

Cory Booker: ISIS Is Winning the Internet War With "Fancy Memes"

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Cory Booker: ISIS Is Winning the Internet War With "Fancy Memes"

No matter how many zillions of munitions we drop or drone-fire onto the territory controlled by ISIS, we’re woefully far behind in the propaganda war—and nowhere is this more evident than the increasing Meme Gap. But internet legend turned senator Cory Booker wants to turn the tide.

During today’s Homeland Security meeting on “Jihad 2.0,” The Intercept reports Sen. Booker became frustrated by how much more advanced the ISIS online media wing is compared to Western efforts:

“There are easy tactics...I know them...how to get more voice and virality to messaging...I know something about memes...look at their fancy memes compared to what we’re not doing!”

He’s literally clutching printed out “fancy memes.” And he’s not wrong! Below, an example of jihadist meme creations I found on Tumblr:

Cory Booker: ISIS Is Winning the Internet War With "Fancy Memes"

The graphics and typographic work are top-notch—I’m half-tempted to join myself! ISIS also knows how to hit that very important youth demo:

Cory Booker: ISIS Is Winning the Internet War With "Fancy Memes"

Wow, watch out Denny’s. This stuff is slick, professional, and if you don’t read the words or think about it, appealing:

Cory Booker: ISIS Is Winning the Internet War With "Fancy Memes"

Now compare that with the State Department’s counter-programming, published as part of a government program called “Think Again, Turn Away”:

Cory Booker: ISIS Is Winning the Internet War With "Fancy Memes"

No offense, but do you guys want ISIS to win? This is terrible:

Cory Booker: ISIS Is Winning the Internet War With "Fancy Memes"

Just really, really bad meme-ing. Booker is right to be indignant. And as his committee colleague Sen. Ron Johnson put it, no one in the world should be able to create fancier memes than the USA:

“Let’s face it: We invented the Internet. We invented the social network sites. We’ve got Hollywood. We’ve got the capabilities… to blow these guys out of the water from the standpoint of communications.”

You’re fuckin’ right we invented the internet (ha-ha-ha only sort of). Think of humankind’s greatest memes: from All Your Base to lolcats to Star War Kid to Booty had me like, Americans lead the way in viral bullshit. And if our ability to paste text over a photograph is so shoddy that disaffected youths are willing to blow themselves up for the other team, then we ought to be ashamed. I propose that Homeland Security recruit Jonah Peretti, OSU Sidepiece Girl, Hero Cat, the Goatse man, and as many Redditors as can be assembled without causing an overpowering odor—put them under Cory Booker’s control, and let’s do what we know is possible, what is our national birthright as content creators.


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

I Don't Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys

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I Don't Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys

I am worried about David Brooks.

I’ve been a pretty regular reader of the New York Times columnist since before he even came to the Times, going all the way back to his seminal 2000 book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, which revealed, to the astonishment of various residents of the East Coast media world’s upper crust, that the rich white people of the Clinton years were different from previous generations of rich white people, because they used their money to buy elite refrigerators instead of jewel-encrusted top hats.

In the years since, he has been a reliable producer of out-of-touch, tissue-thin pronouncements on the perils of our secularized, technologized 21st century lives, virtually all of which rightly can be interpreted as passive-aggressive nostalgia for what Family Circus comics told him “outdoors” might have been like when he was a kid. You could just about set your calendar by it: In a month of Brooks, you’d get the call to begin or continue a war with Iraq or Iran, the grasping attempt to paint some cretinous Senator or presidential hopeful as the intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, and then, at last, the decline-and-fall column. You’d see a headline like “The Slow Virtues” or “The Hollow Century” or “Why the Teens Are Despicable,” and you’d know ol’ Dave’s coffee shop was out of plain croissants a week ago and the barista had a nose-ring and he’d decided he’d witnessed the death of the Western moral tradition.

I think I got too comfortable automatically deploying this familiar way of understanding his occasional life-musings. I think that is why I missed a change in Brooks’s work. This change started some time ago, and subtly at first; I didn’t fully recognize it until very recently. Once I detected it, I went back and read through some of his older columns. Re-examined with fresh eyes, they are pretty alarming.

At some point around the new year, this powdered coffee creamer man abandoned his career-long mission of guessing at what the lives of common Americans are like, in favor of a new and more urgent mission, like an Antarctic explorer stalked by privation and death turning away from the far-off pole to race for the nearest hospitable bay, and with no less desperation. The bay is Us. We are It. He is trying to reach us before despair reaches him.

David Brooks is telling us something dark and sad—about loneliness and the search for connection; about social desolation and sexual frustration and sadness. Something deeply personal, about discovering, too late in life, that accomplishment and position and thinkfluence are no ameliorative for the rejection of your gross old-man wiener by cute millennials. Something not about what priorities he guesses Whole Foods Uncles will take into the voting booth in 2016, but about himself.

Oh God, I don’t think we have been listening.

Jan. 5, 2015: “The Problem with Meaning

As near as I can tell, Brooks first abandoned the survey equipment and turned his face toward the equator with the publication of this column. Which, I mean, right there in the headline is the tentative outstretched hand of a man who has lost his moorings in the world. “What do we mean when we use the word meaning?” he asks.

You might guess that the nature of meaning would be too weighty a subject for illuminating in an 800-word newspaper column, but that is not the important thing here. The important thing, here, is the professional thinkfluencer—rounding into senescence, stung by the discovery that the inflation rate on smug, uninformed well-actually-ing in this newfound internet economy has rendered him a cultural pauper, coming to terms with the reality that the reputational spoils of a career spent inventing pseudo-sociological voter categories are as nothing to the perky youths—is using his newspaper column to wrestle with the possibility that he will never feel good about his life.

Happiness is about enjoying the present; meaning is about dedicating oneself to the future. Happiness is about receiving; meaningfulness is about giving. Happiness is about upbeat moods and nice experiences. People leading meaningful lives experience a deeper sense of satisfaction.

