On Sunday night, the world saw the premiere of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s HBO show, the football bro-medy drama-doo-bee-doo-bee-doo Ballers. In what felt like the longest short pilot in history, viewers were treated to lesson numero uno in what it means to really ball. Do these guys have what it takes to ball? Let’s find out.

Episode one begins, like all television programs, with what we would traditionally describe as an intro sequence (industry talk). In the Ballers intro sequence we are treated to a football montage (industry talk), which includes real footage of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson playing football, in addition to some other people playing sports, training hard, balling hard, and doing other things with heightened physical intensity. In this montage, we capture a frame of The Rock bestowing his beatific smile on what appears to be a group of adoring fans. In the background, Lil Wayne’s “Right Above It” plays.

This is a one hundred percent perfect, FDA-certified, baller-ass smile. Ten out of ten balls awarded.

As we wade through the show’s muddy writing, we eventually learn that Johnson is some sort of former football player-turned-financial planner named Spencer Strassmore. Spencer Strassmore suffered a painful injury during his former football days, which we know about because this guy is literally chewing pills every time we see him. What pills? Who knows? Do we care? Right now. . .no, we do not. Because it is time to ball.

In the opening sequence, Strassmore wakes up next to a naked lady and pours about 30 to 60 pills into his hand, munching them like they’re Teddy Grahams. This is a very baller thing to do. He is awarded seven out of ten balls for this act of complete wanton disregard for his medical health.

Tight.

Moving on, we meet a football player—a footballer. This particular footballer is driving a car with an attractive woman in the passenger seat; she is his mistress. In a matter of seconds she has confessed her love for him, grabbed his dick, punched him in the face, and caused him to careen off the road. They both quickly die in a horrific car accident.

This is a terrible tragedy and thus, it is not baller. Zero out of ten balls are given. Death is not a joke.

As Strassmore performs a eulogy for the fallen baller, a woman in the crowd flashes her panties at him. Medium level baller. Five out of ten balls. The man to her right appears smug and solemn all at once. He, independent of the panties woman and The Rock, is afforded one solitary bonus ball for his cool facial expression. Good work.

As a financial planner (or whatever he is, we’re still mostly unclear), Strassmore is also very good about giving advice to his friends and other loose ballers; he doles out this advice liberally and generously, often before anyone has asked. At a hot, exclusive party at one of Miami’s fakest looking nightclubs, Strassmore tells a group of men standing around a valet area with lots and lots of fancy cars, “First piece of free advice, y’all gotta listen. Y’all make millions. Never buy a depreciating asset. If it drives, flies, floats, or fucks, lease it. Let’s go have fun.” That was a weak-ass thing to say before going to a party, but whatever works, man! Ball hard.

Having fun: sounds like they’re about to ball. Free advice? Not a baller move. We’ll give this one four out of ten balls.

Big trouble—as is commonplace in the lives of ballers—is afoot. At the hot, exclusive Miami nightclub where the ballers find themselves that night, good footballer Ricky Jerret gets himself into an altercation with a pink-shirted man who had some fucked up shit to say. If you’re asking me, the pink-shirted goon deserved a punch to the face. Perhaps you aren’t asking me and you’d rather just watch the show. Either way—if you’re on a football team, punching a stranger in the face at the club is not good business. You take the balling with the not balling, and you hope to make it out the other side.

Punching a guy at the club: baller. Getting cut from the team: not baller. Three out of ten balls for Ricky Jerret.

Unfortunately for Ricky Jerret, there is more to the story.

Ricky Jerret’s girlfriend’s shirt has several holes in it and that seems really unnecessary. Things are not looking good for Jerret so far on the pilot of this show. Three balls now seems like too many. Two out of ten balls awarded.

To make things even worse for Ricky Jerret, he shows up at 5:01 p.m. to his 5 p.m. meeting with the coach of the Miami Dolphins. What do you think you are, some sort of superstar baller who has golddust in his pee? No, my friend. You are not. You are downgraded to one out of ten balls.

“Do you think you are some sort of baller, my friend?”

The tide turns for Jerret, however, when he decides to do an unballer-like thing and wait it out for the coach of the Miami Dolphins to return from his boat outing to have a later meeting. This impresses the coach of the Miami Dolphins in that he realizes Jerret is also humble, while still remaining a baller deep down. He gets a spot on the team after professing that the three most important things to him are “God, family, football.” Eight out of ten balls.

Now Ricky Jerret needs someone to handle his cash. He calls up Spencer Strassmore, wearing a big ole Super Bowl ring and a cool blue sweater. Looking fresh as hell: ten out of ten balls.

Strassmore is down, he can do anything Jerret needs. Of course he can! He is the king of the ballers, after all! No problem—let’s do this.

Except, as he chatters on about trust and assuredness, we learn only too soon that—TWIST—the biggest baller of them all is a fraud, a liar, an empty-pocketed scam artist. Strassmore’s bank account is as useless as a deflated football during the Super Bowl. This oversight reduces him to Zero out of ten balls.

Ballers episode one balling average: 6.42 plus 1 bonus ball.

Screenshots via HBO. Contact the author at dayna.evans@gawker.com.

How does 2 Bros Pizza—the popular New York hot-cheese-n-crust-for-just-a-buck joint—keep its prices so nice? By underpaying its employees and working them to the bone, according to a new lawsuit.

The class-action lawsuit, filed against dollar-slice emporium 2 Bros on behalf of more than a dozen cashiers, pizzamakers, and the like, alleges that workers were paid minimum wage or less with no overtime for workweeks that often hit 60 or 70 hours. From the New York Daily News:

Gabriel Bailon, who worked as a piemaker and cashier at the chain’s flagship pizzeria on St. Marks Place and saw 2 Bros. become a citywide staple, said he and other employees were talked into staying with phony promises about raises, but their bosses never came up with the dough.

The cheap pizza chain did cut workers’ hours this year, “but they gave me less money, too,” said Bailon, who would typically work from 11 in the morning until 11 or 12 at night, six days a week.

Another longtime worker, Ruben Aca, worked 72 hours a week at the eatery’s Lexington Ave. locale, where he said he was paid a flat $480 a week — or $6.66 an hour — for two years. The suit says he got a raise to $600 a week in 2014 — but still works 60-hour weeks.

As the Awl notes, the suit comes a month after the New York Times exposed the unspeakably bad conditions faced by workers at New York’s low-price nail salons. Next time something strikes you as so cheap as to seem almost criminal, that’s probably because it is.

Photo via Jason Lam/Flickr. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

On Saturday, the New York Times published an article about Charleston shooter Dylan Roof’s newly discovered manifesto and cache of selfies. It would have been a pretty straightforward news story had the Times not been fooled by a teen into reporting that Roof was a diehard fan of My Little Pony and was obsessed with 9/11 memes.

Fusion has the story about how Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner Frances Robles ended up reporting info about Roof that was actually straight up invented up by some random kid. Both the Times’ screw up and Fusion’s reporting on it comes from a 16-year-old British boy named Benjamin Wareing, who provided the Times with the made-up information and then turned around and exposed the paper on his blog. (This post accepts that Benjamin Wareing, despite having already pranked the media, is indeed a 16-year-old British boy named Benjamin Wareing.)

According to Fusion, a friend of Wareing’s named Sadrak Ramirez had become Dylann Roof’s Facebook friend shortly before the massacre in Charleston. After the shooting, Ramirez was inundated by Facebook messages from reporters writing about Roof, and he directed Robles, and likely others, to Wareing, who presumably passed himself off as a long-distance internet friend of Roof’s.

