Majida and Adly Abumayaleh were just driving across their suburban Minneapolis-area neighborhood on a Friday night to get their teen son from a party. Until a self-appointed watchwoman, Nancy Kay Knoble, decided they might be agents of international jihad and grabbed a rifle.

“She said you are suspicious in this neighborhood. She told me open the window, open the window. We couldn’t do anything. I was frozen,” Majida—who wears a traditional hijab—told local TV station KARE-11:

Majida and Adly were not armed, they were not even outside of their car but Knoble, charging documents say, was pounding on their windows demanding them to get out of the car.

But the yelling wasn’t the scariest thing Knoble was doing according to the charges against her.

“She pulled the rifle and said open the window or I’ll shoot you guys,” Adly explained.

Adly said he didn’t want it to get worse so he did whatever she told him.

“She said get out of car, you need to prove your son is here and I said ok. I got out and she put the gun at my back and said walk to the house,” Adly explained.

At the house Majida and Adly’s son did come out and they said once Knoble saw that they really were the boy’s parents she backed off.

But the damage to this couple was done.

“I thought, I am going to die this night,” Majida said in tears.

Turned out Knoble’s rifle was a pellet gun, but that was small comfort to the Abumayalehs—and to county police, who arrested Knoble on three counts of assault and making terroristic threats:

A Nexis search turned up no prior criminal record for Knoble, though she has lost three court judgments to creditors totaling about $13,000 since 2010.

Police are sidestepping any questions of Knoble’s cultural biases, which angers the Abumayelah’s daughter, Mnar Muhawesh—an activist and journalist who’s taken her parents’ case to social media:

“I believe this has hate crime written all over it,” Muhawesh—who confirmed that her parents are Muslim Americans—told Gawker in an email:

I spoke with the reporter at KARE who covered the story and because the police are not investigating it as a hate crime, she could only say that it’s not being investigated as a hate crime in her report. But, in the interview which I was present in, she asked my parents ‘why do you believe you were targeted?’ So, she also suspected it could be racially or religiously motivated.

Muhawesh said her parents “have thankfully never really received any ill treatment before,” but they’re shaken by the confrontation with Knoble. “In millions of Americans’ minds, as we’re seeing, Muslims are dehumanized and are looked as ‘others’ and in turn are treated as suspect as if they themselves are ISIS or al Qaeda,” she added.

While Muhawesh’s news site posted information about her parents’ case to Facebook, visiting commenters did their best to confirm her thesis:

Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: FD97 D50A DE57 3943 4534 1A49 FA8B 74B4 A7A0 07BE

Swiss authorities this week arrested seven top officials of FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, on allegations of a racketeering, money laundering and wire fraud conspiracy that’s been ongoing for the past 24 years. Wednesday night, Jon Stewart speculated about what took so fucking long.

The FBI’s corruption investigation began in earnest in 2011, with the cooperation of an American FIFA exec, but it took until now to affect any arrests. That may have something to do with the results of FIFA’s internal investigation into the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups—the organization exonerated itself in November despite the objections of the lead investigator.

And that, as Stewart points out, means Qatar keeps the 2022 World Cup (and the growing body count that comes with it), and the losing U.S. bid remains a loser.

Perhaps the revelation that FIFA officials allegedly took (and paid) millions in bribes will prompt a reexamination of the process that awarded Russia and Qatar the next two World Cups? Naaaah.

“When we get bribed, we stay bribed,” as Stewart puts it.

Still, it’s pretty amazing how quickly the Justice Department was able to act when the U.S. got screwed out of a huge, global sporting event, considering that we’re still waiting for even one of the bankers responsible for the financial crisis to face criminal charges.

Yesterday, Gawker Media announced that we will be holding an election next week to vote on whether our editorial staffers want to form a union. The purpose of this post is to allow our writers to discuss how they’re voting, and why.

The vote next week is to decide whether we want to agree to collectively bargain as a group, and join the Writers Guild of America, East. (It is not a vote for a specific contract—that would come later.) All Gawker Media editorial employees are invited to share their thoughts on the upcoming vote in the comment section below. We like to do these things out in the open.

[Photo: Flickr]

On April 8, staffers at the Boston Public Library noticed that Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve—an engraving valued at over $600,000—was missing from its collection. After an internal search, a Rembrandt etching was found missing as well. A month on, no one knows what became of the art—but police believe the apparent heist may have been an inside job.

The Rembrandt—the self-portrait pictured above—is worth about $30,000. According to Boston Police Commissioner William Evans, the prints may have been missing for over a year. Police are investigating an unspecified number of library employees, the Boston Globe reported last week, and Susan Glover, the library’s keeper of special collections, has been placed on paid leave. While it’s “clear that the BPL may have been the victim of a crime,” library president Amy Ryan told the Globe, it’s also possible that the prints were simply misfiled.

According to police, additional works may also be missing. A security audit of the library excerpted by the Globe yesterday claims that it has no complete inventory of its own valuables, and that “Current estimates for holdings are [in most categories] guesses made many years ago that have been adjusted with newer guesses along the way.”

If the Dürer and Rembrandt were stolen, an inside job seems exceedingly likely. The works are kept in a storage room only accessible to certain employees; visitors who wish to see them must give a card with their personal information and cannot access the “reading room” where they are brought for display without the accompaniment of a librarian.

It isn’t the first time Boston has lost a Rembrandt: in 1990, robbers disguised as cops made off with $500 million worth of art including three works by the Dutch master from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Image via Wikiart. h/t Hyperallergic. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

It’s been public knowledge for some time that Jon Stewart is leaving the Daily Show in August, to be replaced by Trevor Noah, a handsome South African comic with a back catalog of wack Twitter jokes. Now we’ve got the first promo for Noah’s “new and sexy” Daily Show, and a premiere date: Sept. 28.

Worth noting: That’s just six months from Noah’s coronation as the new host to his first episode behind the desk. By way of comparison, Stephen Colbert is putting in nine months to develop his new “baby,” the Late Show, which arrives Sept. 8. Larry Wilmore, whose Nightly Show now holds down Colbert’s former time slot, also had nearly nine months to plan his show after it was announced in May 2014.

Manage your expectations accordingly.

In the past week, the Duggar family scandal has fully rocked the nation. Who could have thought that an extremely religious family with 19 children that believes women should obey men’s orders might have some gross secrets? Anyway, you can’t fully understand the Duggar scandal until you’ve had your name Duggar-fied. What’s your Duggar name? Find out with our handy tool below, created by our in-house tool jenius Adam Pash!

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

President Obama paid a visit to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida, this morning, to observe how the agency works and to speak with officials in the days leading up to the beginning of Atlantic hurricane season on June 1. While there, he helped the agency issue a forecast for Tropical Storm Andres.

During his visit, he toured the agency’s facilities and held a briefing with several officials, including FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate, to raise awareness about the need to prepare even in the face of what’s forecast to be a hurricane season with a below-normal number of storms. He also emphasized that the direct efforts of federal agencies like FEMA and NOAA are shining examples of the excellent, hands-on work that the government can do for the people of this country.

The Sun Sentinel quoted Obama as saying “’Sometimes, we spend a lot of time griping about government bureaucrats,’ he said. ‘Suddenly disaster strikes and we realize how much we … depend on these folks.’” He has a point—the list of politicians who slam the federal government and then demand their help after a disaster is longer than the April issue of Storm Data.

Obama visited the agency at just the right time, as forecasters were issuing an advisory on newly-formed Tropical Storm Andres out in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The storm is expected to become a hurricane as it moves far away from land, posing no threat to anyone but some fish and ships. The president observed one of the forecasters as he wrote the forecast discussion for the storm, and according to the NHC, he “reviewed, signed, and transmitted the Tropical Cyclone Discussion upgrading Tropical Depression One-E to Tropical Storm Andres.”

He signed a printed copy of the forecast, and his signature also appears at the bottom of the forecast where the forecaster typically signs his or her name.

[Images: Associated Press, National Hurricane Center]

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

About 30% of my female clients have never taken a good look at what they’ve got going on between their legs. About 75% have some sort of misinformation or inaccurate belief about their genitals. And virtually all of my clients feel insecure or ashamed about some aspect of the most intimate areas of their bodies. Here’s your guide to breaking out of those statistics and becoming friends with your crotch.

