This month marks the ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the storm that ravaged New Orleans leaving 1,833 of its citizens dead. There are a lot of reasonable emotions to feel in response to this particular tragedy—sadness, grief, and anger, to name a few. How about envy? Sure, I guess—so says one brave Chicago Tribune op-ed writer who isn’t afraid to present herself as a potential sociopath in her quest to expose Chicago’s inadequacies.

Because Chicago is a shit city that should be rebuilt from scratch, is what conservative writer Kristen McQueary argues in “In Chicago, wishing for a Hurricane Katrina.” The piece has since been reframed as “Chicago, New Orleans, and rebirth” but McQueary’s fervent wish for a natural disaster to destroy Chicago and, one assumes, its citizens (figuratively, of course, she’s not a psychopath), remains:

Envy isn’t a rational response to the upcoming 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

But with Aug. 29 fast approaching and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu making media rounds, including at the Tribune Editorial Board, I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops.

“That’s what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans. Chaos. Tragedy. Heartbreak,” McQueary concludes. Also death, which she declines to touch on—a little too real, presumably, for the perfect storm metaphor. But, one suspects from her breathless appreciation of the healing effects of a devastating flood, those fatalities were ultimately for the greater good—just look what happened:

Residents overthrew a corrupt government. A new mayor slashed the city budget, forced unpaid furloughs, cut positions, detonated labor contracts. New Orleans’ City Hall got leaner and more efficient. Dilapidated buildings were torn down. Public housing got rebuilt. Governments were consolidated.

An underperforming public school system saw a complete makeover. A new schools chief, Paul Vallas, designed a school system with the flexibility of an entrepreneur. No restrictive mandates from the city or the state. No demands from teacher unions to abide. Instead, he created the nation’s first free-market education system.

Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth.

Hurricane Katrina also gave a great American paper a tone-deaf, embarrassing op-ed, so I guess you take the good with the bad.

But lest you think her uncaring, she assures you, she is not—she can relate.

That’s why I find myself praying for a storm. OK, a figurative storm, something that will prompt a rebirth in Chicago. I can relate, metaphorically, to the residents of New Orleans climbing onto their rooftops and begging for help and waving their arms and lurching toward rescue helicopters.

Except here, no one responds to the SOS messages painted boldly in the sky. Instead, they double down on their own man-made disaster.

Except here, no one responds to the SOS messages painted boldly in the sky. Instead, they double down on their own man-made disaster.

In a Twitter addendum to the piece, McQueary writes: “If you read the piece, it’s about finances and government. I would never diminsh the tragedy of thousands of lives lost.”

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

If you were Khloe Kardashian, through some kind of arcane Freaky Friday-ass blessing/curse, your first order of business would be to fly to Chipotle on a private jet with your crafty, beardy new boyfriend. Yes it would. Don’t you lie to me.

Khloe reportedly lived your best life Thursday, after a run-in with her washed-up ex Lamar Odom, currently a free agent on many levels, at a Hollywood SoulCycle. Shaken by the unexpected encounter, Khloe went straight to Houston on a private jet to meet current boyfriend James Harden–who is apparently less infuriating to women than he is to NBA defenders—for burritos.

She wore sunglasses and checked her phone, and reportedly ordered “several chicken bowls, extra guacamole and water.” Exactly what you would have ordered if you were her.

Meanwhile, if she were you, a non-jet-owner, Chloe would have walked to the nearest Chipotle and cried into a single chicken bowl with only one serving of guac. Damn.

[Photos: renizzlexo, itsohsochloe]

In a recent review for Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad, Guus Valk examined three books—The Sellout, Between the World and Me, and Loving Day—that confront race relations in America. The piece, which was accompanied by an illustration of a man in blackface, featured a headline that read: “Nigger, are you crazy?”

Gay couple David Moore and David Ermold, who documented the Rowan County Clerk’s refusal to grant them a marriage license last month in a viral YouTube video last month, returned to the Kentucky office yesterday and were once again denied a marriage license. This shit is still happening. It’s not over.

Two nights ago, former reality TV star and fledgling memoirist Kristin Cavallari shared something personal with the world: she dreams. To illustrate this revelation, she posted a photo on Instagram of a bottle with a message inside. (The message: “Dream.”)

“Dreaming with @emeraldduvjewelry #EmeraldDuv,” Kristin wrote in the caption. Emerald Duv (pronunciation unknown) is the name of her jewelry line.

