The criminal investigation unit of the IRS expects to add to the list of 14 FIFA officials and corporate co-conspirators already indicted in this week’s soccer corruption scandal or whatever the fuck, the New York Times reported Friday evening. But it’s still not clear whether the U.S. will go after the biggest fish, freshly reelected FIFA emperor-for-life Sepp Blatter.

“I’m fairly confident that we will have another round of indictments,” Richard Weber, the chief of IRS criminal investigations told the NYT, but he declined to name names.

The story dances carefully around FIFA’s lingering Blatter problem, implying he might be a target of the investigation without coming out and saying it. Here’s Matt Apuzzo for the Times:

Mr. Weber would not identify the remaining targets of the federal investigation or say whether Mr. Blatter was among them. Mr. Weber said he understood that federal investigators, by publicly vowing to rid soccer of corruption, had raised expectations around the world. But he did not shy away from those expectations.

“We strongly believe there are other people and entities involved in criminal acts,” he said.

“Eppsay Atterblay,” Weber might as well have said, winking suggestively.

The IRS says the timing of the FIFA arrests wasn’t intended to stop Blatter’s seemingly inevitable reelection, and that the association’s annual meeting in Zurich was the only time they could get so many of their suspects, based in several different nations, in one convenient location.

For his part, Blatter claims to be “disgusted” at the allegations of widespread bribery and money laundering within the organization that he’s run for the past 17 years. He’s decided not to resign in the face of the continuing investigation.

[Photo: AP Images]

As feminist student activists fight to expand their circle of vulnerability in collegiate life, Title IX has gone from a law designed to protect college students from sexual misconduct and discrimination to a means by which professors are put on trial for their tweets.

Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis found herself entangled in one such trial after two female graduate students filed Title IX charges against her because of an essay and a tweet she authored. Kipnis was then plunged into a secretive and labyrinthine bureaucratic process that she believes threatens her academic freedom.

The trouble for Kipnis started a few months ago when she published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the growing sexual paranoia on college campuses. Though Kipnis primarily focused on conduct between professors and students, her essay did feature a cutting indictment of the current activism around consent and sex on campus: “women have spent the past century and a half demanding to be treated as consenting adults,” Kipnis writes, “now a cohort on campuses [is] demanding to relinquish those rights, which I believe is a disastrous move for feminism.”

Student activists at Northwestern protested Kipnis’ essay by carrying around mattresses in the style of Emma Sulkowicz, which Kipnis regarded as “symbolically incoherent,” given that Sulkowicz’s mattress had come to symbolize student-on-student sexual assault and that Kipnis’ essay was primarily about sex between students and teachers. Further, Kipnis hadn’t assaulted anyone. Nevertheless, the students, with mattresses in tow, went to Northwestern’s president with a petition demanding swift and official condemnation of Kipnis essay.

Of the protest, Kipnis writes, “the new [consent] codes infantilized students while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives, and here were students demanding to be protected by university higher-ups from the affront of someone’s ideas, which seemed to prove my point.”

Though the President said he would consider the petition, Kipnis assumed that academic freedom would prevail.

But Kipnis was wrong.

After the petition was circulated and mattresses dragged to the University President’s office, two students filed Title IX complaints against Kipnis. Kipnis was informed of the complaints through email but was not told what she had done or to whom she had allegedly done it. Here’s Kipnis :

I wrote back to the Title IX coordinator asking for clarification: When would I learn the specifics of these complaints, which, I pointed out, appeared to violate my academic freedom? And what about my rights — was I entitled to a lawyer? I received a polite response with a link to another website. No, I could not have an attorney present during the investigation, unless I’d been charged with sexual violence. I was, however, allowed to have a “support person” from the university community there, though that person couldn’t speak. I wouldn’t be informed about the substance of the complaints until I met with the investigators.

Kipnis refused to meet with investigators until she learned what the charges were about. The investigators were attorneys from outside law firm hired by Northwestern. The attorneys agreed to tell Kipnis about the nature of the complaints over Skype and agreed not to ask her any questions.

Here’s Kipnis again:

Both complainants were graduate students. One turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with the essay. She was bringing charges on behalf of the university community as well as on behalf of two students I’d mentioned — not by name — because the essay had a “chilling effect” on students’ ability to report sexual misconduct. I’d also made deliberate mistakes, she charged (a few small errors that hadn’t been caught in fact-checking were later corrected by the editors), and had violated the nonretaliation provision of the faculty handbook.

The second complainant was someone Kipnis mentioned, not by name, in connection with lawsuit brought by a Northwestern professor who had two sexual harassment investigations brought against him. The professor is suing Northwestern for defamation and one of the students for defamation. Kipnis mentioned these lawsuits in her essay.

The complaint charged Kipnis mention of the lawsuit was retaliatory and created a hostile environment, though Kipnis points out that she said nothing disparaging. Additionally, the complaint charged that Kipnis omitted information that student believes should have included about her. “This seemed paradoxical — should I have written more?” Kipnis writes, “And is what I didn’t write really the business of Title IX? She also charged that something I’d tweeted to someone else regarding the essay had actually referred to her. (It hadn’t.)“

The Title IX creep that’s happening to Kipnis doesn’t just stop with her. Kipnis was allowed to bring a ‘support person’ , who was not allowed to speak, to her meeting with the Title IX investigators. A Title IX complaint was then filed against the support person. Certainly, such blithe use of a provision to expand the sphere of victimhood seems counter productive to the goal of protecting those who were directly victimized by sexual misconduct or discrimination.

For the rest of the insane and increasingly paradoxical twists to Kipnis’ ordeal (which is still ongoing), including the Title IX investigators asking Kipnis if she would like to file her own retaliation claim against the students, read her dispatch here. It is a stunning example of feminism devouring itself.

Image: Olivia Exstrum/Daily Northwestern

Contact the author at natasha.vargas-cooper@jezebel.com.

On Thursday, police in Shelby Township, Michigan apprehended a loose pig, WXYZ Detroit reports. Here is a photo of that pig looking like a person. What a ham!