If you have a vagina, you’ve been socialized to believe that that it looks weird, smells weird, tastes weird, and is just generally weird. At times, you may have even been a bit befuddled by it. But you probably also want your genitals to feel good, right? It’s hard for both of those dynamics to exist at once. If you want to experience pleasure and have orgasms—not to mention be proud of the body you have— you need to have a certain level of comfort with it.

Make a Date with Yourself

To start, let’s take a tour of your lady bits. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done it before; unless you can draw an exact replica of your genitals from memory, you can benefit from taking another peek. If you feel anxious about it, try to relax yourself by taking some deep breaths, having a glass of wine, or scheduling it for a time when you know you’ll have uninterrupted privacy. Try to find the most comfortable position your body can get into that will allow you to take a peep. Depending on your physical ability, you may need to use a hand mirror, some props, or creative positioning.

What to Look For

Now we’re going to go on a treasure hunt for some of the basic parts of your anatomy. After reading the description, try to find that part on your own body. First one to find ‘em all gets a prize!

• The Mons Pubis: Let’s start at the top, The mons pubis is the area that rests on top of your pubic bone. It’s covered in pubic hair. You’re probably most familiar with this part since it’s the part you can see when you look down.
• The Outer and Inner Labia: Your mons pubis splits off into your two outer labia, which are also covered in pubic hair. You also have an inner pair of labia, which have no hair, and are made of more delicate tissues. There’s an incredible amount of variety when it comes to labia. Labia can be brown, tan, pink, black, red, purple or cream. Some women have larger outer labia, while others have larger inner labia. There is no “normal”, so don’t worry what yours looks like!
• The Clitoris: If you follow the line of your inner labia upwards, you’ll find a little spot where the tissues converge. This area is the home of the clitoris, a small nub of skin that houses virtually all of the nerve endings in your genitals. Some women will be able to spot the clitoris right away, while others will need to do a bit of searching. The clitoris is typically hidden under a clitoral hood, which is a thin membrane of skin. You may need to pull the hood back in order to see your clitoris.
• The Urethral Opening: Right below your clitoris is your urethral opening, which is the hole you pee out of. It’s a very small opening, so you may not be able to see it with your eye.
• The Vagina: Further back is the vaginal opening, which leads into the magical place known as the vagina. The vaginal canal is where any sort of penetration occurs, and also where menstrual fluid flows out of, and babies get delivered out of. Your vagina is capped off by your cervix, which then opens up into your uterus, Fallopian tubes, and ovaries.
• The G-Spot: Oh, the G-spot. Is there any structure in the female anatomy that’s more hotly debated? Many doctors and researchers insist that the G-spot does exist, while others fervently swear that the “g-spot sensation” that some women feel is just the internal fibers of the clitoris getting stimulated. Some say that every woman has a G-spot, while others believe that only some women have them. It seems ridiculous that there’s not a straightforward answer to this question yet, but this debate won’t be settled here.
  
  What I can tell you is that the G-spot is named after the doctor who originally found it: Grafenberg. If you want to find your (maybe possibly existent) G-spot, insert a finger into your vaginal canal with your palm facing up. Your G-spot is on the anterior wall of your vagina, meaning the side closest to your stomach, not the side that closest to your back. It is about the size of a nickel, and is dense and spongy. It protrudes from the vaginal wall, so that’s usually how you can tell that you’ve found it.
• The Perineum: This area is the smooth strip of skin between your vaginal opening and the anus.
• The Anus: You might need to maneuver around a little bit to take a look at your anus. Your best bet is probably going to be bending over at the waist in front of a mirror, and using your hands to spread your cheeks apart. The nickname “balloon knot” is surprisingly apt. The anus is surrounded by nerve endings, and can be a ton of fun to play with.

You can read more, as well as check out some handy diagrams, at the Wikipedia page for vulva.

Find What Feels Good

As you explore each area of your body, try experimenting with different types of touch in that spot. See if you can find all of the pleasurable ways of stimulating each part of your genitals. You might like a light pinching of your outer labia, going in circles around your clitoris, and the tiniest bit of pressure on your anus. This kind of exploration can literally last a lifetime, and it’s the best way to develop more pleasurable relationship with your body! And the more comfortable you are with it, the better your sex is going to be.

(Almost) Everything You Should Know About Your Genitals

Now that you’re a little more familiar with the anatomy, let’s talk about the things that can happen in, around, and to your genitals.

Pleasure and Orgasm

This is undeniably the most fun thing about having lady parts. Women have about three times the amount of nerve endings present in their clitorises than are present in the average penis, so our capacity for pleasure is much higher! (Sorry, guys.) We’re also capable of having multiple orgasms.

The clitoris is the center of the orgasmic universe for most women. The majority of women will have an area of their clitoris, such as the surface, or the upper left quadrant, that feels more sensitive than the rest of the clit. Repetitive stimulation of the clitoris is typically what leads to orgasm.

A fun piece of party trivia, though, is that the clitoris is much larger than most people realize. The visible portion of the clitoris can range in size from a small pea to an inch or more, but the clitoris actually extends into your body and splits off into two legs, much like a wishbone! Most sex researchers believe that stimulation of the internal parts of the clitoris can lead to orgasm, just like stimulation of the external part can. The implications of this fairly recent discovery are huge. The vast majority of women can’t orgasm from penetration alone, and virtually all of those women feel guilty and deficient for not being able to do so. I try to remind my clients that women who can orgasm from penetration are simply getting stimulation to the inside portion of their clitorises. It’s still the clitoris getting stimulated, just different parts of it!

Tightness

Your vagina also has an enormous capacity to stretch (remember, it’s designed for newborn babies to travel through!). The vagina also goes through a fascinating process known as “tenting”, where the vaginal muscles help the uterus lift up to make even more space for penetration. Fortunately, the vagina is also designed to return to normal after all this stretching. A lot of women feel self-conscious about their perceived vaginal “looseness”. Without having seen your vagina, I can assure you that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your muscle tone.

If you’d like to develop more control over your muscles, however, try doing Kegels. Squeeze the muscles you use to cut off the flow of urine, then release and repeat. You can also invest in a nifty little toy like the KGoal to help you develop a training regimen!

Pubic Hair Care

Pubic hair grooming is an important part of your relationship with your genitals. Pubic hair styles change all the time, but it’s worth noting that your pubic hair is there for a reason: it helps prevent chafing if you have intercourse. If you choose to remove all or some of your pubic hair (and you certainly don’t have to!), make sure you go to a trusted professional at a hygienic salon. Sugaring seems to be the hair removal method that is easiest on the skin. The most frequently-used method of hair removal is shaving, but it can lead to some pretty gnarly nasty razor burn and ingrown hairs.

Lubrication

If you insert a finger into your vagina, you’ll probably be able to feel the natural lubricant that your body secretes through the vaginal walls. When you become aroused, your vagina secretes more lubrication to make penetration easier (even if penetration isn’t your jam). Women vary widely in the amount of lube they produce, and the volume of lube can change based on cycle and age. Getting wet “enough” is yet another one of the endless number of ways that women stress out and feel insufficient, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting a little help from artificial lube. In fact, adding more lube is almost always more fun!

Discharge

The lubrication process is happening constantly, so Unfortunately having a vagina means having discharge. Most women feel self-conscious about discovering wetness in their underwear at the end of the day, but rest assured that this is totally normal. The vagina is a fascinating little ecosystem that does a great job of keeping itself clean and at the proper pH.

If you insert a finger into your vagina, you’ll probably be able to feel the natural lubricant that your body secretes through the vaginal walls. Your body is always producing natural lubricant. It fluctuates throughout your cycle, so there are days where you have much more secretion than others, and times of the month where the secretion looks different.

You absolutely do NOT need to douche or clean your insides with soap. In fact, that will actually do far more damage to your vagina than good, by killing off the good bacteria that your vagina needs to stay healthy. You’ll know that something is up with your vagina if your discharge is thick and clumpy, a markedly different color, or a very strong odor.