What does Kristin dream when she dreams with Duv?

Maybe this.

Or this?

This is nice.

Sometimes in black and white, maybe.

I love to dream.

Mmm, yes.

Fast forward!

Is all that we see or seem—

But a dream within a dream?

What do you think Kristin dreams?

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photos via Getty, Shutterstock, and MTV]

A terrifying and cold-blooded demonstration took place today in Cape Cod and trust me when I tell you, this killer shark knew exactly what kind of bloody message he, or maybe she, was sending to wealthy Massachusetts residents: “I’m gonna fucking eat you.”

Because this wasn’t just a fin, slicing through the water, letting beach goers know who’s in charge (Do I have to spell it out? The sharks are in charge)—nay—this demonstration was premeditated—calculated—dare I say—evil.

Two Cape Cod beaches were forced to close Wednesday after witnesses saw an “explosion of water and blood” when a great white shark mauled a seal about 30 yards off the beach.

Beachgoers at Nauset Light in Eastham, Mass., saw the shark attack the seal at around 4 p.m. The seal was then thrown out of the water onto the beach, where it died, witnesses said.

“It was almost like “Jaws,” one witness told WCVB.com.

This is just “what sharks do,” you may be saying, and you’d be totally wrong—don’t be naive, bub: Jaws mayor Larry Vaughn didn’t buy it either, and guess what, he ended up looking like a real moron too.

Picture via WCVB. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

For more than four decades, the television show Sesame Street has existed to teach children lessons. Today’s lesson is that people without disposable household income are in an inferior position and should be happy to receive secondhand goods.

The original purpose of Sesame Street was to provide uplifting educational programming to the widest possible audience of young children. Yesterday, the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces the program, announced that for the next five years, new episodes will not run on the nonprofit, over-the-air Public Broadcasting Service, but will be distributed through HBO, a premium cable channel owned by the for-profit Time Warner media megacorporation.

In the press release, Sesame Workshop CEO Jeffrey Dunn described the arrangement as “a true winning public-private partnership model.” What does this winning model entail? It entails removing public goods and services from the commons, to repackage them as luxury products for affluent consumers.

Sesame Street was founded with grant money from charitable foundations and the federal government, on the premise that children’s broadcasting is a public trust. Although Sesame Workshop, through the years, developed a licensing and merchandising empire that covered most of its costs, Big Bird has been brought out whenever a politician threatens to reduce taxpayer contributions to public broadcasting, as a potent symbol of cultural democracy.

Now Sesame Street will be restricted to a network that reaches less than one-third of American households. According to the announcement, with the money it gets from HBO, Sesame Street “will be able to produce almost twice as much new content as previous seasons.” And poor kids won’t be able to see any of it.

Or, more precisely, they will be able to see it after the expiration of a nine-month HBO window of exclusivity—at which point the no-longer-new episodes will be passed on to PBS, while the children whose parents can afford to pay for premium cable are watching new-new episodes. The old Sesame Street block has been gentrified, so that HBO can build a sleek high-rise with a separate poor door.

This is, we’re told, what the economic realities dictate. The New York Times explained the context:

Sesame’s business has struggled in recent years because of the rapid rise of streaming and on-demand viewing and the sharp decline in licensing income. About two-thirds of children now watch “Sesame Street” on demand and do not tune in to PBS to watch the show.

The children who are watching Sesame Street on demand through Amazon and Netflix will also lose access to the show under the HBO deal, the Times reports. Online viewership will be available solely through HBO’s own services.

This is the state of the public interest. Three years ago, in a 2012 presidential debate, Republican nominee Mitt Romney felt comfortable enough challenging PBS to suggest he would kill its federal subsidy if elected. I’m not sure if any of the Republican candidates have brought it up this year, because their first round of primary debates was proprietary to the Fox News Channel. To get it through my TV provider would have cost $79.99 a month.

Illustration by Jim Cooke. Contact the author at scocca@gawker.com.

Occasionally, against all odds, you’ll see an interesting or even enjoyable picture on the Internet. But is it worth sharing, or just another Photoshop job that belongs in the digital trash heap? Check in here and find out if that viral photo deserves an enthusiastic “forward” or a pitiless “delete.”

Image via Facebook

DELETE

In an effort to explain Megyn Kelly’s exsanguinating cross-examination of Donald Trump at last week’s GOP debate, some of the candidate’s supporters suggested a possible hidden agenda with this photo, supposedly showing the Fox News reporter posing with Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal and his unnamed, niqab-clad sister.

