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Louis C.K. Will Call You Up to Talk About His Alleged Sexual Misconduct

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Louis C.K. Will Call You Up to Talk About His Alleged Sexual Misconduct

A few months ago we got an email from a tipster who said he was awaiting a phone call from Louis C.K., who will host the final episode of Saturday Night Live’s 40th season this weekend. The subject of their phone call was sexual misconduct allegations made by the tipster’s friend against the comedian.

Our tipster, who works a 9-to-5 job but does comedy at night, had sent an email to C.K. at the address louis@louisck.com. The tipster—we’ll call him Jason—says he had received fan club correspondence from that email, and he had used it when he was a teenager to send C.K. fan mail. (A rep for C.K. would neither confirm nor deny that C.K. uses that email.)

In his first email, Jason plainly lays out his grievances against the comedian, signing it “a former fan.” (In the following screenshots, provided to us by our tipster, we have redacted his name, email address and phone number):

Louis C.K. Will Call You Up to Talk About His Alleged Sexual Misconduct

According to Jason, C.K. replied with the following, and then sent another email to correct a typo:

Louis C.K. Will Call You Up to Talk About His Alleged Sexual Misconduct

Louis C.K. Will Call You Up to Talk About His Alleged Sexual Misconduct

Then, per Jason, the two arranged the phone meeting (the following thread shows the response emails coming from”louis@louisck.com”):

Louis C.K. Will Call You Up to Talk About His Alleged Sexual Misconduct

I talked to Jason after this phone call with C.K. He characterized their conversation as stilted and non-substantive. His interpretation was that C.K. was “sizing me up” to “find out what I had heard.” Jason left the conversation under the impression that the two would speak again soon. In the four or so months since, they haven’t.

I had asked Jason about the events that motivated him to email C.K. out of the blue in the first place. He was reluctant to go into much detail, but he said that two women he knew had been mistreated by him. He described one of the alleged incidents, which he said had happened sometime in the second half of 2014: A female friend of his told him that C.K. had come up to her at a comedy club, grabbed her by the back of the neck, leaned into her ear, and said “I’m going to fuck you.”

This was not the first allegation of sexual misconduct levied against C.K. In March of 2012, we ran a blind item titled “Which Beloved Comedian Likes to Force Female Comics to Watch Him Jerk Off?,” which described an incident that had supposedly taken place in Aspen a few years prior involving “our nation’s most hilarious stand-up comic and critically cherished sitcom auteur” and two unnamed female comedians:

At the Aspen Comedy Festival a few years ago, he invited a female comedy duo back to his hotel room. The two ladies gladly joined him, and offered him some weed. He turned it down, but asked if it would be OK if he took his dick out.

Thinking he was joking (that’s exactly the kind of thing this guy would say), the women gave a facetious thumbs up. He wasn’t joking. When he actually started jerking off in front of them, the ladies decided that wasn’t their bag and made for the exit. But the comedian stood in front of the door, blocking their way with his body, until he was done.

The item, which we couldn’t pin down at the time, was, as several commenters noted, a now well-circulated rumor about C.K.—although, in a confusing development, the comedian Doug Stanhope, a friend of Louis C.K., took to Facebook and claimed to be the culprit. (Several of Stanhope’s Facebook commenters replied that they thought it was about C.K.)

One of the commenters on our post affirmed that the whispers of C.K. taking his dick out whenever he pleases are well-known within the comedy world:

I have it on good authority (friends in the biz) that it’s Louis CK. I’ve heard stories about his propensity for whipping it out and jerking off in front of women at inappropriate times (i.e. dinner table, bar, etc.).

Another source relayed a story about a similar incident, at an afterparty at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal several years ago. The comedian allegedly took two women up to his room, but at some point they barged out, claiming he had started masturbating in front of them without warning.

Jason had heard the Aspen rumors, and said he reached out to us because he thought up-and-coming female comics should know “the reputation” of perhaps the most powerful stand-up comedian in the world.

We had no means of verifying Jason’s claims directly. He said the women he knew had told him they wouldn’t come forward, citing C.K.’s reputation and power in the comedy world. The two members of the comedy duo who were supposedly subjected to the Aspen jerk-off incident wanted nothing to do with the story then, and did not respond for comment when contacted before the publication of this post.

We’ve reached out to C.K.’s rep about these allegations and are awaiting word back.

Have you been sexually harassed by Louis C.K., or do you know someone who has? Have you heard rumors of the sort? If so, please leave a comment below or contact me at jordan@gawker.com, anonymity guaranteed.


Guam Lashed by 100+ MPH Winds as Typhoon Dolphin Skirts Island

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Guam Lashed by 100+ MPH Winds as Typhoon Dolphin Skirts Island

Typhoon Dolphin lashed the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific last night as a strong category two. The storm was initially expected to clear Guam with mild impacts, but a last minute shift in the storm’s track left Andersen Air Force Base with winds gusting over 100 MPH.

Guam Governor Eddie Baza Calvo is doing a pretty good job of keeping territorial citizens up-to-date on the recovery efforts across the island through his Facebook page. It doesn’t seem like there’s too much damage across the island, relative to what could have been, though power outages are widespread and numerous roads are blocked by downed trees and debris. The airport will reopen late Saturday morning for both inbound and outbound flights, and schools might hold classes on Monday, depending on how well they can repair infrastructure over the weekend.

Guam is 14 hours ahead of Eastern Daylight Time, so 5:00 PM Friday in New York is 7:00 AM Saturday in Guam.

For several days, official forecasts by both the National Weather Service in Guam and the U.S. military’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center expected the center of Typhoon Dolphin to head northwest through the Northern Mariana Islands, coming close to or making landfall on the small island of Rota, home to about 2,000 people. The agency wrote a very strong statement on Thursday warning of the devastating impacts Dolphin could have when it made landfall, which was similar in language and tone to the infamous “Katrina Bulletin” issued ahead of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast.

However, as the storm neared the islands, a sudden burst of heavy thunderstorm activity south of Dolphin’s eye dragged the center of the storm farther to the south, allowing the typhoon to track farther to the west than anticipated. I mentioned this possibility in yesterday’s post (“Any leftward wobble in Dolphin’s forward motion from its forecast track would produce much more dire conditions in both Guam and Rota [...]”), and the storm’s effects on Guam were much greater than originally anticipated on Dolphin’s initial forecast track.

Guam Lashed by 100+ MPH Winds as Typhoon Dolphin Skirts Island

In the end, Dolphin’s eye managed to cut a path down the center of the channel separating Guam and Rota, lashing both islands with intense winds in the typhoon’s eyewall. Andersen Air Force Base, located on the northeast tip of Guam, recorded typhoon-strength wind gusts for several hours on Friday, with winds gusting as high as 106 MPH at one point. The storm’s close proximity to the island gave us a great look at its structure on Doppler radar until the radar stopped transmitting data.

Dolphin continues to move away from land, strengthening rapidly in the process. The typhoon quickly cleaned up its appearance and developed a well-defined eye after it passed the islands, and it should reach category five status with winds close to 165 MPH as it recurves to the north and northeast, staying well east of Japan and no longer posing a threat to any landmasses.