Debbie DeRiemaecker was doing yard work when the pig confronted her, she told WXYZ. “It chased her into the front yard before getting distracted by a decorative ball,” the ABC affiliate reports. DeRiemaecker called 911, and more pigs showed up. Haha, just kidding—the police came.

The arresting officer took the photograph above, which, naturally, Shelby police posted to Facebook.

According to the Detroit News, the pig’s owner picked up his wayward animal at the police station, and offered to clean out the cruiser, in which a mess—poop—had been made.

“Just when you think you’ve seen it all ... ,” 25-year law-enforcement veteran Deputy Chief Mark Coil said. “I’ve seen pigs at large, dogs at large, monkeys at large, parakeets at large, horses at large. For some odd reason Shelby Township is like Noah’s ark.” Don’t we know it.

Image via KiroTV. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

On Friday, a Nevada landlord was found not guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of an unarmed trespasser on a property he owns in a working-class neighborhood east of Reno that prosecutors say he had abandoned nearly a decade ago.

The Associated Press reports that, in February 2014, Wayne Burgarello, a 74-year-old retired schoolteacher, shot and killed Cody Devine and wounded Janai Wilson in a vacant duplex he owns. Burgarello said he acted in self-defense, invoking Nevada’s stand-your-ground laws, which allow property owners to use deadly force against attackers—armed or unarmed, so long as the shooter does not initiate the altercation—who pose an imminent threat.

During the two-week trial, Wilson testified that she had stayed at the duplex intermittently over the course of three years. She said she and Devine were sleeping on the floor when Burgarello open fire, without provocation. Neither was found to have had a gun.

Burgarello told police that Devine’s arm “came up like a gun,” the AP reports. Burgarello’s attorney, Theresa Ristenpart, speculated that he might have mistaken a black flashlight found at the scene for one.

“He did what he had to do to protect his own life,” Ristenpart, said. It was not Burgarello, she said, but Devine and Wilson, who “created the dangerous, threatening situation, trespassing, getting high on meth and being where they shouldn’t be, where they had no right to be.”

Prosecutors alleged that Burgarello had acted with premeditation, seeking revenge for a series of burglaries at the run-down property. According to the AP, Burgarello shot Devine five times—once in the head—and Wilson three times.

After the clerk read the jury’s verdict, the AP reports, Burgarello laughed with his family outside the courtroom. “It’s going to be OK,” he said.

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

On Saturday, speaking in Baltimore, Martin O’Malley officially announced his candidacy for president. “The presidency is not a crown to be passed back and forth,” he said, “between two royal families.” Very subtle.

The night after Michael Brelo was acquitted for the 2012 shooting death of unarmed Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, I started writing. There is a certain burden of clarity and urgency that hangs over the writer, which he or she must ultimately answer to. But the weight of things was especially heavy this night. How ought I to reckon with the taking of another’s life in such brutal fashion? Brelo, an Iraq war veteran, pumped 49 shots into the car of Russell and Williams until they were no more. For that, he received the state’s mercy.

I called my father. We talked for three hours.

I am the only one next to God and the psychiatrist who knows of the atrocities my father committed and witnessed in Vietnam. Up until December 23, 2013 (45 years after his tour), no one knew. On the night of Brelo’s acquittal, my dad recounted to me the hell he has lived for much of his life.

The tragedy of state violence is that it forces the agents who act in its name into religious and righteous innocence. Those who effectively act as the state’s caretakers are not trained to see terror as such. Brelo, and the thousands of lawmen who bear the badge across the country, act at consent of law. My father was acting at the will of the state. And as the logic holds, there can be nothing morally reprehensible about violence so long as the state allows.

My father never forgot Vietnam nor was he ever able to come to terms with the taking and theft of life of those which his homeland had deemed enemies. And if you ask me, one must not simply “come to terms” with violence as a matter of reckoning with its destructive capacities. For at the root of the matter, one has to think more fundamentally about its very necessity. And even more, one has to think about the paradox of exacting violence, for a nation in which he himself had long been disposable.

It now seems strange that for all my curiosities as a young black boy coming of age, I never asked dad about Vietnam. I never prodded or pressed the matter beyond vague references to the commendations he had received. All this, I gathered, was precisely the point of war. That when we, the citizens, send men and women to kill at the state’s beckoning, we do so with a particular kind of reluctance to know the full extent of what we actually charge them to do. I never asked my father about Vietnam partly because I wasn’t thinking critically about the matter. But also because of a more willful ignorance; a subconsciously profound want to not know.

This all changed when I asked him, days after my graduation from college and on the night of Brelo’s acquittal, if he had been proud to serve his country.

He paused. It had gotten so quiet you could hear air sifting in and beyond the microphone. “It was chaos,” he began, finally breaking a silence that seemed to carry on for eternity. “It was a nightmare.”

The seamlessness of terror, I suppose, had brought him intimately closer to time. He combed through dates and intimate details which made it appear as though his memory of the facts were deliberate. “11 months, 28 days,” he recited. This was how long he spent in “hell,” as it were.

Dad used the nightmare metaphor many more times on that night. For 11 months and 28 days, he walked, crawled, foxholed, killed, cried, screamed, and survived his way through literal hell. And in the 45 years since, it has haunted him. It was the realization of his complicity in state terror, the violence he exacted, the rehabilitation he would not receive, his own internalized rage, his return to a nation that hated him.

The war had come home.

Dad told me there were three choices for most black men in 1968: die, go to jail, or head to war. So my father left Clarksdale, Mississippi for basic training in Fort Benning, Georgia, just weeks before Martin Luther King Jr. would be shot dead in Memphis. He had no time to mourn. When you’re preparing to protect the empire, there’s little time to eulogize the dead or fully remember the slain.

He left for Vietnam in September. Two weeks after arriving, members of the platoon to which he had originally been assigned were all dead.

