"It's so good," the actress Christine Baranski told a film crew at the Four Seasons last night, "to have another paper in town." The paper in question was the New York Observer, celebrating 25 years of publishing. The camera crew was from the New York Observer, reporting on itself.

In the introduction to The Kingdom of New York, the 2009 Observer anthology, longtime editor Peter Kaplan—who resigned while the book was making its way to the presses—wrote that to the paper, the city "was the world's richest coolest burg, a never-never land on a perpetual Thursday night." Now Thursday was profoundly literal. Paparazzi flanked the entrance, waiting for Katie Holmes. In attendance were Hannah Bronfman, Ray Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Cory Booker, Dan Abrams, Ron Perelman, Spike Lee, Joel Klein, and Rupert and Wendi Murdoch.

The dining room was bathed in golden light, shaded by four blooming cherry trees. Arthur Carter, the paper's founder, was there, and Kaplan, and Kaplan's Twitter ventriloquists, Jim Windolf and Peter Stevenson—men who had made the paper what it was, or what it had been. Winding through the crowd was the paper's latest editor, Ken Kurson, a friend of the paper's current owner, Jared Kushner, and a former Giuliani operative. He didn't speak to many people, but David Carr rubbed his shoulder in greeting.

At opposite ends of the restaurant there were two stations where guests could have caricatures done on blank Observers, so that it looked as if they were the subject of a meaty takedown. This week's actual print edition of the Observer featured a special pullout section profiling "Influential New Yorkers," including Ivanka Trump, who is married to Jared Kushner.

"That's the thing about genetics," the paper wrote, in a capsule entry praising its owner's wife's business acumen (published under the byline of "The Editors").

Genetics! Breeding, if you will. There was a time, when the Observer maintained a careful and admired balance between chronicler of and caller-of-bullshit about the elite, that the marriage of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner might have been the Observer story of the decade. The merging of the bloodlines of brass-plated businessman-carney Donald Trump and the New Jersey real estate mogul turned blackmailer turned convicted felon Charles Kushner—it would have been a spectacle, but the Observer was in no position to spectate.

Thus New York magazine had quickly broken down the Observer's list of New York's "Rising Stars," pointing out that beyond Ivanka Trump, the list was padded with Jared Kushner's friends, business partners, and cronies. The future belongs to the children of the past.

Meanwhile there were tiny fish tacos and canapes made from hollowed-out cucumber slices. Guests bolted mushroom caps with meatballs inside, because the waiters weren't sticking around to take back the spoons that held the '50s-ish fungal treats.

And there was Donald Trump himself, in a blue suit, white shirt, and shiny blue tie. He posed for a picture with a woman on each arm. Did he think his daughter had only made her husband's newspaper's list because of her connections? "Probably not, she deserves to be there," he replied without hesitating. "She's amazing, she's beautiful." In person, Trump somehow looked and acted less realistic than he does on television.

Soon Trump was gone, part of the hit-and-run bold-name circuit. Katie Couric came and went. "I just can't," she said, when greeted by a non-famous journalist. Google chairman Eric Schmidt—who has invested a bunch of money with Jared Kushner's younger brother Joshua, head of the investment firm Thrive Capital—left before Couric. Charles Kushner, Jared's father, who made lively Observer headlines and spent two years in prison for hiring a prostitute to have sex with his brother-in-law so he could send a tape of the encounter to his sister in an attempt to obstruct an investigation into his financial misconduct at the family real estate business, would stay until the end.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived and was buttonholed by Nana Meriwether, the current Miss U.S.A. They discussed Baltimore, where she was from and where Bloomberg went to college, and South Africa, where she was born.

"You're very pretty and you should enjoy it," Bloomberg told her. "It's something you'll look back on all your life."

Then it was time for Jared Kushner to make a speech. Donald Trump Jr. slapped him on the shoulder and said, "Go to work, man." Kushner sidled up to a microphone on the staircase overlooking the room and placed his feet wider than his hips as he spoke. Kushner is 32, but he doesn't project adulthood very well, and his voice is high-pitched. He looks like Bruce Wayne, but when he opens his mouth, he sounds like Michael Jackson.

Nor, for a newspaper mogul, is he particularly good with words. He was admitted to Harvard, to the surprise of people who knew him in high school, after a very large donation to the university by his father. On the subject of his smarts, one former Observer employee said, Kushner manages to be both self-deprecating and menacing—confessing his academic weakness the way a man in the forest clutching a Bowie knife might confess to you that he feels hungry.

Here is a passage from his address:

"You know when I bought the paper, today the media world is much bigger than it was seven years ago. The landscape has changed dramatically and when I think about how it is today, even seven years ago, it's much much different than the one that was twenty-five years ago when Arthur, who is also here tonight, who is a truly brilliant and a very, very special man, decided to start this paper. He really had audacity to do that. And I think that, as the owner of the paper, the thing that I try the hardest to do is really put this organization in a place where while the content quality, the mediums will change, what we stand for in terms of being there as a paper that really is there for the truth and is a paper of journalism and producing great content and really loving the city of New York, we'll be able to find the next twenty five years."

Mayor Bloomberg spoke next, lowering the microphone so deeply that he accidently turned it off. "When I first heard about this twenty-fifth birthday party," he said, after he'd turned it back on. "I thought, 'Wow, Jared, you're growing up so fast!'"

He praised the paper with a series of adjectives. It is, he said, "ambitious," "opinionated," "independent," "sophisticated" and "street smart." "They share some incredible, sometimes unbelievable stories, that ya just gotta know about," the mayor said.

The mayor had said that the Observer today is better than it had ever been. Kaplan, approached for comment on that proposition, declined. Gawker owner Nick Denton attempted to goad him into a response, but Kaplan brushed by him with a laugh.

Then it was time to cut the salmon-colored, four-tiered cake, featuring the Observer's logo, the trenchcoated man watching the sunrise—or the sunset—with a paper under his arm that may or may not be the Observer. Kushner stood next to the company's new CEO, another brother-in-law, smiled, and posed for a picture.

