On September 12, 2000, Jon Stewart started The Daily Show’s Headlines segment with the following joke: “The GOP accused of using subliminal advertising. Bush says, ‘Why would we advertise underwater?’” After a run of jokes about then-candidate George W. Bush, Stewart chuckles, “He’s making it so easy.”

Laughs were easy in the late summer of 2000. I was 12 years old the first time I watched the joke, aware that the presidential race had already boiled down to a battle between “boring” and “stupid,” that my parents would be voting between “subliminable” and “lockbox.” None of it seemed overly pressing, after years of economic prosperity and relative post-Cold War peace. Making fun of politicians was gentle sport.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which wraps up its 16-year run tomorrow night, is being eulogized as a constant, steady presence in the culture. In advance of Stewart’s departure, though, Comedy Central has been streaming every episode on its website, in order — an opportunity to wind back time, and to see history happen again on fast-forward. What the time-lapse perspective reveals is that Stewart and his show have been different things at different times, caught unawares with the rest of us by the force of change.

Like any time traveler, the retrospective viewer of the Daily Show is most shocked by everyone’s appalling lack of foresight. Underwater advertising! Does Jon Stewart understand that this man is going to be president? Why isn’t the Daily Show of 2000 researching the candidates? Why isn’t he angry?

This is not the show we have told ourselves we remember. The political jokes don’t go very far beyond what you’d find in any other talk show’s monologue. The entire guest roster of 1999, for the first 11 months, consists of entertainers. Stewart — known now for reading every book by his guests and for long, in-depth talks and debates that are posted online — is bad at interviewing these guests. Today, people routinely go online to watch an extended Stewart interview. Then, I’d turn the show off when the interviews started. Get a few extra minutes of sleep before taking the bus to school.

Speeding through those first two years again, I was perversely thankful to know that the debacle of the 2000 election was coming soon. It was a weird kind of schadenfreude — taking pleasure in pain that I’d already experienced. But I knew that it meant the show would be funnier. Because, in a fit of prophetic brilliance, the Daily Show’s election coverage was branded “Indecision 2000.” Every time they said it before the actual election night, I felt a weird sense of smugness. “You don’t even know how right you are,” I said to the Stewart of the past.

After election night, The Daily Show played clips of CNN’s swerving calls of the Florida vote. They call it for Gore — cut to Stewart saying “Only that wasn’t true.” They call it for Bush, and he grits his teeth and says, “Only that wasn’t true either.”

Once Florida finally ends up going for Bush, Stewart says, “By a total of 537 votes. Wow. That’s a landslide if you’re running for student council treasurer.”

The “Wow” dripped with contempt. The glibness of the joking was gone. Stewart was as frustrated and tired by the five weeks it had taken for America to have a new president as the nation was. Seeing it again, I realized that I’d repressed how utterly awful the legal wrangling in Florida had been. How weeks of my seventh grade civics class were devoted to explaining to a room of 12- and 13-year-olds how any of this could be happening. We were supposed to be studying American exceptionalism, the wisdom of the founding fathers, and the Constitution.

Suddenly, instead, we were in a full-blown constitutional crisis. Instead of our abstract right to vote, we were talking about the electoral college, “butterfly ballots,” and “hanging chads.”

All we were talking about was the goddamn electoral college system and whether we needed a Constitutional amendment to make sure nothing like this ever happened again. About replacing paper with electronic voting machines. What “absentee ballots” were and why they mattered. And, of course, the very real possibility that our next president could win the election without winning the popular vote.

In 2015, it’s upsetting all over again. There’s the déjà vu of reliving the past, but there’s an anger born of hindsight, too: all that momentum, all the recognition that our democracy wasn’t as strong or perfect as we liked to think, wouldn’t come to anything. It’s a short historical note now — the trauma obliterated by everything else to come. As time moved forward, inexorably, on the stream of videos, I wished it were the worst thing that was going to happen.

These days, Indecision 2000 is considered a turning point for The Daily Show. It’s when it finally grew into its own. But the election finally dragged to its end, and The Daily Show lost momentum as quickly as the movement for reform did. And then the waiting really started.

As the stream played the events of December 13, 2000 through September 10, 2001, I sat through an endless parade of vapid news items. December, 2000: Stewart interviews the Spice Girls and Victoria Beckham says that Stewart isn’t that funny — and I agree with her. May 2001: Stewart’s Headlines segment includes the joke, “Steven Tyler’s national anthem angers crowd at Indianapolis 500. Spectators quickly placated by vroom-vrooms going ‘whee!’” And on August 23, 2001 — in the penultimate pre-9/11 episode — Mo Rocca does a five minute segment on entertainment for cats.

It was disposable television back then. It’s unbearable now, knowing there’s no way for them to see what’s about to happen. And I, miserably, want them to. As time passed for the show on my computer screen, I couldn’t look away. I started to worry that I’d stop watching and miss it, all the while hating myself for wanting the show to just get to 9/11.

On July 3, 2015, around 11:30 in the morning, “Your Month of Zen” aired the episode of September 20, 2001, the Daily Show’s return after 9/11. Unlike all the other episodes I’d just sat through, this one was already seared into my memory.

In that show’s monologue, Stewart says:

And our show has changed. I don’t doubt that. And what it has become I don’t know. “Subliminable” is not a punchline anymore. Someday it will become that again, Lord willing it will become that again, because it means that we have ridden out the storm.

In the rewatch, the time between “Subliminable? He’s making it so easy” and “Subliminable is not a punchline anymore”? About two and a half days. Time compression as a bingewatch.

Two and half days of episodes to go from the biggest thing to happen being Bill Clinton’s sex scandal to 9/11. To go from a Stewart making jokes about Al Gore kissing his wife to one who says this:

The view from my apartment was the World Trade Center and now it’s gone. They attacked it. This symbol of American ingenuity and strength and labor and imagination and commerce and it is gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. The view from the south of Manhattan is now the Statue of Liberty. You can’t beat that.