Guam Lashed by 100+ MPH Winds as Typhoon Dolphin Skirts Island

The typhoon shows the importance of the cone of uncertainty, which is the historical margin of error in track forecasting for a certain region. Confidence in a storm’s forecast track goes down with time, and storms can and usually do deviate from the forecast. Today is the first day of hurricane season in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and June 1 is the first day over in the Atlantic basin. Remember that anyone in and around the cone of uncertainty is at risk for seeing adverse conditions from a storm, and even if the cone shows the storm moving away from you, things can change in an instant.

[Images: NOAA, Gibson Ridge, NWS Guam]


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

30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

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30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

While 30 Rock may have officially ended two years ago, its legacy lives on in the vodka-tampon, MILF-addled-memories of our nation’s most sensitive viewers. And now, we have the official FCC complaints to prove it.

MuckRock brilliantly filed a FOIA request under the Freedom of Information Act for every FCC complaint mentioning 30 Rock during the show’s original air dates. And apparently, people were mad. And obscene! Think of the children! Here are some of our favorites.

People were aghast at the show’s depictions of sex. Specifically, one episode’s foray into the world of “auto erotic exphixiation” (sic).

30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

One viewer seemed particularly troubled by all the sexy moms on his television screen.

30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

Some even found fault with beloved, teen pastime vodka tampons.

30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

This one is less of a complaint and more of a general observation on the beauty of nature.

30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

And while this last one is not explicitly about 30 Rock, it is a very good complaint and we would be remiss to exclude.

30 Rock FCC Complaints: Vodka Tampons Are Obscene and Indecent

You can read the rest of the FCC complaints, courtesy of MuckRock, below.


Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Deadspin Bill Simmons’s Goodbye Email: “I Am Done Being Involved With Grantland” | Gizmodo The Metic

Woman Narrowly Escapes After Being Tied Up, Kidnapped by Craigslist Date

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Woman Narrowly Escapes After Being Tied Up, Kidnapped by Craigslist Date

Michigan state troopers pulled over a 41-year-old man on suspicion of drunk driving early Wednesday morning after they saw him swerving across the road. It didn’t take them long to find the real reason he’d been driving erratically, though: a 22-year-old woman he’d just met through Craigslist was tied up in his backseat, kicking at him while he drove.

Troopers say the two connected on Craigslist after the man posted an ad seeking a submissive. They chatted online and agreed to meet in person, and that’s when everything went completely sideways for the victim.

“The mistake she made was she met him in a remote, secluded area near his home. She got into his vehicle and once they were moving, she realized this guy looked nothing like the picture that he had sent her. Also, the conversation wasn’t anything like it was online,” Michigan State Police Lieutenant David Kaiser told CBS Detroit.

When she tried to leave, the man allegedly choked her, then bound her arms with zip ties and duct-taped her mouth shut. He put a bag over her head and threw into his backseat, where she fought and yelled for help until cops finally spotted the car.

“What we learned after this, is the lady is actually very fortunate she wasn’t further assaulted or killed,” Lt. Kaiser said, “The man used a fictitious photo, he used a fictitious name and he had a throw-away email account which would make it very difficult for an investigator, had something happened to her, to locate this person.”

Police haven’t named the driver, but they confirmed he’s been arrested for kidnapping and assault by strangulation.

[Photo: Michigan State Police/Facebook]

What Causes the "Dadbod" (and How to Reverse It)

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What Causes the "Dadbod" (and How to Reverse It)

Ah, the “dadbod.” A recently coined term, it describes the body of a man whose belly suggests that he’s had a few thousand beers during NFL Sunday. Now, he’s not “fat” by any means. In fact, his broad shoulders suggests that he balances his pizza intake with bench presses and curls. So how does this body occur and how do you undo a “dadbod?”

The dadbod first came into light because some women actually found dadbod it hotter than the ultra-ripped ken doll look. Many people agreed, some disagreed, and the entire fitness world went into a tizzy. Basically, it was the black-dress-blue-dress of physique preference.

But let’s say you, the once-fit-and-now-aging fella, have found yourself with this particular body type and don’t like it, and want to get a bit more in shape. What do you do? Rest easy: You actually have it easier than most.

How Fitbods Turn Into Dadbods

Many who gain weight over the years blame their metabolism. With dadbods, however, metabolism usually isn’t the issue. We’ve explained before that your resting metabolism (the amount of calories that you burn just living) accounts for 70% of total calories. On top of that, 85% of this number can be explained by fat free mass, or more simply how much muscle you have.

Sure, metabolisms do decrease as people age, but only if there is an accompanied loss of muscle a condition known as sarcopenia, in which you lose muscle mass each year after the age of 50. The signature of a dadbod is that there is undoubtedly a good amount of muscle underneath the “flab.” So how do once-athletic bodies turn into dadbods?

There are three possible explanations:

  • You’re burning fewer calories. Sure, we’ve talked about the fact that exercise is probably not a great means for weight loss. However, if you were a former athlete for example (which many dadbod-wielding folks are) and keep your original caloric intake while no longer playing sports, weight will start to creep on.
  • You’re taking in more calories (due to your environment). Let’s face it. When many people get older and have more disposable income, that income gets spent on food. Social events too revolve around food, and there’s a lot more imbibing that occurs.
  • You started lifting and there’s muscle under that flub. It’s possible that someone at a higher BMI started a lifting regimen, made no change to diet, then developed more muscle. While it looks like they deteriorated into a “dadbod,” it might have actually been an upgrade over what some would call “skinny fat.”

Basically, the dadbod has nothing to do with changes in metabolism, and everything to do with changes in life as you age.

How to Reverse a Dadbod

This part is easy. Dadbods have the ultimate advantage. They are men with a good amount of muscle tone, which means that they have a higher metabolism. Out of any single persona, the dadbod is physiologically the easiest when it comes to weight loss. If you have a dadbod and feel like weight loss is difficult, try being a 5’3 180-lb woman then get back to me.

Really, all dadbods have to do is use determine the number of calories they need every day to lose weight—which will still be a lot—whilst simultaneously keeping their protein high. Of course individuals may encounter particular difficulties. Perhaps mindfulness is an issue, for example, but I am being terse here for a reason. You have it easier than anyone else when it comes to losing weight.

Obese individuals, those who can’t even develop a dadbod, and pretty much all women have it dozens of times harder. Of course, perhaps you enjoy your dadbod and don’t want to change it. That’s okay too. But if you do, you are at an elite echelon of weight loss candidates, so don’t take that for granted.

Vitals is a new blog from Lifehacker all about health and fitness. Follow us on Twitter here.

Things I Regret Saying Yes to Until the Very Moment They Happen, Ranked

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Things I Regret Saying Yes to Until the Very Moment They Happen, Ranked

I’m a pretty big “yes” person, as in if you ask me to do something, I will probably say yes, emphatically and with a smile on my face. The minute I do this, I start to regret every single second leading up to the moment where I have to do the thing you have asked me to do. When this moment arrives, it’s fine. But not a single second before.

Here are the things I regret agreeing to, ranked from least amount of regret that I suffer for saying yes to most amount of regret that I suffer for saying yes. To reiterate: once I do this thing, or the event has begun, it is fine and I am deeply at ease. But not a second before. Not a single second before.