Behold, another hypocritical politician for us to laugh at.

New York Assemblyman Steve Katz is the Putnam County politician who just last year voted down a bill to legalize medical marijuana in New York. Now fast forward to yesterday at 10 a.m., when Katz was pulled over for doing 80 in a 65 on I-87. The officer who pulled Katz over reportedly smelled pot in the car, at which point he discovered that Katz had a small bag of weed in his possession.

It's too bad Katz, who is a Republican, is so anti-marijuana in his professional life, because he sounds like he'd be a blast to smoke a joint with. According to the Wall Street Journal, he's got some wonderful stories from his former career as a vet:

This is not Mr. Katz's first brush with the law. A veterinarian by training, he revealed last year that he had two prior arrests for illegally dumping the body of a dead dog and an alleged attack on a dog in his care. Both cases were ultimately dismissed.

In an interview last year with City and State newspaper, Mr. Katz said he agreed to dispose of a deceased German Shepherd as a favor to an elderly patient and dumped the body only after the clinic that was supposed to receive it was locked. The corpse, he explained, had started to liquefy in his car.

"It was starting to ooze on my daughter's Barbie doll collection," he said.

The second arrest came after a Chihuahua he was treating at his veterinary clinic bit him and the dog fell to the floor when he tried to shake him off, Mr. Katz told the newspaper. The dog's owners pressed charges, and Mr. Katz described the Chihuahua as "meaner than a dirt snake."

[Image via Wikipedia]

When a Georgia mother's 2-month-old baby suddenly stopped breathing, there was only one thing she could think to do: Scream at the top of her lungs.

"I had him in my arms and still screaming over and over," recalled Susanna Rohm of Marietta. "Then I ran outside. I saw two boys playing across the street and I yelled, 'go ask your parents to call 911.'"

Ethan Wilson, 10, and Rocky Hurt, 9, called 911 themselves, and then Rocky did Rohm one better: He taught her how to perform CPR.

Noticing that Rohm was attempting to revive her child incorrectly, he immediately stepped in and guided her through the procedure.

"I told her to push on the baby's chest five to 10 times with only two fingers, tilt back the baby's head, plug the baby's nose and breathe into the baby's mouth," Rocky instructed Rohm. "He said it so confidently that I just listened to him right away," Rohm told 11Alive.

Seconds later, baby Isaiah began screaming. "I told her that's a good sign because the baby's breathing," Rocky said.

Paramedics soon arrive and rushed the infant to a nearby hospital where he was diagnosed with sleep apnea.

Asked where they learned CPR, Rocky and Ethan said they memorized the steps illustrated on a cafeteria poster at their elementary school.

"We just wanted to know just in case it happened," Ethan told NBC News, "but we never knew that we'd have to do that."

[screengrab via MyFoxAtlanta, video via Today]

After Allen Engstrom accidentally left his iPad on a plane back in February, he was unable to track it down, and, as Senator Chuck Grassley might say, assumed iPad lost.

That is, until the iPad tracked itself down thanks to an unthinking thief whose selfies had begun popping up on in Engstrom's iCloud thanks to Photo Stream.

"It's just like I'll wake up one day and they'll be new pictures there and I'm like oh my gosh, she has no idea," Engstrom of North Little Rock, Arkansas, told local CBS affiliate THV 11.

Engstrom, who points out that "Ugly McCrazy Shirt" (as he calls her) is most definitely a thief considering his name and contact information are etched on the back of the device, soon began posting the selfies he was receiving to his Facebook page for others to share in his amusement.

"I have no problem with putting it on Facebook, because hey, it's fun for me and it's apparently fun for a lot of other people," Engstrom said. "And there's always the chance that someone will say hey, I know who that is. And I want my iPad back."

Despite reports to the contrary, Engstrom says he has yet to learn any more about the identity of the iPad snaker.

However, as soon as he finished saying that, a Facebook user asked Engstrom to email him, claiming he had "some info" for him.

[photos via Facebook]

Every year on March 17, the people of the world congratulate Alec Baldwin's 17-year-old daughter Ireland on her new modeling contract by celebrating St. Patrick's Day. Unfortunately, in their attempts to observe St. Paddy's day, many people accidentally observe "St. Patty's Day."

"Patty" is a woman's name. The nickname used for a man named Patrick, for example, the man named Patrick who is credited with converting great swaths of Ireland to Christianity, is "Paddy," from the Irish Padraig.

Calling St. Patrick's Day "St. Patty's Day" is like referring to Christmas Eve as "Christie's Eve" or Hanukkah as "Helen's Festival of Lights."

How Did Padraig Become Patty?

Just as the process that transforms shamrocks into McFlurries is murky, so is it unclear exactly where or when Padraig's feast day became Patty's tea party. The confusion obviously has something to do with the fact that the Irish name Padraig is Anglicized Patrick. But the English nickname is "Pat," not "Paddy."

"Patty" is probably an American thing, like a McDonald's hamburger patty.

Isn't "Paddy" a Slur?

While it's true that "paddy" came into fashion as a slur against Irish people in the 19th century, it's also true that Paddy is just a regular old name still in use today. You'll have to go by intent on this one. Calling a person "a paddy" because he's Irish is offensive. Calling a person "Paddy" because his name is Paddy, is not. Calling St. Patrick "Paddy" might upset some people since he's a canonized saint and not just some guy you know.

If someone gets rankled by your use of "St. Paddy," revert back to "St. Patrick," which is more correct, not "St. Patty," which is less. (And don't get into a big fight on St. Patrick's Day. It's a happy day.)