In 2001, that was the message we needed to hear. We were reeling from an attack we’d been told could never happen. “There’s never been an attack on American soil” was a phrase teachers had said to me. “I used to say to students that they had no frame of reference for the assassinations of Martin Luther King and JFK. Not anymore,” was what another teacher told me after 9/11. We were so desperate for heroes, we turned Rudy Giuliani into one.

In a way, Stewart is right when he says subliminable isn’t a joke anymore. It wasn’t Indecision 2000 or even 9/11 where we saw the Daily Show come into its own. The real transformation occurred in the years after that — not in the disasters, but in our failure to come out of disaster better and stronger. As the message of hope yields dispiriting results, Stewart becomes invaluable as a court jester. As things go from bad to worse, the Daily Show went from good to brilliant. Stewart spoke about awful truths in the only really palatable way — comedy. But even he had no idea how many hits we were going have to take.

The Daily Show called the beginning of the War on Terror “America Freaks Out.” Then “Operation Enduring Coverage.” Then we go into Iraq, and the Daily Show hits gold with “Mess O’Potamia.” A segment title with its first appearance in 2003. The last? In 2014. You can see that they’re winging it — that the chyrons weren’t supposed to last this long. When the attacks by ISIS force him to return to the segment, Stewart dumps the “Mess O’Potamia” logo out of a box and blows dust off of it. An acknowledgement that they hadn’t foreseen this.

Bush being stupid isn’t a joke anymore. But Jon Stewart now has to find a way to make the detention of enemy combatants funny. Enter Gitmo the puppet.

As things go from bad to worse, the most iconic Stewart moments start happening. He sings “Go fuck yourself!” with a gospel choir. He feuds with Jim Cramer about the failures of business reporters. He devotes a whole episode to the bill getting 9/11 first responders health care. It’s a segment called “I Give Up.”

I started watching the stream upset that Jon Stewart was leaving the Daily Show. I ended it feeling like he was better off going. In a grim inversion of Marx’s meditation on Hegel, the first time had been farce, the second time tragedy. The old episodes weren’t funny anymore. They were hard to watch, and could only have been harder to make.

I watched Stewart talk about 9/11 and how we’d persevere. And then I watched him deal with fourteen years of America not rising to that challenge. He made an amazing show, but he stared into the darkness of our world for a very long time. I don’t even blame him for going after easy targets like Donald Trump. They must feel like a relief now, rather than the kind of rote jokes from the first few seasons.

After 9/11, in that famous monologue, he told us:

I wanted to tell you why I grieve, but why I don’t despair.

But this summer, after the attack on Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Stewart once again said he couldn’t be funny. But the tone had changed:

I honestly have nothing other than just sadness once again that we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a just gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. And I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah. That’s us.

Back in 2001, he evoked another racial wound — the death of Martin Luther King. And he used it as an illustration of our endurance and ability to overcome:

One of my first memories is of Martin Luther King being shot. I was five and if you wonder if this feeling will pass...Uh, when I was five, he was shot. Here’s what I remember about it. I was in a school in Trenton. They shut the lights off and we got to sit under our desks and we thought that was really cool and they gave us cottage cheese, which was a cold lunch because there was rioting, but we didn’t know that. We just thought that “My God. We get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese.” And what if – that’s what I remember about it. That was a tremendous test of this country’s fabric and this country’s had many tests before that and after that.

And the reason I don’t despair is because this attack happened. It’s not a dream. But the aftermath of it, the recovery is a dream realized. And that is Martin Luther King’s dream. Whatever barriers we’ve put up are gone even if it’s momentary. And we’re judging people by not the color of their skin but the content of their character. And you know, all this talk about “These guys are criminal masterminds. They’ve – they’ve gotten together and their extraordinary guile...and their wit and their skill.” It’s a lie. Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters, these policemen and people from all over the country, literally, with buckets rebuilding. That, that – that is – that’s extraordinary. That’s why we’ve already won. It’s light. It’s democracy. We’ve already won. They can’t shut that down. They live in chaos and chaos...it can’t sustain itself. It never could. It’s too easy and it’s too unsatisfying.

By June of 2015, after sixteen years of hosting the Daily Show, Stewart offered a bleaker vision of how the past flows into the present:

And we’re going to keep pretending like, “I don’t get it. What happened? This one guy lost his mind.” But we are steeped in that culture in this country and we refuse to recognize it, and I cannot believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity. That’s racial wallpaper. That’s — that’s — you can’t allow that, you know.

Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them, who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina, and the roads are named for Confederate generals, and the white guy’s the one who feels like his country is being taken away from him. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing. Al-Qaeda, all those guys, ISIS, they’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.

Obviously, this happened after he announced he was leaving. He even says, “And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run, or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral.” But it could just as easily be that he’s leaving because the commonality of the occurrence means that he knows he won’t pull out of that spiral next time.

Jon Stewart has rarely ever broken the format of The Daily Show. He did on 9/11. He did it again when Representative Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011. He managed to give us hope on 9/11. And in 2011, he said “Not to say resistance is futile” about finding a way to prevent shootings. But by this June, we were too broken for Stewart to make comedy out of it.

I don’t know if that’s an accurate view on the world. There have been some great advancements in the last decade and a half. The Daily Show exulted in them, too. Mostly, though, Stewart made the miserable bearable. But it’s finally too much for him to stay.

Top image by Jim Cooke

Full disclosure: I interned at The Colbert Report for a semester in college. Contact the author at katharine@io9.com.

First it was Ben and Jen. Then it was Gwen and Gavin. Yesterday, it was Frog and Pig. Today, it’s Frog and “Pig” again, but different ones.http://gawker.com/donald-sterlin...