In this way, meaning is an uplifting state of consciousness. It’s what you feel when you’re serving things beyond self.

Here David hints at his misery as best he can. “I am miserable,” he says. “I do not have ‘upbeat moods’ or ‘nice experiences’ and my wiener has cobwebs on it. But maybe I suffer on behalf of posterity? Maybe I have meaningfulness?”

It’s a soothing notion, for a moment, but David cannot rest on it; it crumbles under the weight of his gloom and self-doubt.

There are no criteria to determine what kind of meaningfulness is higher. There’s no practical manual that would help guide each of us as we move from shallower forms of service to deeper ones. There is no hierarchy of values that would help us select, from among all the things we might do, that activity which is highest and best to do.

Because it’s based solely on emotion, it’s fleeting. When the sensations of meaningful go away then the cause that once aroused them gets dropped, too. Ennui floods in. Personal crisis follows. There’s no reliable ground.

This has gone to a very dark place! “My life has meaning, because I suffer dick webs for the future—but meaning itself is trash, because it does not prove I am better than Paul Krugman. I feel unmoored and unmotivated. I am in personal crisis. Please help me.”

We really dropped the ball here, guys.

Jan. 22, 2015: “The Devotion Leap

When David Brooks’s marriage collapsed, reportedly, around the end of 2013, it should have freed him to enjoy the spoils of pundit-class celebrity. He would be Out There, America’s most eligible thinkfluencer, thinkfluencing a perky publishing assistant onto his elbow for mutually rewarding committed relationship action and/or love!

It has been a whole damn year since then, but where are the hot online singles? David Brooks sought them on their dating websites, but they were too busy ogling each others’ believable smiles and firm abdominal muscles.

People who date online are not shallower or vainer than those who don’t. Research suggests they are broadly representative. It’s just that they’re in a specific mental state. They’re shopping for human beings, commodifying people. They have access to very little information that can help them judge if they will fall in love with this person. They pay ridiculous amounts of attention to things like looks, which have little bearing on whether a relationship will work.

Apes! Intellectual lotus-eaters! This is a source of bitter disappointment for David Brooks. Why won’t they ogle his firm belief in the importance of social psychology? What is a “six-pack,” compared to a regular seat on the “Meet the Press” panel?

How he burns with resentment. The hot millennials do not want a New York Times columnist from whom to receive stimulating discourse about the moral and attitudinal deficiencies of the poor. No, they want a “not-repulsive person” who “does not look like a waxed talpid,” thanks to some cockamamie notion that “sexual attraction” might be a more fruitful basis for a relationship than “being lectured by a fusty boomer pissbaby about how masculine chivalry is the bedrock of civilization and both were destroyed by the sexual revolution.”

When you look at all the people looking for love and vocation today, you realize we live in a culture and an online world that encourages a very different mind-set; in a technical culture in which humanism, religion and the humanities, which are the great instructors of enchantment, are not automatically central to life.

I have to guess some cultures are more fertile for enchantment — that some activities, like novel-reading or music-making, cultivate a skill for it, and that building a capacity for enchantment is, these days, a countercultural act and a practical and fervent need.

Once again we have arrived at a place of incredible darkness and anguish. “I cannot endure this loneliness. Can anyone love me, an incurious congratulator of the past? I can only guess.”

Feb. 10, 2015: “The Act of Rigorous Forgiving

Let’s set the mood, first.

Even very famous people can do self-destructive things in an attempt to seem just a little cooler.

And then just like that, you are trying to keep the death of your marriage out of D.C.’s public records.

Nominally David is writing about disgraced NBC news anchor Brian Williams, whose serial fabrications first received widespread media attention days before. But of course he has not discussed this with Williams; the self-destructive hunger for the regard of others he describes is his own. How it gnaws on his guts. He can never be thinkfluential enough to sate it. It is like a tapeworm that eats self-esteem, instead of chewed-up plain croissants! Day and night it feeds. A man can only take so much before he becomes desperate—becomes weak, becomes desperate and weak and lonesome in the undies—before, in a low moment, he—

No. Dave cannot say it. He needs forgiveness first. Can’t you ... can’t you just forgive him, baby? Can’t you just come home? Pre-emptively?

Martin Luther King Jr. argued that forgiveness isn’t an act; it’s an attitude. We are all sinners. We expect sin, empathize with sin and are slow to think ourselves superior. The forgiving person is strong enough to display anger and resentment toward the person who has wronged her, but she is also strong enough to give away that anger and resentment.

In this view, the forgiving person makes the first move, even before the offender has asked. She resists the natural urge for vengeance. Instead, she creates a welcoming context in which the offender can confess.

“She.” This is not David’s most subtle work, here.

Do we exile the offender or heal the relationship? Would you rather become the sort of person who excludes, or one who offers tough but healing love?

Can I borrow a feeling?

Mar. 3, 2015: “Leaving and Cleaving

Shit is getting pretty grim for Dave. Dave has hit a new low. This column (which puzzled Adam Weinstein, understandably) is Dave at his most naked and confessional, and it is ... it is harrowing.

He is lost. Lost and alone. He misses her so goddamn much. Her, and the way things used to be. Sometimes he thinks maybe she, too, longs for what they had, wants to find their way back, together, hand-in-hand. They even bought a new house together! Other times, she will not even answer his text messages. Where has the love gone?

Such is the confused nature of our modern, technologized relationships, Dave tells himself. Even people in near physical proximity can be separated by cosmic digital distance. We don’t even “like” each other’s Face-Books! It’s like I can’t even fluence your thinks anymore at all.

If you are like me you know a lot of relationships in which people haven’t managed this sort of transition well. Communication that was once honest and life-enhancing has become perverted — after a transition — by resentment, neediness or narcissism.

Dave. No. What did you do. What did you do, Dave?

