Jake Gyllenhaal—an actor whose face you’d like to punch—is back on the press circuit, this time for his new boxing movie, Southpaw. While one hoped Gyllenhaal would have discussed how his character is influenced by the real-life struggles of Marshall “Eminem” Mathers during an interview with British Esquire, Gylly had moon matters on the brain.

There are a handful of beautiful quotations to note from the Esquire profile, in part because it’s written in that familiar style that affirms that this celebrity used to be young and immature but is now very much a Serious Actor. Gyllenhaal told writer Sanjiv Bhattacharya that the change for him occurred in 2010, after the release of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time:

Then something tectonic took place. His priorities shifted and his perspective changed. “I woke up one day and I wasn’t in the right room,” he says. “It was like a David Byrne song: ‘That’s not my beautiful house. That’s not my beautiful wife.’”

On the filming of his Serious Film Southpaw, director Antoine Fuqua told Battacharya about Gyllenhaal, “He even broke up with his girlfriend because he was at the ring every day!”

Prior to his boxing movie, Gyllenhaal played a cop in End of Watch, another Serious Role:

“There were times, when I was taking cover, wearing a Kevlar vest and thinking, ‘Come on, we’re making a movie!’ You know?” he says. But at the same time, he loved it so much, it changed his life. “I have never felt so good about being in Los Angeles as when I was in East LA working with police officers. Just being in that culture, especially the Hispanic culture. It was amazing.”

The delicate icing on Gyllenhaal’s Serious Actor cake is, of course, a strong belief in quasi-science and mysticism:

This is why he prepares so intensely, because for Gyllenhaal, empathy has a molecular, even mystical quality. “I believe deeply in the unconscious,” he says. “That you literally accumulate the molecules of the space that you’re in. We’re like 90 per cent water, so naturally we are going to be affected by the moon when it’s full: if the sea is, why wouldn’t we be? That seems scientific to me. So, if you spend enough time in whatever environment your character would exist in – the way I spent six months with police officers – then the molecules of that environment must transfer somehow. And then you put it on screen, and people go, ‘I feel something that I don’t normally feel.’”

At least Gyllenhaal seems to be sort of aware of the limited importance of his job as an actor:

“There’s a hierarchy of importance, and actors are way down. I get that my job is absurd. I’m hyper-aware of how ridiculous it is. But at the same time, I take it extraordinarily seriously! Because as absurd as it is, it can also breed empathy.”

Whatever you think, man. It’s working.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

Sepp Blatter is no longer the president of everybody. The scandal-wracked FIFA head has announced he will resign, and a special session of congress will be held to elect his successor.

It is not clear what changed between Blatter’s reelection to a fifth term on Friday and today’s announcement. though the paper trail tying FIFA’s No. 2 official to a purported bribe for World Cup votes may have been a major development. We have to assume there is much more coming, or that the ongoing U.S. Swiss investigations into FIFA corruption are expected to implicate more and higher-level executives.

Update: Yep, Sepp was in the DoJ’s crosshairs.

Source tells ABC News that Blatter was indeed subject of FBI investigation.

June 2, 2015

Here is Blatter’s full statement, delivered at a press conference in Zurich today.

And here’s the video of his remarks, delivered in French, with English translation:

Blatter left without taking questions.

Domenico Scala, chairman of FIFA’s Audit and Compliance Committee, will handle the transition. Scala said that Blatter will remain on as president until the election is conducted. That election, Scala said, would take place some time between December 2015 and March 2016.

There will potentially be other changes to FIFA’s structure:

Scala: Term limits for president and ExCo will be proposed.

June 2, 2015

Scala says there will now be "integrity" checks on its top people - and it will at last publish how much its president is paid! #FIFA

June 2, 2015

Blatter has served as president since 1998, and has been a part of FIFA since 1975.

The video was obviously horrible: Fraternity brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the University of Oklahoma, jubilantly and drunkenly singing—to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”—“There will never be a nigger in SAE.” The song went on. “You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me.”

So national media and the university responded swiftly: That chapter of SAE was immediately shut down, the students identified in the video were expelled, and college President David Boren released a statement calling them “disgraceful” and telling them, “You should not have the privilege of calling yourselves ‘Sooners.’”

If the offenders weren’t “real Sooners,” as Boren put it, they were real SAE members, with many brothers in their ranks. The song, further investigation discovered, had come to the Oklahoma chapter by way of a national SAE “leadership school.”

SAE is a traditionally Southern fraternity, founded at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. It was not a coincidence that the incident at OU happened mere days before March 9, SAE’s “Founder’s Day,” the day in which the frat celebrates their over 150 years of existence—so many years that they’re the only fraternity to have been founded in the South pre-Civil War. It was also not a coincidence that the national chapter had, exactly one year prior, gotten rid of pledging and implemented what they referred to as the “True Gentleman Experience,” which was their attempt to clean up a fraternity that had recently been dubbed the most dangerous in the country.

Much of the outrage about the song was a response to the flagrant bigotry of its words: the racial slur, the merry invocation of lynching. But its underlying message, that SAE would never pledge a black brother, was substantively every bit as racist. And it fits all too well within the mainstream tradition of Southern Greek life.

In September 2013, University of Alabama students Abbey Crain and Matt Ford published an article in the school’s student paper, the Crimson White. Under the dramatic title “The Final Barrier: 50 years later, segregation still exists,” Crain and Ford described how multiple sororities at UA (Alpha Gamma Delta, Tri Delta, Chi Omega and Pi Beta Phi) had been actively prevented by their local chapter alums from accepting at least two strong candidates into their folds that year because they were black.

After I wrote about the Crimson White story, I got an email from woman who called herself “Anonymous Sorority Girl”:

I wanted to say that I really appreciated your story about sororities at the University of Alabama not rushing black women. I currently attend another very large southern University and this problem exists here as well.

I have heard multiple stories (not my sorority in particular) that have turned down black women because they are afraid of losing funding from alumna or socials with fraternities who won’t interact with sororities who have black women due to the fact that they also could lose funding from their alumni.

What, if anything, has changed between the Alabama story and the OU scandal? Racism is endemic across Southern colleges, consolidated at their fraternities and sororities. What is shifting, however, is the speed at which the usual enablers of these private clubs feel compelled to react to these moments of bad behavior. The national headquarters that local fraternity and sorority chapters report to, and the colleges they are housed at, have recognized how quickly these stories are spreading. They’ve seen how fast an offensive song drunkenly sung on a bus can dilute and tarnish their brands. They’re trying to stop it. They’re just not sure how to fix the real problem without upsetting everything they’ve always known.

Students protesting at the University of Alabama in 2013 (Dave Martin/AP)

After the Alabama story broke, I started asking current and former college students to talk about Greek system racism they’d seen at their Southern schools. I imagined gathering stories that showed a clear pattern of offenses and publishing a list of schools or organizations where things had happened over and over again.

It quickly became messier. It wasn’t simply a matter of naming particular chapters with bad histories, or specific national organizations that had always turned a blind eye. Racism seemed to have touched every Southern school explicitly, permitted to propagate by the fully grown adults in charge. The college structure allows Greek organizations to institutionalize racism through a system that feeds off of homogeneity and hierarchy—and it has done this for decades, passing off the blame.

“Sadly, the real answer to why this problem persists is a little hard for people to grasp, specifically those who aren’t from the South,” said Greg*, a Sigma Nu who graduated from Louisiana State University. He explained that every entity involved in the Greek system—from its students to college administrations to the national fraternities themselves—expect the other to handle it: “It continues to exist because people involved in the system, whether incoming freshman or active members (on a wide scale) are not clamoring for it to change.”

What I heard from the students affirmed that the legacy of slavery still affects racial attitudes all over the South—living in students who refer to the black men they accept into their fraternities as “good” blacks, as one man who emailed me explained; or in men who admit that their fraternity doesn’t accept black members, as one woman recalled of one of Mizzou’s frats (which, she wrote, lost its charter after a black man was beaten up for trying to enter a party). It’s visible in the white women who have to be told not to use “nigger” (a seemingly frequent word of choice regardless of who is being addressed) around the black staff who clean their sorority houses, or to call them “the help.” It’s apparent to the black woman who finds out the only reason she’s been given a bid to a sorority is because she’s “best black one they were gonna get,” or the black man who is told by a white sorority sister that the entire college campus “doesn’t want them here, so they should all just go somewhere else.”

These stories aren’t always individually shocking, but they add up. “There hadn’t been a black brother in a traditionally white fraternity in a couple of years,” a Delta Chi at UNC Wilmington claimed, describing his school a few years ago. “Sigma Nu recruited a couple of black guys, maybe three, and SAE was giving them shit about it. At one point, SAE sent pledges in blackface to a Sigma Nu party.

“The South is a fucked up place,” he added, before continuing harshly: “It’s like the Civil Rights era took a shit, nobody bothered to clean it up, and then someone laid sod over it. It’s beautiful to look at, but it’s unbearable beyond that.”

Sigma Alpha Epsilon at Emory University (Emory University Archives/Flickr)

In a recently published paper, “The Political Legacy of American Slavery,” Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen describe the long-term effects of slavery on attitudes of those living in the American South today:

Whites who currently live in counties that had high concentrations of slaves in 1860 are on average more conservative and express colder feelings towards African Americans than whites who live elsewhere in the South. That is, the larger the number of slaves in his or her county of residence in 1860, the greater the probability that a white Southern today will identify as Republican, express opposition to affirmative action, and express colder feelings towards African Americans.

Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen found that, as researchers have noted many times before, every generation of Southerners has inherited their parents’ racial beliefs. But the authors also argue that the abolition of slavery pushed white Southerners to create “informal institutions and cultural norms” that were racially driven because the “state-level institutions promoting slavery” previously protecting “their economic and political positions in society” were gone. They stated, “Locally high concentrations of African Americans today in turn threaten whites’ dominance today, which results in whites contemporaneously adopting more conservative racial attitudes.”