I Still Want to Celebrate St. Patty's Day

That's great. You can do that too. Saint Patricia was born into a noble, possibly royal family (some sources describe her as the niece or granddaughter of Constantine the Great) in Constantinople (now Istanbul). When Patricia—"Patty," to you—was a teenager, she fled to Rome to become a Bride of Christ (nun). Later, she left for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Along the way, her ship was caught in a storm and she and her party were shipwrecked on a tiny island near Naples, where she established a chichi prayer community. She fell ill and died at age 21.

According to legend, over 500 years later, a knight paying his respects to Trish's remains decided he wanted a souvenir and plucked out one of her teeth, because obviously. Miraculously, blood started pouring out of the long-dead cavity—blood that nuns preserved in two glass vials. Today that blood is display at the San Gregorio Armeno Church in Naples, where it is said to turn back liquid every Tuesday morning at around 9:30 and every August 25th (Patricia's feast day).

All of which is to say: Celebrate St. Patty's Day on August 25th.

No, I Mean I Just Want to Call St. Patrick's Day "St. Patty's Day"

Well then you are just being willfully wrong. We have offered you knowledge and you have taken it, examined it, and deliberately rejected it. Cast it out like so many snakes from Ireland. (By the way: Ireland never had snakes. The "snakes" St. Patrick banished were probably the ones used in pagan symbolism, after he converted the druids to Christianity.)

If you're American, the words are even pronounced in the same way. We're just asking that you adopt the correct spelling, which, incidentally, is already phonetic.

So What Can I Call It?

You can call it "St. Patrick's Day." You can call it "St. Paddy's Day." You can call it "St. Pat's." You can call it "Maewyn Succat's Day" (after Saint Patrick's birthname). You can call it "March 17th." You can even call it "Liberalia," an ancient Roman holiday also celebrated on March 17 is probably much closer to modern American St. Patrick's Day celebrations in spirit. (A procession of people carried a giant penis through the countryside, and everyone sang dirty songs and left food everywhere.)

Don't call it "St. Patty's Day".

[Padraig / St. Patricia Parish // National Geographic // Image by Jim Cooke]

A panel on rebutting charges of racism at a conservative political conference went exactly was well as you might expect when one audience member suggested slaves should have been thankful to their masters for "feeding... and housing" them, earning scattered applause and a collective chorus of "Ooooooohh....!"

The audience member, a North Carolina gentleman named Scott Terry, wanted to know if Republicans should endorse segregation (Scott: no).

After the presenter, K. Carl Smith of Frederick Douglass Republicans, answered by referencing a letter by Frederick Douglass forgiving his former master, [Terry] said "For what? For feeding him and housing him?" Several people in the audience cheered and applauded Terry's outburst.

After the exchange, Terry muttered under his breath, "why can't we just have segregation?"

ThinkProgress, bless their hearts, caught up with Terry later, and was just as charming as you could hope:

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party's roots, to which Terry responded, "I didn't know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public."

The panel, TP reports, "continued to be racked in controversy." It is unclear if the attendees did, in fact, learn how to "trump the race card." The Atlantic Wire's Elspeth Reeve has a full report.

[ThinkProgress, The Atlantic Wire]

Yesterday, the Boston Phoenix announced that the alternative-newsweekly would stop publishing after 47 years. I learned this by phone, from someone who'd been a colleague of mine there, while the paper was experimenting with editors, before its final stretch of apparent stability.

I called Carly Carioli, the paper's last editor ever and someone I'd worked with closely. He'd been at the Phoenix for 20 years, quitting college to take a job there and working his way up. When I reached him, he and some of the staffers had been drinking whiskey in the office's online-radio studio and blasting Lana Del Rey's Born To Die. "I feel like someone just killed my best friend," he said.

The Phoenix was historically important, as everyone is saying today: a breaker of stories, a model for a certain kind of loose-jointed newspaper journalism, an incubator of talent. Charles Pierce of Esquire and Grantland, who is one of the standard entries—Susan Orlean, Charlie Pierce, David Denby—on the list of distinguished graduates of the Phoenix, wrote that it was "where the soul of newspapering came to reside," which was largely as true in fact as it was false in sentiment.

That is, the Phoenix was a business operation, whose owner, Stephen Mindich, showed few signs to most observers that he gave a fuck about its soul. There was an endless cycle of alienating people and selling out—and being denounced for selling out—once Mindich wrested the Phoenix name away from an idealistic countercultural collective and crushed the Real Paper, the idealists' subsequent bid to compete against it. Sex ads paid a lot of the freight. The publication produced such an impressive roster of ex-employees mostly by buying them cheap and working them till they jumped up the professional ladder to get away. But while they were there, grumbling at the business side, they were writing, in ways and at lengths that better-funded journalists couldn't touch. There was a paper to fill.

Not everyone left for bigger or ostensibly nicer things. A core of misfits saw what the deal was—that it was, in fact, a more blunt version of the deal on offer everywhere—and built their lives around it. The Phoenix was not a post-collegiate journalism boot camp, for them, or an object of distant and fond (but distant) nostalgia. It was their newspaper.

There was the rail-thin cop reporter who cursed like a sailor and left work daily with the janitor, a cartoon of a Boston sports fan who sold pot while he emptied trash cans. The prototypical vampiric music editor who was immeasurably aloof and, pretty much, proudly, a giant know-it-all raving asshole. The bitterly meticulous arts editor, a man who, it was widely reported by the males on staff, would mutter "motherfucker" violently to himself at the urinal, a man who once broke down into a high-pitched screeching fit because someone had absconded his veggie-burger sandwich from the communal fridge.

And there was Clif Garboden. Until 2009, Clif was the Phoenix's senior managing editor, and he had been on staff for more than 30 years. He sat in a corner of the Phoenix newsroom, hunched at his computer with the posture of a question mark. His face had no angles. He wore sweaters over collared shirts and khaki pants. He enjoyed smoking and grumbling. His 1989 Buick Park Avenue, which he bought for $6000 with 43,186 miles on the odometer, was named Jerome. (I know this because he devoted an entire essay to the car.) He once received a death threat from a mime.