We all know men and women who stalk ex-lovers online; people who bombard a friend with emails even though that friendship has evidently cooled; mentors who resent their former protégés when their emails are no longer instantly returned; people who post faux glam pictures on Instagram so they can “win the breakup” against their ex.

Dave. Dave! What did you do.

The person left in the vapor trail is hurt and probably craves contact. It’s amazing how much pain there is when what was once intimate conversation turns into unnaturally casual banter, emotional distance or just a void.

Oh no. Dave. You didn’t. Please say you didn’t.

The person being left has to grant the leaver the dignity of her own mind, has to respect her ability to make her own choices about how to live and whom to be close to (except in the most highly unusual circumstances). The person being left has to suppress vindictive flashes of resentment and be motivated by a steady wish for the other person’s ultimate good. Without accepting the idea that she deserved to be left, the person being left has to act in a way worthy of her best nature, to continue the sacrificial love that the leaver may not deserve and may never learn about.

That means not calling when you are not wanted. Not pleading for more intimacy or doing the other embarrassing things that wine, late nights and instant communications make possible.

David Brooks sent his ex a dong shot. And then used his New York Times column to tell the world about it. Our man perches upon the edge of The Void, and hears its howl. Does it call his name? Or does he only want it to?

We could have picked up the phone. We could have stopped by with a chicken lasagna. We could have invited him to address our ideas conference for just under six figures. We could have listened. But we did not.

Apr. 3, 2015: “On Conquering Fear

Like David Brooks, the ancient Israelites were haunted by fear. Bedeviled and bound by it. It enfolded their lives, not unlike David Brooks is enfolded by the filthy shower curtain he wears around the house like a toga while he sobs and eats ice-cream sandwiches and leaves anonymous nasty comments on Paul Krugman’s blog.

Their fear trapped them between their merciless oppressors on one side, and the unknown perils of terrible, terrible freedom on the other. David Brooks is likewise pinned in place, beset to the left and to the right: he fears the culture, its dissolution and laxity, its memes and its dread lord Kanye, and so he cleaves to the staid life of the thinkfluential nag—but oh, how he fears the loneliness and irrelevance this life has brought him.

If only he could defeat the fear. If only he could conquer it. But how? He interrogates the Torah for an answer.

Fortunately, one such method is embedded in the story that Jews read tonight as part of the Passover Seder. It’s an attractive technique because it involves kissing, talking and singing your way through fear.

“Somebody, anybody, please handle my wiener. Please.”

Zornberg’s emphasis on the role women play brings out the hidden, unconscious layer of the Exodus story. But it also illustrates an important element in the struggle against fear. We’re always told to confront our fears. Take them head-on. But, in the sophisticated psychology of Exodus, fears are confronted obliquely and happily, through sexiness, storytelling and song.

“It recoils from my touch.”

Apr. 25, 2015: “Love and Merit

Where can Dave find a handhold for his self-esteem? His wife rebuffs him; the hot online singles reject his pick-up lines (“Is it cold where you are or are you just a person of low character?”); the culture’s eyes glaze over and it checks its Twitter mentions these days whenever he tries to explain the lost virtues of humility using his own work as an exemplar. He wallows in misery for the benefit of a posterity that will arrive too late to manipulate his crank.

Has he at least been a better father than those damn Gen-Xers?

[Today’s] children are bathed in love, but it is often directional love. Parents shower their kids with affection, but it is meritocratic affection. It is intermingled with the desire to help their children achieve worldly success. Very frequently it is manipulative. Parents unconsciously shape their smiles and frowns to steer their children toward behavior they think will lead to achievement. Parents glow with extra fervor when their child studies hard, practices hard, wins first place, gets into a prestigious college.

This sort of love is merit based. It is not simply: I love you. It is, I love you when you stay on my balance beam. I shower you with praise and care when you’re on my beam.

The wolf of conditional love is lurking in these homes. The parents don’t perceive this; they feel they love their children in all circumstances. But the children often perceive things differently.

Joshua, your father doesn’t even care anymore that you went to Indiana University instead of Yale. Point finger-guns at Kenyan children all you want. Just stop sending your father to voicemail. Your father is so lonely, and your voicemail always cuts him off before he can finish explaining why it’s all John Lennon’s fault.

Meanwhile, children who are uncertain of their parents’ love develop a voracious hunger for it. This conditional love is like an acid that dissolves children’s internal criteria to make their own decisions about their own colleges, majors and careers. At key decision-points, they unconsciously imagine how their parents will react. They guide their lives by these imagined reactions and respond with hair-trigger sensitivity to any possibility of coldness or distancing.

These children tell their parents those things that will elicit praise and hide the parts of their lives that won’t.

“Is this why you roll your eyes and close your Skype tab when I ask you what the millennials look for in an aging thinkfluencer?”

May 5, 2015: “What Is Your Purpose?

David Brooks surveys the human condition—his human condition—and finds it in utter desolation. A vast, frigid, windswept waste. He has nothing and is nothing and leaves nothing behind.

Every reflective person sooner or later faces certain questions: What is the purpose of my life? How do I find a moral compass so I can tell right from wrong? What should I do day by day to feel fulfillment and deep joy?

At every step of his long journey he planted seeds of blinkered, glib, useless moral instruction, and the barren ice rejected them. Where can he go now? Why should he go anywhere? In the great emptiness there are no places to go—only places to die, to make by dying The Place Where A Lonely Man Fell, which the uncaring winds will scour away to featureless anonymity in their time.

There was a coherent moral ecology you could either go along with or rebel against.

All of that went away over the past generation or two.

We drift in the emptiness. All is arbitrary. All folly. Our wieners the punchlines of cruel jokes told by dead gods in languages we forsook.

The old days when gray-haired sages had all the answers about the ultimate issues of life are over.

“Don’t look to me for answers anymore. The nothing I know I take to my bottomless grave, which is nowhere.”