As Snopes reports, however, the image is just a Photoshopped version of a picture taken at The Hollywood Reporter’s “35 Most Powerful People in Media” event last April.

Additionally, if one were to actually “GOOGLE IT!” as the image implores, they’d quickly learn that Prince Al-Waleed is far from being “the co-owner” of Fox News.

In reality, Al-Waleed’s Kingdom Holding Company has a reported 6.6% interest in 21st Century Fox, the News Corp. successor that owns the company’s former entertainment assets, including Fox News, 20th Century Fox and the Fox television network.

Images via Twitter/AP Images//h/t Snopes

DELETE

On Tuesday, popular image-pirating account @SciencePorn tweeted this picture of the Moon “kissing the ocean,” which was soon re-shared by thousands.

But as @PicPedant and others noted, the Moon should appear red and distorted this close to the horizon, as seen in a legitimate photos of a rising full moon.

In her original upload, creator Vivienne Beck makes no effort to hide the fact that the image has been manipulated, saying she went “a little loony playing with the moon.”

Image via Twitter

FORWARD

This heavenly image recently shared by NASA, on the other hand, is the real deal, despite attempts by several amateur astronomers to debunk the GIF.

On Wednesday, The Verge posted a detailed explainer addressing some of the most common quibbles with the photos, including the absence of a shadow (the Moon isn’t passing between the Sun and Earth), Earth’s seemingly stationary clouds (cloud structures move slowly) and the relative size of the two bodies as seen by NASA’s DSCOVR satellite (the satellite is hundreds of thousands of miles away from both objects).

Image via NASA

DELETE

As many (hopefully most!) suspected, this viral image of “the world’s smallest cat” currently making the rounds on Facebook again is a fake, the result of a Photoshop contest held almost 10 years ago.

Mr. Peebles, on the other hand, is a real animal reportedly crowned the “Smallest Living Domestic Cat” by Guinness in 2004.

The actual Mr. Peebles, however, is significantly larger than the mouse-sized mouser seen above, measuring 6.1 inches tall and 19.2 inches long, tail-included.

Image via Facebook/h/t Snopes

SoulCycle—ever heard of it? It’s a dark, neon hellscape where Charlize Theron routinely terrorizes Tia Mowry—I assume for sport—but it’s also more than that. It’s a place where rich people of all shapes and sizes can spend large sums of money to exercise their bodies and their aggression, often at the same time.

Here’s a brief timeline of the latest SoulPsycho behavior:

• August 21, 2013: Someone famous—maybe Mariah Carey, though for legal reasons I must emphasis it could just as likely not be Mariah Carey (it’s probably Mariah Carey)—becomes so desperate to drop weight fast she goes deaf from too many hours of a SoulCycle instructor screaming at her over the dulcet tones of very loud EDM.
• July 23, 2014: Charlize Theron, a ghost who still haunts Sean Penn, rebuffs celebrity actress and identical twin to...someone, Tia Mowry after a SoulCycle class.
• August 7, 2014: Charlize Theron tries to have whatshername who looks like that other lady on Sister Sister banned forever from the SoulCycle studio. She is unsuccessful.

And now, the latest:

• August 13, 2015: Lamar Odom accosts Khloe Kardashian, the walking down payment on an E! Entertainment executive’s beach house, outside of her SoulCycle class. Khloe accuses him of stalking her. Odom doesn’t exactly deny it:

Nobody got followed. Nobody got hassled. Nobody got harassed. Nobody got grabbed on. None of thatI am not, not, not the person they’re trying to make me out to be, whoever’s doin’ it. I live in Las Vegas. I live in Las Vegas. So was there an address or place given? So was there an address of a place given? Or I just guessed right.

Sounds like he guessed right. Not that it was too hard? Drama has no problem finding SoulCycle on a map, that’s for damn sure.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Michigan state rep. Cindy Gamrat on Friday held her first press conference since being caught in an affair with her fellow representative, Todd Courser—despite Courser’s incredibly bizarre attempt to cover it up by implicating himself in a gay sex scandal. Gamrat announced that, pending the results of an investigation, she will not resign. http://gawker.com/state-rep-plan...

Gamrat had been encouraged to step down by her fellow Tea Partiers, but she declined. She claimed her family had known about her “mistake” for some time, and they had already been in counseling before it became public.