“It wasn’t my time to go,” he said aloud. It was nothing to be on patrol and in light-hearted conversation in one instance and looking over your shoulder to see someone’s head pop off in another, or, as he recalled, “to see a full round go through your battle buddy” as they reflected in the jest of casual conversation.

Horrific does not begin to capture the extent to which he, and his fellow soldiers, had been ravaged and destroyed by war. One of the soldiers on his patrol collected ears as proof of the people he killed. Shrapnel would whisper just above their bodies as they lay prone in the trembling jungle. He watched another soldier drown at night while attempting to cross a river. Two months before coming home, he was a snapshot decision from walking to a base where everyone would be killed in an ambush attack.

He flirted with death and yet, somehow, he refused to be taken. Perhaps it was luck. Or, ironically enough, maybe it was God. Still, what was the necessity of it all? That the nation needed its citizens to die, witness death, and dole it out reveals dishonesty. But it too exposes the after-life that war takes on. There is a particular kind of continuity to state violence that transcends event and vocation. On these grounds, we might be able to connect the horrors of chattel slavery to Vietnam to Palestine to Baltimore. Here we might be able to close distance between the master, the lawman, and the soldier.

How radical must it be to hold terror and all its faces in equal absurdity? That dead black teenagers have more in common with slaughtered Vietnamese children than we would like to acknowledge is frightening enough. But acknowledging that the soldier and the lawman exact the same kinds of terror gets at the heart of the matter. When the war comes home, violence does not remake itself. It does not begin anew at the point in which it steps outside of its particular moment. Violence exacts and re-exacts; emerges and reemerges; moves and sweeps across its subjects until the nation has no soul to lose.

As dad recounted his story, I thought about the limits of the American imagination and the power of radical self-renewal. One can wield force –by the whip, the gun, the purse –and yet have no control over one’s own humanity. But on the grounds where we are deeply honest about our complicity, we will find that renewal and forgiveness are not far behind.

Dad left Vietnam in August of 1969. The army gave him a shower, a uniform, and a steak dinner. There would be no debriefing. There would be no reckoning with the emotional and spiritual destruction caused by incessant violence. There would be no efforts to rehabilitate those, who, just days before their return, had doled out heaps of terror at the state’s command.

“We went from killing to a plane ride home,” he said. Years later, he would attempt to become a Tennessee State Trooper but quit after learning of that state’s “use of force” policy. “I could not bring myself to a position of killing anyone,” he would tell me.

Home would reveal the normalcy and fluidity of it all. What struck me most was the way in which he had moved from the terrors of war to the realities of racialized violence. If the violent and unjust expansion of empire tells us one thing, the fact of 30 percent of black men being incarcerated in 1969, at the advent of the prison boom, says all that needs to be said about the nation’s care and concern.

It is all so deeply traumatizing. And I suspect that, for the state, this move to dismember particular kinds of violence from the larger project of empire is not a coping mechanism. It is the strategy through which violence can always be justified. If violence can be constructed as a normal feature of the state’s existence, the nation doesn’t have to live with its own immoralities. And if the extremes of state violence vis-a-vis Vietnam, or Palestine, or the War on Terror, can be explained, explaining racial terror, and police brutality, and the caging of human beings, would be par for the course.

For 45 years, my father tormented. By the time I was old enough to know something was wrong, it was far too late. Anger and isolation—both features of a condition known as PTSD—were well into effect. Though Vietnam was long over, the war raged in dad’s head and heart for far longer.

He was haunted both by his sins and the sins of the nation he served. Though he never talked about it, I sensed the weight of a deep horror hovering about him—its burden manifesting itself in the nightmares, in the incalculable rage, in his isolation from everything and everyone—including me.

He saw a psychiatrist for the first time two years ago. He was deeply troubled and drained. Dad had been holding on to an inexplicably violent rage that controlled and paralyzed him. He would make his way through a number of marriages only to pack up and head for a new city after it dissolved. He was running from something, though I was never able to discern what it was he was running from.

By the time he finally confronted the horrors of 1968 and 1969, he was confronting, for the first time, his own complicity in a conflict that has had sweeping implications on the nation and the world.

“I felt like I was stepping straight off the battlefield,” he told me. Dad had come face to face with a terror that subsumed a great deal of his life and had forced him, a poor black man from rural Mississippi, to wield violence for a nation which hated him; and which continues to view his children as unremarkably disposable.

One has to reconcile with the invisible wounds that violence leaves behind. And amid the manifestation of racialized violence of the kinds we see in Baltimore and elsewhere, one has to reckon with the ways in which violence traumatizes the victims and the agents who dole it out. For dad, this means wrestling with his own complicity and confrontation with terror. For the nation, this means being honest about it.

Jared Loggins is a writer and student of political theory. He is a frequent contributor to The Huffington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at @jaredloggins.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]

Megyn Kelly will interview Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar on Wednesday night. They are expected to discuss the recent news that their son, Josh Duggar, molested four of their daughters. Jim Bob and Michelle will also discuss the future of their TLC show, 19 Kids and Counting.

The Duggars announced the exclusive interview on their blog:

Next week we will sit down with Megyn Kelly on Fox News to share our hearts with you about the pain that we walked through as a family twelve years ago, the tears we all shed and the forgiveness that was given. We appreciate the outpouring of love and prayers for our family at this time.

The Jim Bob-Michelle response was inevitable, but this interview seems like it’s going to be yet another attempt to emphasize “forgiveness” for their son over the lives of their daughters. Whatever, it’s going to be terrible.

Image via Getty.

A 47-year-old sport fisherman died in Hawaii on Friday after being impaled by a swordfish he had shot with a speargun, CNN reports.

According to Hawaii News Now, charter boat captain Randy Llanes was in Honokohau Harbor on the Island of Hawaii when he spotted the six-foot-long fish and jumped in the water with a speargun.

After Llanes successfully shot the swordfish, however, police say “the fish got wrapped around a mooring anchor, came back and swam at him.” From the Department of Land and Natural Resources:

The fish then reportedly struck the man in the chest with its sharp bill. He was pulled by onlookers from the harbor and was unresponsive.