From there, Wareing and Ramirez, per Fusion, told Robles that Roof had kept a personal Tumblr, that had since been deleted, which included “memes” along with his writings about My Little Pony. Here is Wareing in his own words, from a blog post from Sunday titled “How I Screwed With the Biggest News Outlet in the World”:

We chose to focus on the “Brony” scene of “My Little Pony”, emphasizing the fact that Roof was a major Brony. We also wanted a bit of best modern-day internet can give; memes. We told this idiot of a reporter that Dylann was obsessed with 911 ‘memes’. Of course, we have no way of knowing if this is true. As we expected, the New York Times reporter took to this like a fat kid in a candy store. No questions asked.

Robles directly quoted Wareing in the story, writing:

Benjamin Wareing, a blogger in Britain, said the writings are nearly identical to blog posts that Mr. Roof posted several months ago on a separate Tumblr page. Mr. Wareing was preparing to write an essay on the dangers of Tumblr and troubled youths, so he took notes on the writings.

“He just made really stupid but obvious statements about people from other races,” Mr. Wareing said in an email. “He would call black citizens ‘nuggets’ and such. He never made direct threats at all on Tumblr, at least it didn’t seem like that, just weird ramblings about how he felt he ‘didn’t fit in.’”

It indeed appears as if Robles took all of this at face value and wrote it into her story, though at some point she either became suspicious, or aware, that everything Wareing had told her was bunk. According to Fusion, the watchdog site Newsdiffs shows that Wareing’s interview as well as the line about 9/11 and My Little Pony was removed from the story only three hours after it was published on Saturday afternoon.

Robles refused to comment to Fusion, so it’s unclear exactly how she vetted Wareing, if at all. But this is the second time this year that the New York Times has printed the fabrications of a shit-stirring teenager its reporter had found via the internet.

Back in April, in a front page trendpiece on the popularity of vaping among teens, reporter Sabrina Tavernise quoted a Twitter user named @drugleaf as saying that he had quit cigarettes thanks to a vape endorsed by the rapper Lil Ugly Mane. @drugleaf, who was livetweeting his punking of the Times as it was happening, was merely a Twitter prankster posing as the kid the Times quoted as “Joe Stevonson.”

In @drugleaf’s case, the Times didn’t do much to factcheck his story, contacting him after his interview only so that he could clarify his location. But, in both cases, there’s only so much that could have been done to verify each teen’s claims—it is certainly plausible that a teen might use a rapper’s vape to quit cigarettes, or that Dylan Roof had blogged on a since-deleted Tumblr.

But nonetheless, in each situation, the Times missed easy warning signs that they were being fucked with. In the vaping story, the Times printed @drugleaf as saying that “the only thing that’s really missing is feeling like your entire mouth is coated in dirt.” Wareing, meanwhile, was quoted as saying that Roof “would call black citizens ‘nuggets’,” and in a screenshot of his correspondence with Robles that he put on his blog, he wrote that he had “never met someone as apparently troubled as [Roof] since my old friend in primary school who used to lick people’s seats!”

These should have probably raised red flags for the reporters involved. In the case of Wareing’s remark about chair licking, it would have been wise of Robles to ask the teen what he meant by saying that he had “met” Roof. (She also, for instance, should have asked Wareing to recall Roof’s supposed Tumblr URL.)

Encountering people on the internet who might want to prank you is going to be the reality for reporters as time drags us all along, and it seems obvious that, at the moment, the Times has an institutional inability to suss out the fakers.

There might be no solution more simple than “try harder,” though perhaps the Times might consider creating the position of Teen Copy Editor.

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

On December 30, 1957, 17-year-old Ann Noblett was seen getting off the bus that was returning her home from a dancing lesson. She had only a short journey on foot to reach her house, but she never made it. A month later, her body was found ... frozen to the core, despite England’s mild winter that year.

The February 5, 1958 Sydney Morning Herald noted that Ann’s body turned up seven miles from her home north of London. It was discovered by an RAF pilot and his teenage brother who were out walking the family dog. She still had her purse, and was wearing her glasses. And there was something distressingly odd about her corpse:

A police officer said today the body was “fantastically cold” when it was discovered — so cold that a thermometer could not register its temperature.

One theory is that the killer panicked after reading in newspapers last week that buildings in the area near her home were to be searched, and that he dumped the body, which he had kept in a state of deep freeze.

Police are interviewing the drivers of dozens of companies with refrigerated vans, and checking on farms with deep-freeze apparatus.

The pathologist on the case was responsible for the deep-freeze theory; the nickname “Deep Freeze Murder” was likely given as part of media coverage of the intriguing case. The woods where she was found had been previously been meticulously searched, which gave further credence to the idea.

Despite the seemingly huge clues that Ann’s killer — who was also believed to have sexually assaulted her — was probably a local with easy and private access to a deep freezer, he was never captured. His reasons for keeping Ann’s body on ice remain a mystery.

Photos by Ron Burton/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Us Weekly reports Britney Spears has broken up with her boyfriend of eight months, Charlie Ebersol, a TV producer and pub quiz answer you’d probably have to sneak into the bathroom to Google.

Since parting ways with the odious Kevin Federline in 2007, Britney has dated a string of non-famous men whose names fade from memory as quickly as if they had been written on sand. She dated and later became engaged to her one-time manager Jason Trawick. After parting ways with Trawick, she briefly dated Dave.

Britney got together with Ebersol last October, and their relationship quickly turned conspicuously cute. Gossip Cop notes they took family vacations with Britney and K-Fed’s sons, and “surprised each other for their respective birthdays in December” before spending Christmas together.

They also posted cootie-contaminated valentines to one another on social media.

But those heady days of extravagant, multilayered baked goods appear to be over now. Britney has completely erased the photos of Charlie from her Instagram account, although he’s left his pictures of her up.

It is always sad to see the end of a relationship between a person and a celebrity who seem to love each other very elaborately.

[h/t Gossip Cop, Photo: Charlie Ebersol/Instagram]

Kristin Cavallari has promised us many things over the last 148 days: a review of Krill oil, a “cute new web series,” and of course, a book about her life. She has finally delivered on one of those pledges—can you guess which one?

Cuteeee neeeew weeeb serieeeees!!!!! Though Kristin’s twitter has been oddly quiet about this endeavor, she has already filmed at least four episodes of the show, which is sponsored by Revlon cosmetics and presented by Cosmopolitan dot com. What’s it about? Love, of course.

As Kristin explains in the opening credits, the show is committed to helping “women struggling with their love lives get back out there.” Kristin assists these single ladies by 1) talking to them, and 2) letting them use her makeup artist and a wide array of Revlon products to get ready for blind dates. The majority of the five-minute show is filmed while the episode’s dateless nerd gets her makeup done. Kristin, ever the consummate professional, does not miss a beat as the sad Cathy tries to answer questions through a face full of makeup brushes.

In one of the first episodes, Kristin helps a “twentysomething world traveler”—whose age is presented in a video graphic as “29”—prepare for a “mixology” date in Los Angeles. (As Kristin’s makeup artist says in the installment, “We all have features, and it’s nice to create a little more accentuation of them.”) It goes like this:

Elyse’s date takes place at the Page 71 Lounge in Studio City, which earned a solid 3.5 stars on Yelp.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Before he shot nine black Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, 21-year-old Dylann Roof posed for photos holding a symbol of racial hatred. The same symbol that’s worn on t-shirts, wrapped around beer coozies, intertwined with American pop culture. Even if the flag is removed from South Carolina’s capitol, as leaders called for today, it’s not going away anytime soon.