Squirting

Just as the G-spot is a source of great debate, so is squirting (also known as female ejaculation). Some sex therapists believe that all women are capable of squirting, while others believe it to be a rare phenomenon. This is another question that seems like it should have been answered already, but there’s still some debate over the exact identity of the fluid that gets expelled when a woman squirts.

Women who squirt typically report that they require G-spot stimulation to do so. The G-spot typically requires very intense stimulation. That’s why I recommend hefty toys like the njoy Pure Wand if you want to experiment with it. When you start stimulating the G-spot, you might initially feel like you need to pee. Don’t worry—it will go away if you keep going, and a more pleasurable, non-pee-related sensation will build. Fluid may come out of you, but it’s not going to be like sitting down on a toilet and urinating. Put a towel down on the bed if you’d like, but don’t concern yourself with anything other than what feels good!

Periods

You probably learned the period basics in a sweaty gym room when you were in elementary school, but there are still plenty of women who aren’t sure about what’s “normal” and “abnormal” when it comes to periods. It’s a good idea to talk to your doctor if you notice any sudden changes to your period, if you go for long stretches (months at a time) without one, if you bleed (“spotting”) or have another full period in between normal periods, or if your period is so heavy that you have a hard time changing tampons fast enough.

Speaking of tampons, swap them out every eight hours and try to find tampons made of unbleached cotton (or make the switch to a Diva Cup). Tampon users can be susceptible to Toxic Shock Syndrome from leaving an overly-absorbent tampon in for too long, but TSS is pretty rare these days.

Yeast Infections

Your vagina maintains a delicate bacterial balance. Introducing unhealthy bacteria or killing off the good strains can lead to infection. Here are some easy tips for avoiding yeast infections:

• Wipe from front to back.
• Take probiotics when you have to take antibiotics (the antibiotics kill off the good bacteria in your vagina as well as the bad bacteria that’s making you sick)
• Never put anything that has been in your butt into your vagina without a solid cleaning first.
• Give your vagina some room to breathe! Don’t wear thongs all day every day. Sleep naked when you can.
• Don’t hang out in your gym clothes after you’ve worked out.

Yeast infections are never pleasant, but the good news is that it only takes a dose of Fluconazole and a few days to clear up. (Pro-tip: Don’t bother with the suppositories you find at the drugstore. Those things are a pain in the ass to deal with!)

Urinary Tract Infections

The location of the urethra—right in the middle of all of the action—makes peeing right after sex an absolute necessity. Bacteria get pushed up into the urethra when you’re getting down, which can result in a urinary tract infection if you don’t pee right afterwards. Having a UTI is excruciatingly painful; it feels like thousands of tiny glass shards are being pushed into your urethra every time you urinate. Trust me, you want to avoid UTIs like the plague. You can also take cranberry extract as a precautionary step.

Vaginal Tearing

Your vaginal walls are delicate and susceptible to tiny microtears. Most of these lesions will heal up quickly and on their own, but it’s worth giving yourself a break from penetration when you feel sore. Using artificial lube is a great way to prevent tearing from happening in the first place, too.

Queefs

If your sex life includes any sort of vigorous thrusting, you’re bound to have a queef (aka “vaginal fart”) at one point or another. Queefs happen when air gets trapped in the vagina and squelches out. Queefs can be embarrassing in the moment, but they’re a natural byproduct of penetration. Just laugh it off or ignore it!

While we’re on the topic of air in the vagina, never, EVER let anyone blow air forcefully into your vagina. While rare, it can cause an air embolism, which can be fatal.

Illustration by Tina Mailhot-Roberge.

James Holmes was mentally ill but legally sane when he shot 12 people to death during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Co., three years ago, according to a psychiatrist who spent 22 hours interviewing him.

Dr. William Reid is one of four psychiatrists who interviewed Holmes after the shooting, and his testimony is the first jurors have heard from a mental health expert during the five week trial. Holmes has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity and faces the death penalty if convicted.

“My opinion is that, whatever he suffered from, it did not prevent him from forming the intent and knowing what he was doing and the consequences of what he was doing,” Reid said, according to the Denver Post.

Jurors also watched some of Reid’s interview with Holmes, a process which will continue over the next three days. From the Post:

“What’s the first thing I need to know about James Holmes?” Reid asked during their initial meeting, in a room at the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo in July 2014.

Holmes, often answering with clipped sentences throughout the meeting, smiled.

“Could you be more specific?” he replied.

On Wednesday, the spiral notebook Holmes mailed to his psychiatrist just before the shooting was released to the public. In addition to ramblings about the meaning of life and death (and pages with only the word “Why?” written over and over again), the notebook contains detailed diagrams and lists related to the shooting, as well as pages where Holmes debates which locations (“Airport or Movie theater”) would allow for “maximum casualties.”

You can view the full notebook here.

Images via AP. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

BREAKING: State Department: Cuba removed from US 'state sponsors of terrorism' list.

May 29, 2015

http://gawker.com/cuba-welcomes-...

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

What is life like for Americans who receive food stamps, welfare, and other government benefits? It ain’t easy. Each week, we let some of them tell you in their own words. Today, we hear from six moms who are making it work.

Life in a small town in New York

My name is Cat. I am 35, the mother of one lovely 12 year old daughter, Alexandria, and I’m married to Nate, who’s 29. He’s not my daughter’s father, he came into our life when she was 9.

I am also the sole breadwinner. And, while I am a college graduate, and midway through trying (not terribly successfully) to get my Bachelor’s degree in social work because I apparently want to be broke forever, I am currently earning $9.00 an hour to support us. My daughter’s father pays $12 a week in child support, and hasn’t seen her since she was about 11 months old.

Now, I’ll wait, until you can stop laughing. Or eyerolling. Or, like me, both.

My husband until last year worked at an agency with at-risk youth; like a juvie center but less restricted, so that hopefully the kids can get on the right track. He worked with developmentally disabled and addicted kids. They could be good kids. They’ve had horrible lives, and as a mother, I hurt for them. He hurt his shoulder when he was 18, lifting weights, and it went bad when he had to stop a fight. He did stop the fight. He protected his kids, at the cost of himself. Though it was a union job, which we thought meant stability and help, when the surgery he -NEEDS- to return to work couldn’t happen for a few months (because surgeons are always backlogged), he lost his job, and we lost the insurance that would have paid for his surgery.

Until a couple of years ago, I was making much better money, working with developmentally disabled adults, providing residential care. Then, my (already bad) back went. 18 years as a CNA lifting people, plus other things, had herniated my discs. I’m still not better. I lost my job, and now I work from home in an office job for less money. I have crippling depression and anxiety, and when my husband lost his job, I got to have the oh-so-fun experience of coming off of a very large dose of antidepressants cold turkey. Luckily, I’m okay.

We’re still on Medicaid. We’re lucky that New York, being a blue state, made it easy for all of us. We’re midway going through certification to have foodstamps, and my husband has finally been approved (since losing his job in November) for unemployment benefits. At last check we are eligible for about $280 a month in food stamps. Our actual bill runs about $500 a month, so while it doesn’t cover everything, it’s undeniably a huge help. Because I have PCOS, I am insulin resistant, and that means carbs are bad, and make me sick and gain weight. However, that kind of diet, heavy in meat, is expensive.

We have a car, which is still being paid for. We have a house, only because my inlaws had paid it off and are selling it to us privately. Until February we were in an apartment where the walls -literally- caught on fire for no reason. In my daughter’s room. An apartment that was freezing in the winter and burning hot in the summer, but whose windows didn’t open. We have cellphones, because even with $90 a month for them, they are necessary anymore. We have these things, and -we- pay for them. We don’t receive cash help, so all that money is ours.

Now, in our town, there are two paths you can take for employment if, like me, you don’t have at least a Bachelor’s degree. You can work minimum wage, usually in food service, retail, or you can work slightly above it in health care. Because of our injuries, and the fact that I haven’t finished my Bachelor’s, though I do have an Associate’s degree, minimum wage is all we have. Cortland had a huge factory population, once. We had Rubbermaid, Borg-Warner, Buckbee-Mears, Smith Corona, and Marietta. All but Marietta are now gone, phased out by technology or moved to other countries or states for tax writeoffs.