Meanwhile, her colleague and apparent lover, Courser, doubled down on his claim that he had been blackmailed over the affair by his former aides and the “Lansing mafia” he claims controls Michigan politics. Courser’s brother, Dan, released screen-grabs Thursday of text messages the blackmailer allegedly sent him starting in May, purportedly proving the blackmail plot was real.

MLive.com reports:

The text messages from the anonymous individual contend there is audio of Todd Courser talking about his affair with Gamrat and that it is legitimate. Dan Courser said he doesn’t know who sent it and isn’t sure if his brother’s former staffers, as Todd Courser has alleged, were involved in sending the text messages.

“I’m skeptical either way, it seems muddled to me,” Dan Courser said. “There’s an opening for either, it could be or not. My past relationship with them (makes me think) no, I don’t want to believe that about them. But, I also think why would you be recording a conversation?”

The former Courser staffers have denied involvement.

Like Gamrat, Courser hasn’t resigned.

In June, Courser introduced bills that would exempt state employees from performing same-sex marriages and require them to be performed by clergy. Gamrat co-sponsored the legislation, calling the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges a “sad day in our nation.”

Just a couple of nice folks.

[h/t joemygod]

Jonah Peretti, the founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, is a big fan of labor unions—as long as they come nowhere near BuzzFeed. According to BuzzFeed reporter Cora Lewis, Peretti told employees this week that “I don’t think a union is right for BuzzFeed,” citing the fact that BuzzFeed is structured more like a tech startup than a traditional media company and his own belief that unionization would negatively affect the salaries of BuzzFeed’s writers and reporters (in whom the company has invested tens of millions of dollars).

Peretti articulated his view toward a potential BuzzFeed unionization drive at a staff meeting held on August 13 at a bar called Ainsworth Park near Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, in response to a question an employee had anonymously submitted. (Per Lewis, the question was: “Several media outlets have recently unionized, do you consider that an option for BuzzFeed? What’s Jonah’s position on unionization?”) Peretti began by endorsing the “positive impact” labor unions have had in places like factories but later concluded that unions “wouldn’t be very good for employees at BuzzFeed”:

A lot of the best new-economy companies are environments where there’s an alliance between managers and employees. People have shared goals. Benefits and perks and compensation are very competitive, and I feel like that’s the kind of market we’re in. A lot of times when you look at companies that have unionized, the relationship is very different. The relationship is much more adversarial, and you have lawyers negotiating for comp and looking at comparable companies and trying to keep compensation matched with other companies.

I think that actually wouldn’t be very good for employees at BuzzFeed — particularly people who are writers and reporters — because the comps for writers and reporters are much less favorable than comps for startup companies and tech companies. In general, I don’t think it’s the right idea for us. The only thing about BuzzFeed is that we’re global, most unions are national. We have people who move between different roles and in general unions do a lot of defining clearly what individual roles, and what the job function is. So for a flexible, dynamic company, it isn’t something I think would be great for the company.

You can read the rest of Peretti’s response at BuzzFeed. If you have any other information about this, please get in touch.

Email/chat: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint · DM: @jktrotter · Photo credit: Getty

The most famous image of Earth is one taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on their way to the Moon in 1972. Not only is it a beautiful picture, but it was the first time many people had ever seen an actual photo of our full planet. Fast forward a few decades, and we can see that view every day. Here’s your world today—as seen by satellites floating around in orbit—in all of its watery wonder.

Here’s Your World Today is an occasional feature that explains the various weather features seen on satellite imagery around the world. Today’s post features a visible image of the Americas from GOES 13’s 17:45 UTC sweep, an infrared image of Africa and Europe via EUMETSAT at 19:00 UTC, and an infrared image of the Eastern Hemisphere from Japan’s HIMAWARI-8 satellite at 19:30 UTC.

The image at the top of this post depicts a true-color image of the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean on Saturday morning (Friday afternoon here) as seen by Japan’s HIMAWARI-8 satellite.

A) Ignacio Imminent

This swirly mass of clouds off the west coast of Mexico is quickly getting its act together, and it’s likely to become a tropical depression or tropical storm by this time tomorrow. If/when it becomes a tropical storm, its name will be Ignacio. The latest run of the GFS model doesn’t seem to develop it much beyond a weak tropical storm, but its location and the time of the year means that any interests in Mexico need to keep a close eye on the system over the next couple of days.