There are few American symbols which are so fraught with controversy—but also so ubiquitous. Drive through the South and you’ll see the distinctive design proudly painted on mailboxes and unabashedly framing license plates. Yet if you look back at photographs of lynch mobs or news footage of KKK rallies, the same flag is there, held up defiantly by white supremacists.

After last week’s shooting, questioning the appropriateness of publicly displaying the flag at all, with specific calls to remove the flag from South Carolina’s capitol. As a sign that conventional wisdom might be shifting, even Republican leaders—many of whose conservative followers feel the flag should be protected as part of their heritage—are speaking out against the Confederate flag’s symbolism.

Mitt Romney might have said it best this weekend:

Take down the #ConfederateFlag at the SC Capitol. To many, it is a symbol of racial hatred. Remove it now to honor #Charleston victims.

June 20, 2015

And Obama agreed:

Good point, Mitt. https://t.co/Ryusfp8Xbh

June 21, 2015

Today, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham joined Governor Nikki Haley to call for the flag’s removal.

But simply lowering the flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds, or removing it from public display completely, is a complicated issue. This is a symbol which many Americans see as overt racism and are calling for it to be banned outright. But there is little historical precedent for banning flags in the US, and moreover, doing so would tread dangerously close to denying free speech.

A Complicated History

The actual Confederate flag, the “Stars and Bars,” flies over Ft. Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina in 1861. Via Battle of Charleston

The Confederate flag which has become so iconicized today is actually not the official flag that represented the South when it seceded from the Union. The first iteration was called the “Stars and Bars,” which, to be honest, looked a heck of a lot like the first US flag: a circle of stars on a blue field, and three red and white stripes instead of 13. In fact, it was so similar to the US’s flag that it was confused with it on the battlefield, so a different design was needed.

The Confederate Battle Flag seen in an illustration of the Battle of Gettysburg

What’s known as the Confederate Battle Flag was created for the Army of Northern Virginia and became the popular choice for secessionists to display their pride, mostly because it was so visually different from the Union flag. This design, which is known throughout the South as the Dixie or Rebel flag—and what many people mistakenly refer to as the “Stars and Bars”—eventually made its way into the design of the official flag of the Confederacy. It actually went through several iterations, including one with an extra red column named “the Blood-Stained Banner.”

But because it was so closely associated with battle, this was the flag draped on the coffins and placed at the gravesites of the Southerners who fought in the Civil War. This is also the reason that its defenders argue that protecting the flag is critical for protecting Southern heritage: It pays respect to the hundreds of thousands of lives lost.

Pride or Racism?

In the years after the Civil War ended, the Confederate flag didn’t disappear. In fact, within a few decades, it began to see a resurgence in the hands of groups which used the flag to demonstrate Southern opposition to various US political positions, or, increasingly, equal rights.

As the Civil Rights Movement began to build in the 1950s and 1960s, the flag was embraced by the Klu Klux Klan and other groups as they carried out violent acts against blacks. In the hands of hate groups, the flag quickly became associated with horrific and unspeakable crimes.

Dr. John Cobin of Greenville, South Carolina holds signs in support of displaying the Confederate flag in Columbia, South Carolina in 2008. Chris Hondros/Getty Images

Yet a strong and vocal circle of advocates vehemently cling to the belief that the flag still properly honors Southern ancestry, no matter how else it was used. Opponents argue that slavery was what the Confederacy was built upon and therefore the flag will always be a symbol of oppression.

A Pew Research Center study conducted for the 150th anniversary of the Civil War found that reactions to the flag were also heavily delineated by race and political party: More blacks and Democrats had a negative reaction to the flag as compared to whites and Republicans.

You can see how this ideological battle illustrates the nuances of the flag as a symbol—for many, the flag’s meaning is all contextual. When seen as a part of history, it’s heritage, but in contemporary society, it’s racism. But does the Confederate flag still have a place—any place—in American culture?

The Battle in South Carolina

In what’s perceived to be the most serious symbolic affront to the families of those murdered last week, the Confederate flag that flies at the South Carolina state house was not lowered to half-mast like the state and US flags after the shooting. In fact, the fight to keep the Confederate flag flying at the capitol is evidence of the strong polarity around the issue, and proves just how difficult it would be to fully eradicate the flag’s image from society.

Even as the other flags were placed at half-mast to honor those killed, the Confederate flag at the South Carolina capitol cannot be moved. Sean Rayford/Getty Images

In 2000, after years of campaigning by the NAACP and other groups, the South Carolina state senate ruled that the Confederate flag would be removed from atop the dome, where it had flown since 1961. But an odd concession was made to appease the flag’s supporters: A smaller flag was placed in the capitol’s lawn, next to a monument honoring Confederate soldiers. It is a location which in many ways is even more prominent.

Since the flag is protected as a historical landmark to prevent it from being tampered with—it’s behind a heavy iron gate—it requires a special order of the state’s general assembly to take it down. That’s why it couldn’t be lowered to honor those killed last week. And that’s why it’s very unlikely that it will ever be lowered permanently—even South Carolina’s Governor Haley said it was time to “move it,” not remove it.

Other Flags of Concern

Even if South Carolina removes the battle flag, there are other traces of the flag on state properties—in fact, elements of the Confederate flag’s design are still represented in the flags of seven Southern states. Mississippi’s flag includes the full iteration of the Confederate battle flag tucked up into the corner, while several others include the distinctive, prominent X.

Georgia’s flag in 1956 and the redesigned flag which was approved in 2004

Some states have already mobilized to remove the battle flag from their designs. Georgia actually introduced a battle flag element to its state flag’s design in 1956, which many believed was tacit support of segregation. Spurred by a negative reaction to the flag during the Summer Olympics in 1996, Georgia held a referendum in 2002 to redesign its flag and ended up with a flag that echoed the original “Stars and Bars” design of the Confederacy. Not all states have been as progressive, however: Mississippi held as similar referendum to change its flag, which was defeated. [Update: A new petition has been launched to change Mississippi’s flag design.]

In fact, there are other countries which have needed to change their flags to separate themselves from painful eras of racial history. South Africa, for example, debuted a new flag in 1994 after the end of apartheid. New Zealand is currently holding a referendum to change its flag design. There are many reasons for the redesign—one of which is that it looks far too similar to Australia’s—but race is part of it. The flag currently celebrates white imperialism by echoing British colonial imagery. A new design could be more inclusive, acknowledging the country’s many indigenous citizens.

Protecting the First Amendment

The Confederate flag at a NASCAR event at Darlington Raceway in Darlington, South Carolina, 2007. Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Even if the flag comes down in South Carolina, there’s nothing stopping the Confederate flag from being flown by any American. An individual can fly any flag, as a symbol of ancestral pride or racial intolerance, thanks to the US’s freedom of speech.

That even includes the Nazi flag, another symbol of racial hatred. But while Americans are protected in their right to display a swastika, it has all but disappeared from German culture. Flying the flag was made illegal as part of the massive denazification process that began after World War II which included renaming streets, destroying paraphernalia, and dramatically imploding infrastructure. The Nazi flag does not fly in Berlin to honor German soldiers killed in battle. It has been relegated to museums and history books.

But if the flag is removed from South Carolina’s capitol, where is the line drawn that doesn’t impinge upon the First Amendment? The flag is found throughout the South, not just in people’s homes, but at battlegrounds and memorials and on plaques and statues. Say we start with states being ordered to stop flying the flags on government properties, for example. That seems reasonable and necessary. But would states also need to expunge all references to the imagery in their official flags as well?