Responding emergency personnel administered CPR and then took Llanes to Kona Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

“This is very, very unusual.” Waikiki Aquarium Director Andrew Rossiter told KHON-TV. “There have been a couple of cases documented in the past, but almost always it can be attributed to an unfortunate accident or the fish being injured.

[Image via KHON-TV]

A six-month-long New York Times investigation has found that New York City’s system of “three-quarter houses” preys on those it ostensibly exists to help—recovering addicts and alcoholics. One sober-housing operator reportedly told residents to relapse and return to certain outpatient treatment programs, so he could receive Medicaid-fee kickback. If they refused, he would evict them.

In New York City, hospitals, treatment programs, homeless shelters, and the Department of Corrections all send people to three-quarter houses—called such because they exist somewhere between more heavily regulated halfway houses and private homes. A 2013 Johns Hopkins study estimated that as many as 10,000 New Yorkers currently reside in three-quarter housing—a reflection, in part, of a broader, city-wide housing crisis.

The people who operate such housing receive $215 for many of their tenants from the city’s Human Resources Administration, the Times reports, and Medicaid subsidies from the state’s Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services reach into the millions.

But, apparently, nobody is tracking that money. “The system, such as it is, dooms tenants to a perpetual cycle of treatment and relapse, of shuttling between programs and three-quarter houses,” writes Times reporter Kim Barker.

“Three-quarter houses are, in my opinion, the frying pan for people who are in the fire,” JoAnne Page, president of the Fortune Society, an organization that helps rehabilitate convicts, said. “Many of them are firetraps, many are very dangerous and many are brutally exploitive. They crowd people beyond anything they could justify. But they are better than what else is out there, so we use them reluctantly.”

Barker’s investigation focuses on two men: Yury Baumblit, a Russian immigrant and two-time felon who operates a series of sober houses, many in East New York, under the name “Back on Track”—and who was previously the subject of a 2013 ProPublica investigation—and Horace Bush, a 62-year-old homeless addict trying to get and stay sober:

Mr. Baumblit first sent Mr. Bush to an outpatient program called New York Service Network. Within five months, he was given a letter that said he was doing well, with “consistent negative toxicology results.” Medicaid paid out almost $13,000 for Mr. Bush to attend the program an average of four times a week, records show.

Joseph LaBarbera, New York Service Network’s lawyer, denied allegations that the program paid Mr. Baumblit money for clients.

No one at Back on Track helped Mr. Bush with permanent housing, and by the time he was supposed to graduate from New York Service Network in August 2013, he had no place to go.

Bush told Barker that, once he had completed the outpatient program, Baumblit told him to relapse, so that he could return to another program. “‘Do what you do’—that’s what he told me,” Bush said:

“Either Mr. Ed will come and tell you or Mr. Yury will come and tell you, ‘You know that your time is almost up, and we’ll have to move you out, or put you someplace else. And to get someplace else, you have to have a relapse, maybe even go into detox,’” Mr. Bush recalled. “And then they’ll put you back into a program, and they’ll get your Medicaid authorization back up. And they work on you from there. And you just keep going around and around.”

Medicaid paid a total of almost $20,000 for Bush’s treatment at three different three programs, the Times reports. In 2014, the city’s Human Resource Administration paid Back on Track $148,000 in housing assistance.

Since August 2010, inspectors from the Department of Buildings have fined the owner of six Back on Track buildings—Baumblit leases—more than $145,000 for 22 violations, 18 of which were considered “immediately hazardous.” According to the Times, none of that money has been paid, and no changes have been made to the buildings.

In 2013, Baumblit stopped paying his rent, which amounted to $300,000 by last summer:

Last June, Back on Track agreed in court that it would move out by Halloween and “make best efforts to relocate the occupants” to other three-quarter homes.

But none of the residents were told. Eviction notices were thrown away, and Mr. Baumblit kept moving in new tenants.

On Dec. 17, the city marshals showed up. They locked up six of the 12 apartments, giving the few residents who were not at group 15 minutes to grab what they could. On the streets, tenants huddled, wondering whether this was really happening. The week before Christmas, 60 people were suddenly homeless.

The story is long, complex, and worth reading both for the detail it provides of the city, state, and federal government’s utter failure to take responsibility for policies that leave the most desperate people even more vulnerable than they already are and for the portrait it draws of a man who exploited that desperation and vulnerability for his own gain.

Image via Leonel Ponce/Flickr. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

According to a new report from People magazine, Bruce Jenner will appear on the cover of an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair as “Her,” the name the former Olympian has used for his female identity.

Citing “an industry source,” People says that famed portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz will shoot the pictorial, Jenner’s first since announcing “I consider myself a woman” during a two-hour ABC special in April.

The same source told the magazine that the issue is slated to come out sometime this summer.

On an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians that aired last week, Jenner told his family that “you will see me and you will know” when it was time to start referring to him as “her.”

[Image via Getty Images]

I’ve done a lot of things while tripping on mushrooms. I’ve eaten meals, taken walks in the park, even closed my eyes and chilled out to my favorite tunes. But, until a few weeks ago, I’d never won first place—and $5,000—in a Magic: the Gathering tournament.

Our journey begins on a Saturday at 6 A.M., a time I’m more likely to stay up until than to get up by. In my living room were three friends: a strip club DJ, a software engineer, and a cosplay photographer—which is almost enough to fool you into thinking that the world of competitive Magic is diverse.

I felt horrendous. There was only one thing that could restore my equilibrium.

“We ready to go?” said the cosplay photographer.

“Almost,” I said.

I ran upstairs and threw a Ziploc bag into my backpack.

As Insane Clown Posse raps, “If Magic is all / we’ve ever, known / then it’s easy to miss / what really goes on. / But I’ve seen miracles in every way / and I’ve seen miracles, every day.” I play Magic because I like the friends I’ve made from it, because I like thinking (or pretending to think); but what gives it its replay value, aside from the periodic printing and acquisition of new cards, is the challenge. Magic is hard. Winning a tournament, no matter how good you are, is always a miracle.