From 1973 until 2009, Clif wrote something called Hot Dots, a weekly column buried in the back of the arts section that ostensibly annotated television listings, but evolved into a far more extraordinary collection of one-liners, political and social commentary, and running jokes. Many weeks, the best writing in the paper was buried in tiny type. A few selected listings:

4:00 (56) Harvey (movie). Nobody ever said anything small in a bar.
8:00 (2) Nova: Why Planes Crash. Because nobody bothers to catch them.
11:00 (38) The House That Screamed (movie). Stayed on the market for three years.

Clif didn't see the alternative press as a professional gateway. It was his destination. Where he sat, the paper's supposed purpose and ideology were real things. As a student of Boston University, he'd protested Kent State. He'd seen Coltrane live in 1966, and as office lore repeated, he'd even once smoked a joint with the Rolling Stones. He came from the days when being a part of alternative media Meant Something: being able to ridicule mediocrity, challenge convention, and say "Fuck you" without asterisks. This wasn't an affectation, or a style, or a posture—as it is with Vice or with roughly 90 percent of the voices on the internet—it was to him the way a smart person with a sense of justice and a moral conscience could sleep at night.

To Clif, the collection of people around him, for all their faults and foibles, was something very special. They could see the hypocrisies in the world and felt an existential obligation to do something about them—and more than that, to nurture and to recruit people who could do the same, his kind of people.

By that, he meant a few things: Smart People Who Gave a Fuck, People With a Work Ethic, People With Talent, but also, in some cases, People From Blue-Collar/Low Income Families. People like Clif himself, a kid from the bad neighborhood in Pittsburgh, who once likened his socio-economic escape to sneaking across the tracks and under barbed wire. People like Chris, a brilliantly witty British writer who'd spent years working as a mover and started his entry-level writing job answering phones as an editorial assistant at the age of 32. People who otherwise would've ended up restaurant staff or retail employees or other assorted cogs because they didn't have parents who could help with the rent while they struggled to become writers. People like me.

Growing up, I was not raised to "follow my dreams." I was told, in very clear terms, to limit my expectations because of money. Only one of my eight older siblings graduated from college. I was specifically instructed not to apply to my top choice of college because we couldn't afford it—the rationale being that if I did get in, I would just be disappointed, so I shouldn't even bother. When I finally did go, I was told every semester was my last. We just didn't have money and that was it.

So it never occurred to me that a regular person like me could be a writer or a journalist or anything otherwise creative. There was no familiar precedent. Clif, in some ways, became my precedent, after a day at an internship fair, I approached the Boston Phoenix table on a whim and just said: Hey, I have no experience, but I love this newspaper and would like to intern for you. It was a longshot, like asking out someone you've crushed on for years. But the Phoenix had a soft spot for free labor, and I was offered an internship under his wing.

This did not immediately unlock a supply of warmth. When Clif acknowledged someone's existence at all, he was bluntly honest. Once, when I was still an intern, trying so desperately to impress that I devoted my senior-year winter break to badgering operational hours out of hostesses for a hopelessly outdated Dining Guide, I came into the office after a visit to Supercuts. "You cut your hair," Clif said. He shrugged. "We like longer hair, but that's OK." He walked away.

So if you didn't understand Clif's affectionately gruff sensibility, you probably wouldn't last, and if you somehow did last, he ignored you. But if he thought you were "smart"—in his mind, intelligence was next to Godliness—he would do everything within his power to praise you and to support you and to emphasize your strengths publicly and anecdotally, though also noting matter-of-factly to you, your colleagues, and anyone else within earshot that you would never get what you deserved. Because, well, that's why we were all here: The world was fucked and the good guys never got what they deserved.

For whatever reason, Clif protected me. He kept making excuses to keep me in the building and giving me projects until the powers that be could finally offer me a full-time job, which led to me getting to write. He sensed that my life would turn out very differently if they let me fend for myself.

One time, I went to a writer's conference in Chicago, where a prominent journalist Clif knew was the speaker. He handed me a white envelope. "Make sure he gets this," he said. On the first night, after ingesting gallons of alcohol, I worked up the courage to deliver it and walked away. He called me back: Did I know what was in there? I did not. He showed me a note that said: "The person who gave you this is smart and very talented. Treat her well."

In the end, the cold business caught up to Clif too. In 2009, the Phoenix laid him off, after his three decades of service, in the first of a series of cost-cutting measures that would point to the end. Less than two years later, Clif died of complications from cancer, at the age of 62. The good guys never got what they deserved.

Susan Orlean told the Boston Globe about the Phoenix's closure: "It's like finding out your college has gone bankrupt and is gone. I am a child of the alt-weekly world, and I feel like it has played such an important role in journalism as we know it today."

Enough people had believed in this mentorship and nurturing and idealism that the paper lasted 47 years. Carly, who admired Clif's mission deeply, believed in it so much that he stuck with it longer than nearly anyone else. He was the family member who stayed back home to nurse a dying relative while the rest of us selfish pricks took off and left him saddled with the bills.

In his sendoff, Carly wrote:

When I took over as editor in chief, a job I'd dreamed about for nearly 20 years, I made a solemn oath uttered only to myself that I would not be the last editor of the Phoenix. To my colleagues, past and present: I'm sorry I wasn't able to see it through. I first set foot here in 1993, still in college, and I've spent half my life in the service of this particular way of making journalism; it's been a blessing to spend that long among the most talented, creative, and passionate people I've ever met. I can't begin to describe how much it hurts to lose this.

So yes, yesterday, we lost the paper whose name appeared on so many imposing resumes. We lost the paper that bred Pulitzer Prize winners, that was responsible for breaking the Catholic Church sex-abuse scandal. But we also lost a place where kids who were never supposed to be writers and reporters and photographers and illustrators and storytellers could start out by refusing to leave the building, people whose parents didn't have the money to help with rent while they struggled to make their long-term pathways better, and try, however minutely, to change things.