In other words, research underpins what anecdotes show clearly: Any institution of higher learning that stands below the Mason Dixon line—at least, any institution started more than a few years ago—is fighting an old, old war.

Amy*, who was a member of Pi Beta Phi at the University of Alabama, told me that she hadn’t seen any black women rejected by the sorority in her time there. None of them had ever tried to join. One biracial student she knew had tried to rush the traditionally white National Panhellenic Sororities, and had gotten nowhere.

Amy said she joined Pi Phi because it had been her mother’s sorority, at another Southern college. A shy and sheltered honors student, she said she only made it through rush as a legacy. When it came time for recruitment the following year, the Pi Phis were sorted into A, B, and C groups, based on how pretty and socially together they were. Amy found herself in group C, looking over recruitment forms in a basement.

Girls were rejected, Amy said, for being different in any way. To stop undesirable candidates, she further claimed, seniors would intervene and change ballots cast by younger members. “The young girls would vote, and the older girls would come in and change them,” she said. “Once you’re a senior, you have hierarchy of power.”

This insistence on similarity is where the racism in Greek organizations begins, in rooms full of people who look alike, seeking recruits who remind them of themselves. When people don’t match—because they’re of a different race, or heavier, or something else—“it’s like a flashlight in the dark. There’s no way not to notice it,” said Greg.

When people don’t match—because they’re of a different race, or heavier, or something else—“it’s like a flashlight in the dark. There’s no way not to notice it,” said Greg.

The alumni also have a say, and will block undesired women from joining the sororities. One woman who emailed me from the Alpha Delta Pi chapter at a large Midwest University claimed that, unbeknownst to candidates, alums will give women a bad or negative recommendation, “a roundabout ‘ladylike’ way of blackballing a woman from joining a sorority. A woman doesn’t even need to write why she doesn’t want someone to join on the form, they just have to write ‘call me, and I’ll explain.’ The alum can then tell the chapter officer a myriad of reasons, true or untrue.”

Sometimes bids are blocked more directly, if mostly through euphemism. One Alpha Xi Delta who attended Old Dominion University in Virginia in 2005 described the way a “quality” girl becomes synonymous with “what things have always looked like,” which, of course, tends to mean “white.” She claimed:

Fall recruitment brought a huge crop of new prospective members, one of which was black. She was everything you’d want in a new member: sweet, pretty, impressive, and totally involved. Round after round, she was invited back, until the last day of recruitment when everyone made their final picks on who would receive a formal invitation to join. That was when all hell broke lose.

I guess it dawned on people that this girl was dangerously close to getting a bid (can’t kick the black girl out immediately ‘cause then you might look like a bunch of racists, right?), because suddenly there was an uproar over the possibility of her joining. No one had a concrete reason why she would be a bad addition; she just didn’t “feel” right. Someone claimed she didn’t seem social enough, while someone else said they just couldn’t envision anyone taking her as a Little Sister (although my roommate at the time spoke up saying she would gladly be her Big). It became a tense fight between a dozen of us who wanted her in and a dozen that did not, while everyone else—mostly newer sisters—sat silent. Finally we ended the discussion and put it to a vote.

I was one of the people in charge of tallying the scores, and vote after vote, next to this girl’s name was written “Not AXiD material.” [...] After watching a group of my “sisters for life” hugging each other upon hearing that she would not be an AXiD, I started to wonder whether I would have been happier there, too. I didn’t stay in long after that.

One of the most important goals of recruitment is keeping membership at optimal levels. If a chapter’s numbers drop for whatever reason, including when recruits perceive the sorority to be at a lower status than it was previously, they can face the wrath of their national organizations—their chapter can even eventually be closed. Sororities considered “subpar” are the ones that are unstable, which means that the members have less money and are less “cohesive.” Homogeneity signals stability; the desire for “quality” women is linked to the notion of “women who look and act like we do.”

The women who are “different” know this. Numerous people who I talked to asked, “Why would any black girl want to join a white sorority?”—the (uncomfortably separate-but-equal) implication being that they have their own, historically black sororities. But black sororities don’t necessarily appeal to every black woman. Many black sororities have a stronger legacy of charity work than white sororities, which isn’t always appealing to someone who likes the social aspect of Greek life more than the giving back part.

It’s also said anecdotally that women in black sororities are hazed more than women in white sororities, a problem that’s been an issue in historically black fraternities as well. In 2010, the New York Times reported that members at two separate chapters of the historically black sorority Sigma Gamma Rho had been hazed by being beaten with wooden paddles to the point of injury. In an interview with Lawrence C. Ross Jr., author of The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities, Ross told the Times, “Most predominantly white fraternities and sororities haze around alcohol, but African-American fraternities and sororities typically haze around something physical, violent.”

Numerous people who I talked to asked, “Why would any black girl want to join a white sorority?”

One woman who contacted me wrote that a black girl she knew who ended up pledging the very popular Alpha Omicron Pi at Arkansas State University in 2002 didn’t have any problems. “However, the black sororities on campus harassed her constantly and told her if she ever went through with rushing a white girl sorority not to even try getting into any one of theirs,” she added. A Delta Zeta from the University of Tampa who attended in 1999 wrote that, while she couldn’t “speak to [the] experience” of the one black girl in her sorority, “I know [the women in the black sororities] harassed her most of the time she was in school because they felt like she betrayed them for joining a Panhellenic sorority.” Another student at an unnamed HBCU (historically black college or university) said that one of the few black women in her sorority decided to join a white sorority because, “she grew up in a mostly-white town, went to a mostly-white high school—she was used to being the only black girl in a group of white girls and it didn’t bother her, so it wasn’t a huge deal.”

In order to successfully pledge a traditionally white sorority or fraternity, an essential factor for any non-white person is to not mind being in the minority, and to not mind potentially ostracizing a group which, if you joined, you wouldn’t be in the minority.

The issues are the same at fraternities, but often more overt. As seen with the SAE OU incident, frats tend to get the most attention for their offensive party themes, members deciding to dress in blackface, free use of the word “nigger,” or their choice to hang Confederate flags on their houses. But behind that shocking behavior is a recruitment process in which the door doesn’t open for black men.

Kappa Alpha Order members at Centenary College in 2002. (The Shreveport Times, Charlie Gesell/AP)

Besides SAE, the worst reputation for racism belongs to the Kappa Alpha Order. KA considers the leader of the Confederate army, Robert E. Lee, its “Spiritual Founder” and features his “definition of a gentleman” on its website. At Auburn University, KA reportedly holds its personal celebration of Robert E. Lee on Martin Luther King Day every year, which one student referred to as “particularly disturbing.” (The states of Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi do this as well—as King’s birthday was January 15 and Lee’s was January 19—though not without controversy). This is a fraternity that, until recently, encouraged its chapters to hold an “Old South” or “Old Dixie” formal every year, where brothers have been known to dress up as Confederate Civil War soldiers, accompanied by dates who wear antebellum-style dresses. (While the Kappas continue to flaunt their questionable roots, in recent weeks, SAE has tried to, for lack of a better term, whitewash theirs away.)

To outsiders, chapters of KA and SAE look surprisingly comfortable with displaying rampant racist tendencies. They appear equally comfortable with actively discouraging black men from joining their organizations.

Greg, the LSU grad, says that in the mid-2000s, lore has it that KA’s chapter at LSU had a black man rush whose name was, coincidentally, Robert E. Lee. The brothers at KA were obsessed with this modern incarnation of their idea of a Southern gentleman. According to Greg, there was “a mutiny in the frat” over this new Lee. Half of the men thought they had to pledge him, because it was just so ironic that Lee was a black dude named after their “Spiritual Founder” and head of the Confederate army. The other half said they couldn’t have a black guy join the frat. They put it to a vote, and Lee was not let in. (Greg says he’d be surprised if the chapter has had a black member since, and though their website appears rather whitewashed, we weren’t able to confirm or refute his claim.)

The reasoning behind blocking the new Robert E. Lee, Greg said, was more complex than simply Kappa Alpha hating black people. By his account, many of the KA members were worried about hazing. “A lot of frats then wouldn’t pledge black guys because they would have gotten in trouble for ‘hazing the black guy,’” Greg said.

Hazing is always worse when you look different—if you’re overweight, Asian, black, gay, whatever, he explains. If they’d had a black member of the frat, he would most certainly have been hazed using the racial slurs the frat was very comfortable throwing out, and that news would certainly have gotten back to University officials, likely resulting in the suspension or expulsion of the fraternity from the college.

“Where I grew up, we just always thought there were the white fraternities and the black fraternities. Why would a black person want to be in a white fraternity?” Greg said. These men were doing what they had been taught: Protecting their brothers and protecting the status quo.

In recruiting, sororities and fraternities operate in separate racist bubbles. But once they’ve chosen their members, they support each others’ attitudes and behaviors. Amy, the Pi Phi member from the University of Alabama, says her sorority threatened to kick out a girl who wanted to bring a black gay man to a party. In fact, she said, black men were not welcome at Pi Phi parties at all, “with very few exceptions”—one being if they were one of the few black men who had managed to pledge a white fraternity. Amy’s sorority sisters believed a black party guest would make their sorority less desirable to other fraternities.

Fraternities have enormous control over a sorority’s social status. If fraternity brothers think the women at a particular sorority aren’t hot enough, or aren’t socializing with the right people, they stop inviting those sorority sisters to their parties. This drives the sorority to the bottom of the social pyramid.

As one commenter on GreekRank.com claimed when reviewing LSU’s KA chapter in October 2013:

Some quality guys but the problem is that they are too set in their old ways, this is not the civil war anymore, and segregation is over. These guys actually canceled an exchange with Kappa Delta (one of the best sororities on campus) this year because Kappa Delta let a black girl in. That is horrible and not classy at all. They are still good but are too set in their old ways to be a top tier fraternity.

Another anonymous commenter had a different take on the situation at KA: “If you ain’t racist you ain’t top tier,” he wrote.