13. The fucking dentist

12. Gynecologist appointment

11. Breakfast (“brunch”) plans before 11 a.m. on a Saturday/Sunday

10. Your reading (book/poetry/blog post/etc.)

9. Going to happy hour with your coworkers and not mine

8. Parties of any kind

7. Going to see your band play in Greenpoint

6. Running outside

5. Picking up a shift that is not typically mine at any sort of part-time job

4. Therapy

3. Helping you move

2. Being the wingman on your date

1. Dates

[Image via Shutterstock]

Seven Transcendentally Boring Videos Exhumed from the YouTube Crypt

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In YouTube, anyone with an internet connection, a camera, and an idea has a potentially enormous platform for expressing themselves to the world. Consequently, most YouTube videos—like most ideas—are boring and bad. But for the long and monotonous videos below, tedium is a virtue. Like paintings by Rothko or music by Steve Reich, these YouTubes are boring and good—transcendentally, addictively, narcotically good.

In the first installment of Lost YouTube, we brought you seven videos from the internet’s weirdest, darkest depths. Here, we’ll do the same—with the caveat that each clip is among the most drowsy, banal drivel you’ll find on the site. Watch each one and be transformed.


What’s Happened to the O&K KONE Escalator ???

In Short , Very good things !!!All of the escalators at the Castle Mall in Norwich are being refurbished by KONE and this one has just been completed . It is a great job and still has the same motor and logos as before , which I was worried might get replaced. All worn steps , broken lights under the handrail and LCD display have all been replaced /fixed and this has made this escalator even more amazing than before . The green lights are a nice new addition . When the cinema opened in 2000 , the lights under the steps were white.

KoneliftmanUK is a YouTube channel exclusively devoted to short point-of-view videos of escalator and elevator rides. At the time of this writing, there are 210 KoneliftmanUK videos.


My Ideal Woman : Part II : Personality Traits

I describe what my ideal woman would be like, personality-wise. This is a continuation of part I, where I described what my ideal woman would look like.

In a video noted by the highly recommended subreddit /r/DeepIntoYouTube, one extremely cool and smart man spends over an hour discussing the personality traits of his ideal woman. Bear in mind that this is the sequel to a previous 20-minute video in which the same man discusses his imaginary lady’s looks. (Do I even have to tell you that he says “greetings” instead of “hello”?) In a way, this guy made a feature-length documentary. Good for him.


stomach trample 5

Ten minutes of one woman dancing atop one man’s stomach.


Sitting and Smiling #83

Artist Benjamin Bennett, whose “Sitting and Smiling” project Gawker covered in January, is still sitting and smiling in front of a webcam for four hours a day, every day. Here’s his latest.


Smoking my Blue Design Berlin Pipe Tobaccos, with Dark Blue White Hat; Light Blue T-Shirt

Smoking my Blue Design Berlin Pipe Tobaccos, with Dark Blue White Hat, Light Blue T-Shirt, Blue Jeans Levi’ s 501; and Tennis.Smoking and enjoy my Blue Design Berlin Pipe Tobaccos, with Tobaccos Aromatics Troost; of Holland.

Like KoneliftmanUK, Adolfo Mateo’s YouTube channel is singularly devoted. In Mateo’s case, it’s tight shots of his own face smoking cigars and pipes coupled with meticulous descriptions of the outfit he’s wearing.


Nickelback - Trying not to love you ( HD - Love Story )

Video Original - Una Historia de Amor en esta gran canción de NickelBack Subtitulado Español By John Fox READ PLEASE “This video was created for non-commercial purposes nonprofit” All copyright WMG,

This last one is a wild card: it isn’t especially boring or long-duration—but it is a fan-made video for a Nickelback song, and it’s about two trees who fall in love. Happy Friday!

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.


The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch

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The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch

In February of 2011, fresh off nine months’ worth of 80-hour work weeks, Jessica Chavez took a pair of scissors to her hair. She’d been working so hard on a video game—14 hours a day, six days a week—that she hadn’t even had a spare hour to go to the barber.

As soon as the overtime came to an end, so did 18 inches of hair. “[It was] retaliation for the headaches the weight of it had given me while working,” she’d later tell me. “It got so heavy… it was unbearable after a while.”

Chavez, who writes and edits text for the boutique publisher XSEED Games, says she dropped 10% of her body weight during this period, where she handled just about all the dialogue for the text-heavy role-playing game Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky. By the end of the project, she weighed 99 lbs. (She’s 5’4.)

Spend any amount of time talking to people who make video games and you’ll hear thousands of stories like this. Crunch, as it’s called, has become status quo for the video game industry, as normal to game developers’ lives as daily commutes or lunch breaks. From multimillion-dollar blockbusters like Call of Duty to niche RPGs like Trails, just about every video game in history is the net result of countless overtime hours, extra weekends, and free time sacrificed for the almighty deadline. This crunch comes in many different forms—sometimes it’s long and drawn-out; sometimes it’s just a few weeks at the end of a project—but for people who work in video games, it’s always there. And because most game developers work on salaries, it’s almost always unpaid.

Conversations about the morality and necessity of crunch have dominated the industry for over a decade now, ramping up in 2004, when the game designer Erin Hoffman wrote an exposé about practices at video game publisher Electronic Arts. Hoffman, who went by the name EA Spouse, wrote about how various forms of crunch were destroying her significant other’s life, hammering EA for practices she said were unethical and illegal. The blog went viral, causing widespread outrage and triggering a series of class-action lawsuits that led EA to settle for tens of millions.

Today, however, things haven’t changed much. Developers regularly lament having to suffer through unrelenting crunch cycles where they go weeks or months without seeing their families. A 2014 survey by the International Game Developers Association found that 81% of polled game developers had crunched at some point over the previous two years. (50% felt crunch was expected in their workplaces and a “normal part of the job.”)

Why is this still happening? Why do people so often have to work crazy hours just to make video games? Should companies be doing more to prevent it? Over the past few weeks, I’ve talked to some two dozen current and former game developers—some of whom spoke on the record and others who asked to be kept anonymous—to try to answer some of these questions. The stories are candid and ugly: some speak of nights sleeping in the office; of going weeks without seeing their families; of losing friendships and relationships because of endless unpaid overtime. Some say crunch drove them away from the video game industry. Some say they’ve taken vows to never work more than 10 hours a day.

To many developers and outside observers, one thing is increasingly clear: the video game industry’s reliance on crunch is unsustainable, and hurts far more than it helps.

The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch

Why does this happen?

Pretend, for a second, that you’re the head of an independent video game company. You’re in charge of ensuring that all of your designers, programmers, and artists hit their deadlines, which seems feasible because you set up a conservative schedule that accounts for standard 40-hour work weeks. So far, you’ve hit all your milestones—game-dev speak for project goals, like having a playable build of the game or hitting beta—without a problem.

One day, you get a call from the publisher financing your game: turns out your hero didn’t test well with focus groups, so they want you to completely redo all of his design, art, and voice acting. Also, they need you to hit the same release date—can’t change that fiscal quarter guidance! What do you do?

You could:

1) Tell the publisher you need more time or more money (for extra staff) to do this, at risk of pissing them off and getting your project cancelled.

2) Tell the publisher you need to cut other features to do this, at risk of pissing them off and getting your project cancelled.