According to the Associated Press, former Clippers owner Donald “I Am Not a Racist” Sterling has filed for divorce from his wife Shelly, citing wholly mysterious “irreconcilable differences.” From the L.A. Times:

Last year, Shelly Sterling removed her husband as a member of the family trust after two doctors declared him to be mentally incapacitated in the wake of his inflammatory recorded comments about African Americans. That cleared the way for Shelly Sterling to agree to sell the Clippers to Steve Ballmer for a record $2 billion.

Last July, Donald Sterling called his wife a “pig” in court after her testimony in a probate hearing that examined the circumstances of the sale.

[...]

In March, he added Shelly Sterling as a defendant in his lawsuit against the NBA and Commissioner Adam Silver in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. He accused her of conspiring with the league to sell the Clippers against his wishes.

This news, of course, means you no longer have any hope of finding true love (sorry). Because if a famously bigoted serial philanderer and the estranged wife he’s locked in a lengthy court battle with can’t work it out, who can?

[Image via AP Images]

The NYPD is frequently deceitful, but rarely is it as hilariously so as it was yesterday, when Commissioner Bill Bratton, during a press conference about the perceived dangers of synthetic marijuana, showed video he said was of “out-of-state” officers arresting a man under the influence of the drug, but which was actually a dude on PCP pulled from a 2003 episode of COPS.

At the briefing, held at One Police Plaza, Bratton called the synthetic substance “weaponized weed,” and went on to describe its users as “totally crazy.” To illustrate his point, he screened two videos that purported to show violent and unhinged users of the drug. “The videos might be disturbing,” Bratton intoned.

Here is one of those clips, which shows a half-dozen officers struggling to subdue a nude and bloody man who punches a hole through a picket fence.

After watching this video, you may have a number of questions, mainly, “Hmm, does synthetic weed really fuck you up that badly?” The answer, as Gothamist first reported, is “maybe not,” considering the footage is a clip from COPS, shot in Des Moines in 2002 and broadcast in 2003, that shows a man on PCP. That would explain why this particular Youtube video (uploaded in 2006) opens with a graphic that delivers the salient advice, “Don’t Smoke Dust.”

Neither the NYPD or Bratton specifically has commented on how exactly he ended up stupidly misrepresenting something you might catch on TV if you were desperately stranded in a hotel. The charitable reading would be that the NYPD made an innocent mistake in its attempt to show the effects of synthetic weed. The more sinister theory, of course, is that Bratton and his people thought nobody would know they were just showing some random shit from COPS.

Either way, Bratton said that any “violent” synthetic marijuana users will be shot with stun guns, so, uh, just smoke real weed, I guess.

[image via Getty]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court ruled that Texas’ voter ID law is “discriminatory” and violates portions of the Voting Rights Act, the AP reports. “We are pleased that the court of appeals agreed unanimously with the district court,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a statement.http://gawker.com/supreme-court-...

Authorities have identified 29-year-old Vincente Montano as the man shot dead by Nashville police on Wednesday after attacking patrons of a Tennessee movie theater, WSMV reports.http://gawker.com/police-gunman-...

According to police, Montano was carrying an airsoft pellet gun and a fake bomb in addition to the hatchet and pepper spray he used in his assault on Antioch’s Carmike Hickory 8 Theatre.

UPDATE: Metro police say suspect in shooting at Antioch theater was carrying this pellet gun. pic.twitter.com/Uv2Lbod76A

August 6, 2015

“If someone confronted you with it, you would think it was a real pistol,” police spokesperson Don Aaron told reporters on Wednesday.

According to Aaron, Montano had “significant psychiatric or psychological issues.” From The Tennessean:

Aaron said in a 7:45 p.m. press conference that Montano had been arrested on an assault charge in Murfreesboro in 2004. Montano had been committed for mental health care a total of four times, in 2004 and 2007, he said. He had also been reported as a missing person Aug. 3, Aaron said.

Authorities say two women were treated at the scene for pepper spray exposure and a man was injured by the suspect’s hatchet but suffered only superficial injuries.

[Image via Nashville Police]

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band may be a record you’ve personally listened to and enjoyed, but Keith Richards would like you to know it’s something he didn’t like one bit, nuh-uh, recently telling Esquire he thought the album was “a mishmash of rubbish.”

“The Beatles sounded great when they were the Beatles,” the Rolling Stones guitarist said in an interview with the magazine published Wednesday:

But there’s not a lot of roots in that music. I think they got carried away. Why not? If you’re the Beatles in the ‘60s, you just get carried away—you forget what it is you wanted to do. You’re starting to do Sgt. Pepper. Some people think it’s a genius album, but I think it’s a mishmash of rubbish, kind of like Satanic Majesties—”Oh, if you can make a load of shit, so can we.”

Wow, “a load of shit.” It sure sounds like Richards has strong musical preferences, ones that may differ your own.

Perhaps even by quite a lot!

[Image via Getty Images//h/t Rolling Stone]

A shirtless, mud-covered man claiming to be Tarzan was arrested on Tuesday after police say he broke into a California zoo and began jumping from trees into animal exhibits, the L.A. Times reports.

A 911 call made by Santa Ana Zoo Director Kent Yamaguchi gives as a real-time account of the intruder’s progress as he scales the zoo’s aviary, then a 20-foot wall overlooking a monkey exhibit before finally climbing down to rest in a patch of bamboo. From KABC:

“We have a gentleman who appears to be under the influence of something and is climbing in our trees and jumping into animal exhibits,” Yamaguchi is heard in the 911 call recording.

“Oh, Okay, wow,” the dispatcher responded.

Yamaguchi said the man, later identified by police as 37-year-old John William Rodenborn, was shirtless and climbing trees near the zoo’s aviary.