As a result, many feel lost or overwhelmed. They feel a hunger to live meaningfully, but they don’t know the right questions to ask, the right vocabulary to use, the right place to look or even if there are ultimate answers at all.

Of what use is our vile “language”? We flap our face-holes and flatter ourselves that we communicate meaning, and yet the dick webs go undusted. Before the horror of The Void even a New York Times column might just as well be the hopeless, inarticulate wail of a loon.

Do you think you have found the purpose to your life, professional or otherwise? If so, how did you find it? Was there a person, experience or book or sermon that decisively helped you get there?

If you have answers to these questions, go the website for my book, “The Road to Character,” click on First Steps and send in your response.

The man literally created a form, on his website, for strangers to acknowledge his damn existence. For Redditors, gamergaters, and Deadspin commenters to tell him how to live. This is the measure of our failure to hear what Dave has been trying to tell us.


If you know David Brooks, please pay him a visit. Do not recoil at the sight of his shower curtain. Sit with him and squeeze his shoulder and tell him it is going to be okay. I don’t think he is doing so hot.

All the rest of you should go to his book’s website, click on First Steps, and sing him back to sunlight.

[NYT]

Photo illustration by Jim Cooke, source via Getty

Comcast: We'll Give You This Refund If You Swear to Tell No One

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Comcast: We'll Give You This Refund If You Swear to Tell No One

There’s good news and bad news in Comcast’s alleged mission to improve its worst-in-America customer service. Good: You might actually get a refund after they bill you for equipment you’ve already returned. Bad: You’ll have to sign an agreement never to tell anyone that Comcast overcharged you in the first place.

One Philadelphia woman says she was offered a $600 refund after Comcast charged her for five years for a cable box she’d actually returned. But, in a recording she played for ABC 6, a Comcast rep revealed the catch:

“We will issue a $600 even credit,” says the person in the recording, “pending that you sign a non-disclosure agreement.”

Obviously, the customer didn’t sign it.

Other subscribers in Philly—where Comcast is in the process of building an upgraded 1.2 billion 59-story skyscraper headquarters with a hotel on top, and has a very, very favorable franchise contract with the city that’s currently up for renewal—said they got their refunds without a problem, but that was after the local news got involved.

“The Action News Troubleshooters get more complaints about Comcast than any other company,” ABC 6 says, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

Comcast points out that it’s going to introduce digital receipts for returns, so customers can actually prove they’ve brought their equipment back—a sensible idea that it’s totally crazy they hadn’t already implemented.

[h/t Consumerist]

It’s exit poll time in the UK, and the Conservatives are coming in strong.

Queens Pizzeria Served Hot Slices with a Side of Cocaine

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Queens Pizzeria Served Hot Slices with a Side of Cocaine

People may have been drawn to Queen’s highly-rated Cucino a Modo Mio pizzeria for the fresh cassava but they stayed for the hundreds of pounds of sweet, fresh cocaine, cops say.

At least 16 people were arrested in a major bust in March and charged today in federal court in what authorities are describing as a family business run out of the kitchen of the family business.

Perhaps assuming no one would know what cassava is—I’m still unsure, it appears to be some sort of tuber?—the family repeatedly hid kilos of coke inside the produce boxes. Which begs the question—why not hide it in the flour? Seems a little less obvious. I don’t know, just some food for thought.

Via the New York Times:

After putting a wiretap on the phone of the pizzeria, Cucino a Modo Mio, agents searched shipments of the cassava bound for the Gigliottis’ wholesale-produce warehouse. In October 2014, they found 40 kilograms of cocaine inside cardboard boxes of cassava, and in December, they found an additional 15 kilograms inside the boxes.

Some of that cocaine was headed for Italy, according to a news release from the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where there was a “narcotics distribution ring allegedly operating in Calabria on behalf of the U.S. defendants.”

The restaurant, which had maintained an impressive 4.5 star rating despite the shenanigans in the back, is now CLOSED according to Yelp.

[image via Google Maps]


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


Watch Jon Krakauer Silence an Idiot Man 

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Watch Jon Krakauer Silence an Idiot Man 

Has Jon Krakauer been reading Gawker? Okay maybe not. But he did a pretty great job of moderating an impromptu post-interview Q&A session for his new book, Missoula, on Wednesday.

Krakauer was being interviewed in Missoula about his book, which focuses on a spate of rapes in the college town between 2010 and 2012. As the interview was winding down, Thomas Dove, who identified himself as a lawyer, made his way to the front of the room and somehow (?) got ahold of a microphone. He then “called Krakauer a liar, accused him of bias and of breaking the law by citing confidential documents in his book,” according to the AP.

At first, Krakauer entertained the local loon, but then realized what he was dealing with (an incorrigible asshole), walked over to him and took the microphone away from him. Wow. Sometimes it’s that simple.

And then everyone cheered.

See for yourself below.


Contact the author at leah@gawker.com. Photo of the Krak via AP.

This Masterful Scene From Lord Of The Rings Gives Me Chills Every Time

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This Masterful Scene From Lord Of The Rings Gives Me Chills Every Time

Everyone has those special film scenes that just give you chills, no matter how many times you see them. For me, one such scene takes place in the first film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring. Here’s a video explaining why this one scene is so perfect.

The scene takes place toward the beginning of the film, and it really sets the plot in motion. It starts in Bag End, when Gandalf comes to realize the truth about Bilbo’s ring, and has to explain the whole thing to Frodo. It consists of long stretches of dialogue and very little action: a scenario ripe for a filmmaker to get creative in keeping viewers engaged. In Fellowship, this is accomplished through subtle but impactful camera work, combined with Ian McKellen’s superb acting. Not to mention the soundtrack, lighting, costume and set design!

Scenes like this bring me back to Lord of the Rings again and again. I can remember the first time I saw it in 2001, having never read the books or seen any fantasy movie. I was floored by how engrossing it was.