Plainly put...we need aid. We need more aid than we qualify for BECAUSE I work. I’m about to run out of funding for school, a full year before I’m done. While I absolutely agree that we should not live on welfare, I don’t know anyone that does. And Cortland, my town, is FULL of people on welfare because of the job market losses that came from the losses of our factories. However, I work full time. My husband can’t, but he doesn’t qualify for disability. We’re trying to get him his surgery (assuming Medicaid will approve it), but for right now...I have a child to feed. Hell, I have a -me- to feed. I was perfectly able to care for her -when I had her-. I have always worked, full time. My husband hasn’t been out of work since he was 14, when he got his first paper route. Even when we worked 2 or more jobs at a time, we worked. We did all we could to pay our way. That, in this town, simply isn’t enough. But goddamn it, part of living in a society is helping those who can’t help themselves. I have never objected to paying in, and I never will, because I know that I am helping others, and that is my JOB.

Spaghetti and PB&J

Let me just state for the record that I really, really hate the stigma attached to being a welfare recipient. It’s mostly fabricated, something the stuffed suits in public office can bitch about and feel like they have something to fight against. Sure, there are absolutely people that abuse the system, but it’s mainly normal, working stiffs like me that are forced to use it, pride be damned.

I’m a Caucasian single mother from a middle class Chicago suburb. I’m 36, and raise a 17 and 12 year old by myself, and have since the day they were born. My daughter has a heart defect, and I have seen her through two open heart surgeries in the last 15 years, one of which was just last year. Every time she has surgery, it causes me to miss up to 6 weeks of work due to her after care. That’s a tough thing to get past with your employer, and it’s sad to say that I’ve had to make the choice between my child and my job.

I’m a Certified Medical Assistant. You would think that such a prestigious job would afford me the luxury of NOT being on PA, but, at $11 an hour, I bring home just enough to pay my rent and bills-I wish I would have saved myself the trouble and student loan debt and just stayed in Customer Service, where I made more money. The $250 in food stamps I get every month supplement us for just about 3 weeks. My kids are pretty sick of the spaghetti/PB&J rut that we’re stuck in at the end of every month.

I’ve gotten benefits off and on over the last 17 years- when I know I don’t need them, I don’t bother re-upping my paperwork. I enjoy the sense of pride that comes along with being able to stand on my own two feet. When I DO need them, getting them is like pulling teeth, and we usually end up scraping and starving for a month or so before the state decides to help us out. It’s embarrassing and frustrating, and those few assholes that do take advantage ruin it for everyone. They are the EXCEPTION, not the rule.

Unfortunately, the odds are against us- Things just keep getting more expensive, but we’re not being paid enough to get ahead of the game. It’s a hamster wheel, running and running and getting nowhere. The only way out of this is for the script to be completely flipped. People can’t make ends meet when they make less than what they need to live, so until the fundamental problem is fixed, the public assistance needs to be in place to bridge the gap.

From a single mom

I am a woman who is on public assistance. This isn’t easy for me to admit, because of the stigma that is attached to people who are public assistance, and it just adds humiliation to an already stressful situation.

I can list so many details to justify why I am having to receive public assistance, but I will break it down. I am a single mom, raising 4 boys on my own, without support from the Father of the first thee, because he is in prison. The other father has since married, had more children, and hasn’t given a thing to his child save for one birthday card when our son turned 1. He doesn’t even acknowledge him publically.

The father of the older three was sentenced to nearly 13 years, because the man who everyone loved so much publically (and a community volunteer) was secretly abusing our boys during his visitations with them. For years the abuse went unreported, because the boys have variations of language articulation disorder, along with Autism. They had no voice that could articulate the atrocities he was subjection them to. I knew something was wrong when they would reurn home but I was looked upon as an angry ex who was looking for retaliation. I fought, advocated, and fought relentlessly to get the courts to listen before he volunteered for, and failed a polygraph. He ultimately admitted to the years of abuse he was subjecting them to, went to trail and convicted of the crimes he confessed to. When his family started harassing me and making threats on my life, the courts handed down an order that afforded me the ability to move to an undisclosed location and change our names if needed. He has continued to harass me from prison. But that is another story.

The other father... nothing.

I know the instant reaction is for people to blame me for picking crappy men to have children with. Everyone wants to blame the person in the bad situation, and scream how they don’t want to carry me and my kids, regulate how we spend the money in ways they see fit for us, and further degrade me into an already stressful situation. The reality is, I work harder than most stay at home parents, and probably even more than most who are working a job...

I am not some druggie. In fact, I rarely even have a drink (if my son needs to go to the ER, who would be sober to drive?). I have chronic pain myself, but I don’t take the medications because it could hinder my ability to care for my child in the case of an emergency. I work hard to care for my family, and do all I can to give these boys a chance in life, despite the crappy choices of their father/s. I am here to raise good men, who are good people and who do great things.

However, I am judged by media, social media, legislators and people in grocery lines, when I take out my SNAP benefits card to pay for groceries or a utility bill. The small amount of 40 something dollars I have gotten in food benefits, and the whole average 450 a month I get in cash, helps but there is no way it could afford me the luxuries that people think I must have because I don’t work outside of the home. Yet, I live in humiliation on a daily basis because of the way society looks at the “economy vampire” they think I am. Look, I get these men are shitty fathers. While I obviously picked them as a mate at one time, I had no idea the level of shitty person they were. Like so many people, I made a choice to be with someone, and that someone wasn’t who I thought they were. I am not the only person this has happened to, but society wants to shove this into my face as though I must pay for a crappy choice, over and over again. I’ve been so crucified by the stigma media portrays, that the villagers come at me with a torch verbally on a daily basis. I live in shame, humiliation and embarrassment, while all the while trying to gain the dignity and power the same media pushes at me to stand strong and yell “I am a survivor” at the top of my voice, while fighting with all I have to help these boys succeed and not repeat a cycle. I can’t change what happened, but I can fight to help them realize they are more than the crappy choices of others.

Often I find myself having to justify, and share my story with people to help them understand. Often I get the response “Oh, obviously you are one of the people who deserve the help”, but I have to tell you that it is a horrible feeling to put my life out there to get the acceptance of the judge and jury to escape the judgment. You might ask why I am sharing it again if that is the case, but I am so afraid that if I remain quiet, I will be one of those people that are too ashamed to stand up for what’s right, and that is the opposite message I am trying to send my children. If a similar law passes in Oregon, that is being pushed in other states, an already crappy situation will just get worse. I need to buy lean meats for my family, I need to withdraw money to pay utility bills. I need to buy clothing for my growing teens boys, I need to put gas in my car to get them to appointments. Some of these new laws would prohibit, or restrain my ability to do so.

No one knows what tomorrow will bring. That person we are with, might snap and do things that change our whole lives. That person who made a promise, might break it, that person we trusted with our lives, might be the person who takes it on a ride to a place we never even thought of going. The difference is what we do from there, and that is what I am trying to do. I guess I would ask people to please stop looking in my cart and thinking you are paying for that meal. And if you had your way, you wouldn’t allow my boys to have the occasional chip or soda. Just because I seem to be a rung lower than you, doesn’t mean I am less of a person. I am a hardworking mom, who is taking responsibility for the lives I brought into this world, and doing the best I can to help them become people that contribute to the world around them. Please stop giving me that look at the check out, and please stop assuming who I am based on a card. I am so much more.

Essentially priceless

I live in Dunnellon FL. (Near Ocala in central FL.) I’m 44 and since 2009 I have received different welfare benefits, namely food stamps (SNAP), and Medicaid for my son who is now 12. I was diagnosed with neurosarcoidosis in 2009, had to quit work, and move in with my MIL. I applied for food stamps and qualified for Medicaid also. I was never in welfare prior to this.

As a family of three, we received a maximum of $168 a month - when I wasn’t working and my husband was also drawing unemployment. I don’t know what the monetary valuse of the Medicaid was. It was essentially priceless; because my son has asthma and his monthly meds run $300. Currently for my son to get Healthy Kids or the state buy-in Medicaid its $150 a month. I can’t afford this so I apply in June and drop it in September. As for his meds, we get samples from his doctor every other month and I pay out of pocket for the rest.

Fast forward: I went back to work in 2011, my husband died in 2013, and my son and I live alone. I work during the school year, receptionist for a local school 30 hours per week at $12 per hour. We also get $1600 in death benefits from Social Security. In the summer I apply for food stamps and receive about $60 per month. Not much but it helps.