“He climbed up into the tree and then proclaimed himself that he was ‘Tarzan,’ and that he was here just to have a good time,” Yamaguchi said.

After a short chase, Rodenborn was reportedly arrested by responding officers.

Police say Rodenborn was in possession of crystal methamphetamine and appeared to be under the influence of the drug.

[Image via Santa Ana Police Department]

Citing anonymous sources, WCBS-TV reports that rapper Busta Rhymes was arrested for assault Wednesday night in connection with an alleged protein shake-throwing incident at a New York City gym.http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/08/05/bus...

According to the news station, the 43-year-old hip-hop artist got into a fight with another member of Iron Gym in Chelsea and “allegedly threw a container of Lean Body Protein at the victim.”

CBS New York’s sources say the victim was offered medical attention at the scene and refused.

[Image via Getty Images]

Do we have Bill Clinton to blame for Donald Trump? According to a report in the Washington Post, Bill called the walking power suit in May, just as Donald was mulling a 2016 run, in which Clinton encouraged him to play a larger role within his party. Joke’s on you, Republicans.

Clinton’s people say that the pair didn’t explicitly discuss a presidential run, but four anonymous Trump associates told the Post that the steak man “was candid about his political ambitions and his potential interest in seeking the White House.” Clinton, they said, told Donald that “he was striking a chord with frustrated conservatives” and “a rising force on the right.” Hmm.

Trump’s current status as unlikely front-runner is bad news for the GOP. Aside from lending his general appearance of lunacy to the entire party, Trump’s disconnection from establishment Republicans means he gets to be an unabashed bigot about, say, Latin American immigrants—a stance that evidently still resonates with some Republican voters but that don’t jibe with the party’s kinder new direction. “Trump is a huge problem for the party. He is appealing to a very important part of the base, and bringing on the issues other candidates don’t want to be talking about,” pollster Stanley Greenberg told the New Yorker this week. And if he wins the nomination—which he won’t, but still—he’s taking it away from Jeb Bush or some other candidate who actually stands a chance of winning the general election.

In other words, if Bill Clinton’s encouragement to Trump had anything at all to do with the latter’s decision to run for president, it made things much more difficult for every other Republican running this year. The perfect troll.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Deadspin Report: Patrick Kane Is The Subject Of A Police Investigation | io9 Bingewatching History: I Relived 16 Depressing Years Of The Daily Show | Gizmodo Why CGI doesn’t actually suck | Jezebel Cloud of Drakkar Noir Robin Thicke Gets Engaged to 20-Year-Old |

Another day, another small, symbolic victory for the masses in the class war. It is from symbolic victories like these that real victories are often launched.http://gawker.com/the-myth-of-th...

Five years after the measure was passed by Congress, the SEC, in a party-line vote, has finally approved a rule requiring public companies to disclose the ratio between their CEO pay and the median pay of their workers. The pay of public company CEOs is already public; this measure will put that pay into perspective.

One Republican SEC commissioner complained that this rule will be used for “naming and shaming.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page, a reliable organ of the economic ruling class, derides this rule as “a political weapon.” Clearly, they are both right. Even more clearly, the beleaguered 99% of American workers, who have been soundly losing the class war for more than three decades now, can use all the political weapons they can get. This rule is more of a slingshot than an atomic bomb, but anything helps.

Public companies must now stand up and publicly explain why it is fair that the average US CEO is paid 373 times what his average worker is paid (and some CEOS are paid much more).

Since any honest person can see that such a system is not fair, public companies must either suffer the shame and outrage of the public actually thinking about this stuff, or make their CEO pay more fair.

And that’s the point.

[Photo: Flickr]

In 17 seasons on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart has crushed, destroyed, demolished, and especially eviscerated every opponent in his path with a merciless, unyielding bulldozer of satire (we know this because every headline of the viral news era tells us so, including many of ours). In his penultimate episode, Stewart takes a look back at the enemies he’s thoroughly defeated... or not.

All those segments made us feel better in the moment, but god, that’s depressing. No wonder he’s retiring.

Trevor Noah, you’ve got your work cut out for you.

[Daily Show]

Brian Rice, one of the six Baltimore police officers indicted in the killing of Freddie Gray, may have received a substandard psychological evaluation from a firm that is now under investigation by the city. In 2012, Rice was accused of threatening the mother of his child with a handgun.

Psychology Consultants Associated, the firm contracted to provide psychological assessments for Baltimore police officers, was placed on probation in June by the Maryland State Police, which also employs its services. PCA was found to take only 15 minutes to evaluate the mental health of prospective state cops when 45 minutes were required in its contract, the Associated Press reports. Baltimore city followed suit with an investigation into PCA, but its contract is still active “pending the conclusion of the investigation,” city spokesman Kevin Harris told the AP.

Veteran Baltimore cop and outspoken critic of the department Michael A. Wood said that after the handgun incident, Rice “absolutely would have had a fitness for duty evaluation, and would have been referred to PCA.” A May report in the Guardian revealed a troubling history of violence from Rice. In addition to threatening to shoot Karen McAleer, his child’s mother, he also allegedly threatened to kill himself and Andrew McAleer, her husband. Andrew McAleer also claimed that Rice forced his and Karen’s child to “shoot” a photo of the McAleers that had been “taped to a piece of cardboard intended for target practice.” Rice, who has been employed by the department since 1997, was charged with manslaughter, assault, and misconduct in Gray’s death.

PCA’s alleged misconduct may extend well beyond the BPD and state police: it has held contracts with at least 17 Maryland law enforcement agencies over the last five years, according to the AP.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Caity Weaver was both. She is not dead, nor is she a spider, but she is gone now, and that, I think, is cause for a tribute.