This also leads to a greater discussion about the Confederate flag’s presence in pop culture, which echoes Germany’s denazification censorship efforts. Would we see it pixelated in old Dukes of Hazzard reruns? Blurred out on Lynyrd Skynyrd album art?

In its original incantation, the Confederate battle flag may not have been as menacing in its intentions as the Third Reich. But like the Nazi flag, its meaning was subsumed by a small group of people who have used the imagery to perpetrate unspeakable racially- and ethnically-motivated crimes.

Shouldn’t this symbol that’s been irrevocably associated with segregation and bigotry and hate and murder be eradicated from culture as well, despite its history?

It would be monumentally difficult to erase 150 years of the flag’s indelible mark—but not impossible. Hopefully the flag’s iconography fades into rightful obscurity on its own. But making it outright illegal might also go against everything that the US stands for today.

[Update: I can’t believe I started the day writing about how Americans would never voluntarily eradicate these totems of racism, and by the end of the day, the country’s largest retailer went ahead and did it: Walmart is pulling all Confederate flag merchandise from its shelves. Nice work, humans.]

Top image: Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Jake Lloyd, the 26-year-old former child actor best known for playing Anakin Skywalker in George Lucas’ Jar Jar Binks biopic Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, was arrested in South Carolina Wednesday after leading cops on a 100-plus MPH car chase. This is a video of that incident.

Lloyd, now free from the prison of celebrity that made his childhood “a living hell,” was being held in the prison of Colleton County Detention Center as of Sunday, on a $10,700 bond. May the Force be with him, always.

A brief video surfaced earlier today that purports to show 19-year-old Vine “celeb” Carter Reynolds attempting to push 16-year-old ex-girlfriend (and social media starlet) Maggie Lindemann into oral sex.

In the video, which appeared uncensored on a Mexican blogger’s Tumblr and has been uploaded to YouTube sans exposed penis (above), a man (allegedly Reynolds) can be heared requesting a blowjob (and exposing his erect penis) to an uncomfortable Lindemann, who repeatedly states that she’s “uncomfortable” with the situation.

“This makes me so uncomfortable,” Lindemann says, “I’m really uncomfortable.” The man chants “Do it!” and says Lindemann should “pretend nothing’s there.” Lindemann replies “I don’t know if I can...I don’t think I can” while the man masturbates and repeats “oh my gosh, Maggie.” The video ends there.

Reynolds hasn’t explicitly acknowledged the explicit video, but tweets like these indicate he realizes he’s in some sort of deep, hot, shitty water:

my twitter account has been hacked so sorry for any random tweets that are posted. we're working with twitter

June 22, 2015

I'm going to explain everything but I want to talk to everyone involved first.I want to make sure u know the full story about what happened.

June 22, 2015

An example of the Vine work that’s netted Reynolds over 2.3 million followers, online fame, and conference appearances, can be seen below:

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

According to TMZ, hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, also known as Diddy, was arrested in Los Angeles today after allegedly assaulting a coach at UCLA, where his son plays football.

The school later confirmed Combs had been taken into custody by campus police on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, the weapon in question being a kettlebell weight.

“No one was seriously injured and UCPD is investigating,” said UCLA in a statement. “Combs is expected to be transported to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Inmate Reception Center later this evening.”

Citing anonymous sources, TMZ reports that the dispute stemmed from the coach’s harsh treatment of Combs’ son. From TMZ:

One source says an assistant coach was screaming at Justin on the field during a strength and conditioning session. We’re told the coach “was riding Justin, screaming intensely at him.” Diddy watched the whole thing from the sideline.

At some point later, we’re told Diddy confronted the coach in his office and grabbed him. Diddy was arrested for assault.

As of Monday evening, Combs reportedly remains in campus jail.

In December, Combs was rumored to have fucked up Drake’s shoulder at Miami’s Art Basel festival, allegedly over the “disrespectful” use of a beat by hip-hop producer Boi-1da.

[Image via Getty Images]

The internet is trapped in a shame spiral, and it’s time for us to get the fuck out. Last week, the vortex churned around British physicist Tim Hunt, the Nobel laureate who went to lunch and lost his job.

Obviously it wasn’t that simple. The “lunch” was a professional meeting of women scientists during an international science journalism conference in Korea, and during his speech to the group, Hunt told the attendees that his problem with women in science is that they are always falling in love with him (or he with them), and crying when they are criticized. Given that Hunt has supervised hundreds of scientists over the past 40 years, and held positions that gave him the power to make or break a scientist’s career, this was a troubling statement to say the least. He was essentially telling these women that he didn’t think they should work in science.

In the hours that followed, people took to Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram to make fun of Tim Hunt with the #distractinglysexy hashtag. Women posted pictures of themselves working in labs and in the field, looking just as geeky or geared up as their male colleagues, and joked about how “distractingly sexy” they were. People posted pictures of “mixed gender lab” signs in research facilities all over the world. “No crying. No falling in love,” they read.

Of course, there were serious criticisms of Hunt’s clueless comments too. Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist who was also speaking at the women scientists’ lunch with Tim Hunt, explained in an article for The Daily Beast that Hunt really did think that labs should be gender segregated because he’d had so much trouble working with women. Blum added that the scientists attending the lunch had been horrified by Hunt’s speech; they sent a public letter thanking all the people who criticized Hunt for his comments.

As a result of all the publicity, Hunt was asked to step down from his honorary positions at the University College London and on the European Research Council. It was clearly the right thing to do. Not only did Hunt say completely reprehensible things, but he couldn’t even figure out that you don’t tell a room full of female scientists at a professional conference that they are lovesick crybabies. This is not a guy who should be in charge of anything.

But then the counter-shame forces kicked into gear, with London mayor Boris Johnson calling for Hunt’s reinstatement. Hunt claimed he’d been “hung out to dry,” and that mobs of mean people on the internet were mischaracterizing his “jokes.” Then the #reinstateTimHunt hashtag began to pop up, and the op-eds rolled in about how terrible it is that we live in a time when “the internet” can destroy a man’s career just because he makes sexist comments at a conference.

Suddenly the argument was in a shame spiral. We were no longer trying to solve the problem of sexism in science, but instead mired in a debate about how people are talking about it. You might recognize this bizarre turn in the conversation as an age-old form of internet rhetoric called tone policing.

On Tumblr, Tooyoungforthelivingdead describes tone policing like this:

Tone policing is the ultimate derailing tactic. When you tone police, you automatically shift the focus of the conversation away from what you or someone else did that was wrong, and onto the other person and their reaction.

Once the tone police arrive, we’re no longer talking about how disturbing it is that one of the top scientists in the world thinks women shouldn’t be allowed to work in labs because he might fall in love with them. Instead, we’re talking about whether it’s appropriate for women to mock his comments by posting pictures of themselves on Instagram.

Jon Ronson’s new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed is another example of this shame spiral at work. Ronson fetishizes the shaming of his subjects, then attempts to redeem or humanize them, without really getting into the question of whether these people actually did something wrong. His book is a bestseller in part because there is nothing more seductive than reliving someone’s shame, then pulling back to shame the shamers, without ever making a judgement about the supposed misdeeds (or, indeed, actual acts of villainy) that set the cycle off in the first place.

No matter how Hunt finally got deposed, we can’t ignore the facts. His comments were unacceptable. A man who says that he can’t work with women because he might fall in love with them should not be allowed to have professional power over women. Or anyone really.