Unfortunately, as the trilogy wore on, artful storytelling gave way to cliche and overwrought action sequences. Two Towers is still pretty awesome, and Return of the King has its moments (let’s not speak of the abomination that is the Hobbit trilogy), but there’s purity to The Fellowship of the Ring that elevates it above all the rest.


Contact the author at mhession@gizmodo.com.

Rather Than Trying Harder, Secret Service Will Add Spikes to WH Fence

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Rather Than Trying Harder, Secret Service Will Add Spikes to WH Fence

So security’s not so good at the White House these days. What’s the Secret Service to do? Try harder? Nah, they’re just going to add some spikes to the fence and call it a day.

Via the AP:

The steel “pencil point” spikes will be snapped into place at the top of the fence and protrude outward, according to a diagram included in the proposal submitted for the Secret Service by that National Park Service. The commission approved the proposal at a hearing Thursday afternoon.

The spikes will be added to the fence along the north and south sides of the White House grounds starting Friday, the Secret Service and National Park Service said in a statement Thursday.

Cool. That’s how my parents handled the deer eating all their vegetation too. Guess who have no plants this year.

[image via AP]


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

No Marker, No Memorial: The Lakin State Hospital for the Colored Insane

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No Marker, No Memorial: The Lakin State Hospital for the Colored Insane

There was nothing there. No marker. No memorial. The hospital had been massive, a campus. Its mission had been legendary. And now there was no trace of it at all.

The Lakin State Hospital for the Colored Insane opened in 1926 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. The mental health facility was one of a series of community services proposed by African American legislators T.G. Nutter, Harry Capehart, and T.J. Coleman. The trio also established the Lakin State Industrial School for Colored Boys, a reform school for non-violent juvenile offenders, age 10 and up (previously, so-called delinquent boys had been sent by judges—or their parents—to a center which housed “inmates” as young as 6).

The main building of the Hospital for the Colored Insane was an imposing brick structure, wide and featureless: unadorned windows, skeletal columns. It looked like a prison, though the “prison” was technically across the street. Both the facilities had opened under the auspices of separate but equal treatment for African Americans.

But Lakin was special: It was purportedly one of only 2 hospitals in the country to have an all-African American staff (the other was Tuskegee US Veterans Hospital 91 in Alabama).

A small river town at the base of the Allegheny Mountains, Point Pleasant sits in the foothills of Appalachia. It’s a rural and desolate area, known for poverty. The county was then, as it is now, mostly white.

Upon Lakin’s opening, the Journal of the National Medical Association noted West Virginia “has recognized ability in the colored medical profession to manage this enterprise…[Lakin] gives an opportunity for young medical men of the race to fix themselves in this heretofore rather exclusive line of practice.”

But Lakin didn’t just provide career opportunities for African American doctors, it provided comfort and safety for patients. Everyone at Lakin, not just the doctors, but orderlies, secretaries, aides, nurses, was black. Lakin was “the only state hospital under the management of an African American Superintendent,” according to Vanessa Jackson’s Separate but Equal: The Legacy of Racially Segregated Hospitals.

Larry Moore, who worked for more than 40 years as a social worker at Lakin, described the hospital as a “serious attempt to accomplish the ‘equal’ portion of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine” without the prejudice of predominantly white-staffed hospitals.

The campus of the hospital looked flat and bare, almost treeless, a far cry from the landscaped grounds of other, mostly white institutions, like the one in my own Ohio town, just across the river: The Athens Lunatic Asylum, whose gardens were designed by a disciple of Frederick Law Olmstead, landscape architect of Central Park.

Lakin may not have had fancy gardens, but the hospital had a working farm. It had orchards and livestock the patients tended. There were barbers and beauticians on campus, an auto shop and ministry. Patients cooked. They canned. “If it hadn’t been for the patients, that hospital would’ve never made it,” Edith Ross, who started working at Lakin as an aide in 1951 when she was 18, said in an interview with the Point Pleasant Daily Register. “The patients cleaned that place up like a hotel.”

As well as working next to the staff, patients lived alongside them. Employee dorms weren’t constructed until the early ‘50s, and before then, staff slept in rooms in the patients’ wards. This meant employees were pretty much constantly on call, but Ross also said this helped make Lakin “like family”—a statement Jackson echoes in her description of archival photographs: “After an endless parade of white men in hats in the official portraits at all of the other African American facilities, the Lakin official photo looks more like a family portrait with female staff and even a small child present.”

Then, in the late 1940s, Dr. Walter Freeman came to Lakin.

Freeman was the inventor of the “ice pick lobotomy,” where a tool is inserted through the tear-duct, destroying the prefrontal cortex of a patient’s brain by scraping or cutting most of the connections away, ostensibly to cure the patient of mental illness. Dr. Freeman, a white man, performed between 150 to over 200 of the radical procedures on black patients at Lakin.

He operated at Lakin so much that a 2014 PBS documentary on Freeman prominently features the hospital; it was, after all, one of the central places he worked.

In his book The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and his Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness, biographer Jack El-Hai writes: “Freeman devoted an intensity and energy to his mission in West Virginia… he frequently visited the state, with the result that its per capita rate of lobotomy was the highest in the nation.”

El-Hai references Freeman performing lobotomies on patients whom Freeman called “twenty very dangerous Negroes.” Freeman later saw the men relaxing on the ground with only a single guard watching them, and reported that half the men were soon released.

Families and hospital staff may have been less pleased. Ross did not report many success stories from the treatment done by Freeman, whom she described as “cold”—and at least two patients died at Lakin from the procedure. Freeman himself admitted in the study “West Virginia Lobotomy Project,” which included patients from Lakin, and was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1954: “Of the 195 patients remaining in hospital [after receiving lobotomies] not more than 8 could be considered improved.” Freeman’s arrival marked the beginning of the end of Lakin.