To me, the Best Restaurant in New York column was a way of finally getting to experience iconic New York City landmarks that I’d never previously gotten around to visiting (probably because I didn’t have a good enough excuse to get me over the tourist-trap snobbery I carried as an NYC resident for 17 years). BRINY was a way of writing freely without having to worry too much about form and how criticism is supposed to look and function. By reporting my observations of strangers, it was a way of celebrating the joy of humanity, the inherent hilarity our fellow people provide on a consistent basis. It was a way of getting Gawker to pay for my lunches every few weeks. But mostly, it was an elaborate excuse to spend time alone with Caity Weaver.

Everyone who has read her knows that Caity is great. There is no difference between Caity in person and Caity on the page. To read her is to know her and to know her is to love her. She is funny, well-read, and wise. Her presence is an enhancement.

There are friends, and then there are people who help make you better versions of yourself. Caity Weaver did the latter on our shared page. Not only did she edit every BRINY post, she kept me on my toes. Attempting to keep up with her sharp, wildly imaginative mind for our back-and-forth writing method was the most pleasurable of creative challenges. And it was all organic—long before we started publishing them, our private G-chats were similarly flavored and paced. BRINY was a slightly exaggerated, but ultimately accurate indication of how we’d be spending our time anyway, even if we never set foot in a single tourist trap together.

Caity left Gawker, and I hate it. (And this goes for all of my departed co-workers, by the way.) Caity and I will remain friends, and I hope we can even find a way to work together again, but it won’t be in the same way that we did when we were both here. That makes me sad. We had so much fun. I miss her.

Where do broken hearts go? Why, to the “branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to the art and architecture of medieval Europe” known as the Cloisters, of course.

The best restaurant in New York is

The Trie Café at the Cloisters

Menu style

À la carte

Cost, including the “recommended” cost of adult entry to the museum:

$53.25

I chose the Cloisters as the last-ever BRINY destination because it was on the list of places that Caity and I had planned on visiting were the column (and her time at Gawker) to continue indefinitely. I had wanted to go since my early college days, when I was timid to leave the Village and Washington Heights seemed so inaccessible, it might as well have been on another planet. It’s a good thing that I went alone to this one because Caity, whose sense of direction is approximately that of a blindfolded child who has just been spun around five times and is on her way to whack a piñata, probably would have gotten lost in Fort Tryon Park and perhaps never made it to the Cloisters or out of Washington Heights. (RIP, Caity, thanks for referring to me as “some pig” and saving my life that one time.)

The Cloisters museum has been assembled from architecture mostly dating back to the 12th through the 15th centuries. Not only does it look like a castle, it looks like a castle on a hill. Getting to it requires a considerably steep climb up several stories through Fort Tryon Park and then a circuitous route once atop.

Nearing the museum, I found myself behind a couple on an increasingly narrow path. I consciously slowed my pace beyond what felt comfortable since passing them would be noticeable and probably seem dickish, especially when we both found ourselves waiting in line to buy our tickets just moments later. Things move more deliberately in parks. Greener spaces call for patience. Recalibrating from city pace to park pace is as conscious a process as writing alone in a column you once shared with a partner.

I paid the suggested donation of $25 to enter the Cloisters museum and then was directed downstairs to the mandatory bag check. There, I noticed a sign that said note-taking in pen was prohibited in the museum; pencil was the only writing implement permitted. A pencil is about as useful as a pacifier to me at this point, and it feels like it’s been an equal amount of time since I’ve used either. Here’s a lifehack: Ignore that rule. I avoided taking deliberate notes in the faces of any guards, and in turn, they didn’t hunt me down and make them show what I was using to put letters on the page. Mutual respect.

Because so much of the art at the Cloisters is from medieval times, almost all of it is Christian in nature. Art that old (and older) is always impressive to me in the exact same way: as a triumph over the limited resources people had at the time. It doesn’t move me the way I like art to move me, but it does impress me. My visit was a series of appreciative, mental “Huh”s.

I also couldn’t help but notice the solitude that I went to meditate on was reflected in many of the Cloisters’ offerings.

This is just the spitting image of Caity Weaver, who left the world alone and died for our sins.

This, too, reminded me of Caity. (It should be noted that Caity is not a big fan of healthy eating, so the idea of her holding fruit is kind of a stretch.)

I couldn’t decide if this unicorn featured in perhaps the Cloisters’ most famous collection, Unicorn Tapestries that date back to 1500, represented me or Caity in our current employment states. Or maybe it’s Caity before she left and thus was in Gawker’s captivity. If only she were a pegasus so that she could truly spread her wings now that she’s free.

When I saw this “acrobat” from across the Saint-Guilhem Cloister, I thought, “Finally, a statue I relate to!” even though that makes no sense because I cannot do this (nor can I suck my own dick, which is, I guess what I was referring to in my lie to myself?). Regardless, I had to stifle my laughter at the thought, and the somber atmosphere of the Cloisters made it that much funnier and my laughter harder to contain. For my entire visit there, I spoke in the firm but barely audible tone that you do at funerals, and only when necessary (mostly to thank someone who’d just held the door for me). All the religious imagery made me feel guilty and like I was paying respect. That Jeanette Winterson quote, “Why is the measure of love loss?” popped into my head at one point. (Why didn’t I tell Caity I loved her when I had the chance, before she ascended to her home planet?!) Tonally speaking, the Cloisters was a great place to mourn.

There’s Caity and me, dead and resting. I’m on top :)

This looks like Weird Al.

This Christ was carved out of walrus ivory. I had no idea people carved anything out of walrus ivory or that walrus ivory cleaned up so nice. The “treasury” section of the Cloisters confronted me with my deep love of the aesthetics of ivory. Ivory is gorgeous and looks incredible carved. Poaching is disgusting and I should feel ashamed for even enjoying looking at its product. Exploitation begets beauty and the world is a fucking garbage dump.