What we lost Thursday was Clif Garboden's dream. The world is a far worse place without it. Fuck.

Besides his downright primitive views on LGBT issues, the most potent critiques against the newly installed Pope Francis have had to do with his potentially gruesome role in Argentina's so-called Dirty War. Today there is more information about Pope Francis and his time in the conflict, and yet exactly what happened remains murkier than ever.

In a book called El Silencio by Argentinean journalist Horacio Verbitsky, Verbitsky details an incident in 1976 in which Pope Francis, known then as Jorge Bergoglio, was complicit in the kidnapping of two priests, Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics. Verbitsky's reporting claims that Bergoglio ordered Yorio and Jalics to stop their work with the poor in Argentina's slums. When the men refused, the military government imprisoned them for a period of five months.

Yorio, who died in 2000 of natural causes, went to his grave believing Bergoglio had hung him and Jalics out to dry. Jalics, on the other hand, went mum. According to the Associated Press: "Yorio accused Bergoglio of effectively handing them over to the death squads by declining to tell the regime that he endorsed their work. Jalics refused to discuss it after moving into seclusion in a German monastery."

This morning, Jalics finally broke his silence, releasing a statement via the German Jesuit order where he now resides. Though Jalics still won't comment on whether Bergoglio had a hand in his kidnapping, abandoning him to the junta, he says he has "reconciled to the events" with Bergoglio.

Starting in 1957 I lived in Buenos Aires. In the year 1974, moved by an inner wish to live the gospel and to draw attention to the terrible poverty, and with the permission of Archbishop Aramburu and the then-Provincial Fr. Jorge Mario Bergoglio I moved together with a confrere into a "Favela," one of the city's slums. From there we continued our teaching at the university.

In the civil-war-like situation back then, the military junta killed roughly 30,000 people within one to two years, leftist guerrillas as well as innocent civilians. The two of us in the slum had contact neither with the junta nor with the guerrillas. Partly due to the lack of information and through targeted misinformation our situation was also misunderstood within the church. At this time we lost our connection to one of our lay coworkers who had joined the guerrillas. After he was taken prisoner nine months later by the soldiers of the junta and questioned, they learned that he had been connected with us. Under the assumption that we also had something to do with the guerrillas we were arrested. After five days of interrogation the officer who led the questioning dismissed us with the words, "Fathers, you were not guilty. I will ensure that you can return to the poor district." In spite of this pledge, we were then inexplicably held in custody, blindfolded and bound, for five months. I cannot comment on the role of Fr. Bergoglio in these events.

After we were freed I left Argentina. Only years later did we have the chance to discuss what had happened with Fr. Bergoglio, who in the meantime had been named archbishop of Buenos Aires. Afterwards we together celebrated a public mass and solemnly embraced. I am reconciled to the events and view them from my side as concluded.

I wish Pope Francis God's rich blessing for his office.

For his part, Bergoglio—now Pope Francis—says he actually saved Yorio and Jalics' lives, even "persuading dictator Jorge Videla's family priest to call in sick so that Bergoglio could say Mass in the junta leader's home, where he privately appealed for mercy."

The Vatican continues to sternly reject any accusation that says its new leader conspired with a dictatorial regime, but at this point it seems impossible to get to the real bottom of the story. The truth now lies between Pope Francis, Jalics, Yorio, and their god.

Update: This post's headline has been amended to clarify that Bergoglio is not accused of helping to kidnap the priests, but rather declining to intervene.

[Image via AP]

The most aggressive email we got this week was from someone who really just wanted to be part of it all. The rest—well, they were not so happy that we seemed to be negative, but maybe that's explained by another person who wrote in complaining that there is no one handsome in the media world anymore. But was there ever? Sigh. Well read them for yourselves, our fan/hate mail this week:

Why do we criticize in the face of ambition?

Subject: Gawker Rhetoric

Body: Hello,

I have been reading Gawker on and off the past few months, and more recently I became aware of something.  In many articles the writers will have a very negative rhetoric towards people or events.  It seems when there is an ambitious event or person the writers only doubt what they can do and hinder accomplishment.  The pessimism is repulsive and I probably will not read Gawker anymore.  

Regards,
-Steve

In which you are maybe insulting our looks—but actually you might be talking about book publishing, not journalism, in which case you trust us to be a judge of handsomeness, so thank you!

Subject: Good looking people in publishing?

Body:
I attended AWP for the first time last weekend, and I naively expected to see at least a modicum of good looking, sophisticated men there. With the exception of some gorgeous gay poets, I was sorely disappointed. A cursory google search led me to your 2007 exploration of the subject, and I was wondering if the general consensus is that the pickings have gotten even slimmer. Are the days of dapper, handsome publishing men over? Did those days ever exist?

My Best,
Lisa

Brian hopes that he can insult-impress his way into a job.

Subject: Fwd: Gossip Reporter

Body: Hi.

Here's a tip:
Give me a fucking job.

I have news chops.
And I'm a major smartass.

Oh yeah, and fuck you.

Thanks for your time.
(I know how fucking valuable it is.)

-Brian

And Orin is encouraged by Hamilton about the face of job market for writers.

Subject:
Body: Wow,  if you can get a job writing,  I guess anyone can.
- Orin

A postcard with neat hand-writing and what appears to be a quality ink pen told us they know about some obscure stuff.

dear Gawker,
I know things others don't.
Lovely,
Tripp Nasty
denver, Colorado
"woot! woot!" goes the owl through the woods.

One last one from a gentleman:

Subject: can someone please
Body: tell me who writes the headlines for the gawker pieces so that i can buy them a beer?

Thanks for the offer, man. That's it. Happy Friday.

News that Reuters deputy social media editor Matthew Keys had been indicted for allegedly conspiring with Anonymous shocked his colleagues in online media. Keys has always seemed like a normal guy who constantly tweets news links. But in the wake of his arrest, details about his online past have emerged that make his entanglement with Anonymous seem less out of character.