Schools and national chapters work hard to emphasize the rarity of racist incidents, but they don’t spring up out of nowhere, and they’re not the result of individual people just acting at random. The SAEs at Oklahoma weren’t just singing a song about how there were no black people in their fraternity; the chapter appears to have had no black members. The overt offensiveness and the discriminatory recruiting are part of the same mindset: that tradition wins above all. Everyone involved works very hard to make as few changes as possible to what they’re used to in order keep things as close to the way they’ve always been.

At OU, while the reactions of both the school administration and the national chapter of SAE were on hyperspeed compared to how schools have responded in the past, the blame-passing remained the same. Neither the administration nor SAE nationals was willing to acknowledge their organization’s role in historically (or currently) allowing these kind of behaviors to grow and flourish. As SAE National President Brad Cohen wrote after the video came out:

SAE brothers, I know the past 24 hours have been extremely emotional, embarrassing and frustrating for us all, but let’s take a moment and reflect. A few bigoted idiots, through a 9 second video showed their true colors and beliefs and did enormous harm to the other 15,000 undergraduates, our 200,000 alumni, your staff and Supreme Council all who were equally disgusted by their vile and racist behavior. This behavior was in no way reflective of who we are as SAEs and what we stand for.

To those that were hurt and offended by these actions, especially the African American community and our Many African American Brothers, I apologize on behalf of our now closed chapter and its members who will be expelled.

After that, the fraternity gave in a little bit more: It announced that it was “establishing a groundbreaking four-pronged initiative to combat instances of racial discrimination and insensitivity among its members.” What does this plan look like? Appointing a Director of Diversity & Inclusion and a national advisory committee, mandating education for SAE members, creating a hotline for individuals to call and report instances of racism, and lastly, starting an internal judiciary committee who will reportedly decide on the fate of members accused of singing racist songs on buses.

SAE Nationals also said they were looking into reports that brothers at chapters like those in Louisiana and Texas have performed the chant heard at OU, which is a PR tactic we’ve seen many times before in a variety of “fraternities in trouble” situations:

In addition, the fraternity has initiated a comprehensive review of all of its 237 chapters and colonies to determine if any currently engage in racially offensive or derogatory behaviors like those captured on video and shared from SAE’s former chapter at the University of Oklahoma earlier this month. The Fraternity will issue a report on its findings at the conclusion of the review.

“Not being aware of the song does not exclude us from ownership of the situation,” executive director Blaine Ayers said at a press conference. “So I want to apologize to everyone for pain that has been caused by this incident.” Shortly after, OU said its investigation indicated the song had been learned at a national SAE fraternity leadership cruise a few years prior and brought back to campus.

This reaction from the national headquarters of SAE mirrors the reactions of the national headquarters of every other sorority or fraternity where these incidents have occurred (and been noted). (The hotlines, education programs and so on are also also very similar to SAE’s anti-hazing plan, which it implemented to change its other long-standing, deep-rooted issue.) What it hasn’t included, at to this point, is any acknowledgement of what has occurred during SAE’s actual history as an organization.

The overt offensiveness and the discriminatory recruiting are part of the same mindset: that tradition wins above all.

When the news of the racist pledging system at UA first came out, many tried to assign blame to the national headquarters of the given sororities. Nationals all vehemently denied being involved. As soon as my first story about UA went up, I got an email from a woman at Pi Beta Phi nationals who was concerned that I’d implied that it was the greater Pi Beta Phi organization that had threatened to pull funding from the UA chapter if they pledged a black woman, not just the local alums of that particular chapter. She asked me to clarify the language immediately, with a kind of urgency that spoke to the fear national Greek organizations have about getting negative press. Individual chapters with flaws can be closed so as to not weaken the fabric of the overall organization, but it must be done swiftly.

That kind of denial happens at individual schools as well. Many members of Greek organizations are quick to defend their own chapter, while distancing themselves from other chapters. “There was a girl in my pledge class who was from Alabama and transferred to UA after freshman year to be closer to home,” one Tri Delta claimed. “She came back for the spring semester because the Tri Delta chapter there was awful and she was miserable. She told us horror stories about how they treated her, but they mostly wouldn’t talk to her. And this was a sweet, stereotypically Southern girl from their home state. So I can’t even imagine how badly they treat women who are not exactly like them.”

While national headquarters of fraternities hold the responsibility of penalizing their local chapters, the whole Greek system wouldn’t exist without the colleges their chapters live at. But college administrators deem fraternities and sororities to be private entities, separate from the universities.

Though most students in Greek organizations are technically legal adults, anyone who has attended college or knows a college student gets that they’re really not treated that way. While this is the first time many of these students have lived away from home, removed from their own family and familiar community groups, they’re still spoon-fed food in their dorms and given comfy group living situations; any truly desirable fraternity has a house they call a home.

Some of those students bring with them racist tendencies, passed down from generation to generation. Those can be the same students who find comfort in the hierarchical nature of the Greek system and who are often predestined to join a certain Greek organization because their parents were members.

University officials, for their part, need those students to have a great time in college—or at least enough of a great time to eventually donate to their alma mater. They may not outright encourage racism in Greek organizations, but they historically haven’t done much stop it—or to force change.

But when they choose to, they can have a large impact. As one Vanderbilt alum wrote:

My favorite was when the most “traditionally Southern” (wink wink) fraternity [Kappa Alpha] got kicked off campus, the school administration renovated their frat house, made it gorgeous, and gave it to one of the traditionally black fraternities on campus [Ed. Note. It was actually given to three of them to share]. So, the asshole bros in the “traditionally Southern” fraternity acted racist as fuck, but the administration was like, “HAHAHA NO get off our campus.”

That said, several sororities at my Southern university were pretty diverse, compared with the segregation I see in articles like this. I was in a traditionally white sorority, and we had a ton of non-white members, I’d say in numbers representative of the school’s overall racial/ethnic mix. Our president my senior year was black and two officers were of Asian descent, and not once did our alumni make a peep about it. One of my best friends was in the same sorority that I was but at a different Southern university, and she is black. I think a lot of it depends on the pan-hel culture, which is often dictated by the administration. My university has for years been trying to shake its traditionally Southern mantle, so perhaps that’s why the Greek system is a little different there.

She went on to say, “My point… is that administration does have a significant degree of power in addressing racism on campus, including in Greek life, and administration sets the tone of what is and is not acceptable.”

It was once considered a big deal to close a fraternity, or to kick out a member, for bad behavior of any sort. That’s despite the fact that shutting down a fraternity is often pointless; organizations often come back a few years later, when what their former members may have done is long forgotten.

In a 2001 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Bartlett outlined the trend of Southern frat members putting on blackface for parties. Many incidents resulted in the suspension or closing of fraternity chapters. Yet over a decade later, all but one of the organizations are active at their given college. The one exception is Sigma Chi at George Mason University, which has been permanently removed from campus following concerns about drinking, hazing and sexual assault. Sigma Chi then sued the school, and won.

Historically, administrations haven’t been able to afford to isolate the same portion of their student body that they’ve allowed to be so powerful and so successful for so long. It’s in a college administration’s best financial interest to keep students happy and give them what they want, and sometimes, that means letting a once-racist fraternity or sorority return. Some of those students may be the ones who who come back for every homecoming. Some of those students will have money and will give that money back to the place that they had such special memories.

The University of Alabama exemplifies the way that Southern colleges in particular long ago set themselves up so that Greek life is an critical part of the college community. At UA, that connection is deeply rooted in the student political system, which is dominated by the Machine, a secret yet well known Greek organization. The Machine anonymously chooses, or appoints, student members—often those who are studying political science, and always those who are in fraternities or sororities. Those students commanding the Greek system as a voting block make sure certain candidates get elected to student government, therefore ensuring Greek domination over school funds and agenda.

The power of The Machine has trickled up into all levels of Alabama politics, the purest example of an Old Boy’s Club that was eventually forced to include white women, as Phillip Weiss explored in a 1992 Esquire article on the group.

According to Amy, when she was at Alabama, the person in charge of the National Panhellenic Council, the organization that governs most of Greek life at UA, told her that “these issues go in waves” and that NPC and the University tries to stop them.

In March, students elected SGA’s first black president since 1976, which Amy notes is “the first time in years that a non-Machine candidate has won the position,” signifying, to her that there might be pushback from the sororities who are uninterested in voting traditionally and are looking for more power. (“There were rumors when I was a student that the last time that happened, it was because the sororities were demanding more power from the Machine,” she says.)

It’s an interesting turn of events; a year ago, Alabama’s student government voted to integrate their fraternities and sororities, a pretty basic bill that required a great deal of work to get passed even though it basically required nothing be changed.

The University tries to regulate its students, but “try” is a loose word. “There are COUNTLESS examples of The Machine alone breaking rules and laws for generations, and the university has pretty much completely ignored it,” Amy told me, a pattern that has been outlined by others. “So why should they start caring about racial and gender equality now? They won’t care until the pressure for change outweighs the support they receive from these people.”

In a stilted video released more than a year ago, University president Judy Bonner addressed Alabama’s attempts to eradicate racism in the Greek system. “We are going to create and sustain an environment that enables our students to be successful in the academic and social aspects of their college life,” Bonner said. “This will fulfill our primary mission to prepare and equip them to be successful throughout their lives and careers.”

It was only the second video like this that Bonner had ever released; the first featured the president discussing whether the accusations of racism published in the Crimson White were “real or perceived.” This past fall, the school followed up with a video from Hannah McBrayer, the head of Panhellenic, who said that “inclusion has always been important” to Greek life at UA and that the sororities had become “much more intentional about our education.”

“[We’re] educating members, reaching out to alumni, current members, even who we’re recruiting. I would say we’re just being a lot more proactive this year in making sure that the pool is diverse in making sure that we are including everybody,” McBrayer said, explaining that each sorority would have a national representative overseeing rush to guarantee the “integrity of the membership selection process.”

During rush, AL.com reported that the university was “limiting media access to rush organizers and providing little information on changes made” and that “no representatives from the Office of Greek Affairs, Panhellenic Executive Council or any sorority would be available for interviews during rush, a departure from previous protocol.”