After about 45 minutes in the museum, when I couldn’t tolerate gazing at sheets of stained glass for another second, I made my way to the outdoor Trie Café, which is situated around a garden “planted with medieval species to evoke the millefleurs background of medieval tapestries, such as the Unicorn series.” Before ordering my food, I waved to Caity, who was confined to a small pen in the middle of the garden. She had a placid look on her face and didn’t seem to notice me at all.

The Trie Café is a café in the same way that Nescafé is a café. (Nominally!) After being reprimanded by the Trie’s surly worker for attempting to take a “display sandwich” that sat by the register, I purchased a sandwich and a salad (procured by him from some cooler out of my range of vision).

The “Aged New York White Cheddar” comes with sun-dried tomato spread and baby arugula on a French baguette. It tasted cold and like 1st grade. You can see that by “French baguette,” they mean spongey hoagie roll. The arugula didn’t entirely compensate, but it did class the sandwich up a bit and I’m not going to be mad at anything trying to give me aged cheddar, be it my mom’s schoolmarmish next door neighbor or a museum sandwich. This was fine, and I ate all of it.

This was referred to as the “Three Sisters Salad.” It supposedly contained “grilled corn, fava beans, baby zucchini, walnuts, sumac, and sunflower seed vinaigrette,” though the corn was not grilled and I was not clear as to which ingredients were the three sisters, and how the other ones were related. I’m guessing the walnuts, by virtue of their nuts, were not considered sisters, but were they then brothers? Cousins? The sisters’ mother’s hot boyfriend? I’m almost positive that the sunflower seed vinaigrette was actually made with almond butter, and the presence of beans and nuts made the whole thing heartier than your average salad. One bite tasted like a cigarette in the best way possible. I also ate all of this. (A little story-behind-the-story magic for ya: I almost always eat all of everything that’s in front of me.)

The social atmosphere outside was slightly more chatty than it was inside, but still hushed, excepting the couple who sat behind me and spoke loudly in an Eastern European language (let’s say it was Polish). Signs on the tables warned against feeding the birds. The sparrows did seem awfully precocious, coming within just a few feet of where I was sitting to regard me with their kind eyes, moving their tiny heads ever so slightly in a variety of positions to take me all in. Those micro-movements fascinate me. I wonder if bird time feels more drawn out or goes by quicker than human time. I wonder if examining cruel circumstance in bird-sized bites would make it seem that much more enormous, or just easier to swallow.

Soon after finishing my meal, I left the museum. On my way out, I thought about how much my time there would have been enhanced if Caity were there with me, being the witty audio guide that she is as a matter of course, regardless of location. I doubt I would go back to the Cloisters. It’s not a particularly good first date spot (Jesus is watching). It’s not a good place to have an affair (Jesus is watching!). It’s certainly not a good place to bring a doll (Jesus likes being the only doll in the building). But it was an ideal spot to contemplate an old friend, her absence, and what that means to me.

There are a bunch of restaurants in the world, including some in New York City. But in a city of over 24,000 restaurants, how do you find the best? You begin your search in places that are already popular: New York’s hottest tourist destinations. In The Best Restaurant in New York Is, writers Caity Weaver and Rich Juzwiak attempted to determine the best restaurant in New York. It was the time of Rich’s life.

Previously: The Best Restaurant in New York Is: The Best Restaurant in New York Is: Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar; The Tenement Museum; FAO Schwarz; The Rockefeller Center Ice Rink; The 9/11 Memorial & Museum Café; The Empire State Building; The Macy’s Basement; Wall Street Bath & Spa; El Museo del Barrio; The Williamsburg Urban Outfitters ; The Central Park Boathouse; The Tommy Bahama Store; The Bronx Zoo; The Armani Store;The Crown Cafe at the Statue of Liberty; The Campbell Apartment inside Grand Central; The U.N. Delegates Dining Room;Play at the Museum of Sex; Le Train Bleu inside Bloomingdales; LOX at The Jewish Museum;The American Girl Café

And also: The Best Restaurant in the World Is: Epcot Center

[Top image by Jim Cooke; Pictures by Rich Juzwiak]

As she reveals in a new interview with Town & Country, life has been unfair to Kirsten Dunst. When I say “Kirsten Dunst,” I’m referring to the famous Spider-Man actor Kirsten Dunst, not some other Kirsten Dunst who might be in jail right now, or something. The famous Kirsten Dunst is exhausted.http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-a...

“What people expect of an actor is totally ridiculous,” Dunst told the Town & Country interviewer over iced green teas in Culver City, Calif. “It’s unfair that an artist is expected to speak really well in public and have skin tough enough to withstand sometimes really hurtful criticism, but also, in order to do the job, be really sensitive and in touch with their feelings.”

Dunst just finished filming the second season of the television show Fargo. Did she like it? Hmmph.

TV is a lot harder than film. A lot harder. When I got the part, my friend Lizzy [Caplan], who is on Masters of Sex, said, “Be sure to get B12 shots to get you through the week.” I was like, “Really? That sounds very dramatic, Lizzy.” By the third week I was all over the B12. It was one of the best roles I’ve ever played—the writing is spectacular—but by the end I was tapped out.

Also: “Every two weeks you get a new [director], and they each have their own way of doing things. You get used to one person’s style, and then they switch it up on you...”

Also: “TV moves much faster than film. And [my character] Peggy talks so fast that every night I felt like I was cramming for an exam.”

And so: “I remember crying to my mom, ‘I don’t want to go back there! Don’t make me!’”

But she finished filming the season, so she can relax now. Right? Wrong. Per Town & Country, Dunst has to lose 10 pounds to star in Woodshock, “a film directed by her friends Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the sisters behind the fashion label Rodarte.” This means that she could not take her interviewer to her favorite Hollywood restaurant, Petit Trois, because she can’t eat. (“Beginning today, courtesy of the film’s producers, extremely skimpy meals and snacks are being delivered to her home.”)