3) Tell the publisher you can’t do it, at risk of pissing them off and getting your project cancelled.

4) Crunch.

Some studio heads might gamble and pick one of the first three options; others will inevitably go with #4, choosing to sacrifice employees’ free time rather than risk losing the game and having to lay everyone off. There are compelling arguments both ways.

That’s a simple scenario, though. And more importantly, it assumes that you, the studio head, view crunch as a last resort. In the world of video games, many producers and directors see mandatory overtime not as a contingency plan but as a natural part of game development, to be regularly used as a way to cut costs and make the most ambitious games on the shortest schedules.

“Many teams (indie and AAA alike) seem to start a project already calculating in crunch to the schedule for added content or productivity, which is bizarrely short-sighted and disgusting,” said Tanya X Short, a co-founder at the indie studio Kitfox Games who has also worked in AAA development.

Short, a prominent critic of game development crunch, says she believes unpaid overtime is the result of poor planning and bad management, not an inevitable part of game-making. One of the issues, she says, is that the people on top of the food chain view crunch as something standard and inevitable rather than a toxic, avoidable practice.

“If your milestone is more than two weeks away and you can tell you’re not going to make it, you have to cut features or extend the milestone,” Short said in an e-mail. “Those are your options. It hurts to cut what feels like limbs off your baby, but sometimes it’s necessary. Certainly more necessary than pointless, burn-out crunch, which if you’re lucky will only leave you sick (physically or creatively)... and if you’re unlucky will make you miss your milestone, get sick, and start you down a path towards bad production practices.”

The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch

It can be a self-sustaining cycle, Short argues. Say a designer is able to create a sizable level after working 16 hours a day for three straight weeks. From then on, project managers will equate a level of that size with three weeks of work, and for future schedules they’ll plan accordingly, allotting three weeks of time to tasks that should require six. The designers will again have to crunch to finish those future levels, and the cycle will go on and on.

That’s just one of the reasons crunch has become so prevalent. It’s easy to point fingers at the managers who allow this sort of thing to happen—and critics of crunch have done exactly that—but it’s worth noting that game development is a creative process. From level designers to character modelers to foley artists, every single job behind a video game calls for right-brain work. Every member of a development team has to make countless subjective decisions on a daily basis, and by nature, people will be more creative on some days than they are on others. Some days the words, art, and code flow; other days they don’t.

In other words, it’s very difficult to figure out how long it might take to finish a given task. Even when a project manager is desperate to avoid crunch, it can be impossible to estimate how much time it might take for a narrative designer to write a scene or for a programmer to come up with an AI tree. Making games is messy.

A million different crunches

It’s important, when zooming out and taking a lens to game development, to recognize the differences between occasional overtime and crunch. Few would take issue with a boss asking his or her employees to work late for a few days or even a week toward the end of a project. It’s when these requests become excessive or even normalized—when standard 40-hour weeks morph into 60, 80, 100—that it turns into a bigger problem.

There’s no one way to define crunch. It can come in thousands of shapes and sizes, varying based on the schedule, the type of game, the scale of a team, the deadlines, the contracts, the personnel, the publisher, the leadership, the amount of money in the bank, and many other factors.

Often, gamers equate crunch with the final weeks in a game’s development, when everyone on a team has to go into overdrive to ensure they hit their release date—”crunch time” is a euphemism for the very last minute of a project. But in reality, according to many of the game developers I talked to for this story, crunch is always there, hanging over studios like a big gloomy rain cloud. Plenty of the people who make video games say they have to crunch all year long.

“Most people think crunch only happens in the final push of a project,” said one AAA game developer who asked not to be identified. “The last [x] months before shipping. Let’s set something straight: That’s complete bullshit.”

In reality, that developer said, many teams find themselves working unpaid overtime all throughout the year, for various reasons. Sometimes it’s by choice; other times it’s because they have no other options.

“Crunch is any time a milestone is behind schedule,” the developer said. “Crunch is any time a project is due for review by management. Crunch is any time an issue comes up that prevents other people from working. Crunch is any time a publisher decides they want to see something now or wants new features that weren’t planned previously. Crunch is when any trade show or article requires a demo/trailer/screenshots/you name it. Crunch is after the public sees said PRE-RELEASE content and starts tearing apart something that’s not finished… Crunch is not uncommon. It is the norm.”

The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch

Sometimes crunch is the result of a young team that thinks passion means working extra hours; other times it’s the result of cold upper management making unreasonable requests of employees.

For example, one developer told me about the years he spent working on a massively multiplayer RPG called Hero’s Journey. As they worked on the game—which the developer described as a sisyphean task—he and his team found themselves crunching not to finish but to build fake demos for publishers and trade shows.

“As most engineers know, demo code is almost always garbage, throwaway code,” said the developer. “So we got to crunch to write code we knew was not actually feasible long-term, but looked good enough for showing it off. Not only was this for trade shows like E3, but once we’d shown stuff off we had publishers coming out and we were trying to court them as well… The longest I ever spent in the office was almost 30 hours. I did not sleep. We had a huge demo for a potential publisher, some division of Sony, and we had to get everything just right. I came into the office early, around 7am, and I didn’t leave until almost noon the next day. I went out for lunch and I went out for breakfast around 6am, but that was it.”

In the video game industry, crunch is ubiquitous, but it’s also different every time it happens. Indie studios crunch—sometimes because they know they’ll run out of money if they don’t. Big studios crunch—sometimes because the publishers behind them force them to add features and hit deadlines. One developer told me their AAA studio’s policy was “We don’t care how many hours you work in the week as long as you get your work done,” which for some people might mean eight-hour days and for others might mean 12. An artist who once worked for a mobile studio said they were told that working evenings and Saturdays was just part of the culture there.

One person who worked on The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—one of the most acclaimed games of the last generation—said the last few months of development were a total mess:

We worked long hours. Our bug queue never slowed. We played the game constantly, dismayed at how slowly the iterations came. Guiding Skyrim in the right direction felt like guiding a thousand-tonne tanker through cold water. Through the fog of panic and activity, we watched as the iceberg of our deadline drew close, inscribed with that horrible prophecy: “11-11-11.” And then, under the steady guidance of Todd Howard, we made it. And as with all great undertakings, the end result was both less than we’d hoped for... and also far, far greater.

People crunch on all those shovelware licensed games, too—the ones you see for $10 at GameStop just a few weeks after they come out. “You know what’s worse than crunch? Death march crunch on games no one wants,” said a developer who worked on Sega’s Iron Man 2. “Mandatory 12 hour days, 6 days a week. If you were salaried (like I just now was) you did not get overtime pay. You did get food though. Oh and there was a keg in the office.”

As a reward for those 70-hour work-weeks, the staff all lost their jobs. On April 2, 2010, a month before Iron Man 2 came out, Sega shut down the studio. (For a look at why layoffs are also so common in the video game industry, see our feature from last year.)

On the flip side, some game developers say that being part of something really successful can alleviate the pain of crunching in at least a small way.

“There was a stretch of a month or so where I slept at the office every other day because my two-hour commute meant I’d get more sleep at the office than I would at home,” said one developer who worked on a critically-acclaimed AAA game. “So I would get in at about 8am, work until 11pm, sleep until 7am so I could shower and be at my desk again by 7:30am. Then I would leave at 5pm to get home in time to see my wife and kids for a couple of hours before bedtime, then I’d do it again. That sounds far worse than I remember it. The fact that the game is awesome, sold well and reviewed well softens the sting a lot.”