In response to an email requesting comment about the status of integration at UA currently, Cathy Andreen, the school’s spokesperson, sent the following statement:

All 16 Panhellenic sororities participating in recruitment at The University of Alabama in fall 2014 offered bids to African-American women and every young woman identifying herself at African-American received a bid. Through the mutual selection process, the women who were offered bids selected the sororities that they wished to join. In addition, many Interfraternity Council fraternities have pledged African-American men. While numbers are not the only measure of success, they do indicate that we are making progress. We will continue to move forward with resolve, energy and enthusiasm as we focus on creating and sustaining a welcoming and inclusive campus for all students.

The numbers broke down to 21 black women and 169 “other minorities” out of 2,054 who joined sororities. (For some context, 12 percent of the over 36,000 total students—graduate students included—at UA are African-American.)

The University of Alabama’s Phi Mu after rush in the fall of 2014. (Image via Brynn Anderson/AP)

Despite the decades of reported racism at UA, Bonner’s hesitation to make any bold statements about the history of problem UA faces at first and since made sense, institutionally.

This lack of reaction is substantiated by former students, like alum Chastity Abrom, who was a member of the historically black sorority Zeta Phi Beta and graduated in 1999. “There are millions of dollars poured into the Greek system by pledgees, members, and alumni… it is a HUGE deal at UA,” she wrote. Much of that money goes straight into the Greek system, but if those former Greeks are wealthy enough to donate to their frat or sorority, they’re wealthy enough to give back to the university community at large as well.

The Alabama university system has an endowment of over a billion dollars; in 2009, UA completed a capital campaign that raised over $600 million. While some of that money was from faculty, staff, and current students, a large portion was the “130 gifts of $1 million or more” from “alumni and friends.” OU’s endowment is also over a billion dollars, and in 2013 (a very good year), it was reported that “the number of private gifts rose to 53,065, an increase of 2,578” from the year prior.

And, as Amy explains, the Greek alumni who are often the biggest donors to the University “are also in positions of social, political, and economic power that transcend donations”—positions like government. After the last election, the North-American Interfraternity Conference reported that 39 percent of the United States Senate and 24.6 percent of the House was Greek. Many of those individuals are part of FratPAC, a political action committee “which seeks to provide financial aid to the campaigns of federal office candidates (House, Senate, and President) who support the objectives of fraternity life.” The number one FratPAC funder for 2013-2014 was the Kappa Alpha Order; they raised $29.6 million. (Chi Omega was seventh, with $12.3 million.)

Currently, KA counts Southern leaders like Congressman Robert Aderholt (R-AL) who went to University of North Alabama, Congressman Charles Boustany (R- LA) who attended University of Louisiana, and Congressman Steve Womack (R-AR) of Arkansas Tech University among its alums. To negatively come down on Greek organizations threatens not just the purse strings of a college, but its standing as an institution that can propel its students into government positions when they graduate, to say nothing of the numerous others who will go on to work in finance or business.

So what’s the solution? Colleges who do penalize fraternities or sororities for racist behavior can find themselves locked in first amendment litigation, a situation the administration at GMU found themselves in with Sigma Chi a few years before they were finally forced out of the college for the aforementioned issues that were (somewhat) unrelated to their racial intolerance problems. In March, former members of SAE at OU said they were considering suing the college; local news network KFOR reported, “We are told the decision to hire [a lawyer] came after an emergency meeting held by SAE members and alumni.”

To some, the only real way to stop the racism that’s an integral part of Southern Greek life and therefore a part of the institutions they sit within is to dismantle Greek life entirely and permanently, which northeastern liberal arts institutions like Middlebury College and Alfred University have done. If you believe that the students that come in with prejudices (or without them) have their beliefs systematized and worsened by the Greek system, that’s the only clear strategy.

That’s why, at least in the case of Alabama, it’s the recent alums of the sororities that reportedly enforced racist attitudes about pledges, while the new women pushed back. The newer sisters hadn’t yet been indoctrinated into the way things were supposed to be. The longer they were a part of it, the more likely it’d be that their attitudes would shift towards the groupthink.

As one Emory student wrote:

In my freshman year of college, I was fairly naive. I believed that the only people who could possibly be interested in joining the Greek system, i.e., paying for “friends” to judge you and police your behavior, would be the lamest of the lame, and that surely the majority of people would never fall for it. That fall my roommate and I were the only girls in our dorm not to rush.

I still can’t believe that the Greek system ever existed. Furthermore, I can’t believe it STILL exists, laden as it is with racism, sexism, and class-ism. I just keep expecting the Youths to, like, wake up and realize they don’t need it and they never did.

Yes yes, I know that some folks on here probably had 100% awesome experiences with the Greek system and formed lifelong friendships, blah blah blah. Good for you. I mean it. I just think that generally frats and sororities are a net negative.

Amy agrees. “Somehow all this truth about the evils—and I know I’m being dramatic, but I really think the word ‘evil’ is accurate here—of Greek life at Alabama is buried underneath sappy stories of brotherhood, sisterhood, and tradition, and it is painted as the jealous, hyperbolic lies of the poor independents.” (Independents are those who choose not to be part of the Greek community, known as as GDIs, or God Damn Independents.)

“I do think that the administrators mostly ignore problems caused by Greek organizations—I don’t see how you could come to any other conclusion, since problems have been reported for years and they have done next to nothing to stop them,” Amy added. “I think they do this for two reasons: first, they don’t really know for sure how to fix the problems because many of them are complex, and two, they fear a backlash.”

“The Universities and Greek organizations have done cosmetically what they need to to deny legal culpability,” Greg said, “and the dog and pony show will continue until a large number of kids at one time stand up and say, ‘This isn’t right.’

“Right now,” he said, “I truly believe it’s less of a conspiracy and more of a lot of people only thinking about themselves and not being interested in rocking the boat.”

Greek life is too widespread to go anywhere, in the South or elsewhere. It’s given too much to the people who have the most power, and colleges will keep attempting to find a way to fix sororities and fraternities without banning them entirely. The number of schools that shut down individuals or individual groups will rise, the speed at which they do so will increase. We’ve seen that already.

Racism among Southern Greek organizations—or in Greek organizations across America, or American organizations in general—comes down to people; people who want power, people who want their lives to stay the same, people who let a group mentality corrupt their lives. To get anything to change, you’d have to get thousands of college kids to band together and demand it—college kids who, by nature of their designation, are only inclined to care about their community in a whole-hearted way for a brief period of time. “It’s all tribal, it’s all pageantry. It’s people trying to freeze-dry cultural aspects of their life,” Greg told me. It’s working.

* names have been changed

Contact the author at dries@jezebel.com.

Illustration by Jim Cooke.

Talk to someone who works at the Huffington Post these days and inevitably one word will keep popping up: “demoralized.” “I’ve never seen people so demoralized” is what a typical HuffPost employee usually says.

A spike in despair makes a certain amount of sense. People are leaving the place in droves. (A huge portion of the business and tech team fled has fled within the last two months, for instance.) The new leadership is said to be of a particularly beastly nature. The site is going through yet another massive, and sure to fail, internal reorganization, moving its beleaguered editors into new complex groupings that will soon be abandoned. And that’s before you get to the small question of whether or not HuffPost will be sold off in the near future, due to AOL’s recent acquisition by Verizon.

But to anyone who has worked at the site for any period of time, as I have, it’s a little bizarre that people could be more demoralized now than at any point in the past, because the Huffington Post has always been an essentially miserable place, with a workplace culture so brutal and toxic that it would meet with approval from committed sociopaths across the land. If things are getting worse there, they have to be really, really bad.

It’s hard to imagine, to pick just one example, how things could be worse than during the Jimmy Soni era. Jimmy, you may recall, was given authority over the entire HuffPost newsroom as managing editor in 2012 based on his stellar journalistic credentials, like being Arianna Huffington’s top assistant and a former McKinsey consultant. Unsurprisingly, he ran HuffPost into the ground. His response to the rise of BuzzFeed—a development that sent HuffPost into an institutional freakout—included telling many sections that they should stop focusing so much on “news” and letting it be known that things like quality and even spelling were unimportant in a digital age. Oh, and he was a serial sexual harasser. That was a great time.

When the news of Jimmy’s offenses hit, Arianna handled it in a manner that would make Stalin proud. One evening last spring everyone got an email from Arianna saying that Jimmy was moving to India to work on stuff for HuffPost there. The subject line of the email was “Passage to India” and it read, in part:

As we are getting close to announcing the launch of HuffPost India, I’m delighted to bring you some related newsroom news. Jimmy Soni will be heading to India to spearhead our launch from New Delhi. This has been a dream of Jimmy’s, as both his parents were born and raised there. And with India such a huge and important market for us, it’s great for HuffPost that Jimmy will be there from the beginning of this effort until the launch [...] And since he has been so involved in the growth of Healthy Living, I hope he’ll come back with plenty of meditation, yoga and other Third Metric editorial initiatives! Arianna

This was, of course, a complete lie. Jimmy was literally never seen or heard from—or even mentioned out loud—after that. His sexual harassment was also never publicly discussed. Thus was the essential HuffPost cycle completed: Jimmy found himself among the legions of the disappeared. (If you’re looking for HuffPost India, it’s here.)

The brief history of HuffPost—a mere ten years old—is filled with stories like that. It is essentially Soviet in its functioning. Purges and show trials are common, especially if you’ve been hired on the basis that you might bring some journalistic firepower to the site. The problem is that any authority those people amass is seen by Arianna as a threat to her position, and so the threats are eliminated. Knowing your place is the best way of getting ahead at HuffPost. (It’s no accident that Roy Sekoff—who is almost universally derided in the newsroom as a sexist embarrassment—is, despite his painful hackishness, HuffPost’s most enduring employee, since he’s also Arianna’s longtime ghostwriter and confidant.)