So they went to an art gallery, to see a show by painter Mark Grotjahn:

Dunst is unfamiliar with his work and is smitten. “Wow,” she whispers. “These are beautiful. They remind me of peacock feathers.” ...

The density and layering of paint, I say, remind me of Lucian Freud. “He’s my favorite artist!” she says, a moment later correcting herself. “Oh, no, I just got confused. My favorite is... What’s his name?... Egon Schiele! I’m sorry—my brain is so tired.”

It’s so hard, everything is just so hard.

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

Sony Pictures Classics is proud to announce its new acquisition Miles Ahead, a Don Cheadle-directed biopic of the iconic singer Miles Davis, who for reasons we can’t discern appears to be holding some sort of valved blowing device in the photo above.

SPC announced its acquisition of the film in a statement released yesterday, which was picked up by The Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, and other industry watchers. It read:

What Don Cheadle has done here with the spirit of Miles Davis is truly astounding. We are not only witnessing for the first time this part of Miles Davis’ story as it deserves to be told, but also the birth of a major film director who happens to portray the iconic singer in a jaw dropping performance.

Boy, could that Miles sing. Congratulations, Sony Pictures Classics!

h/t Marc Masters. Image via Getty. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

A developer is planning to build Brooklyn’s first 1,000-foot condo tower, which could be nearly as tall as the Empire State Building, and will sell fabulously expensive apartments to all the billionaires who want to live in Downtown Brooklyn next to a bunch of Modell’s. http://gawker.com/where-is-the-n...

Police suspect the death of a woman who received an illegal butt injection at a hotel near the St. Louis airport may be connected to a previous fatal butt-lift in Dallas.

The victim, 22-year-old Daysha Phillips, went to the hotel with two friends and paid $300 for butt-enhancing shots, her aunt told the Dallas Morning News. One of the other women backed out of getting the injections, but Cooper, who had done it before, went ahead.

She had a heart attack shortly after the procedure.

“They heard her moaning and gasping for air, wide-eyed … like a rag doll,” her aunt said.

Police in Edmundson, Mo., believe Phillips’ death may be linked to similar cases in Dallas. Wykesha Reid, 34, died in a salon February 19 after allegedly getting the procedure from Denise “Wee Wee” Ross and Alicia Clarke, a transgender woman, who are also accused of giving another woman an extremely painful injection and sealing it up with super glue.http://gawker.com/dallas-woman-f...

Ross and Clarke have been charged with murder, but were released on bond in June. Ross, who was initially on house arrest, was freed from her ankle monitor July 10—Edmundson police suspect she may be involved in Phillips’ death.

“I’m feeling it is one and the same,” Edmundson police chief Miklos Hurocy told the Morning News, “That’s pretty much what we’re thinking.”

[Photo of Phillips via Fox2Now]

The internet scoffed again this week: “Six dollars for a bottle of water with asparagus in it? Whole Foods has gone too far.” But the bougie grocery chain is doing God’s work by ripping off the foolish.

This was the perfect internet micro-outrage non-event: take something recognizable (Whole Foods) plus something relatable (drinking water) plus something vaguely immoral (overpriced... food?) and throw it on Instagram:

And the headlines about nothing rolled in:

But you all fucked up: charging six bucks for some asparagus stalks floating in a water bottle isn’t just delicious and refreshing (maybe) but righteous, an act of social justice.

Exploiting the poor has and will always be categorically wrong, but ripping off the rich and dumb—for whom uncooked asparagus is put in water bottles—is the American dream. Just like one cannot step in the same river twice or kick a dream, it’s impossible to “exploit” the rich; they are the ones who exploit. They can, though, be ripped off and fleeced, and should be, as much as is possible and legal. Six dollar Whole Foods asparagus water is one such legal means of taking money away from people who have six dollars to spend on Whole Foods asparagus water and moving it somewhere else in the economy.http://gawker.com/the-30-hot-dog...

Remember the $30 hot dog cart? That man—demonized by the tabloid press, naturally—was a hero of New York. He made Spider-Man look like shit. The $30 hot dog cart was a tax on foolhardy people with more money than sense, a casino for the hungry and moronic. What better way to wash down a hot dog sold at a $29.50 markup than with a refreshing glass of asparagus water, you sucker?

New York City has long served as a vast machine for extracting cash from people too stupid and undeserving to hold on to it—six dollar veggie water is the only missing cog. So we ask you Whole Foods, don’t stop stocking asparagus water at your L.A. store, but send it our way. And charge $10.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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“The only thing necessary for the triumph of Adam Sandler is for good men to do nothing,” Burke once said. Leaked emails from Sony show just how many men and women did nothing while Pixels, one of the worst movies of the year, in production. They have blood on their hands.

How does something bad happen? Sometimes it’s by order of a dictator or just an unlucky accident. But other times, ostensibly bright and professionally capable people with a great deal of power fool themselves into believing something bad is actually good, because the terrible truth is too terrible to believe. Adam Sandler’s latest film, Pixels, a movie about video games that come to life and try to destroy Earth before being defeated (I assume, haven’t seen the flick) by Sandler, Josh Gad, and Peter Dinklage, is one such terrible truth. The film has been near-universally panned by critics since it opened last month, earning a lowly 18 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and nothing but bile for its writer and star, Adam Sandler, whose “total lack of involvement brings his fellow cast members down” according to New York magazine.

And unlike other Sandler shit sandwiches that prove to be inexplicable money-makers, Pixels is not. Via Forbes:

Sony Pixels dropped hard in its second weekend, tumbling 57% for a $10.4 million second frame and a new $45.61m domestic total for the $90m video game-centric sci-fi action comedy. That’s one of Adam Sandler’s bigger second weekend drops, on par with You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (-57%) and just above Funny People (-64%). And yeah, I took my newborn to see it on Monday as one of those “take your baby to the movies” showings. It was sadly every bit as bad as you’ve heard, and that’s coming from someone who still defends Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and loves Role Models.