The developer later added that although the critical acclaim was nice, it could never justify radical crunch time. “[Some] studios think that their pedigree enables them to overwork employees and that the employees should be ‘honored’ to work there,” he said. “It has gotten so bad that a lot more experienced devs will see the word ‘passion’ on a job description as a red flag. There are a few studios whose games have been critical and commercial darlings but I would never want to work there because of how bad the crunch and culture is.”

Over the years, as the video game industry has evolved, crunch has, too. Thanks to day-one patches and downloadable content, video games are rarely “finished”—the people behind them can keep zapping bugs and building new features all the way through release, and even afterwards, as we’ve seen with games like Driveclub and Halo: The Master Chief Collection, both of which shipped broken in several ways.

“For the record, I hate day-one patches as a consumer,” said a programmer for AAA games who asked not to be named. “Day-one patches are a godsend as a dev, though. Reliance on them is a horrible idea—but just knowing you can fix issues almost immediately for all consumers is a huge stress relief.”

Painful long-term effects

In January of 2014, artist Clarke Nordhauser took a job with a big-name studio that was working on a well-known video game franchise. As Nordhauser recalls, when he arrived at the company for his first day, the producer welcomed him and asked if he wanted dinner—oh yeah, and it’d be great if he could stay a few hours extra...

“It wasn’t just that night, it was every night,” Nordhauser said. “[Then it] turned into requests for weekends. By the third week of working there, I had noticed that I have never seen certain team members leave the office ever… You enter a certain point of depression where a process is comforting, and once I’d felt like another cog I just accepted this as my fate.”

By April, Nordhauser was burnt out. He told the studio he was done, and he walked out the door, vowing never to crunch again, even if it means leaving the video game industry entirely.

“I’m constantly disappointed in AAA titles but it makes sense with how much they are overworking and under-compensating their workers,” Nordhauser said. “Until there is some sort of union for game developers, I probably won’t find myself working in the industry again.”

Although there are no good statistics for the number of people who have left gaming for less volatile, more lucrative fields, there are plenty of stories. Ex-QA tester Steve Holland, for example, told me he gave up on his dreams of making video games after a stint at Atari working 60-hour weeks on games like Civilization III.


“Until there is some sort of union for game developers, I probably won’t find myself working in the industry again.” - Clarke Nordhauser


“During my job search after Atari I kept seeing some variation of ‘Weekends and long hours required’ in every job posting at every single development studio or publishing company,” Holland said. “This made me come to the realization that crunch was not some occasional occurrence before you gave the thumbs up on Gold Master for large-budget games, but was instead an off the record mandatory death march required of all employees who wanted a career in the video game industry.”

How many people have been scared away from the video game industry because of mandatory overtime? Will we ever actually know?

Does crunch even work?

Ask five developers about crunch and you’ll get 20 different anecdotes—“war stories,” many of them will say, eyes twitching as if suffering from some sort of video game PTSD. It’s human nature, especially in the United States. We like to brag about how hard we work.

It makes for a fun fantasy, too. Can’t you picture it? A team of talented-yet-underpaid developers crunch together, working unimaginable hours to turn their video game dreams into reality, sacrificing their lives to accomplish what everyone else thought was impossible. Painful short-term loss exchanged for glorious long-term gain.

But this sort of mentality can be ineffective and even dangerous, says Tom Ketola, a veteran programmer and director who’s been making video games since the PS1 days. After all, it can lead to awful, self-sustaining habits.

“Hindsight being 20/20, I oftentimes find crunch time stories turning into a bragging match about who worked more hours and suffered more,” he said. “Our facility to forget how bad things actually are can often glamorize bad decisions and bad processes to the point of nostalgia, and as we move up the ranks in development and start managing younger workers, those stories bias our own management towards repeating the same mistakes.”

Some developers say they’ve felt compelled to stay extra hours at the office just because other people were doing it too. Several told me they just couldn’t shake the notion that more hours directly equate to higher-quality games—after all, more hours means more work, which means more features, polish, and testing.

Then again, you don’t need to know C++ to imagine a bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived programmer making mental mistakes that lead to game-breaking bugs and cause even more work for the rest of the team. There isn’t much data on this subject, but a recent study by a group called The Game Outcomes Project did find that mandatory crunch led to less successful games—even if one of their gauges for success was the very-flawed aggregate tool Metacritic.

Wrote Paul Tozour: “Our study seems to reveal that what actually generates ‘extraordinary results’ – the factors that actually make great games great – have nothing to do with mere ‘effort’ and everything to do with focus, team cohesion, a compelling direction, psychological safety, risk management, and a large number of other cultural factors that enhance team effectiveness.”

In other words, all that crunch-time might be making games worse. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time in a creative field knows that tight deadlines and occasional all-nighters can sometimes make miracles happen, but caffeine and adrenaline aren’t enough to fight off the exhaustion of working outrageous hours for weeks or months on end. Whether you’re writing dialogue or modeling characters, sleep deprivation can have a severe negative impact on what you’re trying to accomplish.

“You can only stretch yourself so far before you start to come apart,” said XSEED’s Chavez, “and quality is the first thing to go at 2am. Long-term crunch is a game of diminishing returns in the end.”

The Horrible World Of Video Game Crunch

Can this be avoided?

Let’s go back to that hypothetical situation from before. You’re the head of an independent studio, your publisher just asked you to change everything, and you’re quickly running out of time and money. What do you do?

I posed a similar hypothetical to Kitfox’s Tanya X. Short, who is as big a critic of unpaid overtime as it gets. Her answer, unsurprisingly: don’t crunch.

“Crunching for more than two weeks won’t help the studio in your question,” she said. “If I were in that circumstance, I would have to find some way to cut something. There literally is no other option. Crunching will just make your clients or publishers feel better through showing you are ‘working hard,’ but you still won’t make it, so crunching is not the final solution.”

That’s an admirable—if idealistic—stance. But while it’s hard to find a developer who thinks crunch is a good thing, there are many who believe it’s a necessary evil. “I think crunch is the worst approach to managing your projects but at the same time is unavoidable for artists because it seems like it’s just part of our nature,” one freelance developer told me, adding that he’d worked both with studios that crunch a lot and studios that don’t.

Veteran game designer Edward Douglas, a AAA-developer-turned-indie who’s currently directing the RPG Eon Altar, said that he feels awful about asking his team to work unpaid overtime, but that he sees no other options. Three years ago, when he started development on what he describes as his dream project, he over-scoped—or planned out more features than were really feasible with their schedule—and now they’re paying the price.

In a lengthy e-mail, Douglas was remarkably candid about how and why he’s told his team to crunch on the game:

Early in a game cycle the skies are blue and anything is possible. As you get closer to final everything you have to trim, simplify, remove, feels like failure. You also have an optimistic perspective on what can be done in any given schedule, so you over-scope. What they call ‘technical debt’ builds up, and you have more and more features to maintain and fix when it comes to the end.