I couldn’t sleep on the car ride down to Portland, and the coffee wasn’t enough to make me feel human. How do people get up early five days a week? The mind reels. I had no choice but to unzip my backpack.

“Forget something, CML?” said Jamal (the strip club DJ).

“Nope,” I said, gobbling some shrooms. They tasted disgusting.

“Can I have some coffee?” I asked Brendan (the cosplay photographer).

“No.”

We were somewhere around Lacey when the drugs started to take hold …

Card games have been a passion of mine since I was ten. After college, I briefly played online poker for a living. When the US government murdered it, I naturally regressed to my childhood passion, Magic. In January, I won a qualifier and earned a comped ticket to Brussels to battle the most powerful planeswalkers in the multiverse. I would say “I couldn’t complain,” but I’d be lying: my Eurotrip was dope, but the (misnamed) “Magic Pro Tour” was easily the worst part. I wrote an article about it, the gist of which was: Magic appeals to only a niche demographic because its events don’t matter and even suck in a lot of ways for the competitors. (Contrast with eSports, which have iconic pros, and have reaped the rewards of their real advertising budgets.) My article elicited some polarized responses, which brought me great joy. But it also made me want to do well in Portland. My expectations for myself were getting dangerously high, my thinking very uptight. Shrooms (I thought to myself while retching out the window) were a way to take the pressure off, remind myself the whole thing was essentially a joke.

But would I be able to play up to my standards for myself? One of the clichés the community uses to explain Magic to muggles is that “it’s like chess and poker at the same time,” which differs from other clichés in being more or less true. You have to devote a lot of thought to the cards you have, the cards they have, the cards you might draw, the cards they might have. Magic is the best game of all time—it tests adaptability and memory, intuition and calculation, stamina and judgment. Bringing the shrooms was a spontaneous decision, but I would never have eaten them without some prior experience.

My training regimen had begun some months earlier, during the NFC Championship game. In the first quarter, I ate some caps and stems. Five minutes in, I felt great; fifteen minutes in, I fled outdoors. The score was bad enough, but the lamentation of women was way too much. After communing with nature, I came back in and lay on a couch in a room where I could hear reports of endless defeat and sighs of frustration issuing from the television and the sectional. It sounded like fiction; the game needed a new narrator. Midway through the third quarter, I walked back to the TV, concentrated, and envisioned a fake field goal. It worked! Thanks to me, we were back in it. As the game grew grimmer, I fantasized about scenarios where the Seahawks won. These fantasies grew increasingly outlandish, until one of them came to life, as I knew it would. Defeat had never been an option.

Day One

We got to the Greater Portland Convention Center with plenty of time. The shrooms had had only a mild effect—I was worried they’d lost some puissance since that irrecoverable football game—so I’d eaten a few more a few times en route. I felt a little buzzed, though, who knows, that could have just been Portland.

Brendan asked if I wanted to smoke a joint. “No thanks. I want to be on my mental game.”

Pairings for the first round went up, and the sea of unwashed humanity coursed around me. Magic tournaments are, for lack of a better phrase, visually stunning. The sheer number of people—472 players in Portland, several thousand at some other events, the chaotic lurch towards match pairings and orderly arrangement, side-by-side, at long and narrow tables; the glaring lights and ugly carpets: you have to see it to believe it. Clad in orange and sweat, I was a part of it.

I looked down at my hand; the flesh darkened and shriveled against the bright day outside. Was I to be slain and lobotomized and reanimated into a dread zombie to do the bidding of vile necromancy? Or was this the first sign of my transcendence to a higher realm, the tinder that would ignite my planeswalker spark? I swiped right on myself and walked towards the first round.

Like you, I waste a lot of time reading the internet, and a lot of that time has been spent reading Magic media. The media is seldom about people, often about cards, and never of interest to anyone not hopelessly addicted. I’d seen my opponent’s deck the day before, so I stared at him through my shades and read his soul. Who said English literature wasn’t a useful degree? Outside, I reveled in the unseasonable sun and had a flashback to that day in Central Park where I discovered I gave a flying fuck about Walt Whitman. Then I had to play another round, so I ate some more shrooms.

“I read your article,” said my next opponent.

Auditory hallucinations? I might have eaten too many.

“Sorry?” I said.

“I said I read your article.”

… I’d definitely eaten too many.

“Oh!” I riposted. “Um, cool. Did you like it?”

“Yes!”

Bless him!

I crushed him.

A friend came up to me. “Your article is blowing up.”

“Huh?”

“I just heard a few people talking about it.”

“Did they like it?”

“No.”

Everything was going perfectly.

“What round is it?” I said.

I have a clear recollection of playing on camera and winning.

Magic game is popular enough that the competitive circuit is well-developed, and the games are often incredibly complicated and strategically rich and completely inaccessible to laymen. To be fair, the coverage team does a thorough and accurate job of describing my games, if you play a lot and have kept current with popular cards and “metagame” trends. But what outsider would care enough to decipher the Wizard language? The World Series of Poker this is not. I share coverage’s despair at communicating the strategic depth and excitement of Magic to a commercial, laic audience. Hence the advent of League of Legends as spectator-friendly, ersatz Starcraft, and Hearthstone as spectator-friendly, ersatz Magic. I guess you’ll have to believe me when I say I played brilliantly.

Another round went by.

“Would you classify shrooms as a performance-enhancing drug?” asked Ranjan (the software engineer).

It was then that I was accosted by a man in a suit. Was it the CIA?

“What kind of content would you like to see published?” he said.

Huh?

“Huh?”

“I’m just wondering what kind of content you’d like us to put out there.”

Oh! He was on the coverage team.

“Ummm. Something honest? Something…with a sense of irony.”

“OK, so you want something honest and something with a sense of irony.”

He understood me! “Yep.”