Yesterday Keys was charged with conspiring with Anonymous members to hack an ex-employer in December, 2010. Keys was suspended from Reuters today.

It turns out Keys has had a history of unusual internet behavior, as pointed out by BuzzFeed. The troll knowledgebase Encyclopedia Dramatica outlines a long list (NSFW) of his alleged internet escapades, which he carried out under a number of handles including madrigalskylark, angelofadia and sunriseagain. Encyclopedia Dramatica is far from a reliable source, but the fact that he has such a long and detailed entry suggests he was mixed up in a seedy online crowd.

In the mid-2000s, under the handle MadrigalSkylark on Livejournal, Keys was apparently a notorious troll, known for starting drama. Encyclopedia Dramatica contends that MadrigalSkylark was "known for his attention whore antics, leaving phony suicide notes, passive-aggressive bitchiness," and more. Some of the allegations on Encyclopedia Dramatic include that he was obsessed with the Los Angeles radio station KLLC, to the point that the station had to publicly declare he was not an employee. Keys was also apparently banned from Daviswiki, community-powered news and information resource on Davis, California after trolling the site with a number of sockpuppet accounts.

"I don't believe *anyone else* has ever been nominated for a ban on the wiki except for Matthew Keys who started purposefully vandalizing it and trying to get banned," wrote a poster on Davis Wiki

At the same time, it seems Keys was struggling with personal issues. In 2005 he posted to Livejournal a post post called "A Cry for Help," in which he wrote: "I'm really not deserving of anyone's love. No wonder I don't have any friends. Look at how I act! I need help. What's wrong with me?!"

Others have alleged creepy behavior on gay dating sites from the time. Gawker commenter dogmaticequation says he knew Keys online "years ago" and wrote that Keys, who is openly gay:

Would make life hell for people who refused to date him. He would stalk and use his tenuous grasp of early social networking to create shitty websites and Craigslist posts full of lies and material created to defame people he didn't like.

He did this to me, he kept trying to get me to go out with him. I refused. Instead of attacking me he went after one of my friends (who he thought was my Boyfriend). He posted fake profiles on dating sights, and posts on Craigslist with his image, with copy that stated that he had herpes, HIV and other diseases.

Juding from posts on his various blogs he seemed to have kept relatively online from 2006 until late 2010. It was then that he reached out to Anonymous hackers, in a move that ultimately led to his indictment. Keys told me at the time that he sought out an Anonymous IRC chat room, and offered to use his journalistic experience as a press liaison for them, after reading about the group's attacks on credit card companies that had cut off Wikileaks in December, 2010. He was then brought into the fold by a group of elite hackers.

Here is how he described his infiltration to me in a phone interview in December, 2010:

"The day that the decentralized group started hacking Visa's and Mastercard's websites with DDoS attacks, I went into their IRC room and wound up befriending someone who belonged to this higher ranking group called the Internet Feds. I identified myself as a former journalist, which was why they allowed me in that group. [to act as a press liaison.] It was me and about 14 people, mostly hackers."

(Keys reached out to me after Gawker was hacked by a team of hackers made up of Internet Feds members.)

But Keys said he'd always planned on exposing the group. Over the course of the next few months, he did provide Gawker with inside information and chat transcripts relating to the so-called Internet Feds, an Anonymous subgroup out of which the notorious Lulzsec gang emerged. His defense claims he was acting solely as an undercover journalist. "He's being prosecuted for that, for going to get the story," one of Keys' attorneys, told the Huffington Post.

Prosecutors say he went much further than that. Under the handle AESCracked, he allegedly gave hackers the login credentials related to his job at a radio station owned by the Tribune Company, which owns the Los Angeles Times, after he was fired. The hackers allegedly used the logins to deface a Los Angeles Times story among other hacks. Now Keys faces 25 years in prison.

Although he's suspended from Reuters, Keys has been keeping his 22,000 followers up to date on his case on Twitter. On Twitter he announced that he's tapped lawyers Jay Leiderman, who has been involved in a number of high-profile Anonymous cases, and Tor Ekelund, who defended the notorious internet troll Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer, to represent him. When a Twitter user named Rob Engelsman tweeted that he'd been discussing Keys' at the bar with friends, Keys tweeted, "where's the bar?"

Hyper-prolific rapper Lil Wayne is currently being given his last rites at L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Hospital after suffering a series of seizures, if TMZ is to be believed. But close friends of Wayne's say Weezy is "alive and well." As the world awaits more news, here is the gist of what's happening.

Wayne's recent troubles began Tuesday night, when he was rushed to the hospital after having an initial seizure. Doctors were able to stabilize him at the time, and he was released on Wednesday. Just a few hours later, however, Wayne's bodyguard found him unconscious and again raced him to get medical attention. That time, attempts to stabilize the 30-year-old were ineffective. According to TMZ, Wayne was then "placed in restraints because he was shaking uncontrollably," and he is now in a medically induced coma.

Responding to TMZ's grim reports, however, Wayne's friends and fellow rappers Mack Maine and Birdman have tweeted that TMZ is wildly wrong and that Wayne is "alive and well":

Regardless of what his condition is at present, TMZ sources say Wayne's seizures can probably be attributed his abuse of codeine "Sizzurp," on which he reportedly binged before being taken to the hospital:

Sources say there's evidence Wayne went on a Sizzurp binge after being released Wednesday, because doctors found high amounts of codeine in his system.

We're told Wanye's stomach was pumped 3 times to flush the drugs from his system.

Update: A message from Wayne's Twitter account:

[Image via AP]

Meeting with journalists this morning, Pope Francis laid out his vision for the Catholic church, which includes cutting spending on ornate ceremony and instead spending that money on the poor. He urged excited fellow-Argentines to skip the costly trip to Rome to visit the first non-European Pope in almost 1,300 years, and instead give that money to the poor.