In a perfect world a game is built on a ‘Minimal Viable Product’ model, where each feature works nicely on its own, and is enhanced by features around it. Although we give internal lip service to this method, to be honest to ourselves we do not do it. We’re making a complex (for us) RPG, with a huge number of moving parts. No feature works in isolation, and nothing can be cut without massive ripple effects throughout other systems. Here, we were overconfident, didn’t scope properly, and now have a huge number of features with lots of bugs to fix and a hard deadline coming up.

We’re completely independent which means we set our own release date, but it also means that when we’re out of money, that’s it. We’re not EA where we can shift resources from studio A to help studio B for the last few months. The only way to finish is to crunch. To ask people who did not commit to the features in the game to spend the evenings, their weekend, their family time, digging us out of this ‘technical debt’ we’ve incurred. Now they’re critical path in getting a game worth shipping, and if they don’t do it they know the game could fail. It’s the absolute worst position to put someone in and it’s shameful that I did it.

Ideally, managers like Douglas could avoid this sort of situation by under-scoping, adding extra buffer time to the schedule to account for catastrophes, and cutting features that he and his team wouldn’t be able to deliver without working overtime. Critics of crunch say those moves are imperative, not optional. But by nature, game developers are creative, ambitious people with a habit of biting off more than they can chew. It’s hard to envision a video game industry where people aren’t over-promising things.

It’s also tough to imagine a culture where people don’t equate long hours with passion and commitment. Many of the game developers I interviewed for this story said that when some members of their teams voluntarily crunched while others didn’t, the crunchers would grow to resent the people who left at 6 or 7pm every day. Even in studios where crunch is never mandatory, a divide like this can rip teams apart—unless there’s a manager forcing people to go home.

In late 2013, the twitter account for Crytek’s Ryse triggered a minor controversy with a tone-deaf brag about the overtime they’d poured into the game. “By the time #Ryse ships for #XboxOne, we will have served the crunching team more than 11,500 dinners throughout development,” they wrote.

Developers reacted harshly—and game companies will now likely think twice before tweeting something like that—but it’s indicative of a cultural trend that’s still prevalent for the people who create the games we play.

“Crunch was invented by humans, normalized by humans, and we absolutely can fix it if we try,” said Short. “There’s not much the common game dev at a larger studio can do about imposed crunch from above, but as soon as ‘we don’t crunch’ becomes something a high-profile studio can brag about (without being weirdly accused of ‘lack of passion’), the rush of quality developers might persuade the rest.”

Whatever the proposed solution—more reasonable and capable management, increased transparency, an organized work force—the problem of crunch seems clear. It’s clear why it happens, and how. Crunch is an ingrained part of video game culture, and will remain that way until Twitter accounts for games like Ryse start bragging about how many dinners their employees got to eat at home with their families.

Crunch manifests in a thousand different ways, and we’re only beginning to understand its long-term, industry-wide effects. For now, the least we as gamers can do is to understand and respect the great strain required to bring us our favorite games; to support those who would try to dismantle crunch culture, and, even just in some small way, try to change things for the better.

You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.

Illustration by Sam Woolley

Eight Bodies Recovered from Crashed U.S. Marine Helicopter in Nepal

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Eight Bodies Recovered from Crashed U.S. Marine Helicopter in Nepal

Nepalese army officials announced Saturday that all eight bodies had been recovered from a U.S. Marine helicopter that crashed earlier this week, the Associated Press reports. There were six Marines and two Nepalese soldiers aboard.http://gawker.com/missing-u-s-ma...

According to the AP, the chopper had been delivering rice and tarps to the town of Charikot when contact was lost. The area of the crash was about 15 miles away, near Gothali village, about 50 miles northeast of Kathmandu.

On Friday, Lieutenant General John Wissler, commander of the Marine-led joint task force, told reporters on Friday that the cause of the crash had not yet been determined. Marine officials have not yet confirmed the identities of the bodies.


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

Senior ISIS Commander Killed in U.S. Special Ops Raid in Syria

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Senior ISIS Commander Killed in U.S. Special Ops Raid in Syria

On Friday, U.S. Special Operations forces entered Syria with the intent of capturing senior ISIS commander Abu Sayyaf and his wife Umm, the New York Times reports. The Pentagon said in a statement that Sayyaf was killed after he “engaged U.S. forces.”

According to the Times, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said that Abu Sayyaf had helped manage the Islamic State’s black-market oil and gas operation. In June, ISIS was earning nearly $2 million per day refining and smuggling oil, Bloomberg Business reported. That number has reportedly fallen since air strikes began last fall.

Carter said that Umm Sayyaf—who was captured and has been moved to a military detention facility in Iraq—was also suspected of being involved in the militant group’s “terrorist activities, and may have been complicit in what appears to have been the enslavement of a young Yazidi woman rescued last night.”

Bernadette Meehan, the National Security Council spokeswoman, confirmed the rescue. “The operation also led to the freeing of a young Yazidi woman who appears to have been held as slave by the couple,” she said. “We intend to reunite her with her family as soon as feasible.”

This is only the second time U.S. troops have carried out a ground assault on Islamic State militants in Syria, the Associated Press reports. The first was a failed attempt to rescue Americans being held hostage.

No American forces were injured or killed in Friday’s mission, Carter said in his statement. The Syria Observatory for Human Rights reports that at least 19 ISIS fighters—including 12 foreigners—were killed in the raid.


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

Derailed Amtrak Train May Have Been Hit With Projectile

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Derailed Amtrak Train May Have Been Hit With Projectile

The FBI will investigate the possibility that the windshield of the Amtrak train that derailed this week was struck by some kind of projectile before it crashed, the Associated Press reports.

According to the AP, at a press briefing on Friday night, National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said that there were concentric circles on lower left corner of the train’s windshield, indicating that something had struck it before it was shattered in the crash.

The New York Times reports that Sumwalt, who is leading the NTSB’s investigation into the incident, said that Brandon Bostian, the train’s engineer, was asked whether he remembered anything hitting the train. “He did not recall anything of that sort,” Sumwalt said. “But then again, he reported that he does not have any recollection of anything past North Philadelphia.” (Otherwise, Bostian has been “extremely cooperative.”)

There have also been reports that something hit a Septa train in the area that same night, and the derailed Amtrak train’s assistant conductor said that she had heard Bostian talking to a Septa engineer, according to Sumwalt. From the Times:

She said she thought she heard Mr. Bostian reply that his train had also been struck.

“Right after she recalled hearing this conversation between her engineer and the Septa engineer, she said she felt a rumbling, and her train leaned over and her car went over on its side,” Mr. Sumwalt said.

Jerri Williams, a spokeswoman at Septa, confirmed that the windshield of one of its trains had been shattered by a projectile near the North Philadelphia station about 9:10 p.m. on Tuesday, about 12 minutes before the Amtrak train derailed.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations has been called in for its forensics expertise, Sumwalt said, but it has not yet begun its investigation.


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

The Traumas That Plague Us

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The Traumas That Plague Us

During my senior year of high school, a kid who sat behind me in class scrawled “Jailyn is black. Colored people suck. Niggers love Kool-Aid” into the wood-grain of his desk. On the day I found the writing, my phone had died and I was sitting in AP Biology trying to entertain myself with anything other than chromosomes, mitochondria, and the nasally voice of the teacher. When the plum-purple of the writing caught my eye, I turned to my best friend and motioned for him to check if what I thought I was seeing was actually there. I stared at the words, silently trying to understand the author’s motive until I felt my friend nudge my side and whisper, “Jai.” I slowly turned to him as he nodded towards the front of the classroom. I followed his gaze and saw the entirety of the class staring back at us.