“… That doesn’t make any sense.”

It did, I thought, but the shrooms had put me in an uncharacteristically non-confrontational mood.

“… Because these guys aren’t really writers who play Magic,” said the commentator, “They’re Magic players who are writing.”

Undeterred, he continued: “You ever read Chuck Klosterman?”

“Yep.”

“You know how he covers things, but he thinks he’s better than everyone else, so, in my opinion, that makes him kind of an asshole?”

Ah! This wasn’t a conversation; it was a rant.

“I don’t disagree,” I said.

“It’s kind of pretentious.”

“Right,” I babbled. “But, uh, what if Klosterman actually was smart, though?”

“Because the majority of Magic readers are looking for decklists and tournament reports. So we give them that.”

“Right, OK, look, I’m, uh, not saying you should publish me, man. Just something a bit more honest.”

“OK, sounds good. We agree.”

“I’ve gotta run. We’ll continue this conversation later.” And he walked back to the booth, where he would resume doing his job, and not badly at that. Contrast with Wizards of the Coast’s official coverage teams, trying in vain to convince you what’s going on is exciting, trying way too hard in fact, taking inartistic liberties with their impersonality-based narratives.

I put on my shades and looked out the exit. My glasses were polarized; the response to the article was polarized; the response to me was polarized; my quality of my play was polarized; everything and everyone was polarized.

I ran into some friends. Together we went to a Greek restaurant and the five of us downed two bottles of wine.

“CML’s going to win the tournament,” said someone. Or were the voices in my head singing Renaissance counterpoint? “What’s your record, CML?”

“I’m 8-1.”

“You’re 8-1?”

“Am I?” I said.

“You are.”

“Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Telling?” said Aaron.

We went out for drinks. I had a whiskey sour and felt drunk, so I had another and that helped me sober up. All of life appeared before me, boozy and diaphanous. Two healthgoths walked by. Portland is all about chill hedonism, about not working and thinking. Playing Magic there, all the stress and dyspepsia—that was, well…that was hella normative.

Shrooms off, whiskey on. I’d be able to sleep! I Ubered back to the hotel and did just that.

Day Two

I started my morning with some shrooms. There seemed to be no point in not eating them, until I understood there was nothing to get rid of the putrid taste. Or was there? Beside my leg was something moist and fishy. My Greek leftovers!

There were no forks in the room. I stole one from the hotel lobby and chased down the shrooms with a salmon skewer. There was some salmon left after that, so I ate more shrooms.

I won the first round, I think? I tried to remember where the Starbucks was but I couldn’t because I hadn’t had any coffee. Caffeine is addictive; drugs are bad.

“‘No alcoholic beverages,’” said Jamal, reading the sign outside the tournament hall. “Read that, CML: it says, ‘No alcoholic beverages.’”

“But it doesn’t say ‘no drugs,’” I said.

“If it did,” said Jamal, “What would they do with all the cats on Adderall?”

It was true, just as any company in Seattle that drug ­tested would immediately have to fire half its employees. Adderall use at Magic tournaments is as widespread as “greenies” were in 20th­century baseball.

A tournament judge walked by. “I hear you’ve added, uh, shiitakes to your diet today,” he smirked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied.

I had to play against a friend? With his wide grin, his feline eyes and whiskers, I could swear I was up against the Cheshire Cat.

“What did you do last night?” he said.

“Went out for drinks.”

“Aren’t you hung over?”

I was! I’d forgotten; it was maybe the fifth-biggest reason I felt physically ill.

“Not really,” I said.

“Are you still shrooming?”

“Most definitely.”

“Why?” he asked, whisking around his tail.

“Why anything?” I said profoundly.

I was going to kill him but ran out of time, so we both got a draw instead. How un-American! How Portland. We were both happy.

I won an incredibly close match. It’s always those wins, not the easy ones, that make you feel like you can’t lose. I sprinted out of the hall; I had a fire flower and an invincible star; I was Beast Mode.

My opponent wasn’t supposed to take an intentional draw, but I wanted to. EXPLAIN A DRAW.

“Wanna draw?” I said.

“I mean …” he said.

“If we draw and lose the next round, we’ll both make it,” I lied.

To “make it” is to reach the elimination rounds, in eighth place or better. I would make it. He might not. Or would he? Why wouldn’t he?

I continued: “I snuck at 8th place at the last one with the same record as you if you lose the last round.”

“OK, if you say so!”

That was easy. I could use language! He was going to make it, after all.

“Congratulations!” I said.

I could try to win the last round, but a draw would really lock things up.

“Wanna draw?” I said. (He probably shouldn’t.)

“I think I have to play,” he said.

Damn! He was right.

“You’re right,” I said.

“But if you concede to me, both of us will make it.”

“I’ll concede if someone else can confirm it,” I said.

“You’d be the most awesome guy ever,” he answered.

I was the most awesome guy ever! He really knew how to flatter someone on shrooms. That, and he was a genuinely nice guy.

The match started and I got off to a big lead in game one. Then I revealed a card that shouldn’t have been in my starting lineup, but on the bench, if you will.

“Oops!” I said blithely. I forfeited the game.

A friend came by. “You’re mathematically locked for top 8, even if you lose.”

“Are you going to concede now?” said my foe.

“Uh, I might later,” I said.

“But you’re in.”

“Might as well play for seeding,” I said, dithering and leaving him, I realized, in agony for a not very good reason.

I won the next game and felt a little bad for not feeling bad about it. We got moved over to the camera table; we’d be on if the other match finished.

“It might be different on camera,” he said. “Just letting you know.”

“I kind of like the idea of drawing on camera,” I said.

I lost. I had put him through far greater emotional turbulence than was necessary. That should make it all the sweeter!

“Congratulations and good luck,” I said, moved by my own generosity.

It’s easy to be a gracious loser when you’re on shrooms! It’s also easy to be a gracious loser when it doesn’t matter much. But if that’s true, then why do we ever get salty after losing at Magic?