People who have fallen out of favor are exiled to Siberia. HuffPost would rather not fire people, since that often comes with severance, so it torments them into leaving whenever possible. One editor was barred from all but slideshow management because she accidentally crossed a friend of Arianna’s. Others have been stripped of all responsibility, with reporters or staffers they oversee reassigned. Another favored tactic is for people to be suddenly told that they are miserable failures and given stringent story quotas and harsh warnings. The ending is almost always the same. Driven mad, people flee.

Bureaucracy lays atop the organization like a frozen snow. People are foisted into strange and meaningless positions, usually involving things like “strategy” or “innovation” or “mobile,” for no reason other than that they need something to do. (HuffPost is so whacked out that it makes up worthless jobs both to punish and reward people.) If you get one of these jobs, you will be told to make up a title for yourself. A place that had sensible leadership structures and actually gave staffers a meaningful path up the ladder wouldn’t need to resort to this just to give restless staffers something to fill the hours, but there you are.

The ultimate priority at HuffPost is making the dictator look good. Arianna has Google alerts for “HuffPost” or “Huffington Post” or “HuffPo” and loves to forward attacks on the site to editors, whose job is then to explain why they didn’t do whatever they’ve been accused of. Sometimes her friends write in demanding that editors not use certain pictures of them, or that criticism of them be taken down from the site. Arianna usually sides with her friends.

Work at HuffPost for a little while and you’ll soon learn which people—Bill Maher, or Mika Brzezinski, or the Dalai Lama, to name just a few—need to be treated delicately. If any of Arianna’s people get caught in a public mess, there can be lots of internal delays while editors figure out whether they actually have permission from on high to mention the scandal. You will also be expected to dutifully and fawningly cover any of her friends’ new projects, no matter how stupid.

If a person is not Arianna’s BFF but is still a celebrity, it’s a very good bet she’ll side with them too. Aaron Sorkin, to cite just one example, almost got people fired because he didn’t like something that had been written about him (the article has now been completely scrubbed from the site). If a person is actually a corporation that threatens to pull tons of advertising from your site, like WalMart once did, it’s a decent bet that Arianna will with the corporation too, as she did by planting an unbelievably fawning interview with a WalMart executive in the business section after WalMart expressed outrage over some tough reporting in that same section.

The people who get ahead at HuffPost will be mindful of all of the above. Even more importantly, they will have decided that they want to master the complexities of HuffPost’s internal politics, since loyalty, pliability, secrecy and the willingness to lie constantly to your subordinates are what matter to Arianna above all else. Sometimes, the people who go down this chilling path also have some editorial skill. More often, the Jimmy Sonis of the world are elevated, usually from sections far removed from what anyone would recognize as “news.”

Either way, all senior staffers wind up pursuing the same vision. Their priority, outside of a few key areas like politics, is to hire cheap and pliable employees, hopefully recent college graduates who are desperate to work for $35,000 a year. When most editors ask to hire people with any kind of track record in their field, they are inevitably told to make do with 22-year-old interns who are just starting out instead. Or they’re told that they will not be allowed to hire anyone at all.

Shockingly, this process—in which hundreds of relatively inexperienced people are asked to produce bucketloads of content at top speed with next to no proper editorial supervision, all while living with ever-present dread about putting a foot wrong—does not always lead to excellence. Unshockingly, it makes people crazy. Staffers at HuffPost walk around scared all of the time. Everyone is seemingly one day away from a nervous breakdown.

Ex-HuffPost employees often speak of their time there like they were survivors of some horrible trauma. Even people who find themselves relatively happy there are quick to acknowledge that they are probably living on borrowed time. One person I talked to recently described leaving HuffPost as “the best day of my life.”

Every couple of years, HuffPost decides that its reputation is slipping and it needs to hire actual quality journalists. It is currently at that point in its traditional cycle, and likely offering the kinds of salaries that the hundreds of people who produce the vast majority of content for the site will never get in a million years. A cursory glance at HuffPost’s history will tell you that this new push is likely to fail.

At the same time, Arianna’s new “positive” editorial priority, “What’s Working”—which, I’m told, has been openly described by senior management as a way to bring more ad revenue to the company—is being foisted on on the site, with staffers forced to come up with ever more “What’s Working” content no matter what section they operate in. Everyone is mandated to attend daily editorial meetings, which run high on propaganda and low on editorial discussion. There’s also the ongoing tale of the attempt to reorganize the structure of the verticals, which have grouped together and then split apart repeatedly over the last two years. It is all too depressingly familiar.

It would be tempting to think that the rather dramatic language I’ve used is better suited to some hackneyed novel than to a 21st century newsroom, but the fact remains that being at HuffPost is actively damaging to the psyche of a huge portion of its staff. It is a very bad place to work and there is probably no saving it.

Anonymous is a former Huffington Post employee.

Image by Jim Cooke/photo via Getty

In January, Kristin Cavallari announced that her debut memoir and lifestyle book Balancing in Heels (originally titled Balancing on Heels) would be available for purchase sometime in the far, far distant future of spring 2016. Today—128 Days Later—Kristin writes on Instagram:

Aaaand Balancing In Heels is DONE!!!! I’ve been working my butt off for the past 4 months on this so I’m really excited!! #BalancingInHeels

Oh my F-ing God.

She has clearly learned how to temper other people’s expectations.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Getty]

Today, Stephen King’s 55th novel, Finders Keepers, will be published by Scribner. I expect the book will be a bestseller, and King’s name will be in the press even more than usual between its publication and the June 25th premiere of the third season of Under The Dome, a television series based on his novel, and for which he’s an executive producer.

While everyone discusses if/how his new book confirms that the author is still the “master of the macabre” or the “King of horror,” I’m going to use this occasion to make an argument that, at one point, he was also one of the best postmodern fiction writers.

Where existentialism is long on detachment and the absurdity of the human condition, postmodernism is a return to familiar themes: love and death. However, it examines these themes through the same cruel, funny, absurd lens existentialists used, and it does so in the context of the present day—rife with current pop cultural ephemera.

You can see flashes and long swaths of postmodern mastery in many of King’s books (particularly his early releases, like Cujo, Needful Things, and Hearts In Atlantis), but there is one book that, in its entirety, is a postmodern masterpiece. It’s a book so brilliant, it deserves a place alongside Don DeLillo’s White Noise as one of the finest American postmodern works of fiction ever written.

It is also one of King’s least-known, least-loved novels: Roadwork.

Published in 1981 as a paperback, Roadwork didn’t bear the name Stephen King. Rather, it was originally released under his pseudonym, Richard Bachman. Bachman had previously authored Rage and The Long Walk, both of which are also stunning. But where the name was different, Rage and The Long Walk were recognizable as King novels in that they had strong, terrifying plot lines.

Roadwork, like White Noise, has no real plot. This lack of plot, I suspect, is the reason why the novel gets no love from longtime King acolytes. Roadwork fails as a horror book. Roadwork fails as a thriller or suspense story. The publisher positioned it as a revenge story, the original cover sporting a gaudy illustration of a B-grade, silver-haired Chuck Norris clutching a rifle and looking badass.

But really, the main character of Roadwork, Barton Dawes, resembles the working-class Jack Gladney (the protagonist of White Noise): He’s an out-of-shape middle-aged man who exists both as an authority (Gladney is a professor; Dawes manages an industrial laundry) but also as someone who is in a near-constant state of bafflement. Really, he is just trying to figure it all out.

This is not Jack Torrance of The Shining, a man locked in a hotel full of ghosts battling personal demons. Barton is a guy who spends his free time driving as much and as fast as he can as a way of dealing with the crippling energy crisis, and then going home and watching a lot of television.

In lieu of plots, Roadwork and White Noise offer premises. For White Noise, it is the “airborne toxic event” and the mysterious drug, Dylar. For Roadwork, it is the energy crisis (the book is set at the beginning of 1972), and the impending roadwork: a highway extension is being built, and Barton’s job and home are both in its path, which means they’ll be razed.

If this were set in the dystopian America of The Long Walk, perhaps the road construction could be the basis for an actual plot—a totalitarian government tearing a family from their home, taking everything from them, for instance. Instead, Roadwork takes place in Midwestern, suburban America, and the government wants very much to give Barton a nice big check so that he and his wife can go buy another house. As for his place of employment, all he needs to do is go find another site for the industrial laundry (in fact, as the book opens, it seems there’s already a place picked out). Again, the company wants to give him a check. It’s not even like he’s got to go out of pocket.

Roadwork, which was published four years before White Noise, is, in many ways, the blue-collar version of DeLillo’s novel. The parallels are at times so striking, that I was sure DeLillo was influenced by Roadwork.

I reached out to the acclaimed author hoping to get an answer. “Sorry to say, I have not read the King novel,” DeLillo told me through his publicist, via email.

White Noise largely revolves around the airborne toxic event, in which a train derailment releases poisonous, potentially lethal chemicals into the atmosphere. It’s threatening and scary, but the facts of it keep shifting (in regard to the chemical cloud itself), with no one really knowing anything about it, even though it’s dictating the lives of residents. The energy crisis in Roadwork is similar in that it’s ever-present and looming with characters both dealing with it, and struggling against it. Television news reports constantly warn viewers of the dangerous toxins, and experts give tips on how to better live in the midst of the epidemic. Both cases, however, are examples of how King and DeLillo use particular occurrences as a refusal to adhere to common sense or order. They have no meaning. They just are.

In lieu of order and meaning, White Noise offers broader themes: unchecked consumerism, false intellectualism, academic theater, and hyper-consumption in media. Even during the darkest discussions, consumerism is right there:

Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it’s obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter. She also thinks nothing can happen to us as long as there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity. We’re safe as long as they’re around. But once they get big and scatter, she wants to be the first to go. She sounds almost eager. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in the night. It isn’t that she doesn’t cherish life; it’s being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness.

MasterCard, Visa, American Express.

I tell her I want to die first. I’ve gotten so used to her that I would feel miserably incomplete. We are two views of the same person. I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.