When you listen to the forces of counter-shame in this debate, or any other one, keep in mind what they are really saying. In the case of Tim Hunt, they think the scientist should be put back in his old job because it’s OK for him to declare publicly that he discriminates against an entire class of his colleagues, at a professional event being held in those colleagues’ honor. But none of those colleagues should be allowed to make fun of him on the internet, nor demand that he step down.

That’s why shame spirals are a fine way to start wars. They are about perpetuating conflict instead of getting to the root of our problems.

So the next time somebody sucks you into an internet shame spiral, remember that it’s a form of policing. To stop the cycle, we need to get back to the bedrock of what started this fight in the first place, and decide which side is right based on the substance of their arguments — not on tone.

Top image by Theo Zizka

Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
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Today, retail giant Walmart announced that it would stop selling products bearing the Confederate flag and remove those that do from stores, CNN reports.

“We never want to offend anyone with the products that we offer,” a Walmart spokesperson told the network, adding that the company has already “taken steps” to pull items promoting the flag. “We have a process in place to help lead us to the right decisions when it comes to the merchandise we sell. Still, at times, items make their way into our assortment improperly.”

As of Monday night, a number of Confederate flag products available on Walmart.com just hours before had been purged from the website, including “Redneck Firefighter Confederate Flag Southern T-Shirt” and “Buckle Rage Country Girl Cursive Confederate Flag Southern Rebel Belt Buckle.”

However, the state flag of Mississippi, which incorporates the Confederate battle flag in its design, remains available for purchase.

[Image via Shutterstock//h/t Gizmodo]

On Monday, the Republican Speaker of Mississippi’s House of Representatives said that the Confederate battle flag “needs to be removed” from the state flag’s design, calling the symbol “a point of offense,” the Associated Press reports.

“We must always remember our past, but that does not mean we must let it define us,” Speaker Philip Gunn wrote on Facebook. “As a Christian, I believe our state’s flag has become a point of offense that needs to be removed. We need to begin having conversations about changing Mississippi’s flag.”

Earlier today, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley similarly advocated for the removal of the Confederate flag that flies in front of the South Carolina State House, saying, “This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.”

In 2001, Mississippi voters were asked to choose between a version of the state flag that included the Confederate emblem and a new design that did not. By a margin of almost 2-to-1, Mississippians voted to retain the design bearing the Confederate symbol.

[Image via Shutterstock]

According to TMZ, a plane registered to film composer James Horner—who scored blockbusters like Apollo 13 and Titanic—crashed in southern California Monday morning, killing its pilot. No others were on board.

The pilot has not yet been identified, but long-time attorney Jay Cooper tells The Hollywood Reporter that no one has talked to Horner since.

“We know it’s his plane, and we know we haven’t heard from him,” Cooper told the magazine. “I’ve checked with the other reps.”

“He loved flying,” added Cooper. “That’s all I can say.”

CBS Los Angeles reports that it is not clear if mechanical failure brought down the aircraft and the crash is currently being investigated.

[Image via Getty Images]

An allegory of the American South: In 1998, a fierce racist (who also happened to be the former attorney of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin) named Jack Kershaw created a monument for another bad man, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. The resulting statue is so hilariously stupid that we should keep it forever.

Only a century or so too late, Americans have begun to form a consensus that the Confederate Flag—the war banner of loser secessionists— is a hideous symbol of slavery. Not only should the flag be taken down from wherever it flies, so too should all “monuments” to the Confederate military be razed, because we don’t need public artistic celebrations of those who tried to destroy the Union in the name of human chattel. Southern “culture,” “pride,” and “heritage” are more often than not codewords for the bygone era of white supremacy. The South has a lot of things to be proud of: hot jazz, warm weather, beautiful native flora. Its population’s failed attempt to form The Confederate States of America is not one of them, and so does not deserve to be memorialized in our nation’s parks and pedestrian walkways.

With one exception. The Nathan Bedford Forrest monument, poignantly located next to a barren strip of land by I-65 in Nashville, is the dumbest looking statue I’ve ever seen in my life, including statues of cartoon characters located inside cartoon shows:

Look at his face! That’s supposed to be a human being. For reference, Forrest was not some sort of puppet gremlin, but a normal-looking man:

And yet:

It is extremely unlikely that Forrest—who was also, as a hate-bonus, the first Grand Wizard of the KKK—ever screamed out the phrase “Snap into a Slim Jim!” and yet, somehow, it’s impossible to imagine the bar-toothed, wild-eyed man depicted in this alarming effigy uttering any other series of words.

Even the steed looks like it was crafted out of chocolate by the hand of a dumb child:

You did a bad job, Jack Kershaw, you dumbass. You’re a bad sculptor, and now Nashville is embarrassed by your shoddy statue.

Between post-Charleston Confederate backlash (Kershaw’s statue is, after all, a 25-foot fiberglass monument to American racism) and the thing generally being an eyesore, residents want this thing outta here.

Tough shit. Tear down every statue of every other general, father, son, and daughter of the Confederacy, but leave up the insane goofy hell-rictus of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the most fitting monument to the ugly idiocy of southern history.

Photo: Brent Moore/Flickr

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com

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Last week, the United States Senate briefly flirted with the idea of actually doing something useful. Depending on whom you ask, the National Weather Service Improvement Act was either a positive step toward modernization or destructive enough to give Rick Santorum the quivers. Even though the bill is now dead and gone, the idea of fundamentally restructuring the National Weather Service is a debate worth having.

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) introduced the bill on June 16 as an attempt to fundamentally restructure the National Weather Service in a way we haven’t seen in more than 20 years. The bill called for the agency to develop a plan that establishes six regional Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) around the United States, each co-located with an existing major university or state/federal agency’s offices.

It doesn’t sound like much, but the proposed change was a dramatic downsizing that would have had enormous implications on the way the National Weather Service works in the future.

Rather than pumping out forecasts from one central location, the National Weather Service of today is a pretty decentralized agency, with 122 individual WFOs scattered around the country. Each office covers a jurisdiction known as a County Warning Area (CWA), which can be as small as a couple of counties or as large as entire states.

The benefit of such a localized system is that a staff of dedicated meteorologists can provide local expertise and greater amounts of attention to a relatively small part of the country. For instance, forecasters at NWS Birmingham are able to use their knowledge of things like terrain and general meteorological quirks (like temperatures always being lower at that one spot) to provide accurate forecasts for residents in the area, details that can be easily missed by forecasters not familiar with the area.

If 122 offices sounds like quite a few, it’s nothing compared to the number of offices they had before the first major push toward modernization in the 1990s. The agency had more than 200 (two hundred!) offices around the country prior to the Weather Service Modernization Act of 1992, which consolidated that tangled web into the measly 122 we see today.

It (Was) Just a Bill

...yes it was only a bill. Sen. Thune introduced S. 1573—National Weather Service Improvement Act—on June 16, and it was an uphill climb for it to survive the arduous legislative process. That bill is now dead. Deceased. It is no more. It is an ex-bill.

On Monday, June 22, Sen. Thune and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) introduced a substitute bill—Weather Alerts for a Ready Nation Act of 2015—that focuses on improving communication of severe weather risks as opposed to completely overhauling the agency itself.

The original bill was shockingly forceful in its attempt to radically transform the agency into a leaner, more streamlined entity. Here are the major outlines of the original piece of legislation, before Monday’s substitution.

The Organization

The Act was just eleven pages long, directing the National Weather Service to establish a plan to shrink itself according to the specifications laid out in the legislation. Among them include establishing the six aforementioned regional WFOs, replacing the 122 offices that currently exist within three to five years of the Act’s passage.