The head judge announced the top 8 — I was in, at seventh. We took a group photo:

Really, this was nothing after guiding the Seahawks to victory. My bullshit had come to life. I was a good person! I deserved some shrooms.

“Trail mix?” said someone.

“Yep.”

“Can I have some?”

“No,” I said, feeling like a prick.

An official came over. Was he ousting me for five counts of delinquency and hooliganism?

I was shrooming; everybody knew I was shrooming.

The official walked past me to the guy I’d drawn with and tapped him on the shoulder. He had actually gotten ninth. Someone had blundered. I felt guilty. Had I squandered all my good (Reddit) karma from the previous week?

On to the quarterfinals! Was I having a flashback? Or was this really the guy I’d played in round 13? I didn’t want to; he was kind of good.

He got incredibly unlucky. I sat back and allowed myself the luxury of sympathy. I saw I’d rolled my way into the semis.

“Dios mio, man,” I said.

“Huh?” said my adversary.

This was the guy from two rounds ago! It was a flashback. (Of course, flashbacks within flashbacks were quite possible.)

I stared at my deckbox, with its virtuous and pure green mana symbol, and the tree became the tree of my ancestry.

I played the first two games about as badly as possible, but, as in a game of pinball that appears accursed but rises up to reach the replay on the strength of an eleventh-hour multiball, as in a round of bowling so deucedly desperate it looks to a turkey to take flight, the third time was the charm.

The finals.

“I am where I need to be,” I said to no one.

“Come again?” said my opponent.

I’d seen him before too! A flashback within a flashback within a flashback.

I stared at the trippy art in my beautiful deck and felt destiny course through me with the might of a million memories. I knew I would win the tournament. I also knew I’d gotten this feeling dozens of times before and I’d invariably lost, at some point, with all the dull brutality of probability.

He stumbled game one, and I was one with my deck. I was the Whip of Erebos that resurrected the Hornet Queen; I was the Satyr Wayfinder that blazed a fratty trail through the virgin lands; I was the Temple of Malady that sucked dry the Forest of impurity and affliction. I indulged myself with these thoughts while so far ahead in game two, so close to victory, that I thought too of all the ways I could lose before realizing there weren’t any.

I paused, and when I came to I saw I could do no wrong; the world was my Minecraft server.

The restoration of limitless narcissism.

Coming Down

Ah, how sweet it is to win when you’re anyone. But how much sweeter when you’re a massive and incorrigible troll!

What would the coverage team say? If they were salty, it’d be hilarious; if they were courteous, it’d be hilarious. They were unfailingly professional.

(A shocker; nerds are usually so confrontational, most of all when doing their jobs.)

I gave a winner’s interview in a state of crystal-clear sobriety.

Then we were on the road, back to Seattle, $2,250 richer after splitting the prizes among the last four players. A hard way to make a hard living.

I shouldn’t have split. “That’s what I get for deviating from my villain persona,” I muttered, with not much regret.

“Huh?” said the driver.

“You fucked it up!!” I yelled. “You FUCKED IT UP!”

“I don’t want to think of how insufferable you’re going to be after this,” he said.

I closed my eyes to vistas of endless geometry. All was well.

Some tournaments as miserable as my Pro Tour are inevitable, while victories are precious and rare; this is the opposite of what the Magic media would have you believe. The truth is that the two make no sense without one another.

The best shroom experiences are full of revelations: I now understand why they are called Magic mushrooms. It was my most righteous life benchmark since I’d bowled 200, my wildest hallucination since the NFC Championship, my dopest trip since Europe.

Three weeks have passed since the tournament. A muggle friend came by, picked up and examined a stray card.

“The fuck is this?” he asked.

I said: “Obviously, you are not a golfer.”

Illustration by Jim Cooke

Included in Nikki Finke’s settlement with Jay Penske—the Variety and Women’s Wear Daily owener who acquired Deadline in 2009, with whom Finke entered arbitration in 2013—is a provision that she may not practice online journalism about the entertainment industry for around a decade, the New York Times reports.

The revelation comes in a piece on Finke’s return (again) to writing, with the launch of her new site, HollywoodDementia.com. Finke plans to charge readers between $1 and $3 to read fiction—written by her and other industry professionals—about Hollywood.

“There is a lot of truth in fiction,” Finke told the Times. “There are things I am going to be able to say in fiction that I can’t say in journalism right now.” Also, she declined to be photographed for the article, providing instead a new portrait she had taken recently, which can be seen here, if that is the sort of thing you are interested in.

“I would say that everyone is secretly full of trepidation about what Nikki’s new site will be like,” former Los Angeles Times film industry columnist Patrick Goldstein said. “Will it be literary short stories, or will it be fiction as a thin disguise for the truth?” People are, apparently, “scared of their own shadows.”

Earlier this month, on the now-defunct NikkiFinke.com, the ex-blogger wrote, “The stories which I and others write won’t depict any actual Hollywood person or event. But they will marry artifice with verisimilitude into original content creation.”

Image via Hollywood Dementia. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

The New York Post reports that fraudulent vendors have been charging unwitting tourists to ride the Staten Island Ferry, which is free. One Queens man allegedly charged an out-of-town couple $400 for a round trip, which makes the $30 hot dog guy look like an amateur. Can’t knock the hustle!

On Friday, a jury found Saved by the Bell actor Dustin Diamond not guilty of felony reckless endangerment but yes guilty of two misdemeanors, charges stemming from an incident where Diamond allegedly stabbed a bar patron last December.

According to the Associated Press, Diamond’s convictions for disorderly conduct and carrying a concealed weapon have a combined maximum penalty of one year in prison. A sentencing date has not yet been announced.

The bizarre trial began inauspiciously for the actor on Wednesday with the judge reprimanding Diamond’s defense attorney for painting “good luck Dustin” on the back window of his car. The following day, Diamond’s lawyer accused the D.A. of “stomping” on the defense’s evidence and not apologizing.