After desegregation in 1954, the hospital became a place of mostly white doctors and nurses, mostly white (and wealthy) patients. Its mission switched from mental health care to treatment for alcoholism and other addictions. Currently, Lakin serves as a long-term nursing facility.

Very little has been written about Lakin’s history, and few, even in West Virginia, know about its years as a home for the “colored insane.” Internet searches for the hospital turn up primarily ghost stories, page after page of “sightings”—the only reason many people have heard of the place at all.

The main hospital building was demolished in the ‘70s. A historical marker was “removed for cleaning,” according to multiple sources, but never replaced. The school across the street was razed in 2006.

“I do find it frustrating that political correctness has led to many years of efforts to deny the history and legacy of Lakin,” Moore said, arguing that the removal of the marker won’t “change the fact that racial prejudice and discrimination did actually exist in West Virginia, and was a factor in every aspect of the lives of West Virginia residents, just as it was in the rest of the United States of America.”

Comments on the few stories published about Lakin, the hospital or school, are often pleas for answers (my grandfather was imprisoned for stealing chickens, where can we find his records?) with no replies. All that remains of Lakin now is questions.

Why did Dr. Freeman operate on so many black patients? Where are the records? Why is there no marker? Why were the buildings not preserved? Moore called them: “reminders of where we were, what we tried.”

Most of Lakin is now a bare field. The only original building still standing is the Office Building, used for storage for the women’s prison, which now shares the grounds with the nursing home. The campus is still mostly treeless, and the wind howls down the long bare drive. When I visited, it had just snowed.

A layer of white concealed everything.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

Alison Stine’s first YA novel SUPERVISION was published by HarperVoyager this month. Also the author of three books of poetry, she lives in the Appalachian foothills.


Sources:

Opening of State Hospital for Colored Insane, JNMA

West Virginia Lobotomy Project, JAMA

Separate and Unequal

Lakin Hospital

The Asylum Projects

The Diagonal

Political Pundit Ja Rule Reveals His Choice for President

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Political Pundit Ja Rule Reveals His Choice for President

Rapper Ja Rule, known for one of history’s most romantic love songs, “Every Thug Needs a Lady,” and roles in The Fast and the Furious and Pauly Shore is Dead, stopped by Fox Business to promote his new business collaboration with Magnises, a credit card company that targets millenials. During the segment, Ja Rule was asked about his thoughts on Baltimore as well as his choice for the 2016 Presidential election, which he announced was Hillary Clinton.

“I like Hillary, but you know, it’s crazy because I also think Jeb is a good candidate as well, but I’m a Democrat so I will vote Hillary,” Ja said. This wasn’t the first time Ja Rule was asked for this thoughts on political events. The Washington Post made reference to Dave Chappelle’s memorable stand-up performance, “For What It’s Worth,” where the comedian remembered when Ja Rule was asked to comment on the September 11 attacks.

When asked why he chose to be the brand ambassador for Magnises, Ja responded,“It’s a very unique situation. Whenever you can marry the affluent with the less fortunate, you get the birth child which is called hip-hop.” What that has to do with a credit card that has a $250 annual fee, I have no idea.

Image via YouTube.


Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.

Conservatives and Wanker Leader Enjoy Surprise Victory in UK Election

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Conservatives and Wanker Leader Enjoy Surprise Victory in UK Election

Defying expectations and early polling, the Conservatives are on track to take a majority in British Parliament with David Cameron securing a second term as prime minister.

Thursday night was a disaster for opposition parties: the BBC projects Conservatives to take 331 of 650 seats in the House of Commons, with their primary rival the Labour Party, believed for weeks to be marching into election night to a near tie, squeaked by with 232 seats. (The Liberal Democrats nabbed just eight seats.)http://gawker.com/meet-the-wanke...

The loss was so embarrassing that both Labour leader Ed Miliband and Lib Dem leader (and deputy prime minister) Nick Clegg resigned Friday. The Guardian has a good summation of how Conservatives were able to pull off their win:

The result was a vindication of Cameron’s much criticized decision to run a largely negative campaign, stressing the risks to Britain’s still-fragile economic recovery of a Labour government that would overspend and drive away investors through taxes aimed at the wealthy and their tax-avoiding practices.

But the prime minister’s victory was partly the product of a relentless Conservative campaign to highlight the dangers of a Labour minority government propped up by the left-leaning SNP in Scotland and this polarizes Britain in an unprecedented way. Critics have protested that the outcome, a tactical success in England, could accelerate the break-up of the United Kingdom.

Also of note was that on the strength of leader Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish National Party took 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats, effectively wiping out the Labour Party’s hold over the country. As the Times notes, the likelihood of another Scottish independence referendum appears “inevitable.”


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

Four Dead After Small Plane Crashes Onto Atlanta Highway

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A small plane crashed onto a highway in Atlanta this morning, killing all four people on board.

WSB-TV reports the plane crashed onto I-285 East near Peachtree Industrial Boulevard. A source reportedly told the station that the pilot noted a problem during take-off and later said, “Hey, we’re going down.”

According to CBS 46, debris from the plane damaged several cars, though no injuries were reported.

UPDATE 4:31 pm: From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The victims, three men and one woman, were reportedly headed to a graduation at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. The men were confirmed by Channel 2 Action News as Christopher, Greg and Phillip Byrd. The woman was identified as Jackie Kulzer, the fiancée of Christopher Byrd.

UPDATE 1:03 pm: Three men and one woman were reportedly on board the flight, as was a dog.


Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.


Terrence Howard's Wife Was Right About His Small Dick

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Terrence Howard's Wife Was Right About His Small Dick

Terrence Howard has alleged in court documents that he was blackmailed by his ex-wife Michelle Ghent. According to Howard, he recorded Ghent saying that she could “get $2 million right now” for putting his “little dick out there in front of TV.” This exchange raises a number of questions, one of which is the following: Does Terrence Howard actually have a small dick? The answer, evidence shows, appears to be yes.