The teacher pulled the tip of her pen from between her thin lips just long enough to ask, “Is there something the two of you would like to share?”

I looked from her, to my friend, and back down to the purple writing. When my eyes finally made their way back up to hers, I realized that I’d never noticed how dry her graying-blonde hair seemed to look. I wondered if she dyed it to hide the gray and thought about asking her. Instead, I said, “Someone wrote on the desk.”

She turned back to the board, intending to continue the day’s lesson. “While I wish we had the time to dissect the deeper meaning of every piece of graff—”

“It says Jailyn is Black. Colored people suck…” I trailed off, my last few words barely above a murmur, “…Niggers love Kool-Aid.”

I stared at my desk. The wood was only a few shades darker than the warm tones of my arm. I wished that I could inconspicuously wedge myself between each groove until I disappeared entirely. When I finally looked back up, it was only to find the teacher softly giggling as she restarted her lesson. A few students followed her lead and chuckled while turning back to face the front of the classroom like nothing had happened. When all 17 faces turned away, my friend and I, who were the only two black students in our grade, exchanged silent glances of shame and disappointment.

Days later, after I had discovered the author of the venomous missive, I was prepared to tell everyone what he had done, if only to provide him with just a dose of the same humiliation that I had suffered. But before the day was over, I was called into the principal’s office. When I arrived, there he sat, next to the principal, in his khaki shorts and deep sea fishing tee. I paused in the doorway as all of the emotion of his hateful act came flooding back. I refused to sit down. “Jailyn, we know you think that he was the one that wrote this, but he has said that he didn’t and there’s no way we can prove that he did,” the principal began. “Now we’ve heard that you were planning to make a Facebook status about this, but that would really just make our job harder and we would prefer if you didn’t.”


I was first made aware of the controversy surrounding Dr. Saida Grundy by way of the Boston University Class of 2018 Facebook page. Nick Pappas, a student from University of Massachusetts, posing as a young white woman named Melanie, posted a link to his website that criticized many of her personal tweets as racists. Here is sample of the tweets he cited:

The Traumas That Plague Us

The Traumas That Plague Us

He went on to claim that Boston University should be ashamed to hire what he believed to be such a racist professor and that parents should wary of sending their children to an institution that could employ a “bigot”.

When right-wing media picked up on the story, they had a field day. Most notably, FOX News published a story that included an interview from someone who said they were “not surprised that Boston University is hiring a racist to teach African American studies. Anti-white racism is rampant in Black Studies programs.”

Yet despite this, our administration initially defended Dr. Grundy’s right to free speech. In the same FOX News article, a university spokesman said: “Professor Grundy is exercising her right to free speech and we respect her right to do so.” However, when the story finally made its way to the general public, the university quickly back tracked, following a wave of alumni and parents supposedly threatening to withdraw their financial support from the school. In an email sent to the entire BU community a few days after the controversy broke, President Robert Brown acknowledged Grundy’s right to free speech while simultaneously implying that her tweets fell under the umbrella of “racism or bigotry” and were “hurtful” to members of the community.


In my first year at Boston University, I was overwhelmed by the number of black people I saw in my classes and walking down the street. Though black students only comprised about three percent of the student population, I was now around more black people than I had ever been around in my life. Thirteen years at a small, private prep-school in Savannah, Georgia made BU’s black population look huge in comparison. I was excited to join the black student union and declare an African American Studies minor with hopes that I could soon begin to examine and lay to rest some of the insecurities that had resulted from the frequent and very racialized instances of trauma I had experienced in my K-12 education.

This idea of white supremacy as more than a rhetorical device or abstract sociological concept, but rather as physical and psychological trauma, is one that I have been toying around with a lot lately. In her essay “Healing Our Wounds: Liberatory Mental Health Care,” bell hooks argues that we must engage with and embrace

“an analysis of the impact of white supremacy on our lives that [includes] a recognition of both psychic trauma and the need for psychological recovery…. Much of the contemporary nonfiction writing by black scholars, particularly males, downplays the significance of trauma in order to emphasize triumph over adversity”

It is easy to treat the research of social scientists as somehow less than the research of other so-called “hard sciences,” because it has become socially acceptable to do so. It is easy to dismiss their findings as superfluous and influenced by bias because these individuals are often challenging deeply rooted social narratives and norms. Mainstream American culture signals to us that it is acceptable to argue with a black professional in the field of sociology about the definition of racism and that it is acceptable to then accuse her of participating in a structure indelibly rooted in a form of systemic power that she fundamentally cannot access as a result of both her race and gender.

This is the environment in which the president of my university can confidently insinuate that a black woman’s words are oppressive to a group of young (and mostly wealthy) white men despite the fact that none will be killed, none will lose jobs, and none will be silenced. These are only a few of the very real consequences of actually oppressive action and speech. These are the very real consequences that Dr. Grundy could face with just the flick of a wealthy white man’s finger.

Is it not violent to publicly pillory a black woman for the conclusions that her valid and valuable research has led her too?

Is this not a form of trauma?


For days now, conversations regarding Dr. Grundy’s tweets have occurred behind the safety of computer and phone screens in nearly every BU affiliated group of which I am a part. The comments made by students, alumni, and parents have often utilized coded language to obscure startlingly toxic sentiments. At every turn, black students and other students of color have resisted and challenged these narratives in both public and private forums; they have met ignorance with knowledge, tactlessness with poise, and angry accusations with well-formulated arguments.

Many have boldly confronted the thinly veiled racism of some of Grundy’s detractors.

And yet for black students, this decision is not without its costs.

My conversations and interactions with my black peers tell a story of fatigue and often despair. Even those students who have opted out of public discussions on the issue have confessed to me that they are both physically and mentally tired of having to justify the right to tell their stories. They are tired of having to do the hard work of overcoming racialized oppression with no one to depend on but themselves. They are frustrated with endless discussions, disillusioned with ineffective demonstrations, and disappointed with the deafening silence and crippling nature of an administration that would seem to be more concerned with lining its pockets than protecting and supporting its most vulnerable students.

Perhaps most disturbing is that our administration can fathom the “hurt” that young white males might feel in response to a few 140-character tweets about the culpability of white/male privilege, but cannot even begin to acknowledge or address the trauma that accompanies facing the full-brunt of white supremacy with little to no support.


Neither my high school nor my university has reached the point where they can speak of oppressive language and action directed towards folks of color as a form of trauma. Instead, those on the receiving end are often met with either apathetic silence or unfettered vitriol. In both cases, we are the ones who suffer. With both reactions, folks of color and others who lie at the intersection of potentially oppressed identities are further discouraged and prevented from speaking openly and passionately about their own truths. On some days, I can still hear the soft giggle of the teacher who flippantly dismissed the violent and racialized language scrawled into my desk. And when I think of that principal who prioritized the discomfort of the privileged administration and students over the trauma I had so recently experienced, those feelings of shame, inadequacy, and anger all come flooding back. With just a few small words steeped in the institutional apathy thrown down from my principal’s pedestal of white/male privilege, I had been denied a chance at healing.