I’ve never bought steak with food stamps but I have bought soda. I’ve never felt bad about it. It’s cheaper than using the vending machine at work.

I worked for 30 years to pay into the system. I don’t feel bad about using a safety net. In a few years, when my son is older, I’m going to dust off my MSW and go back to a “real job” and kiss the bureaucracy bye bye.

A future teacher

I am 28 years old and my fiancé is 38. I am student teaching right now so I do not have an income and will not until August of this year. My fiancé is an immigration attorney and started his business one year ago after being laid off. He made $30,000 last year, and after using the savings he had to pay income taxes, it made it impossible for us to make ends meet. We had a child last summer and I was insured by the state (during pregnancy)because the job I had did not offer insurance. Currently my child is insured by the state while my fiancé and I remain uninsured. This accounts for several thousand dollars in doctors bills. I receive WIC, which provides about $150 per month for formula and food. I receive $350 per month in food stamps, and the state covers $400 out of the $500 for daycare service. I have been receiving these benefits for 8 months. I live in Missouri and I am so thankful for the assistance I am provided with. Without such assistance I would not have been able to complete my teaching degree. I have signed a contract to start teaching in August and look forward to August, when I do not have to rely on public assistance. I never imagined I would be a person using assistance but life happened and I am doing my best to change things for the better. I believe there are a lot of others like us out there but we are ashamed to come out and talk about it. My own family and fiends do not know about our assistance.

“It’s hard and I hate it”

I live in Ventura county CA. I’m 36 years old, recently divorced with 3 children. In July of 2013 I was laid off from my job which paid 90k annually. I looked for work everywhere and could only find a similar job 60+ minutes away for way less money. I interviewed for multiple spots but they were just too far to drive daily. I collected unemployment while I was looking.
I decided I wanted to return to school and become a nurse. My unemployment ran out and I applied for cash aid. I’m now in a program called welfare to work or Calworks which provides cash and food stamps. I receive $800 a month cash [and] $550 a month in food stamps.
I struggle every month. My house (a mobile home) is paid for but I pay space rental and utilities. That runs about 450 a month. My car payment is 400 but I can’t refinance, get a new car or get rid of it because I’m not working. My phone bill is 100 for me and my daughter. Her phone is part of the contract so I can’t cancel it. My car insurance roughly 150. Internet another 50. Which leaves me with nothing for gas, after school care for my kids. I have to borrow money constantly to make ends meet.

I recently received a job and will be making 11.50 an hour. I became a nurse assistant last year with the help of the welfare to work program. Sadly even with this job I will still probably qualify for some sort of aid. I receive no child support and when he was paying the state kept all but $50 because I was on cash aid. So the monthly amount he paid of 1000 didn’t even go to my kids.

I’m embarrassed every time I have to shop with my ebt card for food. I get glared at because I refuse to look poor or leave my 4 year old coach purse at home. I’m trying to make a new life for me and my children.

I want people to understand that being on cash aid is not a free handout and by no means is it enough. I don’t want my kids to ever know or feel ashamed because of what we have or what we don’t. There has been a lot of talk about changing what I can buy with my food stamps. Yes I buy healthy food so we can have meals at home. But if my kids want a new type of cookie or
Need to bring chips to a school party I buy those too.

It’s not a life that should be critiqued or punished. It’s hard and I hate it.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

A racist flyer that made waves on social media today after a resident of an Irvine, Ca. apartment building found it hanging in an elevator is fraudulent, according to a spokesman for property company Equity Residential.

“This flyer is a fake. It wasn’t produced by us. It wasn’t posted by us. I don’t know where it came from,” Equity representative Marty McKenna said over the phone this morning. The flyer—a notice about noise complaints in Irvine’s Toscana apartment complex—included a bolded section directed specifically at African-American residents. It read:

We also would like to remind our African-American residents to keep conversation volume down and reduce music levels between 10:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m.

Multiple complaints have been made regarding this issue.

The notice attracted attention after Toscana Apartments tenant and Instagram user @teyent_theequeenb posted a photo and video to her page. “This is what it means to be black in Irvine,” she says in the video. “Blatant racism,” another woman adds.

McKenna said that Equity, a national company which owns the Toscana Apartments, is investigating the origin of the flyer. He added that the company does not have a practice of posting flyers about noise complaints, preferring instead to contact residents by email. “It is not from us, and certainly we don’t condone that kind of messaging,” he said.

The Toscana Apartments are used as residences by some students of University of California, Irvine, but are not affiliated with the university. The school quickly disassociated itself from the apartments on social media, leaving Instagram comments and tweets in response to people who posted images of the flyer.

@_27kaday Toscana Apts are not affiliated w/ UC Irvine & we do not condone the flyer's message. UCI is addressing this w/ apt mgt & city.

May 29, 2015

Irvine has a history of racial strife. In 2013, the school made headlines when a black student found a note in her backpack that read “Go back 2 Africa slave,” and in January, the university’s Black Student Union published a petition demanding “additional institutional resources for black students,” and greater “efforts to recruit and retain more black students, staff and faculty,” the campus newspaper New University reported.

McKenna said that he believes it is unlikely that a Toscana employee would post the notice without the knowledge or authorization of Equity Residential. That leaves one distinct possibility for its origin: a racist resident.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

We’re three days away from the start of hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, and we’ve already seen one tropical storm this year. Tropical storms in May aren’t all that rare, but they aren’t exactly an omen, either. Forecasters expect a below-average hurricane season, but it just takes one to make a mess.

Almost all major forecasts released by various organizations over the past couple of weeks have called for a below-average hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean, with most forecasts predicting eight or nine named storms (tropical storms or hurricanes), four or five of which could become hurricanes, and one or two of those possibly turning into major hurricanes (category three or stronger).

Here’s a chart showing these predictions compared to the 30-year average and last year’s Atlantic hurricane season.

(Since NOAA and WeatherBug create forecast ranges (NOAA predicts a 70% probability of 6-11 named storms), I averaged-out the range and rounded up in the chart above.)

These forecasts generally include Tropical Storm Ana, which formed earlier this May. The storm strengthened to 60 MPH before weakening and making landfall near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The big theme of NOAA’s hurricane preparedness campaign in the days leading up to the beginning of hurricane season—which is next Monday, June 1—is a recurring theme for disasters here on The Vane: “it only takes one.”

The 1992 hurricane season is a great example of a quiet season producing a catastrophic hurricane. We went almost the entire summer without seeing a named storm that year—the first named storm didn’t form until the end of August. That storm was category five Hurricane Andrew, which slammed into southeastern Florida, killing dozens of people and leaving behind tens of billions of dollars in damage in its wake.

Hurricane season forecasts come with a huge caveat that they exist to show trends. Meteorologists can’t predict hurricanes beyond more than a week or so. Forecasters and models can predict long-term large-scale trends (water temperature anomalies, El Niño, general patterns) that can affect whether or not small-scale ingredients can come together in a favorable environment and produce a tropical cyclone. If you’re a month from hurricane season and you see a strengthening El Niño, colder-than-normal ocean temperatures, and you have Saharan dust blowing over the Atlantic, you can be sure that it’s going to be extremely hard for storms to develop.

Last year is a good example of a season both overperforming and underperforming based on what forecasters predicted just before the beginning of the season.

The total number of named storms last year in the Atlantic clocked-in both below average and below what forecasters expected, with only eight named storms (compared to 12 on average and about 10 forecast). However, six of those eight storms became hurricanes—surpassing expectations—several of which made landfall.

The National Hurricane Center (hurricanes.gov) issues five-day forecasts and watches/warnings for tropical systems in both the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific basins. Organizations will update their seasonal hurricane outlooks as we head into hurricane season.

[Images: AP, NOAA | Charts: author | Corrected the first chart to reflect that the averages listed below the forecasts are 30-year averages.]

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

The senior boys of Biglerville (Pa.) High School are all getting ready to dress up in khakis and collared shirts for their graduation ceremony this month, per the school’s dress code. Meanwhile, the girls are getting ready to hide their unsightly “sausage rolls, as Mrs. Elliott calls them” also per the dress code, because everyone knows “you can’t put 10 pounds of mud in a five-pound sack.”