B) Dead Atlantic

The Atlantic Ocean is dead quiet as our below-normal hurricane season chugs along without much to talk about. Dry air through the atmosphere, unfavorable upper-level winds, and dust blowing off of Africa are joining forces to kill any tropical cyclone development in the ocean basin for now. There might be a little something to watch in a couple of days—see item G below—but it’s a low chance and a long way away.

C) Upwelling

See the abrupt clearing over the west coast of Chile? That’s caused by upwelling. Cold water from deep in the Pacific Ocean hits the side of the continent and rises to the surface, creating lowering sea surface temperatures in this part of the Pacific. This chilly water kills convection, clearing the region of puffy clouds and leaving the adjacent land devoid of precipitation. That adjacent land is the Atacama Desert, by the way, and it’s so arid that it’s often used as a simulation of the surface of Mars.

D) Intertropical Convergence Zone

This persistent band of showers and thunderstorms near the Equator over the Atlantic Ocean is known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, more commonly called the ITCZ for short. Instability from warm, humid air and the interaction of winds from the northern and southern hemisphere create pretty regular storms in this region of the ocean. Flights between South America and Europe have to fly through the ITCZ, producing uncomfortable turbulence at the least, but very rarely it can be dangerous. The icing that triggered the events that caused the crash of Air France 447—a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris—was likely caused by the aircraft flying through the top of thunderstorms in the ITCZ.

E) Dust

The fuzzy, tannish color hanging over the west coast of Africa is an enormous area of dust and sand suspended in the atmosphere. This floating desert will slowly start to make its way over the Atlantic Ocean over the next week, eventually reaching the Caribbean by the middle of next week. If you’re going to be in the area next week, depending on its concentration, the dust in the atmosphere should make sunrises and sunsets more colorful than usual.

F) Hudson Bay

There’s still a little bit of ice on the southern part of Hudson Bay. Happy August!

G) Tropical Waves

As we typically see during this time of the year, there are a series of tropical waves making their way toward the Atlantic from sub-Saharan Africa. Almost every significant hurricane that’s spun-up in the Atlantic forms from one of these waves, starting life as a tropical cyclone near the Cape Verde Islands.

The wave just coming off the coast looks pretty healthy, and the latest run of the GFS model has it maintaining some composure as it heads west toward the Caribbean. The National Hurricane Center doesn’t mention it in their outlooks, and environmental conditions aren’t really favorable for development, but it’s a good reminder that we’re creeping toward the peak of hurricane season, and that even though it’s a slow year, it only takes one storm to make a mess.

H) Daily Thunderstorms

A common sight through the wet season, the full-disk image shows pop-up thunderstorms across the rainforests of central Africa. This part of central Africa sees the highest frequency of lightning strikes of any other region on Earth.

I) Nice in Europe

Showers and thunderstorms are parked over western Europe right now, but overall, it’s pretty darn nice for August by American standards. Paris, for instance, can expect sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s and low 80s for the foreseeable future. The heat wave that’s gripped eastern Europe should also start to wane soon, so more good news across the pond.

Fall is just around the corner, so temperatures will cool off here in the States pretty soon.

J) Twin Tropical Cyclones

Two tropical cyclones out in the Pacific Ocean are gearing up to be the biggest weather story on Earth for the next couple of days. Both were just upgraded to tropical storms just before the publication of this post. The westernmost system is Tropical Storm Goni and the one to its east is Tropical Storm Atsani.

Tropical Storm Goni will slowly strengthen over the next few days as it crosses the Northern Marianas Islands, becoming a strong typhoon as it heads in the general direction of the northern Philippines.

Tropical Storm Atsani is also expected to become a strong typhoon as it heads northwest, not posing much of a threat to land.

Goni is the one to watch, so if you live in Guam or the CNMI (or know anyone who does), keep an eye on this storm over the next few days.

Full Sunrise Picture

Here’s a full view of the image at the top of this post, showing a true-color image of the sun rising over the Pacific Ocean, as seen by Japan’s HIMAWARI-8 satellite.

Blue Marble

Remember the Blue Marble image? The picture as you know it is a lie. The original photograph was taken “upside-down”—with Antarctica on top and northern Africa on the bottom—but NASA just flipped it over to better match the public’s perception of how the world is situated. Ask C.J. Cregg about that.

[Images: NOAA, EUMETSAT, JMA]

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

If you enjoy The Vane (of course you do!), then you’ll love the author’s new book—The Extreme Weather Survival Manual—which is available for pre-order on Amazon and comes out on October 6.