The bill also mandated that the National Weather Service must “hire or retain” a Warning Coordination Meteorologist at each of the 122 existing WFOs to act as a liaison between the agency and the public and local officials. Warning Coordination Meteorologists already exist at each local office, and under the text of the Act, they’d have remained in largely the same role as they carry out today.

More Juice

The legislation mandated that any savings accrued by this centralization should be used to improve the National Weather Service’s tools, such as expanded supercomputers, additional Doppler weather radars to fill gaps in coverage, more weather stations to take surface observations, and investing in research and improved ways to communicate risks and urgent alerts to the public.

Warnings

A great amount of scientific and sociological research has gone into the public’s perception of severe weather forecasts and alerts issued by the National Weather Service, most notably those related to tornadoes and severe thunderstorms. Even well-educated individuals have a hard time keeping the terms “tornado warning” and “tornado watch” straight, and depending on their access to technology, some people may not receive lifesaving alerts until it’s too late to act appropriately.

One of the sections of the bill requires that the National Weather Service evaluate its current warning system (both the alerts themselves and the dissemination of such), coming up with solutions to fix (the many) weak spots they discover, implementing them within four years of the bill’s passage.

This, along with the following section about contractors, are the only parts of the original legislation that survived in the substitution.

Contractors

They also want to expose and put an end to any shifty practices with regard to contractor positions in the National Weather Service. The most glaring case is a senior official who retired from the agency, only to come back the very next day as a contractor in a consulting position he was instrumental in creating. This is generally frowned upon.

The Substitution Is Still a Positive Step

Even though I am in favor of taking a serious look at how the National Weather Service can improve itself—had it gotten that far, their restructuring plan likely would have been a treasure trove of positive steps toward improvement—the substitute bill is still pretty good. We need to take a good look at how we communicate severe weather in the United States. The sheer number of alerts is overwhelming, and it’s easy to forget what means what, especially since so many of the alerts are associated with specific criteria.

Did you know that a Winter Weather Advisory is a step above a Winter Storm Watch? Do you know the difference between a Flood Warning and an Areal Flood Advisory? How many people can correctly point out the difference between a Tornado Watch and a Tornado Warning? Let’s not even get started on something as fundamental as severe weather outlooks.

These are major issues in weather forecasting today—you could produce forecasts with phenomenal accuracy, but they’re useless if people don’t understand what you’re telling them. The substitute bill plans to look at ways to remedy this issue, and that’s a huge step forward.

The Santorum Problem

Any discussion over changing the status quo in the National Weather Service takes place with an elephant in the room that adds a layer of distrust and discomfort to the conversation.

One of the most infamous bills introduced in Congress in recent years was the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005, a steaming pile of legislation introduced by former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA). The bill would have abolished the National Weather Service as we know it, privatizing the agency to such an extent that private weather companies would have exclusive rights to the data and information we paid for with our tax dollars in order to sell it back to us.

This horrifying thought is compounded by the fact that the bill’s introduction may have been influenced by AccuWeather. In addition to thousands dollars donated directly to the senator’s campaigns over the years, AccuWeather CEO Joel Myers donated $2,000 to Santorum’s PAC—America’s Foundation—on April 12, 2005, two days before the former senator introduced the legislation.

Thankfully, that bill died a painful death in committee. There don’t seem to be any indications that this bill would have followed the same path of complete destruction, but again, reducing the National Weather Service to a handful of offices is seen as tantamount to abolition by some of the status quo’s staunchest supporters.

Weighing the Pros and Cons

The Act may not have resulted in the death of the agency, but it would have created just as many issues as it aimed to resolve. Threading the needle between the pros and cons was a delicate task for supporters of the bill, and vociferous opposition from the bill from many meteorologists—including the National Weather Service Employees Organization—appears instrumental in killing the National Weather Service Improvement Act before it had a chance to see the light of day.

Here are some of the issues and solutions the Act would have presented.

Pro: Savin’ Those Zeros

Everything comes down to money, especially in a slash-happy Republican Congress. That’s not meant to be a partisan dig—Republicans genuinely seem to enjoy slashing services they deem wasteful in order to save money and redirect it to other services or very important tax cuts.

(Now that was a dig.)

The prospect of shrinking the National Weather Service to save money—the agency accounted for about a billion dollars, or 0.023% of the federal budget, in FY2013—is practically nothing in the grand scheme of things. It’s the equivalent of saving $6.90 if you make $30,000 a year.

But there’s a catch! The shrinkage proposed by the bill could have resulted in some nice savings if done in an efficient manner, and by law (unless they change it), this Act would have required that all of those savings were reinvested back into the agency in order to improve its instruments and services. Aside from that whole “losing jobs” thing, the cuts could have been enormously beneficial if they were truly reinvested in the agency.

Now, speaking of jobs...

Con: The Great Culling

For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that each National Weather Service office employs ten meteorologists to keep a watchful eye over the weather in their neck of the woods (sorry Al). That’s 1,220 meteorologists across all WFOs. If you were to divide those 1,220 experts up among six newly-created regional offices, that’s about 203 meteorologists per office.

That ain’t happening, and that means there would have been a Great Culling. People would lose their jobs. Lots of people, most likely. Not only would people simply lose their jobs, but the agency would have lost an untold number of skilled, talented individuals who are instrumental in keeping the agency on top of its game in both calm and calamity.

Local weather forecast offices are already stretched too thin when active weather plays out, and they can’t always rely on the help of their neighboring offices, especially if something like a severe weather outbreak or landfalling hurricane demands the attention of a large number of offices at once.

Fewer meteorologists would mean less overall skill employed by the agency, fewer eyes keeping watch over our huge country, fewer people with intricate knowledge of local phenomena, and less leeway if something big happens (and it will happen).

The prospect of saving jobs is the greatest benefit of the Act being scrapped.

Pro: Goodbye County Warning Areas?

One of the things that annoys me the most about the National Weather Service is its frustrating adherence to jurisdiction. If a tornado is heading toward the edge of the area covered by the National Weather Service in Roanoke, Virginia, they will continue to warn the storm up to the very edge of their jurisdiction. Anything even one mile beyond that border is the responsibility of the neighboring office. If National Weather Service in Raleigh, N.C., is slow to act, people living right along the boundary may not receive warning in enough time to act.

I live along the boundary in that example, and I’ve witnessed countless occasions where warning polygons inexplicably stop a mile from me when the storm isn’t losing an ounce of strength. We’ve had snow forecasts that predicted a dusting here, but just two miles away across the boundary line, the neighboring office predicts six inches of snow.

We’ve seen these ridiculous warnings and forecasts play out time and time again due to the ridiculous nature of forecasting to an artificial set of lines we draw on the map. Nature does not adhere to our political boundaries. The National Weather Service needs to be able to break out of its artificial boundaries, and this legislation may have allowed it to do just that.

Last October, I wrote a long post urging the National Weather Service to rethink County Warning Areas, ending with the conclusion that the agency needs to abolish its offices’ jurisdictions in order to more effectively issue forecasts for the country. The solution I skirted around at the time—either out of subconscious denial or whatever—is the fact that you can’t really remove these boundary lines without removing the offices.

Assuming the six regional offices didn’t absurdly decide to forecast to a meaningless geographical boundary—y’know, instead of predicting the weather the way it actually happens—one of the great benefits of this reorganization would have meant smoother, more meaningful forecasts that follow both common sense and the laws of physics.

This solution is but a dream, now, and that is the greatest disappointment to come out of this legislative debacle.