At least one Biglerville student, graduating senior Briana Burtop, isn’t down with this body-shaming in the guise of modesty, and she went on the local news to tell Mrs. Elliott where she can stick her goddamn sausage rolls.

Burtop’s mom wants to take it even further, threatening to sue the school for gender discrimination—the boys’ section instructs them not to show their underwear, but it doesn’t order them to minimize the appearance of their body fat.

Fortunately, sausageghazi looks like it might be the rarest of American problems, the kind that can be resolved without a lawsuit.

“School officials said the issue is being addressed and the letter does not reflect the standards of the Upper Adams School District,” ABC News reports. It’s apparently been failing to meet those standards for quite some time: officials added it was “drafted years ago, and the author of the original document has since retired.”

They didn’t clarify the district’s current position on sausage rolls or explain why someone would want to put mud in a sack anyway.

[h/t Barstool]

One half of the Florida couple convicted of repeatedly having sex on a Florida beach as a grandmother filmed them has been sentenced to time served. Elissa Alvarez, 20, will also have to register as a sex offender.

Last July, Jose “Benny” Caballero and Elissa Alvarez had sex on Florida’s Bradenton Beach for nearly 30 minutes in broad daylight as dozens of people watched. The two then fell asleep for hours before waking to publicly fuck again.

Caballero and Alvarez were found guilty May 4 of lewd and lascivious exhibition for having sex in public, including in front of a 3-year-old child.

Alvarez, who had no prior record, accepted the prosecutions recommendation of time served on Wednesday.

“To say she has learned her lesson would be an understatement,” her attorney, Greg Hagopian, told the Brandenton Herald.

Caballero, who has a prior conviction for cocaine trafficking, will be sentenced July 4. Prosecutors have recommended a 2 and a half year sentence.

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Things got heated last night on Gawker’s roof, during a post-screening Q&A with the directors of the new movie Heaven Knows What, Josh and Benny Safdie, the film’s director of photography, Sean Price Williams, and one of its stars, Buddy Duress. It happened when Gawker employee Victor Jeffreys pointed out that he had seen one of the movie’s performers panhandling (or “spanging” as many who do it call it) on the street yesterday. There we were on the roof of a beautiful building in a beautiful part of New York and the first-time actor in question, Manny Aguila, was nowhere to be found.

“And I’m not saying that you are making tons of money off the film, and I’m not asking you how you sleep at night, but how does it all work?” Jeffreys concluded.

Josh Safdie, the more talkative of the two directors (the other, Benny, is his brother), started his response by explaining that actors were the only people who’d gotten paid in this movie that’s a blend of fiction and documentary focused on the heroin-using homeless population on New York’s Upper West Side. Almost the entire cast of the movie is from that world, playing versions of themselves, which contributes to the film’s vérité intimacy.

“The amount of money I would suggest that they were being paid, even in cash, is inconsequential to your, specifically your, prospect going forth. So how do you reconcile that?” is what Jeffreys followed up with.

Josh turned defensive, accusing Jeffreys of “PC concern-trolling.” As moderator, I asked Duress if his life had improved or gotten worse since shooting the movie in March 2014, as one of the most brutal winters in memory tapered off. Duress lived on the street while filming the movie and has since served time in Rikers for drug-related offenses.

“This movie has changed my life,” said Duress. “I would never have woken up one morning and thought, ‘Maybe I’ll pursue being an actor.’ That would have never happened. It just fell into my lap by pure luck...[Josh] asked me one day if I’d like to do a couple scenes and I said, ‘Yeah, why not? I’d love to do that.’ Who wouldn’t want to be in a movie?”

I had spoken to the Safdies earlier this month to interview them for this piece. I also spoke with Arielle Holmes, the focus of Heaven Knows What and the inspiration for its plot—the story goes that after meeting Holmes while researching another film in the Diamond District, Josh asked her to write her life story and the 150 or so pages typed up at various Apple stores was adapted by Josh and co-writer Ronald Bronstein for the screenplay. Last night’s screening was my third time viewing the film, which I think is compulsively watchable and culturally crucial. By the time we sat down in front of the 40 or so people who remained after the screening, I had more or less vetted the directors and the film to my satisfaction.

Still, I was prepared for Jeffreys’s question, or some variation of it. We are in a time when cultural appropriation is more examined and debated than ever, thanks to the internet, and two men with enough money (or the means of getting their hands on it) making a movie telling the story of people who beg for change and often don’t have a roof over their heads has “thinkpiece deeming this ‘problematic!!!’” written all over it. On the film’s quasi-documentary setup as well as Holmes, 21, playing a version of her drug-addled self (her character is named Harley in the movie), Ben Kenigsberg wrote in the New York Times earlier this month, “it’s a risky strategy that raises questions about what crosses the line and what is exploitative.”

During my discussion with Holmes in office of Radius, which is releasing the movie, I asked if she feels like she was exploited. “I felt like I was exploiting myself,” she responded. “I didn’t feel like these guys were coming in and using my story. I felt like these guys are coming in helping me use my story. Or my experience in this part of the world. I don’t really like calling it ‘my story’ because it’s one of many in that world with core similarities and various differences. I showed everything I felt comfortable showing.”

Holmes told me that she was not on heroin while filming the movie, and Josh said, “We couldn’t have made the film if she was shooting up all the time. It just wouldn’t have been possible.” She was, however, on methadone, and she suggests the opiate may have helped her achieve such a naturalistic performance. “Heroin makes you very detached,” she explained. “I already have issues with that that I’m working on now. It wasn’t hard for me to film any of it or reenact anything. Someone just asked me if it was hard reenacting when I tried to kill myself. It wasn’t. I just did it, laughed about it after the scenes.”

Josh, by Benny’s description, was “so deep” in Holmes’s world, by the time they started filming in March 2014. Josh says he met Holmes about ten months earlier and got to know her and her friends.

“You spend one week with someone in that world, you’re their best friend,” said Josh. “Forget about it, you’re a family member. I got past that threshold with so many different people. When most of these people met me, I wasn’t a filmmaker, I wasn’t there for any other reason but to hang out. Do you know how many times I was offered like a fuckin’ full syringe?”

“I was very involved in that world. I don’t think I ever slept on the street, but there were times that I was there until everyone had fallen asleep,” he continued. “I have a home, I’m not homeless. Sometimes people would stay with me, but very, very rarely. I wanted to keep that distance. Just for my own sanity. It was getting to a point where I didn’t know...I would just go and try to find people to hang out all the time.”

Josh says that he never took anyone up on their offers of heroin, and that he’s never “flirted” with that drug but has with others and has ultimately one addiction: filmmaking. Still, he says working with addicts is “great,” and that he related to them on fundamental levels.

“Most people that are addicts I’m attracted to them because, whatever, I have certain chemical imbalances myself and I think most people who take drugs are self-medicating, so therefore they have certain personality disorders, chemical imbalances. I can relate to them,” he explained. “There’s an intensity to them that I really respond to. I really respond to someone who’s all or nothing. I really respond to someone who just wants the entire world in one moment. That’s all I want. That’s why I make movies, because I think that that’s the only way to access that feeling—the velocity of the now. For better or worse these are the people that I personally can find that access with.”

And that, I think it’s fair to say, is how worlds intersect. That why movies about specific experiences resonate to those who will never have the opportunity to see what the characters see or feel what they feel. That is why Heaven Knows What works.

“We didn’t want the drugs to be at all glorified,” said Josh. “We wanted to remain truthful to the romantic yearnings of this young woman. I think that that generally is a pretty accessible [thing]. That’s every teen romance movie.”

“Going into it, it was a very moral thing for me,” added Benny. “It was like, I don’t want this to in any way give anyone the hint of possibly wanting to try this. In this lifestyle, there are times that you feel really close to it, but there also has to be that feeling: If I take this turn there’s no going back and that’s going to be a frightening road.”

Holmes told me that she’s “proud” of Heaven Knows What and she thinks it’s a “great film.” But shortly into our conversation, when the subject turned to Ilya Leontyev, her real life ex-boyfriend who’s fictionalized in the movie and played by working actor Caleb Landry Jones, Holmes’s voice turned shaky. Leontyev was found dead at 25 last month. When I asked her if his death complicates her relationship to the movie, I felt like I might be trespassing on a life that had seemingly been offered up for examination through the medium of film.