As at least one commenter noted in my previous post about Terrence Howard’s penis, Howard goes full frontal in Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, the 2005 biopic based on the life of rapper 50 Cent. In the film, Howard’s character befriends 50 Cent’s character after a fight breaks out in the prison showers. In that scene, all of the actors, including 50 Cent, are nude, but—for some reason—only Howard’s dick becomes visible to the viewer, and man is it ever visible.

Terrence Howard's Wife Was Right About His Small Dick

As our own Rich Juzwiak put it, Howard’s dick “appears to be so small that it’s shocking he allowed it to be filmed.”

Here’s a gif for good, uh, measure:

Terrence Howard's Wife Was Right About His Small Dick

And here, if you’re just very interested in a nude Terrence Howard avoiding a prison shower stabbing, is video of the scene:

So, his ex-wife was right. The more pressing question now is how exactly she could have used Howard’s small dick as blackmail when anyone can pull up a stream of a Paramount Pictures-distributed film and see it for themselves. Alas, that’s probably one for the lawyers to answer.

In any event, hope is not all lost for Howard. He may not be hung like a horse, but he does have an ass like one.

Terrence Howard's Wife Was Right About His Small Dick

[top image by Jim Cooke, body images/video via Rich Juzwiak]

South Carolina Senator and anthropomorphized seersucker suit Lindsey Graham will reportedly be annou

Here's What Happens When You Report Sexual Misconduct on the Subway

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Here's What Happens When You Report Sexual Misconduct on the Subway

Yesterday morning, between 9:30 and 9:40 a.m. (yes, I was running late to work) I was the victim of sexual misconduct at the Fulton Street subway stop, at the exit near Fulton and William streets. The MTA and the NYPD failed to provide substantial measures in responding to and reporting the incident.

I had just gotten off the A train. I was exiting the station standing on the right side of the up escalator. I was listening to a podcast and generally in the commuting mindset of zoning out and focusing on getting to work. I thought I felt my skirt blow up a bit from a draft when I heard a woman scream “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” I turned around and saw a man running down the up escalator. I looked around and realized that the woman was talking to me—about me. She and the woman behind me were yelling about how the man had taken a picture up my skirt. I was so confused. I took out my ear buds and they told me that the man had lifted up my skirt and took a picture up it.

The woman standing next to me, Susan (name has been changed) was incredibly upset because this had happened to her last month—a man, quite possibly the same man, had lifted up her jacket to take an upskirt picture. She even saw a picture of her own underwear on the screen of his phone. He got away, but she managed to get some blurry pictures of him on the platform. She is almost certain he was wearing the same thing that day–a two-toned silver windbreaker and a backpack. Yesterday, he was wearing white or silver pants. He had a dark complexion and dreadlocks.

Here's What Happens When You Report Sexual Misconduct on the Subway

Another woman who witnessed the incident went with us to the MTA booth and reported it to the MTA worker. The MTA employee verified if I wanted to call the police. I said yes and asked Susan to stay with me. Susan said she was absolutely staying and did not want this to happen to somebody else. The MTA employee called for officers. And then we waited for what felt like a lifetime. About 15 minutes later, three officers showed up. The three officers were very nice but completely at a loss as to what to do.

I was expecting there to be a protocol or a game plan, but quickly discovered that there was no such thing. I kept waiting for a supervising officer or somebody who knew what to do to show up, but instead the three officers just kept asking each other “So what do we do now?” and made it clear that they did not know what to do next. Susan and I stood by helplessly. I was experiencing wave after wave of different emotions and feeling worried about how the photo of me was in the wrong hands, possibly on the internet, possibly circulating among other creeps.

One of the officers left to call command. They were not sure if we would have to go to the station. At one point it seemed that we wouldn’t have to and a supervisor would come to us. But then the officer returned and told us we were told we would have to go to the station. The officers asked us if we wanted to go to the station. I wanted to scream “Yes! I will do whatever it takes to catch this guy and get that picture deleted and scrubbed and get my dignity back!”

They asked each other if they should canvass the area. I couldn’t even believe that this was a question they had to ask each other because this should have been the first thing they did. One officer suggested that two of them go and one stay with us. The officer who had left to call the station said he didn’t want to go again. So he stayed with us, while the other two canvassed the station. They returned shaking their heads–he’s gone.

The officers did not seem to take this incident with any remote seriousness. They told us that that the city was full of weirdos and creeps and that what “sucked” was that if they caught the guy, he would get locked up for a night and released the next day. Not really the best thing to tell two victims of sexual misconduct.

I asked if there were surveillance cameras and couldn’t they look at the footage. One of the officers replied that the cameras weren’t running. Susan asked if they needed the pictures she had on her phone. They took a look but said it wasn’t helpful because it was just the guy’s back. They said they had a picture specialist they could bring in to take a look, but they didn’t ask Susan to actually give them a copy of the picture.

At some point, the officers finally decided that we would go to the station with them and file a report. We would have to take the train uptown to Canal Street. So Susan and I–a Latina and an Asian woman–walked with three white, male officers, down back into the belly of the subway where I had just been violated. People gawked at us. I couldn’t help but feel like people were thinking we had done something wrong.

On the way down to the platform we stopped by where the incident happened. I pointed out the security cameras because I refused to believe they weren’t running. One of the officers took a look but it still did not seem clear to any of them where and how the incident happened.

While on the platform, people asked the cops for directions. They were very good at giving directions. They bantered with a yuppie with her giant stroller with two kids and a giant diamond ring about how she had to suffer in the elevator with a yelling homeless lady and one officer even quipped, “That’s the perils of riding public transportation!” I couldn’t believe he had the audacity (or lack of sensitivity) to say that to somebody who was not the victim of a crime in front of two victims of the same public transportation crime.