How did people whose job is to make good movies—and make money—do the opposite?

Children born during the last year Adam Sandler was funny are now considering what college to attend, and yet the comic and his vanity production company enjoy tremendous sway within Sony Pictures, the studio that continues to provide a breeding ground for his comedies, like an old wheelbarrow filled with water and malarial fly larvae. Sony’s unwillingness to exercise critical thinking with regards to Happy Madison Productions has become such an ongoing embarrassment that many employees cite Sandler as one of their top grievances.http://gawker.com/sony-hack-reve...

But looking through hacked emails between top Sony Pictures executives published earlier this year by Wikileaks reveals that none of them saw what was coming—in fact, many thought they were working on a classic.

On July 30th, 2014, Sony producer Heather Parry wrote to doomed co-chairman Amy Pascal:

Hey there!

On Pixels set. Going great. Martha Stewart was amazing. Gonna be funny.

Pascal herself agreed that Pixels, a movie in which Q*Bert fucks Josh Gad, looked good:

From: Pascal, Amy

To: Belgrad, Doug; Dickerman, Sam; Minghella, Hannah

Sent: Sat Jan 04 08:53:03 2014

I thought pixels was really good

In June 2014, Sony exec Adam North provided Pascal with an update on the film’s progress:

It’s subtle, but it feels like a different Sandler (in a good way), and Josh Gad is still so funny.

This was the first and last time Sandler’s work would be described as “subtle.”

In February of 2014, Doug Belgrad emailed Pascal to say that Sandler et al. were working on a more conservative version of the script, later described by another exec as “cleaner”:

Re: Pixels budget meeting

Adams cranking on a script with cuts... No area 52, pacman in NYC, centipede reduced, DC action reduced. We’ll budget that and then work out a proposal to him and chris to modify deals. That’s when you need to lobby him...later this week.

Btw, Gad loved the script. Have to work out his schedule. KJ loved it too.

Sony Pictures Japan exec Noriaki Sano signed off:

Read the script with pleasure especially knowing the games of those days.

In January of that year, Columbia Pictures co-president Hannah Minghella praised Pixels’ humanity:

Lots of really good work on the script. More than ever Brenner feels like our protagonist and all the relationships are working to explore his own feelings of inadequacy as opposed to competing for attention. We see this in both his friendship with Cooper, his romance with Violet and his rivalry with Eddie.

Steven O’Dell, President of Sony Pictures Releasing International, was optimistic about the movie’s reception overseas:

Had a meeting with Chris Columbus and Sandler. They showed the 3 key action sequences of Pixels in previs. It looks fantastic…I’m 100% in on this one.

Stephen Basil-Jones, a Sony VP covering the studio’s Oceanic territory, concurred:

I’m with you……………..loved the script.

But no one outside of Sony’s despairing echo chamber liked the script. The reviews are uniformly scathing:

“Pixels is a movie without wit, without jokes, with nothing to say but plenty to regurgitate.” - The Globe and Mail

“Pixels” is a special-effects eyeful burdened by the fact that it is also yet another film in which Adam Sandler plays a man-child who somehow turns the head of an attractive woman.” - The New York Times

“Not funny. Just relentless and exhausting.” - Rolling Stone

“Moronic jokes.” - New York Daily News

“[A] barrage of witless one-liners, strained reaction shots and aggressively inane celebrity cameos.” - Variety

You could look at the disconnect between these internal emails and external reception and come to the shopworn-but-incontrovertible conclusion that, in Hollywood, No One Knows Anything. You can also feel a pang of sympathy for these poor, overpaid saps who watched each other pour tens of millions of dollars down the drain while keeping their game faces on and texting “Yes!” to the right people.

Because, at bottom, it’s really Adam Sandler’s fault. He’s got the entire film and TV monolith in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome thrall. A September 2014 email between Minghella and Pascal regarding a contemporaneous Sandler project (an adaptation of Candy Land, sure to be a classic) is revealing:

Developing with Sandler is complicated as you both know even better than I do. I rolled up my sleeves and did my best to bring a singular emotional idea and narrative structure to the version he was developing because the bar for these movies is really high and you can’t just string a bunch of jokes together.

As are Pascal’s replies, in typical Pascalian fashion:

Adam is an asshile and this is more his fault than anyone’s but what we did was not communicate with eachother and make assumptions maybe I didn’t pay attention when you were telling me what I was walking into but it also comes from a non alien meant between us all and too many people doing everything and no one taking responsibility and I mean myself as it is my responsibility to let you guys know what I want to breath life into

Sandler...made up in his head that everyone forced him to write the script while he was shooting pixels at great personal sacrifice to him and his family. also convinced himself that all of you loved the movie and wanted to make it and were waiting on the final word from me since everyone else at the studio was over the moon which is why everyone was assembled as a tribunal

So, it’s what we’ve always known: Adam Sandler is about as professional and capable of navigating the adult world as the manchildren he plays on screen. How else could he get away with demanding that his wife be cast in Pixels, for no reason?

On Jun 4, 2014, at 12:48 PM, “Belgrad, Doug” <Doug_Belgrad@spe.sony.com> wrote:

Adam called me a little sheepishly to ask if we would be ok casting Jackie as the First Lady.

I think we got so much goodwill by casting Gad, Dinklage, Monaghan and not having silly cameos or the like that it won’t be a problem to have Jackie in the movie for a few scenes.

But I want to make sure I’m not compromising after we’ve all worked so hard to make the right version of the movie.

Anybody have concerns?

Pascal’s reply: “He promised it would be good and funny.” Well, if he promised.

Illustration by Jim Cooke

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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