Four years earlier, Roadwork employs an identical strategy. King makes us constantly aware of just how ubiquitous products are; they are there at every moment, no matter how intimate or dire. He lingers on signage and packaging, the copy from which is constantly peppering the narration, enriching it, or, in some cases, actually completing it. This passage finds Barton at the grocery store:

He was on his way down a middle aisle toward the checkouts when God perhaps spoke to him. There was a woman in front of him, wearing powder-blue slacks and a blue cable-stitched sweater of a navy color. She had very yellow hair. She was maybe thirty-five, good looking in an open, alert way. She made a funny gobbling, crowing noise in her throat and staggered. The squeeze bottle of mustard she had been holding in her hand fell to the floor and rolled, showing a red pennant and the word FRENCH’S over and over again.

“Ma’am?” he ventured. “Are you okay?”

The woman fell backward and her left hand, which she had put up to steady herself, swept a score of coffee cans onto the floor. Each can said:

MAXWELL HOUSE

Good To The Very Last Drop.

In a world that is overwhelmed by products and brand names, the grocery store becomes church-like in both novels. It is the place where people gather, where they see proof of life, of death, or as King notes, where “God perhaps [speaks].” About Barton, King writes, “He liked to go shopping. It was very soothing, very sane.” In another scene, Barton is at the Stop ‘n’ Shop and runs into an old neighbor who’s since moved, as his house is also set to be demolished by the approaching roadwork.

Jack’s cart was full of frozen foods, heat-and-serve canned products, and a lot of beer.

“Jack!” he said. “What are you doing way over here?”

Jack smiled a little. “I haven’t got used to the other store yet, so... I thought…”

“Where’s Ellen?”

“She had to fly back to Cleveland,” he said. “Her mother died.”

“Jesus, I’m sorry Jack. Wasn’t that sudden?”

Shoppers were moving all around them under the cold overhead lights. Muzak came down from hidden speakers, old standards that you could never quite recognize. A woman with a full cart passed them, dragging a screaming three-year-old in a blue parka with snot on the sleeves.

“Yeah, it was,” Jack Hobart said. He smiled meaninglessly and looked down into his cart. There was a large yellow bag there that said:

KITTY-PAN KITTY LITTER

Use It, Throw It Away!

Sanitary!

Jack Hobart, unlike Barton, has moved on from his home, although he’s still not ready to leave the familiar comfort of his grocery store. In this small scene, we witness friends gather, we witness youth, we witness death, and it’s all in the midst of those cold overhead lights and soft Muzak.

Compare this to one of the many supermarket scenes in White Noise, which considers similar themes:

We ran into Murray Jay Siskind at the supermarket. His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling. There was a white can labeled CANNED PEACHES. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words IRREGULAR PEANUTS. Murray kept nodding to Babette as I introduced them.

“This is the new austerity,” he said. “Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I’m not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It’s like World War III. Everything is white. They’ll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.”

He was staring into Babette’s eyes, picking up items from our cart and smelling them.

In another scene set within the supermarket, DeLillo writes of the “ultra-cool interior” and how “the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children.”

Love, life, death, and God. They’re all on sale at your local Safeway.

Roadwork and White Noise are certainly horrifying. They are obsessed with death. The characters never really stop thinking about it or talking about it. Jack and his wife discuss who wants to die first, with Jack telling her he’d want to be the first to go while secretly hoping he outlives her. His exposure to the toxic cloud means he’s dying, though the book makes it clear that, by simply living, we’re all in the process of dying. The purpose of the mystery drug, Dylar, which becomes a plot device, is to eliminate one’s fear of death. Similarly, in Roadwork, Barton is constantly faced with death: his son’s, the woman in the grocery store, a coworker’s auto accident, and a later suicide. The concept of suicide begins to haunt Barton, as it simultaneously fascinates and terrifies him. (King also claims he wrote the book in response to his mother’s death.)

Whether juxtaposed next to death, or not, there’s a constant wit throughout the narration of both novels. And one of the more enjoyable aspects of both Roadwork and White Noise are when their characters are simply talking to one another—or, in the case of Roadwork, when Barton is talking to himself.

In White Noise, DeLillo repeatedly takes us to a university cafeteria where Jack and his colleagues, fellow professors, have lunch. We’re in no rush to find out about the latest events concerning of the toxic cloud. Rather, we enjoy conversation after conversation about men’s rooms, James Dean, and sex.

King, on the other hand, takes us to a diner:

Tom laughed and tapped more ashes into his plate. Gayle came back and asked them if they wanted more coffee. They both ordered more.

“I got those cotter pins today for the boiler door,” Tom said. “They remind me of my dork.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, you should see those sons of bitches. Nine inches long and three through the middle.”

“Did you mention my dork?” he asked, and they both laughed and talked shop until it was time to go back to work.

These are the things men talk about as chemical clouds gather overhead and the wrecking balls swing toward our homes: our dicks, and what we do with them.

If one of the points of postmodernism is that we see Love, Life, Death, and God in all things and all places—from the supermarket to the television—then we don’t need to only look at the National Book Award winning novel to find genius. DeLillo has been rightly and thoroughly lauded for his achievements, but King remains a controversial figure in the literary world, and when you read some of his work, there’s no question why. But taken on its own, Roadwork is a singular, funny, and wholly inventive novel brimming with postmodern ideals. DeLillo invents a college and a field of study to tell his story, but King points at a random house on a random street in a random neighborhood in a random suburb and asks, Why not that? Isn’t this place just as worthy as the basis for an entire novel? Must a person be a professor and head of Hitler Studies (like Jack) for him to be a hero? Can’t he just be anybody?

King seems aware of this even as he writes Roadwork: “A nice street, Fred. A nice neighborhood. Oh, I know how the intellectuals sneer at suburbia—it’s not as romantic as the rat-infested tenements of the hale-and-hearty back-to-the-land stuff. There are no great museums in suburbia, no great forests, no great challenges. But there had been good times.”

Good times, indeed. And that’s what ultimately makes both White Noise and its earthier cousin, Roadwork, so successful: they’re just fun to read. King and DeLillo captured/ created unique voices that were alternately harrowing and hilarious, insightful and incredulous, and at all times, compelling.

In one of the very first scenes of Roadwork, Barton finds himself in a gun shop. He’s not even really sure what he’s doing there, or what he’s supposed to say, so in speaking with the proprietor, Harry, he improvises, lying here and there to keep the small talk going. In the middle of this exchange, King pauses to reflect: “He felt that he could go on talking to Harry all day, for the rest of the year, embroidering the truth and the lies into a beautiful, gleaming tapestry. Let the world go by. Fuck the gas shortage and the high price of beef and the shaky ceasefire...”

I’m with you, Barton. I could sit here reading King and DeLillo all day, for the rest of the year, as they weave truth and lies into the beautiful, gleaming postmodern masterpieces their respective novels are.

David Obuchowski plays guitar in Publicist UK, and writes about books and beer for Gawker and Deadspin. Find him on Twitter @PublicistUK.

[Image via AP]

Four teenagers were airlifted to hospitals Tuesday afternoon after two cars on one of England’s best-known roller coasters collided, stranding passengers 25 feet off the ground.

The collision happened just after 2 pm local time on The Smiler roller coaster at Alton Towers, an amusement park located 150 about miles north of London. According to Sky News, a car carrying 16 passengers crashed into an empty car in front of it.

One witness tweeted that there was “blood everywhere” and that passengers were knocked unconscious.

The four teens—two boys and two girls—“suffered serious leg injuries in the incident,” according to Steve Parry, a spokesman for West Midlands Ambulance Service. Parry told Sky News the other 12 passengers were not seriously injured.

Ian Crabbe, director of Alton Towers Resort, said the accident is under investigation. The crash is reportedly the seventh time The Smiler has been forced to close for repairs since it opened in July 2013, including one incident in November 2013 when the ride’s wheels fell off and struck several passengers.

Other than that, everyone had a fun day at the park

Image via Sky News. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Apple is the biggest company in the world. Apple is worth $725 billion. How big is that, exactly?

PriceWaterhouseCoopers today released its annual overview of the world’s largest companies. Some perspective:

• Apple is worth almost twice as much as the world’s second largest company, Google (valued at $375 billion).
• Apple is worth as much as the second and third largest companies in the world (Google and ExxonMobil) combined.
• Apple is worth more than Walmart, Facebook, and JPMorgan Chase combined.
• In the past year, Apple increased in value by more than the total value of General Electric.
  
• Apple is worth more than the gross domestic products of Pakistan, Peru, and the Philippines combined.
• Apple is worth more than the gross domestic products of West Virginia, New Hampshire, Idaho, Delaware, North Dakota, Alaska, Maine, South Dakota, Wyoming, Rhode Island, Montana, and Vermont combined.
  
• Apple is worth more than the net worth of the fourteen richest people on earth combined—a list that includes Carlos Slim, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, the Koch Brothers, and the entire Walton family.
  
• Apple is worth more than $100 billion more than the entire 2014 United States defense budget, which includes all spending on the armed forces and Defense department and related departments and all international wars.
  

Them flat computers are neat.

[Photo: AP]

Since its official launch in 2013, Fusion has aimed to be a haven for sweet millennial clicks and a place for journalists to make a lot of money while practicing “post-text” journalism. You can debate whether it’s accomplished either of those things, but one thing that can’t be debated is that no one is actually reading Fusion.

Screenshots of Fusion’s internal traffic metrics obtained by Gawker—measured by Chartbeat, which Gawker and many other properties use—show that even in the middle of a workday, virtually no one is reading anything the website publishes. The number of “concurrents” (people reading the same thing simultaneously) is unbelievably low for a website that’s been around for two years and employs some of the most widely known digital journalists around.

At the moment the above screenshot was taken (this afternoon), only 32 people were reading a post titled “Hot Girls Wanted: A disturbing, behind-the-scenes look at how ‘amateur’ porn is made.” It is the most popular story on the entirety of Fusion.net—and if you can’t get people to click something about naked teenage girls on the internet, something is deeply wrong.