We found out that the A and C trains were not running uptown. The cops looked at each other and said “What should we do now?” The officers did not have a contingency plan and without the trains running, had no idea how to get to the station to file our report. I couldn’t believe that because the trains were not running there was no other way for the officers to return to the station. I suggested Uber. They sheepishly looked at each other and one guy muttered that he didn’t have good experiences with Uber.

At this point it seemed like if we could not go to the station, we could not file a report. I asked if we had to go to the station. I offered going to my office and using one of our conference rooms. An officer asked, “Is there a restaurant there?” The idea was dropped.

The officers suggested several times that we come back tomorrow morning and they would be on the platform. If we saw the man who had photographed me, we should point him out to them and they would arrest him and that would take care of it. I brought up the point that if they were in uniform, standing around the station, he would likely not show up. One of the officers said that was a good point. I did not say this but I also did not like the idea of having to victimize myself and essentially use myself as bait to catch my predator.

The officers discussed possible charges. Harassment? Annoying and threatening behavior? Susan adamantly insisted that we were not being annoyed and harassed; this man had touched my skirt without my permission and taken a picture of me. That was at least forcible touching.

It became more and more clear that a report would not be filed. One officer took out a ratty plastic file with a few sheets of paper in it to show us that he did not have the ability to file a report. I pointed out that their system needs to be upgraded. They laughed and said that the system was totally archaic and that they’re still using typewriters. I wasn’t sure if that was a joke. The officers assured us they would write one when they returned to the station and get back in touch with us.

Susan and I gave them our contact information–two phone numbers, email addresses, and our address. They were ready to part ways; I had to ask them if they had cards or a phone number so that we could reach them. They assembled themselves before us so we could read their name tags and then provided a number to NYPD Transit District 2. I failed to ask them for their badge numbers but they never even offered us their names, numbers, or badge numbers.

We went back up the escalator where I had been violated and out into the street. The shock and disgust of the sexual misconduct had been replaced by utter disbelief as to how my incident was handled. The entire time I felt helpless and worse, that the officers were helpless. I felt that I had to coach them through the experience. The officers were nice guys but I felt that they were completely at a loss as to how to handle the situation and how to sensitively deal with two women who had been egregiously violated by a stranger.

After waiting with the officers for an hour and a half, neither Susan nor I had filed a report. However, over the course of that time period, we had to repeat ourselves to the officers over and over again so that they could understand the uncomplicated details of the situation. So after being violated and reporting the incident to the MTA and the NYPD, I was literally left with nothing.

This morning, in the same subway station, I happened to run into one of the police officers from yesterday. He said a report had been filed and gave me the number. He told me that now that I have the number, if something like what happened to me happens again or if I see the guy who violated me, I can go to a police officer and give them the report number and they will arrest the perp, assuming that guy hangs around after I’ve caught him. I don’t know if I ever would have obtained the report number without running into him.

How many times have you heard an announcement or read a sign on the subway that sexual harassment should not be a part of your commute? The announcements tell you that if you are harassed or inappropriately touched, you should report it to an MTA worker or a police officer. In fact, there’s an entire webpage devoted to the subject. Yesterday, I did exactly that, and learned that reporting it to an MTA employee or police officer does absolutely nothing in protecting your safety. Instead, I was left feeling helpless and degraded.

Photo via AP

Kris Jenner Is Here to Protect the Kardashians' Hard-Won Costco Respect

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Kris Jenner Is Here to Protect the Kardashians' Hard-Won Costco Respect

The New York Times Magazine published a highly-entertaining profile of Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner today, for which writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner spent a day on the set of Keeping Up With the Kardashians at the sprawling Jenner manse in Calabasas. Brodesser-Akner got to sample one those salads the Kardashians are always eating and use Jenner’s special-order black toilet paper. She was not permitted, however, to join Jenner on a filmed Costco trip:

When the time came for us to leave, a producer entered the kitchen. Sorry, she told me, but the plans had changed, and I wouldn’t be able to come along. Costco would only allow four people total, and Kris, the camera person, the sound person and the producer all needed to go. I argued halfheartedly. I had my own Costco card; I could go of my own free will. I had just been there the day before, in fact, the high ceilings and numbered aisles and zombie-driven shopping carts chipping away at my soul. “No offense,” the producer told me, “but we can’t have any association with you there.” They have to keep up good relations with the businesses where they tape; this would not be Kris’s first or last time shooting at Costco. It would be her last time talking to me.

No offense, but if you haven’t read the whole piece yet, what are you doing?


Photo via Getty. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

149-Page PhD Thesis With No Punctuation Is an Anticolonialist Protest

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149-Page PhD Thesis With No Punctuation Is an Anticolonialist Protest

Patrick Stewart, 61, has successfully defended his PhD thesis in architecture at the University of British Columbia, despite the fact that it was mostly written without any punctuation marks or capital letters or identifiable grammar.

The National Post reports that Stewart’s dissertation topic was “Indigenous Architecture through Indigenous Knowledge.” Part of that Indigenous Knowledge, it seems, was Stewart’s determination to write in the style of a 19 year-old who has only recently discovered ee cummings. In fact! Here’s a sample:

“in my defense my style of writing is not laziness or lack of knowledge of proper usage of the english language it is a form of grammatical resistance as a deconstructionist in the manner of many writers especially american poet ee cummings he graduated with a master degree in english from harvard university and they called him experimental and innovative not words likely to be used to describe an indigenous writer who breaks all the rules of writing (the behavioural ethics board at the university of british columbia suggested that i hire an editor as it appeared that i did not know the english language) times though they are changing”

“Stewart explains that he ‘wanted to make a point about aboriginal culture, colonialism, and ‘the blind acceptance of English language conventions in academia,’” the National Post adds.

Congratulations to Patrick Stewart on his newly earned PhD.

The fact that his thesis was not originally published on Thought Catalog is the biggest shock of all.

[National Post via Inside Higher Ed. Pic via]


Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

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