“I think it’s, what’s the right word,” she started and then trailed off for a few beats. “He dies in the movie. I just…yeah. I don’t really know what I think about that.”

Regarding her life now, Holmes is “good, for the most part.” After wrapping Heaven Knows What, she completed a rehab program on the Safdie brothers’ dime, and signed to the ICM Partners talent agency.

“I’m not on the streets and on heroin,” she told me. “I went through a kind of dark period even after that, living in L.A. I was really kind of depressed for a while, so I wasn’t really doing much. I was doing auditions and things like that.”

Art is not under any obligation to change the world. When it happens, it’s great, but we should be careful to avoid conflating expression with activism. That said, it seems like something like Heaven Knows What has a greater chance making a difference than most movies released today. It a way reminiscent of Abel Ferrara’s ‘80s output, it reminds us that New York is a brutal place to live, glamorized portrayals from the past two decades be damned. It dances on the fine line between living and death, gleaning a frenetic pace from characters who live moment by moment. It pulls back the curtain on a group of people who are hiding in plain sight, overlooked and ignored as those more fortunate whizz by. I’ve never really taken the time to think about what was going on in the lives of people begging me for MetroCard swipes, before or after they ask the question. Now I do.

“I read that often: ‘Oh, the stories no one ever pays attention [to]’ or ‘The people you often ignore,’ and I always found the opposite,” explained Josh. “Obviously, I made the movie. But I’m always so intrigued by those who feel uninhibited...The goal from the get go was: Here are these people that I’m attracted to, people that have become my friends. I just wanted to shine a light, and show some type of truth. I wanted to show the dangers of that lifestyle and, the way I look at it, the beauty of that lifestyle.”

Regarding the experience of living on the street, Duress said last night that Heaven Knows What “captured it really realistically.” Holmes told me the friends from her street days who have seen the movie “really like” it.

“I was kind of saying [to a friend], ‘Why did this even happen to me? It was just so random. Why did I get picked out of everyone else for this to happen to?’” she told me. “He was like, ‘But you know what? It wasn’t just luck. Yeah, you had the luck of meeting the right people, but it was you that actually took the chance and put the work and the effort and the time into it and made everything happen.’ He was basically saying that not everyone would do that or could do it. For me, it wasn’t even about if I could or would. There wasn’t anything else to do.”

This weekend’s major film release is Cameron Crowe’s Hawaiian wet dream Aloha, starring Bradley Cooper, Rachel McAdams and Bill Murray, plus Caucasian, Arizona-born Emma Stone as a part-native Hawaiian named Allison Ng. Aloha currently has a very bad 14% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is not a surprise considering the film’s financiers openly lamented how painful and shitty the movie is.

Among the gossip leaked from Sony in December was the plight of Aloha, which was then untitled but had carried the name Deep Tiki in a previous life. Bringing the film to life was so torturous that then-Sony Pictures Entertainment head Amy Pascal vowed it would be her last time ever starting a movie in which “the script was ridiculous” and “we al [sic] know it.” You can read the rest of the saga below, and/or watch the first 8 minutes of Aloha, which were put on YouTube by Sony for reasons that I guess made sense to someone somewhere.

Last week, conservative political activist and reality star Josh Duggar admitted that, as a teenager, he molested several underage girls—including some of his sisters. The admission was confirmation of a longstanding and widely circulated rumor about the 19 Kids and Counting Family, and it’s not the only tale out there.

Thanks to a 2006 police report, we know the Duggars “train” their children with a rod; thanks to a former 19 Kids crew member, we know matriarch Michelle Duggar may have once gotten a gay crew member fired.

Below, read some of other the stories we’ve heard from people who worked with the Duggars or know someone who did. As always, email me at allie@gawker.com if you have something to share.

On that “rehab” Josh got after the abuse

To start us off, here’s a note from someone who says they attended church with the Duggars when Josh was a teenager.

...When I spoke with Josh as a teen, I was struck by the person I saw beneath the obnoxiously outspoken persona that he parades around with. He was fiercely intelligent, weak, hurt, ambitious, and sincere. He also had tight control over his image for a teen—likely a result of living in the limelight for years. ...

Nobody told me that he was guilty of sexual molestation. I do remember that he was caught for pornography and being sent away for rehabilitation when he was 17 or so. If people look back to when Josh was bald on the show, it was because he was being “rehabilitated”. The head-shaving was part of the shaming process. I remember thinking that everyone was overreacting. When Josh returned from his “porn rehab”, he was brought before the church. After Josh gave his “testimony”, his sisters came up and hugged him and I remember seeing huge, confused tears streaming down their faces. I remember being confused about why they seemed to take it so personally.

Now it makes more sense.

When the confession letter was found in the book and the Oprah incident happened, I remember there being a lot of panic in the camp. Being a teen, I wasn’t told the details. A friend of mine told me that he thought he overheard Josh had touched a girl inappropriately. We thought that maybe it was a weird consensual teen fling at a family camp event or something. When there were rumors of lawyers and police, I started thinking that something more serious was going on. I began to feel weird about the whole family and started drifting away from that circle as I got older. Years later I found the postings in the online forums about Josh and his sisters and heard that he was heading up the FRC. And I also learned how much money and power the Duggars were accumulating from the show. The whole thing made me sick. It was out of control. ...

How Jim Bob punishes children who masturbate

And here’s a secondhand story about more of that good, old-fashioned Duggar discipline:

My cousins husband used to work at the Duggar production as well. He has many, many, stories about this family, but one that particularly strikes me as terrible is when one of the older Duggar Boys was caught playing with himself. He said that one of his brothers had told on him for being in the bathroom for a few hours one night, worried that he was sick. Well to see if he really was, Jim Bob walked in. He caught him doing it, and on one of the day’s the cameras were filming. Jim bobs screams made the crew run to where they were filming. Immediately they asked him what was wrong. All Jim Could reply was “idle hands are the devils playthings.” Apparently, the whole next day he was supposed to do chores around the house. But, Jim Bob had tied his hands together so that doing anything was nearly impossible. ...

Also: Jim Bob won’t order from waitresses?

According to one former server...

I worked at a pseudo fancy Italian chain that the Duggar family likes to frequent and waited on them many times. Sometimes the whole family, sometimes Cousin Amy and her mother were along, sometimes just the boys came in.

One time it was just the parents, the eldest girl and the youngest (at the time) baby. They were with another man and he and Jim Bob were talking about taking another run for office. Michelle was sitting quietly, while the older daughter took complete care of the infant as if it was her own.

Each time I waited on them, the children were all, including Josh, very polite and caused no problems. However Jim Bob never once talked to me. He would give me a nasty look, then tell Michelle what he would like to eat. She would then relay his order, which I had just heard, to me. I checked with other servers, and the females all were treated the same way by Jim Bob. He would give his order to male servers himself. He is also a horrendous tipper, averaging around 5 percent after asking to have the gratuity removed from his bill.

Jim Bob makes a joke

Here’s a story from a reader who met the family at a Christian conference.

just wanted to share my interactions with the father duggar at an event in colorado some years ago (they were presenting at some christian conference that was near by house and i went out of curiosity. don’t judge!)

i’m a woman but pretty andro, short hair, skinny, boyish clothes etc. important to the story

[Jim Bob] was gladhanding with various people and i shook hands with him. he called me buddy and did that bro arm slap men do when they shake hands. when he heard my voice though he was surpsied. “oh i’m sorry, i thought you were a boy”

“i get that a lot,” i said. no biggie. he laughs. “good thing you aren’t that boys don’t cry girl, we’d probably be in a very different position right now!”

only later did i see the movie and discover that the hillary swank is raped and murdered after a man discovers she’s a girl posing as a boy

cool, dude

Proof the Duggar homeschool program is highly effective

Finally: a short anecdote from someone who met the family at a book signing.

Weird little story. Met them at a book signing in TN maybe a year or two ago. Was wearing a t-shirt with a t-rex on it. The line moved at a pretty quick pace, but when I went through one of the boys (a teenager) asked me why I had “dragons” on my clothes.