Fusion’s traffic crisis was recently noted in a New York Times rundown, which reported horrendously low monthly pageview figures:

Its web traffic late last year, according to internal figures obtained by The New York Times, dropped as low as 23,000 page views on some days. Fusion said its traffic this past December reached 1.9 million unique users and increased to about five million by April.

Well, it’s June, and only seven people are reading a breaking news story about the disgraced president of FIFA:

This from a website that’s been handing out six-figure salaries to staff writers for the past year, and reportedly just locked down $30 million in further funding from its co-owners, Disney and Univision. Our most recent Fusion traffic screenshot shows 706 concurrent visitors—that’s over $42,000 per reader.

I’ve reached out to Fusion editorial chief Alexis Madrigal for comment, and will update if I get it.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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Police in North Charleston, S.C., have arrested the man they believe wrapped electrical tape around the muzzle of Caitlyn the dog, a chocolate Staffordshire, and left her for several days with her tongue stuck between her teeth, unable to eat or drink.

Caitlyn’s case made the news last Wednesday, when the 15-month-old dog was found and freed from her trap. On Monday night, cops picked up William Leonard Dobson, 41, and charged him with animal torture, the Post and Courier reports.

Under South Carolina law, a conviction would earn him a $5,000 fine and up to 5 years in prison. He’d also have Caitlyn taken away from him and be ordered to pay for her treatment.

CNN reports Caitlyn’s recovery is going well. According to the Charleston Animal Society, her snout is still swollen from the tape and she’ll likely need surgery to remove part of her damaged tongue, but she’s going to be fine.

Here’s CNN on Caitlyn’s treatment since last week:

The dog was transferred to Veterinary Specialty Care in Mount Pleasant on Friday. She started receiving hyperbaric treatments every 12 hours to improve the damaged tissue in her mouth and cold laser therapy to promote healing, Senior Director of Veterinary Care Lucy Fuller said. She underwent a small surgical procedure on her lip Saturday, but there is not currently a procedure planned for her tongue.

She’s now off her IV drip and drinking food and water normally.

“We have the greatest of hopes for this beautiful girl,” Fuller said.

[Photo: Charleston Animal Society]

As we crawl through this, our second day of True Summer (not that fake astronomical stuff), many people who haven’t had thunderstorms yet this year are in for a flashing, crashing, startling treat. What exactly is it about lightning that makes that thunderous noise, and why does it seem to crackle, boom, and roll?

Lightning is one of the first bits of science they teach us in elementary school—these large-scale discharges of static electricity form in much the same way that you can torture someone in your living room on a dry day.

The ice crystals high in a thunderstorm and surface of the Earth both tend to take on a positive charge during a storm, while the base of the storm takes on a negative charge. The buildup between the regions of positive and negative charges can result in an explosive discharge we see and hear as lightning, occurring more than a billion times around the world every year.

This enormous electrostatic discharge is gorgeous, but it’s nothing to play around with. Not only is lightning dangerous because it’s a powerful jolt of electricity (duh), it’s also five times hotter than the surface of the sun—the temperature of lightning frequently clocks in at more than 50,000°F, while the surface of the sun is relatively chilly, sitting at around 10,000°F. Air expands when it’s heated, so when lightning flashes through the sky, the layer of air immediately around the bolt rapidly expands as it’s heated by tens of thousands of degrees in less than a second.

If you’ve ever watched one of the dozens of episodes where the Mythbusters blow stuff up, you know that the force and deafening sound of the explosion comes from the shockwave that emanates from the center of the blast. This is why we hear the loud crack of thunder after a flash of lightning—a small shockwave forms from the air expanding so rapidly in that split second the lightning existed. The closer you are to the bolt, the louder the thunder will be, and bigger shockwaves can rattle both you and your house, just like an explosion. (The above video shows a Russian Proton-M rocket exploding—the shockwave was so powerful that it shattered windows in nearby buildings.)

It makes sense that you hear the initial crack or boom of the thunder (and even the echoes of that boom off of nearby buildings and hills), but why does thunder seem to continuously crackle and roll? When you hear thunder that booms and rolls or crackles for another few seconds, what you’re hearing is actually the shockwave from the entire length of the bolt from the ground to the bolt’s source up in the clouds. You hear the blast of air closest to the surface, and the roll and crackle of the thunder fades as shockwaves from higher and higher up the bolt reach your ear holes as that soothing, summertime treat.

Oh, and if you were wondering, the old thing about judging the distance of lightning by counting the seconds between the thunder and the flash really does work. Depending on conditions like terrain, air temperature, and precipitation intensity, it takes thunder about five seconds to travel one mile. If you see a flash of lightning and count ten seconds before you hear the clap of thunder, the bolt of lightning was roughly two miles away. However, you should always do this indoors—if you can hear thunder outdoors, no matter how faint it is, you’re close enough to get struck.

[Top image by the author, taken during the June 30, 2012 derecho | Video via YouTube]

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“Atmosphere: exploring climate change,” the London Science Museum’s exhibit on global warming, is principally sponsored by Shell. You’re asking yourself: Hmm, Shell—isn’t that the name of some trendy “green” startup? No, it’s the same old Shell that fills your gas tank and that was responsible for 76 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions last year. What could go wrong?

The answer is: pretty much exactly what you’d think. Emails obtained by the Guardian via a freedom of information request show that the English-Dutch petroleum behemoth was all too happy to get a little pushy with its suggestions and concerns about the project. One 2014 email read:

“Regards the rubbish archive project [an interactive exhibition examining waste in the context of climate change], xxx and I have some concerns on this exhibition particularly as it creates an opportunity for NGOs to talk about some of the issues that concern them around Shell’s operations.”

It goes on: “Could you please share more information with us on the symposium event planned for September? As you know we receive a great deal of interest around our art sponsorships so need to ensure we do not proactively open up a debate on the topic. Will it be an invite only event?”

And it ends: “Regarding the gallery update, can I check whether you have touched base with [Shell climate change advisor] David Hone to see if he would like to participate in the content refresh?”

The museum acknowledged its relationship with Shell, but maintained that it did not cave to any external pressure regarding the exhibit. And maybe it didn’t! I haven’t been to the museum, but based on this promotional video, it doesn’t seem like the facts and analysis are spun in a particularly Shell-friendly manner. Still: These are the perils of corporate sponsorship. Be wary of the museum’s next big exhibit: A history of the space age sponsored by BP.

Screencap via London Science Museum. h/t Hyperallergic. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

“Can we please get started now? This is an interview.”

Writer Ruby Warrington had the excruciating pleasure of sitting down with Kylie and Kendall Jenner a few weeks ago in an interview for the Sunday Times, and, let me tell you, she was able to pry the girls away from their cell phones just barely long enough to grab some truly incredible quotes.

After setting the scene up top—the two young celebrities sitting, texting wordlessly (hence the interviewer’s aforementioned plea “Can we please get started now?”)—Warrington explains that the pre-approved length of time she was given to speak to the girls had already been cut in half due to the fact that the sisters were “tired.” Poor sweet babies! After being asked to begin, Kendall offered her dark thoughts on social media, which sometimes inspires in her a desire for physical violence:

“I think social media has taken over for our generation. ... I hate it sometimes, like, I literally want to throw my phone so I can’t look at it. It’s all a made-up world if you think about it. Social media, everything, this interview, everything. It’s not real. It’s pretty crazy.”

That’s life. Sometimes you literally want to throw your phone so you can’t look at it, but you can’t, because it has taken over for our generation. Nothing is real. Even this interview.

My God.

Kendall then offered an anecdote about a recent trip to Thailand—the very trip that made her come to see social media in this light (“not real”). She also saw: “dogs that were, like, withering away”; “people who live in huts”; meat hanging; everything:

Kendall had an epiphany about social media on a recent family holiday to Thailand. “We had a two-hour drive from the airport to where we were staying, and I’d left my phone in my bag, so I didn’t touch it the whole way. I looked out the window at everything, and I saw people who live in huts and have dogs that were, like, withering away. And all their food, meat, was hanging in front of their house. It was very sad.

Meat hanging. Very sad.

Even sadder, Kylie missed it all:

“Then we pulled up to this amazing house we were staying at, and I looked over and Kylie was on her phone the whole time and didn’t see one thing that I saw.”

Damn. I truly love this girl very much. And while we’re on the subject of Kylie, Kylie does not want to grow past 18:

“I’m scared of the day I turn 19. I really don’t want to grow past 18,” Kylie says. She looks at her sister. “You’ll be 20 this year — that’s crazy. And any second you’ll be, like, 21, 22, 23...”

Time marches on, and Kendall—Kendall, so frail, so near to death, almost 21 in like any second—feels mortality’s weight, as well:

Kendall nods. “It’s scary. Life is scary.” But why this fear of getting older? “It’s just scary to think how fast everything is rolling and you can’t stop it. It’s rolling right now,” she says.

Do you hear that? That’s the sound of my heart beating even slower.

Plus, Kylie has done so much, physically and whatever, in this past year:

“You see a picture and you’ve changed so much in a year,” Kylie agrees. “I’ve done so much, physically and whatever.”

She’s changed so much. Or, at least, one specific part of her face has changed so much. It’s scary. It’s alarming.

However, the sisters would not like to explicitly identify these physical changes, nor would they like to talk about their body insecurities, which is understandable, I don’t know why any young women would want to talk about that:

But when I broach the topic of what body insecurities the sisters deal with as young women today, Kendall shuts me down with a swift “Next question”.

But is Kendall’s refusal to give a writer a quote about her bodily insecurities because she is a feminist? Warrington asks her if she considers herself one.

“I don’t know much about it, so I can’t really speak on it. I get what you’re saying, but I’m not gonna say much because I’d like to be more educated.”

Kendall gets what you are saying but she is not educated enough to know if she considers herself a feminist. She may be working toward a minor in Kendall, but she has chosen to major in General Disinterest.

Kendall, I love you, and I would never tell you when you should just say yes. You are perfect and so is your sister, Kylie. And Kylie—please look out the window next time you are on vacation. It will make your sister feel better.