"Oh, how I would like a poor Church, and for the poor," he told the gathered journalists. He explained the reason he took the name, Francis, after St. Francis of Assissi, was because of St. Francis's devotion to the poor and love of animal life. On climate change, the Pope remarked, "Right now, we don't have a very good relation with creation."

Still, questions linger about the new Pope's actions during the Argentine dirty wars in the 70's and 80's, when priests were kidnapped by the brutal military junta. The Pope has claimed he helped free the priests, while Argentine journalists have reported he was complicit in their kidnapping.

On the subject of those meddling journalists, the Pope has asked that they "always try to better understand the true nature of the Church, and even its journey in the world, with its virtues and with its sins".

Benjamin J. Rhodes was just a run-of-the-mill New York prep school kid working on a novel, when the events of 9/11 changed him forever. Now an intervention-favoring deputy national security adviser for the President, Rhodes, 35, is filled with anguish at the suffering of people the world over, trying to be free:

"It's hard for Ben in the same way it's hard for the president," said Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, who worked closely with Mr. Rhodes in his previous job as the principal deputy national security adviser. "He cares about people. You can't see what's happening in Syria and not be torn by it. At the same time, he's very realistic."

Rhodes, who moved to Washington in 2001, apparently has the President's ear when it comes to policy, and has favored such can't-miss policies like arming the opposition to Qaddaffi in Libya (which has totally worked out for Mali), and now is pushing the President towards arming the Syrian opposition. Nowhere in the glowing New York Times profile does it mention his support of drone strikes, the collateral of which probably appeals more to his realistic side, then the "caring about people" one.

Rhodes is currently helping to prepare a speech that Obama will give in Jerusalem next week that will reiterate the United States' "unshakable support for Israel."

His novel, "Oasis of Love," which is about "a woman who joins a megachurch in Houston, breaking her boyfriend's heart," remains unfinished.

If you were thinking of buying a faux fur coat, how much dog fur would you consider to be "too much" dog fur while making your purchasing decisions? Because Marc Jacobs uses some dog hair in their faux fur coats, turns out.

An investigation by the Humane Society has revealed that the "faux fur" jackets by designer Marc Jacobs sold at Century 21 department stores actually contain dog fur.

The jackets are said to have been made from the fur of Chinese raccoon dogs. This breed of dogs is a soft and cuddly looking creature that resemble a fox. The fur of these dogs is way cheaper than synthetic fur which might be the reason behind its use.

That's not a big deal, right? It's like the horse meat thing. Everyone's eaten some horse meat, everybody's accidentally worn some dogs.

"Do you like this jacket? It's faux fur. I love it. It's so warm."

"Oh, miss? There's actually - it's part faux fur, but also with some fur. There's some fur from dogs in it."

"But it's still faux, right? It's fake fur? I want a fake fur jacket. This says fake fur."

"There is some dog in it. An amount of dog."

"Is it all dog?"

"No. Well. It's not part of the dog-fur line, so I think legally it can only contain up to 70% dog, or what we in the industry call 'a fucking ton of dog skin.'"

"My God! I'll never shop at a Century 21 department store again."

"No, this is the Century 21 real estate LLC."

"Isn't it kind of weird that you have the same name? Like, there's a reason no one's tried to open a Nordstrom's Realty, right?"

"No. It's perfectly normal. We sell real estate and dog jackets."

That's life, though. As the saying goes, you have to take a little dog fur with the good. Here are a few facts about your new all-raccoon dog fur wardrobe, courtesy of MSN:

Raccoon dogs, which are wild members of the canine family and resemble raccoons but are not related to them, are common in parts of China, Japan and Siberia. They're valued - and skinned alive - for their soft coat, which can be cheaper than fake fur. According to the BBC, 70,000 raccoon dogs are killed every year for their fur, consumption and medical use. In China, according to Fur Free Alliance, 1.5 million raccoon dogs are bred on fur farms where they're held in horrible conditions and killed for their hair.

In unrelated news, this year's Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has seen the mysterious death of at least one "otherwise healthy" racing dog. It's probably unrelated, anyhow. I'm sure five-year-old Dorado died of normal, ordinary skin loss.

[Image via AP]

This morning, Ben Carson spoke at the CPAC conference, a day after a panel on 'the race card' failed spectacularly, with some audience members defending slavery. Carson is a renowned pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins and a conservative who gently criticized Obama's healthcare policies while speaking in front of him at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast. Since then, he has become a sensation among conservative bloggers and today at CPAC, announced his intention to leave behind medicine to focus on education initiatives, and possibly a future in politics.

But who is Ben Carson? Born to a single mother in Detroit, Carson graduated from Yale before becoming the youngest-ever major division director in Johns Hopkins history, when he was just 33. A devout Seventh-Day Adventist, Carson has performed groundbreaking procedures on conjoined twins, and at his peak, participated in over 450 surgeries a year. Cuba Gooding Jr. portrayed him in a TNT film.

Carson's religious beliefs dictate a lot of his politics, including a belief in a flat tax (based on the biblical "tithe" system) and his opposition to abortion (he has favorably compared the pro-life movement to the abolitionists). He once went head to head with Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett on his belief in creationism.

This morning, he asked audience members at CPAC, "When did we reach a point where you had to have a certain philosophy because of your skin color?" He then half-joked about a possible presidential run, "What if you magically put me in the White House?," leaving the door open for a run at the 2016 Republican nomination.

The Facebook you already know, but now with more hashtags in it. #Hashtags are #coming to #Facebook. That's #digital. That's #innovative. That's #disruptive. From the Wall Street Journal:

Facebook is working on incorporating the hashtag, one of Twitter's most iconic markers, into its service by using the symbol as a way to group conversations, said people familiar with the matter. It is unclear how far along Facebook's work on the hashtag is and the feature isn't likely to be introduced imminently, these people said.