Know anything else? Email me, or drop a note in the comments.

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

As expected, courageous leader, tenacious progressive, and upstanding citizen Sepp Blatter has won re-election as president of FIFA. His impeccable credentials gave him the overwhelming victory over Guy Who Is Not Sepp Blatter, with the first vote ending up 133-73 before Blatter’s opponent generously conceded to the irresistible wave of history.

It has been a trying week for the governing body of international soccer, with arrests of FIFA officials for corruption being carried out by American and Swiss authorities, and the announcement of a separate investigation into allegations of bribery in the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. FIFA is in crisis. The only man capable of leading it back to respectability is Sepp Blatter, and, thankfully for those concerned about ethics, Blatter has received a fifth term to carry out his much-needed reforms.

Blatter’s 17 years in office have been marked by financial irregularities, shady backroom dealings, fraud, graft, cronyism, sexism, dismissal of racism and homophobia, resistance to technological change, a lack of transparency, irreparable rifts between member states, and numerous and toothless ethics investigations. None of these, naturally, are Blatter’s fault. He is a firm and forceful administrator, minutely involved in every aspect of FIFA’s activities, but cannot be held responsible for the actions of rogue actors within the organization.

From this graphic you can see how #Blatter would have no clue about alleged corruption at #FIFA - via @McKenzieCNN pic.twitter.com/WmQpDjTVSd

May 29, 2015

A vote for the status quo is a vote for progress. A vigorous and united FIFA, marching together under the yoke of Blatter, will be prepared to make the hard decisions necessary to continue to thrive into the 21st century. Who better to combat corruption than the man so intimately familiar with FIFA’s inner workings? Who better to root out malfeasance than the man who has already witnessed so many disgraced and indicted lieutenants? The only thing more productive than four terms of Sepp Blatter is five terms of Sepp Blatter.

The voting delegates have overpoweringly affirmed that FIFA is strong and healthy, and requires no new blood. After all, why fix what clearly isn’t broken? In re-electing Sepp Blatter, FIFA has declared that its way forward is to stay the course.

On Thursday, at about 4 p.m. Central Standard Time, several news outlets reported that Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and Illinois congressman, was indicted for, among other offenses, lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The media entities included BuzzFeed News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and CBS Chicago, all of whom posted their stories within minutes of each other.

However, the BuzzFeed story was the only one to have multiple professional journalists—both BuzzFeed employees and otherwise—praise it as a “scoop” upon publication. (The practice of BuzzFeed employees spamming everyone’s timeline with the same link at the same time, giving the impression of an institutional hive mind, has been previously noted by Awl Dean Choire Sicha.)

BuzzFeed’s story is timestamped 4:01 p.m., as is CBS Chicago’s. Already the claim that BuzzFeed “scooped” anyone is dubious, especially since the Sun-Times—whose story is timestamped 3:58 p.m.—beat them both (I was formerly employed by the Sun-Times’ parent company, Wrapports Inc., though I worked in a completely separate division and had nothing to do with the Sun-Times’ reporting or anything else).

A list of journalists and “media personalities” who heralded BuzzFeed’s “scoop” on Twitter:

• Rosie Gray, a political reporter at BuzzFeed
  
• Ashley McCollum, BuzzFeed’s chief of staff
  
• Lydia Polgreen, international deputy editor at the New York Times
  
• Jamil Smith, a senior editor at the New Republic
  
• Chris Geidner, BuzzFeed’s legal editor

Neither CBS Chicago nor the Sun-Times’ stories were lauded as “scoops” by anyone on Twitter.

The “scoop” as it stands in 2015 is a source of much derision, though perhaps not enough. Last year, financial journalist and Willy Wonka impersonator Felix Salmon said at a journalism conference that scoops are “the most masturbatory things journalists do. The reader couldn’t give a flying fuck who broke it.” He is correct; the only people that care about such arbitrary designations are the reporters and editors that get them and the reporters and editors that do not.

The internet made the “scoop” irrelevant. This has been obvious for a very long time. In 2006, American Journalism Review published a cringey piece on the new hot trend of newspapers publishing breaking news on the internet, as opposed to waiting until the next day to splash the story across the front page. “I understand where we’re going [with the Internet],” Carlos Illescas, a Denver Post reporter whose editors decided to break one of his scoops online instead of in the newspaper, told the Review. “I just don’t quite buy into that death-of-the-newspaper thing.” This conversation today would be ridiculous to have; the idea of holding onto news to sell newspapers is an obsolete one.

Much of the time, when a news outlet claims that they have a scoop, what they mean is, “We got this through the CMS first.” Nowhere is that more obvious than in entertainment journalism. In a 2013 story about L.A.’s quartet of identical trade outlets, Patrick Goldstein wrote:

After months of speculation, an actress had been chosen to play lusty Anastasia Steele in Universal Pictures’ adaptation of the best-selling erotic thriller Fifty Shades of Grey. The casting of Dakota Johnson, the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith, was the kind of scoop that the Big Four trades (Deadline, The Wrap, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter, which goes by the acronym THR) would have killed for. But it was not to be, since the book’s writer, EL James, had just revealed the casting choice herself on Twitter.

Within moments everyone in today’s zero-attention-span media scrambled to post the news, hoping to get a bump in Web site traffic. Stories about casting—a form of journalistic name-dropping—have been a staple since Variety was founded. But today, because they are the biggest drivers of traffic, they dominate as never before. Given that James had alerted her more than 358,000 Twitter followers, you would think it impossible for any journalist to claim bragging rights on the Fifty Shades news break. Still, one did: Mike Fleming, Deadline’s veteran movie writer, who topped his story with the label “Exclusive.”

When everything is exclusive, nothing is.

As it happens, the argument against “scoops” is rather convincing. You may remember the New York Post’s infamous “Bag Men” cover from the day after the Boston Marathon bombing. There were many, many faults with the reporting surrounding the Boston Marathon bombing and the ensuing manhunt, many of which were prompted by the drive for a “scoop,” at the expense of checking facts and getting information from multiple sources. (The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, generally a prudent man, bafflingly defended much of that reporting, reasoning that readers won’t remember who broke the story, so they won’t remember who got it wrong.) It’s a practice that is endemic, extending to high-profile news startups run by former star Wall Street Journal reporters.

The old definition of a “scoop” in journalism, which dates to 1884, generally meant that whichever outlet claimed the scoop exclusively published the information, or at least published the information first. Since BuzzFeed did not even publish the story first, there is no feasible way that this story was BuzzFeed’s “scoop.” Even if it had published it first, it is a very hard sell to claim that a federal indictment of a former congressman is a “scoop” or “exclusive” at all, since it would inevitably be reported widely. (It is not as if BuzzFeed has some exclusive agreement with federal prosecutors to see their indictments before anyone else, as this would be highly unethical.)

Perhaps the first real online journalism “scoop” was when Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story in 1998, after Newsweek killed it. James Fallows, then the editor of U.S. News & World Report told CNN, “The technology of nonstop news and the Internet means that allegations that would have been carefully checked out a generation ago no longer are. We now have a 24-hour-a-day news cycle. News gets used up very quickly and there’s a constant hunger for new tidbits.” If that was true then, it is scripture now. Erick Schonfeld wrote in 2009, “Web companies large and small are embracing [the] stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck… The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.” It is something, then, that BuzzFeed is now publishing directly on Facebook.

The first batch of articles published directly to Facebook were an odd bunch (a New York Times feature, a 9,000 word Atlantic cover story, a… BuzzFeed listicle) but publications, especially ones that break news, like the above three, will eventually learn to use the platform the way their users do: to quickly update people on happenings. What are most Facebook status updates, already, if not breaking news? When New York Times stories are broken directly onto Facebook, it may mean that Facebook will direct more of its terrifyingly large userbase towards them—but it also, as Tom Scocca noted on this website, means that publications will begin, if they haven’t begun already, self-censoring articles (or, you know, news) to Facebook’s decidedly Disneyfied taste. So then what happens? We are become Facebook, destroyer of worlds.

Sam Stecklow is an editor at The Morning News and a freelance writer in Bridgeport, Chicago.

Photo of ancient newsroom via AP