Amen.

(By the way: Ruby Warrington—wonderful Ruby Warrington—Ruby Warrington who I love almost as much as Kylie and Kendall—was ostensibly sent to interview the girls about their new Topshop clothing line.)

Read the entire incredible article, “The Kylie + Kendall show,” here if you’d like to.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Some stellar news today for fans of classic Land Rover Defenders, imported vehicles and anyone who’s not a fan of civil forfeiture: Nearly a year after they were seized by federal agents in pre-dawn raids across the country, and a few months after our big exposé on the seizures, more than two dozen imported Defenders will be returned to their owners after the government agreed to drop their case.

North Carolina attorney Will Hedrick, who led the federal courtroom fight to get the seized Defenders back to their owners pro bono, told Jalopnik that the case was settled in arbitration proceedings on Monday.

The government has agreed to return all of the seized Defenders to their owners, at no cost to them, within 30 days, Hedrick said. Officials also agreed not to pursue the vehicles in the future.

“I’m feeling pretty great about things,” said Hedrick, himself a Defender enthusiast who quit his lawyer job to focus on this case full time in recent months. “It’s just a huge relief for my clients. They thought they were never going to see those trucks again.”

It’s unquestionably a huge win for one lawyer waging a David vs. Goliath fight against the Department of Homeland Security, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and federal prosecutors. They argued that the imported Defenders in this case were not at least 25 years old, making them eligible to be brought into the country, and thus subject to seizure under civil forfeiture laws.

Some 85 percent of civil forfeiture cases go uncontested, Hedrick said, sometimes because the seized assets were used in the commission of crimes and sometimes because people don’t have the means to fight it out in court.

But Hedrick argued — successfully, now — that the government had no proof these vehicles weren’t of legal age. He also showed that even if they somehow weren’t in compliance when they were imported, they are at least 26 or 27 years old now.

“The government, in my opinion, really didn’t have a case,” Hedrick said. “The information on their warrant was not accurate. They pursued this on false grounds.”

All the trucks in this case were imported by one man, North Carolina chiropractor Aaron Richardet, but he was never charged with a crime. The status of his case — if there is one — is unknown. “If they did pursue criminal charges, I think that they would have an extremely difficult case to prove,” said Hedrick, who is not representing Richardet.

Had he not succeeded in arbitration, Hedrick said he would have taken the case back to court, where it could have dragged on for several more months, if not longer. He also said he planned to appeal if he did not prevail there.

Jennifer Brinkley, another North Carolina owner and longtime Defender enthusiast whose vehicle was seized by body armor-clad Homeland Security agents last year, said she was ecstatic over the outcome. At the same time, she remains perplexed why the trucks were seized in such an aggressive fashion and with such shaky evidence to begin with.

“We’re still scratching our heads a bit,” Brinkley said. “I hate the waste of taxpayer money and people’s time.”

Nonetheless, she can’t wait to get her truck back — all thanks to the efforts of one attorney who never even asked for compensation. “Without Will Hedrick, none of this would have happened,” she said.

As for Hedrick, the only payment he’s asking for from his owners is a photograph of them next to their Defenders once they get them back.

“I feel like justice prevailed here,” Brinkley said. “It’s a great thing.”

Top illustration credit Sam Woolley

Contact the author at patrick@jalopnik.com.

Who ruined our economy, Bush or Obama? Trick question! The economy’s never been better, for investors and rentiers. And it’s never getting better for everybody else, including the half of Americans who just told the U.S. government they’d be fucked if they needed to come up with $400, like, now.

That’s one data point from the Federal Reserve’s newly released report on the economic well-being of U.S. households. As AllGov explains:

[T]he agency asked 50,000 people if they could handle an unexpected “financial disruption” costing them $400. Just over half (53%) said they could “fairly easily handle such an expense” by using money in their bank accounts (checking or savings) or by leaning on a credit card.

But for 47% of respondents, $400 was a tougher problem to handle. Within this group, 14% said they simply couldn’t cover it. Another 10% would have to sell something, 13% would have to borrow money from a friend or relative and 2% would have to resort to a high-interest payday loan.

It gets grimmer: Among households with income under $40,000—about two-thirds of members say “that they would sell something or borrow money to cover a $400 emergency expense or could not cover the expense at all.”

Some other highlights of our economic recovery:

• “Thirty-one percent of respondents report going without some form of medical care in the 12 months before the survey because they could not afford it.”
  
• “Just under one-quarter of respondents indicate that they or a family member living with them experienced some form of financial hardship in the year prior to the survey.”
  
• “Twenty percent of respondents report that their spending exceeded their income in the 12 months prior to the survey.”
  
• “Thirty-nine percent of non-retirees have given little or no thought to financial planning for retirement and 31 percent have no retirement savings or pension.”
  
• “Over one-half of non-retirees with self-directed retirement accounts are either ‘not confident’ or only ‘slightly confident’ in their ability to make the right investment decisions when investing the money in these accounts.”
  

Then there are the statistics on homebuying, which isn’t merely an American Dream: It’s also the cornerstone of long-term economic security, seeing as how owning can save you nearly a quarter of a million dollars over renting in a few decades. But the Fed’s survey finds that half of Americans who’d like to buy are still unable to afford a down payment or qualify for a mortgage.

It’s true, mortgage companies are really concerned about your ability to make a monthly payment with your debt load! So you’ll just have to continue paying monthly rent, the cost of which is quickly rising, outpacing mortgage payments in much of the country. That won’t be a problem for you, will it?

America: The economy’s great! Just not ever for you, you entitled lazies.

Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
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Dave Matthews once sang, “crash into me.” Then he sang, “and I’ll come into you,” making the song racier than you thought. Recently he surprised a fan by shoving his face in her car window while she was stuck in traffic. Coincidence?

It’s every Dave fan’s dream: you’re driving in your car, which proudly sports a Dave Matthews Band “Fire Dancer” bumper sticker, and you’re stopped in standstill traffic near a hotel at which Dave Matthews is staying. I assume you’re about to get blazed. I assume you’re listening to Dave. I assume you’re wearing a Dave t-shirt. I assume you’re wearing a Dave baseball cap. I assume that, on speaker phone, you’re talking to an old friend you still see almost every day about something that happened in high school. And then, via TMZ:

The unsuspecting superfan says she heard a tap on the window, looked left and screamed ... “Holy s**t!! Dave Matthews’ face is in my car window!” She immediately pulled over, ‘cause y’know ... it was FREAKIN’ DAVE!

Damn. It was Dave! TMZ reports Dave then took a photo with the “unsuspecting superfan” (or woman who just happened to still have one of those stickers on her car from before—hard to say) and asked her the location of a good bar.

As Dave would say:

Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

Last July, NYPD Officer Ymmacula Pierre and her partner found Kenneth Sanden dead after being called to his East Village apartment by a concerned relative. So Pierre allegedly did what any respectable cop would do: pocket the dead man’s Mastercard and use it to buy a diamond ring.

The New York Post reports that a $3,282 diamond ring was purchased with Sanden’s card from Zales.com two days after the 65-year-old architect’s death. His niece received a fraud notification and alerted Zales, who reached out to FedEx to stop shipment.

As it turns out, the package was allegedly on its way to Pierre’s boyfriend’s apartment. The IP address of the computer used to order the ring also originated in the boyfriend’s apartment, according to prosecutors.

Pierre, a three-year veteran, pleaded not guilty on Monday and was released on her own recognizance.

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

Critics agree: Aloha is the worst film Cameron Crowe has ever made (reminder: Cameron Crowe made We Bought a Zoo). Sony Pictures exec Amy Pascal infamously wrote in a leaked email that “It never … Not even once … ever works.” But the least workable thing, according to Cameron Crowe, is that you got mad when he cast the translucently white Emma Stone as a woman who’s a quarter Asian. Cameron Crowe is sorry you were offended.

In a note on his website calling Aloha “misunderstood,” Crowe wrote:

Thank you so much for all the impassioned comments regarding the casting of the wonderful Emma Stone in the part of Allison Ng. I have heard your words and your disappointment, and I offer you a heart-felt apology to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice. As far back as 2007, Captain Allison Ng was written to be a super-proud ¼ Hawaiian who was frustrated that, by all outward appearances, she looked nothing like one. A half-Chinese father was meant to show the surprising mix of cultures often prevalent in Hawaii. Extremely proud of her unlikely heritage, she feels personally compelled to over-explain every chance she gets. The character was based on a real-life, red-headed local who did just that.

See? You had it all wrong. Cameron Crowe wrote a character who he felt could be played by a white actress, and then cast a white actress. He made this plan years ago, so it was definitely a pretty good plan. Cameron Crowe is so sorry you misunderstood, and he’s glad to be able to clear this up.

Later in the open letter, he points out that Emma Stone did “tireless research” to play Allison Ng, so it’s totally not her fault if you didn’t understand what she was going for.

Plus, Crowe writes, he was “able to present the island, the locals and the film community with many jobs for over four months,” so he and Hawaiian culture are basically even now.

“So many of us are hungry for stories with more racial diversity,” he concludes, “more truth in representation, and I am anxious to help tell those stories in the future.”

Not that Cameron Crowe is saying Aloha’s representation lacked truth or anything. In Cameron Crowe’s opinion, Aloha was pretty good. It’s a shame you didn’t get it, but maybe you will buy a ticket now that you know he really met a red-headed Hawaiian, you guys. It only made $10 million on opening weekend, so it would actually be really great if you could do that. Cameron Crowe thanks you in advance and asks you to remember that he made Say Anything.

Aloha.

[Photo of Emily Jean “Allison Ng” Stone via Sony Pictures]

“With WikiLeaks and Eric Snowden spilling our beans every day, what’s happening on the Obamacare exchanges is the best-kept secret in Washington.” Please enjoy the Guardian’s compilation of U.S. lawmakers forgetting the name of the central figure in one of recent memory’s biggest news stories.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.