For more on the scourge of County Warning Areas, see:

• Frustrating Bureaucracy Leads to Ridiculous Tornado Warning
  
• National Weather Service Issues Insane, Physically Impossible Snowfall Forecast
  

Con: Forecast Quality

One of the things specifically ordered by the Act was that the National Weather Service must ensure that “local forecast quality will not be degraded” by the centralization and inevitable Great Culling of meteorologists that will come soon after.

It’s hard to see a scenario in which the National Weather Service is able to reduce the number of meteorologists on its payroll while maintaining the same quality it has today. In order to produce stellar products with fewer meteorologists, it would take an enormous effort on the part of the agency to develop a system similar to what The Weather Channel utilizes in its forecast process; a system of well-developed computer programs meshed with subtle human intervention to create forecasts that are by and large the most accurate available today.

Pro: New Tools

Radar! Observations! Supercomputers! All things we desperately need in order to understand, predict, and prepare for the weather around us. The issue of more Doppler weather radars in near and dear to me, given the large number of gaps in low-level coverage around the United States. The beam gets higher off the ground the farther away it travels from the weather radar, so the beam is 10,000 feet off the ground within 80 or 90 miles of the radar site. This leaves some pretty big gaps in low-level coverage, which is crucial for determining hazards like tornadoes and damaging winds.

Supercomputers are important, as well, since Europe is currently wiping the floor with us in the weather model department.

No restructuring means that, unless they magically come up with gobs of money, these are just fantasies as well. Onward...

Pro/Con: Severe Weather and Continuity of Operations

National Weather Service offices are notoriously stretched thin during major severe weather outbreaks, and that can be dangerous if meteorologists start missing things or they don’t get a warning out in time. These two cases are exceedingly rare, but one of the benefits of centralizing operations is that you would have many more eyes available to cover severe weather events. The threat of an office getting stretched to its max diminishes with centralization.

However...

It’s not terribly uncommon for tornadic thunderstorms to threaten a National Weather Service office during a major severe weather outbreak. Several offices had to abandon ship and head for shelter during the string of outbreaks in 2011, delegating their duties to another office in an area not running itself ragged with severe weather coverage. This is known as continuity of operations, and it generally works pretty well when bad things are happening.

Say, for instance, that one of the six centralized regional offices set up shop on the campus of the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where the Storm Prediction Center and WFO for Oklahoma City are currently located.

Norman, along with its neighboring communities like Moore (you’ve heard of it, right?), are not in a fun part of the country when it comes to severe weather. They tend to see big tornadoes. Big, angry tornadoes. Big, angry tornadoes that don’t care that the National Weather Center is there. If a serious threat unfolds that requires the National Weather Center to take tornado precautions, they’d have to transfer all of their duties to another regional office. That’s a huge workload being pushed onto another office, especially if they, too, are seeing active weather in their area of responsibility.

While highly unlikely, if one of these six regional centers were to be rendered unusable due to a disaster like a storm or fire, it would have a much greater effect than if one of today’s 122 regional offices was destroyed by a disaster.

Continuity of operations would be something they’d have to strongly consider if the idea of consolidation comes up again in the future.

Pro/Con: Everlasting Communication Problems

The National Weather Service’s communication systems kinda suck; their internet and telephones have gone down with some regularity in recent years. These communication problems have actually caused significant issues in the past. Back in May 2014, the office in Albany, New York, was unable to transmit a tornado warning for the small town of Duanesburg until it was too late. By the time the warning surpassed the outage and made it to the public, a half-mile wide, EF-3 tornado had already torn through the town.

That’s not cool, and a telephone or internet outage would have much greater implications if it knocked out one of these six regional offices instead of an individual office that covers a much smaller portion of the country.

Hopefully they’ll be able to find and invest more money in these systems even though the potential savings will never be realized now that the bill is dead. The agency needs to invest in a more reliable system (with plenty of redundancies) so one snapped telephone cord doesn’t cripple their ability to push out lifesaving warnings one day.

Maybe One Day...

I’m disappointed that the senators killed the legislation before it had a chance to foster a wider debate about things the National Weather Service could do to improve its products beyond severe weather watches and warnings. Even though the bill is gone now, the potential benefits from even small changes to the organization are too great to let this issue die out without wider discussion.

These seemingly small issues have a significant impact on the agency’s effectiveness, especially when they begin to interfere with the communication of forecasts and hazards to the public. Going forward, the agency needs to confront issues with boundary lines, radar gaps, falling behind in supercomputing power, and things as basic as a reliable telephone and internet connection. Overhauling the way the agency goes about severe weather watches and warnings—which could, itself, solve the issue of boundaries if they go about it the right way—is a great step in the right direction. However, the scrapping of the initial legislation doesn’t give the agency a pass on having to take a good, hard look at itself beyond these important products.

The National Weather Service is by far one of the most important (if not the most important) federal agencies in existence, and it’s something in which we need to invest time, energy, money, and research to make better in every aspect of its operations. Hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later.

[Images: Senate Sergeant-at-Arms via AP, author, AP, Getty Images, NWS EDD, Gibson Ridge, NWS]

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

Marvel announced today that 19-year-old boy actor Tom Holland will play Spider-Man, a role previously inhabited by men, as the name suggests, in 2017’s installment of the Spider-Man franchise. What is wrong with Hollywood?

As audiences there are some things we simply should not put up with. A boy as a man? Please. Here is what Tom Holland looked like just five years ago, according to his outdated Wikipedia page that you’d think would have been updated ahead of such an announcement:

That’s no Spider-Man. Here is another photograph of Tom Holland from his outdated Wikipedia page—which claims he is “best known for playing the title role in Billy Elliot the Musical at the Victoria Palace Theatre, London”—celebrating the 5th anniversary of Billy Elliot the Musical:

A sweet boy, yes—but a man? A Spider-Man?

Here is a Spider-Man:

Tell me: Does that look like a boy to you?

Hollywood?

Images via Wikipedia, Flickr. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

In a recent interview with Elle (dot com), Kristin Cavallari made a characteristically aggressive statement about her adopted city of Chicago: “Chicago’s just not home.” The people of the Big Onion were upset, or course—not that Kristin cares. Her husband, Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler, is now working feverishly to mend some bombed out, totally destroyed, most likely utterly irreparable fences.

In order to keep the peace as he rides out the last five years of his multi-million dollar contract, Jay told ESPN this weekend that Kristin’s hateful words were “taken out of context.” He then insisted:

We have family in Chicago. We have a house in Chicago. Our roots are in Chicago. We love being there.

Do we?

Here is the full text surrounding Kristin’s comment, from Elle (dot com):

...[T]hough the family—who is expecting its fifth member—is very rarely in Nashville, this is where, “if all goes according to plan,” Cavallari says diplomatically, they hope to settle down when Cutler’s six-year contract concludes. “Jay hates L.A.,” Cavallari says with the clipped laugh that once seemed sarcastic on TV, but now reads as knowingly tolerant. “And Chicago’s just not home.”

Reads pretty clearly to me, but let’s give Kristin the benefit of the doubt. Has she ever said something like this before?

Hmm, well, it appears that yes she has, practically verbatim. In a recent episode of a Revlon-sponsored web series that we discussed yesterday, Kristin tells this story:

My husband, I first met him—I was living in LA at the time, he was in Chicago—and I flew back to Chicago. We hung out one night and decided to go to Nashville the next day, barely knowing him. And now five years later we actually have a house in Nashville, and that’s where we want to live when he’s done playing football in five years.

Enjoy your colossal pizzas and tomato hot dogs, Chicago. Kristin’s getting the fuck out!