I have photos of the words I found on that table saved on every single electronic device that I own. At this point I have every curve and color of those words in the photo memorized. If asked, I am sure I could replicate them with pen and paper, down to the very shadows in the wood. And still, every once in a while, I load them up. Three years later, and I am still reliving the moment in which I felt most silenced, most dehumanized, and most humiliated.

I can’t help but wonder if three years from now, Dr. Grundy will Google her name, scroll down to the comments section of some outdated article, and torture herself with the memory of such a directed and personalized attack. Her trauma, which she was forced to watch play out in the unsympathetic sphere of mainstream media, awakened in the entirety of our community memories of our own versions of racialized trauma. If when she revists these attacks, we are lucky enough to still have Dr. Grundy sharing her wisdom and knowledge in classrooms across our campus, I am confident that a community of black students and faculty will be standing beside her ready to offer the support of collective healing denied them by the Boston University Administration and white supremacist power structure to which all American institutions belong.

As a community, we must value the addition of an individual who not only personally understands the intricacies of this brand of trauma and its effects on both the collective and individual psyche, but one who also intellectually understands it. We must warmly welcome the opportunity to contextualize the suffering of our most vulnerable communities in a body of research that Dr. Grundy has dedicated her life to. If we can only accept the joint power of both the personal and the intellectual as viable forms of truth, I have high hopes that we can all begin to understand and to heal from the traumas that plague us.

Jailyn Gladney is a rising senior at Boston University where she is currently pursuing a degree in Sociology with a minor in African American Studies. She is also the founder of The Cornerstone, a daily e-newsletter focused on the top political and cultural news impacting US communities of color. You can find her tweeting at @jaiglad.

[Image by Tara Jacoby; Photo via the author]

Mitt Romney Has a Posse

Norm Macdonald Ends Final Stand-Up Set on Letterman With a Teary Goodbye

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Two of television’s most famously deadpan comedians shared a surprisingly touching moment on Friday, when Norm Macdonald closed his last stand-up set on Late Show with David Letterman with a tearful tribute to the man he called “the greatest talk show host who ever lived.”

“Mr. Letterman is not for the mawkish, and he has no truck for the sentimental,” said the former “Weekend Update” host in his emotional send-off. “If something is true it’s not sentimental. And I say in truth, I love you.”

You can watch Norm’s full (very good) set below:


Man Accused of Shooting at George Zimmerman Arrested

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Man Accused of Shooting at George Zimmerman Arrested

Matthew Apperson, accused of firing a gun at George Zimmerman earlier this week, was arrested on Friday night, WFTV reports. On Monday, Apperson’s lawyer said that he had acted in self-defense.

WFTV reports that Apperson has been charged with one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, one count of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, and one count of firing a deadly missile into an occupied conveyance. Apperson turned himself in to police on Friday night.

The men had met before, when they had a violent confrontation in September, police said. Apperson did not press charges at the time. During Monday’s incident, WFTV reports that Apperson allegedly told Zimmerman, “You owe me your life. The only reason I didn’t press charges on you is because I wanted to kill you myself.”

Police recovered two handguns from Apperson’s vehicle and one gun from Zimmerman’s. Both men had permits for their weapons.


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

Last year, for the first time, the 10 best-compensated CEOs in America all received at least $50 mil

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Last year, for the first time, the 10 best-compensated CEOs in America all received at least $50 million, the New York Times reports. Most of that was in stock, but some was in cash: “a form of compensation that does little to incentivize long-term performance.” Sounds like a raw deal.

Something Tells Us This Romney-Holyfield Fight Isn't On The Level

Notre Dame Student Falls to Death From Roof One Day Before Graduation

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Notre Dame Student Falls to Death From Roof One Day Before Graduation

A student due to graduate from the University of Notre Dame on Sunday died early this morning after falling off the roof of a sports arena, NBC News reports.

Officials say 21-year-old William Meckling was among “a small group” of students who gained access to the top of the school’s Joyce Athletic and Convocation Center on Saturday. Meckling then fell from the roof, which police noted was wet with rain. From the Chicago Tribune:

A Notre Dame Security Police lieutenant, on patrol near the center at 3:45 a.m., was approached by two students who said they needed his assistance. The officer found the victim unresponsive on the ground near Gate 7 of the center, on its east side. Emergency medical personnel also responded. CPR and other efforts to resuscitate the student were unsuccessful.

According to a statement by the university, the Centennial, Colorado native was a member of the school’s fencing team who studied mechanical engineering.

“Billy was a talented fencer and a determined worker on a very competitive sabre squad,” said coach Gia Kvaratskhelia. “More importantly, he was a great friend to all members of our program. A true Notre Dame man, his kindness and warmth impacted each and every one of us — and makes his loss all the more difficult.”

Authorities say no one else was injured in the accident.

[Image via WNDU]

Deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi Sentenced to Die

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Deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi Sentenced to Die

Ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and more than 100 other prisoners were sentenced to death on Saturday, the New York Times reports. Morsi was on trial for having fled prison during the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.

Morsi was Egypt’s first democratically-elected leader. He was deposed in 2013, after a year in office. In a statement, Amr Darrag, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was also a cabinet minister under Morsi, said that the sentencing was a symbol “of the dark shadow of authoritarianism that is now cast back over Egypt.”

From the Times:

The case against Mr. Morsi centers on a prison break that took place at the peak of the revolt against Mr. Mubarak. Mr. Morsi and other Brotherhood officials had been detained, taken from their homes or from street protests, along with many other Egyptians swept up in the turmoil. Mr. Morsi had been held for two days at Wadi Natroun prison, on the highway between Cairo and Alexandria.

The escape came on the night of Jan. 28, 2011, after a day of street battles between the police and protesters. In the chaos of the uprising, some of the guards at Wadi Natroun had abandoned their posts. Armed men overcame the prison’s remaining guards, freeing thousands of inmates, including Mr. Morsi and other Islamist leaders.

Mr. Morsi announced his escape in a call from a satellite phone to the news channel Al Jazeera. Neither before nor during his tenure as president did he face charges over the episode.

The 105 defendants sentenced on Saturday include around 70 Palestinians, the Associated Press reports, many tried in absentia. Prosecutors alleged that factions from Palestine’s Hamas party—a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood—infiltrated Egypt during the 2011 revolt against Mubarak and freed nearly 20,000 prisoners.

A Hamas spokesman in Gaza, Sami Abu Zuhri, told the AP that “some of those convicted were killed before the Egyptian revolution and others are serving prison terms in Israel.” The death sentences will be referred to the grand mufti, Egypt’s highest Sunni Muslim religious authority, for his opinion. A hearing is scheduled for June 2nd.

“In light of the politically charged environment within which the Morsi prosecutions are taking place, the perception by some may be that these trials are more about political retaliation than bona fide criminal activity,” Mona El-Ghobashy, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University, wrote in an email to the Times. “The self-appointed permanent guardians of the state, judiciary and military are messaging that the revolution’s political results (free elections, civilian president, right to protest) were unnatural, unreal and unsustainable.”

“They’re saying to Egyptians: This whole business of democracy and choosing your rulers is a fantasy. That’s not the way power works here.”


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

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