It's going to be amazing. Think of the possibilities. Think of how many uplifting status updates are going to be pegged to #blessthismess. Think of how many jokes you'll be able to sift through simply by searching for #hihaters and #notgonnalie and #sorrynotsorry. That's when someone acknowledges they should probably feel sorry, but they aren't, because they can't possibly be expected to play by your rules.

If you're not really clear on what a hashtag is, the WSJ has a primer:

On short-messaging service Twitter, the hashtag-a word or phrase preceded by the "#" pound symbol-is a way for people to collate many Twitter messages about a single news event or topic, like the selection of the Pope (#PopeFrancis). The hashtag is closely associated with Twitter, and fans of the service use the hashtag as short-form creative expression.

Don't overthink the hashtag. Just fling it in. When in doubt, add a hashtag, my grandmother used to sing cheerily in the kitchen over a bubbling pot of hashed tags. She's dead now, but she used to be so alive. "It's the hashtags," she'd announce feistily whenever a reporter knocked on her willow cabin to inquire about the source of her longevity. "Just the hashtags, young man." Then she'd knock back a whiskey sour, roll back the rug, and do pastoral dances until he begged her to stop.

"More hashtags, please!" we children used to plead through the window as she placed a steaming plate of hashtags to cool on the sill. "More hashtags?" she'd ask, pretending to be shocked. "Didn't you children just finish all the hashtags in the hashtag bowl by the door?"

"Noooo," we'd chorus, trying desperately to keep straight faces.

"Land sakes," she'd say. "Lord have mercy." Then she'd cough and cough and cough until she had to sit down. Then she'd usually take a nap, and refused to listen to any more of our questions. Late afternoons weren't as much fun at Grandma's house.

Gizmodo's Sam Biddle wrote about the growing "unauthorized" use of the hashtag (a "vulgar crutch, a lazy reach for substance in the personal void-written clipart") on Facebook back in 2011.

Sam Biddle, an #early #adopter of the hashed tag, is on Twitter as @samfbiddle. He would love to see your favorite hashtags. You should send them to him!

A few important things to remember about hashtags:

• The more hashtags you use, the more SEO you have. You want a lot of SEO. That's very important. You can use SEO to buy Facebook "gifts" like a drawing of a gift to send to someone you have a crush on.
• All nouns must be hashtagged or you might find yourself locked out of Facebook. This goes for status updates, inspirational Churchill quotes ("we will never #surrender" is good, "#we will #never #surrender" is great), whatever.
• Creating a hashtag is very simple. All you do is hold down alt+bracket+F4+double-shift and then tap once on the * key. Alternately, you can send Mark Zuckerberg (or Zuckerman, both spellings are correct) a DM and he'll send you one. You can copy-paste it into a Word doc and then just reopen it whenever you want to use it again. Don't forget to re-save the Word doc with a new name every time you use it, though. So, for example, you might have 40 documents all labeled "Hashtag 1," "Hashtag 2," "My Lil'est Hashtag," whatever.

  [Image via AP]

Party rockers on the hardcourt tonight?

Redfoo, of the legendary (to many) group LMFAO, will attempt to qualify for the U.S. Open this summer at a tennis tournament in California. Redfoo, who also dispenses stock tips in his free time, has been searching for a way to fill his days, now that his days of habitual (everyday, pretty much) shuffling and wiggling (when he is sure he is sexy) are over.

The son of Motown founder Berry Gordy, the 37-year-old Redfoo will compete under his given (uncool) name, Stefan Gordy. ESPN explains that Redfoo "played tennis as a junior and has attended some of the Grand Slam tournaments." He hosted his own women's tournament last year, called "The Party Rock Open."

A bus carrying the Seton Hill women's Lacrosse team crashed earlier today, careening off of the Pennsylvania turnpike and colliding with a tree. The driver and one other passenger were killed and 24 passengers were taken to a local hospital with various injuries.

Seton Hill, a Catholic school of about 2,500 students near Pittsburgh, was set to play Millersville University on Saturday when the bus went off the road at around 9 AM.

The NYPD officers who shot 16-year-old Kimani Gray seven times last weekend have a long history of lawsuits alleging civil rights abuses and have cost New York City over $215,000 in settlements. Sgt. Mourad Mourad and Officer Jovaniel Cordova, who have now been identified as the officers who shot Gray, have had a total of five lawsuits brought against the two of them, including suits stemming from wrongful arrest and illegal stop and frisks.

Lawyer Brett Klein, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs in four out of the five cases, told the Daily News that, "Our clients' interactions with Sgt. Mourad and Officer Cordova expose a disturbing pattern of unconstitutional and aggressive stop-and-frisk practices."

The lawsuits include a wrongful arrest that resulted in a man staying four months at Rikers Island, as well as a traffic stop where Sgt. Mourad attempted to pull the driver's underwear off. Another lawsuit alleged that Officer Cordova punched a man in the face inside of a Manhattan apartment building.

The officers have been put on desk duty while the Brooklyn DA investigates the circumstances of the shooting, which occurred after the officers alleged that Gray pulled a gun on them. Eyewitnesses dispute whether he was carrying a gun at all.

The shooting has set off a week of demonstrations by residents (and non-residents) of the heavily-policed East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, whose unsuccessful filibuster of John Brennan was the main topic of Ted Cruz's CPAC keynote last night, has won the CPAC straw poll, the first almost real gauge of 2016 Republican presidential nominees.

Of the nearly 3,000 votes cast, Paul won 25%. He finished slightly ahead of Florida Senator Marco Rubio, with Rick Santorum finishing third. There was one write-in vote for Richard Nixon.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie only managed 7% after falling out with the more conservative factions of the Republican party over their refusal to pass a Hurricane Sandy relief bill. Dr. Ben Carson, who is at this moment making his way around the Sunday morning news show circuit, finished with 4%.

The young, Libertarian-leaning crowd also overwhelmingly opposed the use of drones to spy on or kill American citizens.