In fact, Kristin’s complaints about the Windy City are long-documented. While things between to the two started out hot and heavy in 2010...

I LOVE U CHiCAGO

August 31, 2010

By 2011, the romance had fizzled.

Feels like summer in LA. I'm gonna enjoy it now before I head to freezing chicago!!

January 18, 2011

Been doused with water.

Oh, it's rainy and grey in Chicago? Shocker. Where is the sunnnnnn

April 17, 2013

Been drenched with Purple-K flame extinguishing agent.

I don't want to leave Nashville today :(

June 21, 2012

Been heroically suppressed with the combined efforts of over a dozen volunteer fire departments, resulting in minimal loss of life, for which we are grateful.

Sick of this gross weather, Chicago 😩 at least I get to wear my new leather jacket. #EmeraldDuv… https://t.co/x0yNEaViKi

May 12, 2015

It’s beautiful in Nashville this time of year.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Taylor Swift spoke and Apple listened. She wrote an open letter to the tech behemoth regarding its plan to use music without compensating artists, writers, or producers during its three-month trial run of its new streaming service, and just like that, Apple reversed its policy. In response, Wired declared Taylor Swift the “queen of the internet,” while Entrepreneur called her “the most powerful person in tech.”

Swift used an open letter—the most self-congratulatory medium there is—to reach Apple. She made a big show of her standing up for the little guy. Part of her letter reads:

This is not about me. Thankfully I am on my fifth album and can support myself, my band, crew, and entire management team by playing live shows. This is about the new artist or band that has just released their first single and will not be paid for its success. This is about the young songwriter who just got his or her first cut and thought that the royalties from that would get them out of debt. This is about the producer who works tirelessly to innovate and create, just like the innovators and creators at Apple are pioneering in their field…but will not get paid for a quarter of a year’s worth of plays on his or her songs.

These are not the complaints of a spoiled, petulant child. These are the echoed sentiments of every artist, writer and producer in my social circles who are afraid to speak up publicly because we admire and respect Apple so much. We simply do not respect this particular call.

In response to this, Pitchfork ran a think piece called “It Me Taylor Swift Literal Underdog.” Its incomprehensible title is consistent with many of its sentences. Writer Kathy Iandoli casts Swift as a people’s champ, her letter perceived as “an earnest request to let the starving artists live. For whatever reason, Taylor was previously viewed as disingenuous, but the reality is, Taylor Swift has never not championed for the underdog.” Regarding Swift’s tweeted response to Apple’s decision, Iandoli writes, “Taylor addressed her congregation accordingly: ‘They listened to us.’ Us. Taylor Swift is now ‘us.’”

There are a few principles we should have in mind when monitoring Taylor Swift’s public behavior:

1. Building and maintaining a personal brand is at odds with altruism.

2. The only true act of generosity is an anonymous one.

3. Taylor Swift is not an underdog.

4. Taylor Swift is not us.

This is not to dismiss Swift’s impressive ability to deliver the results she sought, no matter how obnoxiously they were packaged. This is a call for some perspective.

The Taylor Swift-is-an-underdog narrative was most publicly hammered out last year by the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica in his review of Taylor Swift’s most recent album, 1989. The pop on 1989 is more synthy but no less poppy than her previous country-inflected pop. That album sold 1.287 million copies in the U.S. its first week. Swift’s preceding album, 2012’s Red, sold 1.21 million copies during its opening week. Speak Now, from 2010, sold 1.047 million copies its first week. Just saying.

Caramanica wrote:

...In the video for this album’s first single, the spry “Shake It Off,” in which she surrounds herself with all sorts of hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.

See what Ms. Swift did there? The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the outsider. She is the butterfingers in a group of experts, the approachable one in a sea of high post, the small-town girl learning to navigate the big city.

Yes, she has written that narrative, and if you believe it, I know a woman with glasses and her hair up that will positively floor you with her beauty once she takes them off and it down. Hit me up and I’ll introduce you. [Editor’s note: I think I look great with my glasses on, thanks.]

To be clear, Caramanica seemed to find this narrative plausible if not wholly authentic. His review of a Swift concert in Bossier City, Louisana, last month ran with the headline: “On Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ Tour, the Underdog Emerges as Cool Kid.” In it, he wrote:

Whatever underdog anxieties Ms. Swift might have had earlier in her career are mostly gone. With the release in the fall of 1989 (Big Machine), her fifth album, Ms. Swift neatly ascended to the top of the pop hierarchy, largely by bypassing and ignoring most of her peers. She used the same blend of guilelessness and savvy that made her a radical figure in country music, and applied it to 1980s-influenced sounds that made her one of the most conservative figures in pop.

So she’s still a kind of underdog, but a big dog, too. The 1989 album has gone platinum four times over, and this show was the first stand-alone date of the American leg of her 1989 world tour, which will mainly play stadiums. (This arena was far smaller, holding about 13,000 people.)

There’s no kind of an underdog about it; Taylor Swift is a pop pitbull. Everything she releases is a hit. Her farts go gold (at least). She is in that can-do-no-wrong career sweet-spot that Madonna found in the mid-80’s, that Janet Jackson held from Control to janet., that Mariah Carey floated through the ‘90s on, that Katy Perry most recently departed post-Teenage Dream. This is undeniable, as much as I would like for it to be untrue, as Taylor Swift annoys the living shit out of me.

Salon wrote a piece about Swift’s posh upbringing to counter Carmanica’s concert review. A photographer has come forward claiming that Swift is a hypocrite for (via her father) handing him a contract that’s similarly shitty as streaming services’ contracts are to musicians. At least one critic wrote brilliantly about the toxicity behind Swift’s disingenuously affirming messages. Sure, uh huh, absolutely.

But all that aside, let’s not invest another second in the idea that Swift is an underdog. It’s bullshit she’s trying to spoon feed you and you’re being seduced by a human product if you believe it. (Do you believe that she’s actually that surprised when she wins music trophies, too?) Granted, Jurassic World taught us that even a great white can be an underdog when in the presence of a mosasurus. They’re still both monsters.

[Image via Getty]

EBay announced today that, after last week’s racist massacre in Charleston, the online auction site would no longer permit the sale of Confederate flags. And they’re not alone—Walmart, Amazon, Etsy and Sears also say they won’t sell the flag anymore.

So what’s the bargain-minded racist to do? Keep shopping on eBay! The rebel flag is just one banner in a parade of merchandise with which to express your white nationalist sentiments—so there still are plenty of shopping options.

For starters, why not buy a white pride flag? No need to argue over the symbolic implications of the Confederate flag—this item shows exactly what you stand for. Hate, not heritage!

Or if you insist on historical symbols: The Confederate States of America may be off-limits, but you can still recreate Dylann Roof’s racist-as-hell jacket, featuring patches of the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia:

If the wardrobe isn’t doing it for you, there’s still a listing to help you outfit your car in mass-murderer style instead:

Nor are the site’s goods limited to anti-black racists. Why not surprise the anti-Semite in your life with a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion? Or, if you’re a rich racist, consider a first-edition hardcover of The Jew at Home (illustrated).

Or how about a nice swastika bumper sticker? Or maybe a Nazi flag decal?

And for the anti-Semite who has everything:

Shopping for a more kitschy kind of racist? Worry not! eBay’s got plenty of tacky memorabilia:

And if you’re not content to keep your racist decorations indoors, browse eBay’s collection of lawn jockeys, or this watermelon-eating charmer (“Item condition: New”):

But if nothing but the Confederate battle flag will do, Etsy for the moment still lists an impressive inventory of bikinis. Get ’em while you can!

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.