On the final day of the trial, Diamond was asked if he liked being compared to “Screech,” the Saved By the Bell character he played for over 20 (pretty gross-sounding) years.

“That means they love you,” Diamond reportedly replied, smiling. “That means you’re doing your job.”

[Image via AP Images]

Police say an Oklahoma man was shot and killed on Friday after he attacked the state troopers who had just rescued him from rising floodwaters, the Associated Press reports.

According to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, the officers found two men trying to push a vehicle in swift-moving waters at around 9:30 p.m. last night.

“They were trying to get them to come out of the water. They were worried about them getting swept away,” police spokesperson Capt. Paul Timmons told the AP. “[The two men], for whatever reason, were just really upset about having to leave the vehicle there”

After making it to dry land, police say at least one of the men attacked the officers, one or both of whom then shot at the man, killing him. A weapon was reportedly recovered from the scene, but as of Saturday it was unclear which of the two men had it or if shots were fired at the officers.

“It’s not real clear how it all transpired,” said Timmons.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Did you know that Taylor Swift hands out light-up bracelets that synchronize to her music at all of her concerts? Does the idea sound dumb to you? Well, how dumb are they now that you know that they SAVE teens’ lives??? That’s right! Not dumb at all!

WBRZ2, a local Louisiana news outlet, reports that three young women were involved in a car accident on their way home from a Taylor Swift concert in Baton Rouge. The incident occurred when the driver, Elizabeth Dazzio, nodded off at the wheel and totaled the vehicle. Dazzio was knocked unconscious and the remaining passengers used the lights from their Taylor Swift bracelets to signal help.

From WBRZ2:

Dazzio was driving her sister, Caroline, and a friend home from the show when she fell asleep and wrecked near the I-110/Scenic Highway exit. Dazzio was knocked unconscious, the car was mangled up and the two girls were trapped.

“You could smell the gas and smoke,” Caroline said. “I was just thinking we need to get out of this car.”

The girls began waiving their bracelets, ultimately attracting the attention of another driver:

Eventually, someone stopped. A woman told the girls she saw the lights and knew someone was in trouble.

“She could tell that there was someone in the car,” Caroline told WBRZ reporter Brett Buffington in an exclusive interview on WBRZ News 2 at 10:00 Wednesday.

The woman and a man with her helped pull the girls out and called for first responders

Elizabeth Dazzio is still in the hospital, but will be released soon. Sure, she and her friends almost died, but it was all worth it for the following tweet:

This is unreal. I'm so happy they're okay.http://t.co/UnylIwhZv5

May 28, 2015

Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.

Image via Getty.

Beau Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden and a former Attorney General of Delaware, has died of brain cancer. He was 46.

The Vice President’s office confirmed the death in a statement:

It is with broken hearts that Hallie, Hunter, Ashley, Jill and I announce the passing of our husband, brother and son, Beau, after he battled brain cancer with the same integrity, courage and strength he demonstrated every day of his life.

The entire Biden family is saddened beyond words. We know that Beau’s spirit will live on in all of us—especially through his brave wife, Hallie, and two remarkable children, Natalie and Hunter.

Earlier this week, Biden was hospitalized at Walter Reed Medical Center. He suffered a minor stroke in 2010 and underwent surgery in 2013 to remove a brain lesion. In 1972, Beau and his younger brother, Hunter, survived a car crash that killed his mother and 13-month-old sister.

Biden served two terms as Attorney General for Delaware and had announced plans to run for governor in 2016. He’s survived by his wife, Hallie, and two children.

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

On Sunday, John Kerry broke his leg while riding his bicycle in France, the New York Times reports. The Secretary of State’s plans to travel to Madrid and then Paris to discuss the Islamic State have been canceled.

The State Department said that Kerry struck a curb while bicycling near Scionzier. He crashed, broke his leg, and was transported to a hospital in Geneva. He reportedly did not lose consciousness at any point.

“Secretary Kerry broke his right femur in a bicycling accident this morning in Scionzier, France,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement. “Given the injury is near the site of his prior hip surgery, he will return to Boston today to seek treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital with his doctor who did the prior surgery.”

The Times reports that Kerry plans to participate in Tuesday’s meeting in Paris—a gathering of foreign ministers from the coalition assembled by the United States to combat ISIS—by videoconference.

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

Don’t forget: You can email us tips at tips@gawker.com, call them in at 646-470-4295, send them directly to any of our writers, or use our anonymous SecureDrop system. And like us on Facebook here!

The Social Security Administration has found that the agency paid out $20.2 million in benefits to more than 130 suspected Nazi war criminals, former SS guards, and others who participated in the Third Reich, the Associated Press reports.

The payments occurred between February 1962 and January of this year, when the No Social Security for Nazis Act became law. By some estimates, there were as many as 10,000 Nazis hiding in the United States after World War II.

Last year, the AP requested that the Social Security Administration provide figures for how many Nazi suspects received benefits and how much was paid to them. The administration refused the request.

At the time, the AP found that the Justice Department had persuaded some people suspected of being Nazis to leave the country in exchange for Social Security benefits. (The Justice Department denied this.)

The forthcoming report, scheduled for public release this week, was triggered by that investigation, when Representative Carolyn Maloney requested that the Social Security Administration’s inspector general look into the scope of the payments.

From the AP:

The IG’s report said $5.6 million was paid to 38 former Nazis before they were deported. Ninety five Nazi suspects who were not deported but were alleged or found to have participated in the Nazi persecution received $14.5 million in benefits, according to the report.

The IG criticized the Social Security Administration for improperly paying four beneficiaries $15,658 because it did not suspend the benefits in time.

The report also said the Social Security Administration “properly stopped payment” to the four beneficiaries when the new law banning benefits to Nazi suspects went into effect. The agency did, however, continue payments to one suspect because he was not subject to the law.

“We must continue working to remember the tragedy of the Holocaust and hold those responsible accountable,” Maloney said in a statement on Saturday. “One way to do that is by providing as much information to the public as possible. This report hopefully provides some clarity.”

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