On Saturday, the Italian navy rescued some 320 migrants from an overcrowded boat in the Mediterranean Sea north of Libya. At least 40 other migrants died in the boat’s hold, apparently killed by fuel fumes, the Associated Press reports.

The survivors included 45 women and three children, according to Italian naval commander Massimo Tosi. “Women were crying for their husbands (and) their children who died in the crossing,” he said, speaking from the navy ship Cigala Fulgosi as the rescue was ongoing.

“The dead were found in the hold,” Tosi told RaiNews24. “It appears to be from inhaling exhaust fumes.” Their bodies were “lying in water, fuel, human excrement.”

“They are still counting the victims,” Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said.

Reuters reports that human smugglers have sent more than 100,000 migrants to Italy so far in 2015. According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 2,000 people have died already this year attempting to reach Europe by boat.

The AP reports that the exact number is believed to be much higher, however, as authorities suspect there are boats that have sunk without rescuers’ knowing.

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

The Guardian reports that St. Louis County police are investigating Officer Todd J. Bakula after he made a Facebook post bragging about his “annual Michael Brown bonus,” an apparent reference to extra income earned while working during protests in Ferguson this week.

Police responded aggressively to demonstrations marking the one year anniversary of Michael Brown’s death. Many St. Louis County police officers ended up working overtime.

“I decided to spend my annual Michael Brown bonus on a nice relaxing bicycle ride trip to Defiance,” Bakula wrote on his Facebook page. Defiance is a recreation destination about 40 miles from Ferguson. “Eating dinner now and staying at a bed and breakfast tonight.”

St. Louis County media relations officer Shawn McGuire confirmed to The Guardian by email that Bakula is a patrolman with the St. Louis County police department.

“We understand the post is controversial,” McGuire wrote. “The St Louis County police department takes these allegations very serious in every case. The remarks on the Facebook page will be investigated by our department.”

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

In her interview with Marie Claire, Miley Cyrus spoke about how difficult it was to work on Hannah Montana at such a young age. Cyrus told the magazine that the gender expectations written into the role had a profound effect on her body image:

“From the time I was 11, it was, ‘You’re a pop star! That means you have to be blonde, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing.’ Meanwhile, I’m this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras. … I was told for so long what a girl is supposed to be from being on that show. I was made to look like someone that I wasn’t, which probably caused some body dysmorphia because I had been made pretty every day for so long, and then when I wasn’t on that show, it was like, Who the fuck am I?”

[USA Today/Marie Claire]

A #tbt from Madonna who wants to remind you that she and Sean Penn were a thing—a kind of weird and unstable thing. Apparently Penn is a rebel heart and a Leo. [Instagram]

Salma Hayek obtained a restraining order against two women. According to court filings, the Hayek alleges that the two Los Angeles-area women are impersonating her and “making a veiled threat to kidnap and ransom Hayek’s daughter.” The order prevents the women from making contact with Hayek, her husband, or her seven-year-old daughter. [Page Six]

• Important Shia LeBeouf news: he has a Tupac Shakur tattoo. [Just Jared]
  
• Steven Spielberg’s $184 million yacht is no longer fancy enough for him. He replaced the plebeian yacht with a newer, bigger $250 million yacht. [Page Six]
  
• Teresa Giudice’s prison emails are hilarious. [Us Weekly]
  
• Jay Leno says Jimmy Kimmel’s ratings are low because he has “mean streak.” [Huffington Post]
  
• A judge rejected Brittney Griner’s request for an annulment. Glory Johnson is kinda being a jerk on Instagram about it. [People]
  

Images via Getty.

The death toll at the Chinese port of Tianjin, rocked earlier this week by a series of devastating explosions, has risen to 104, the Associated Press reports, including 21 firefighters. An unknown number of firefighters remain missing.http://gawker.com/series-of-huge...

Chinese authorities ordered further evacuations after new, smaller explosions ripped through the area, an important port and petrochemical hub about 75 miles east of Beijing, on Saturday. Everyone within three kilometers of the blast site has been ordered to evacuate over fears that the highly toxic chemical sodium cyanide, discovered at the site, could cause more casualties.

“Out of consideration for toxic substances spreading, the masses nearby have been asked to evacuate,” state media hub Xinhua reported. According to The Guardian, the order came after authorities detected a change in the wind threatened to spread the poison inland. (The New York Times reports that the evacuation order has since been rescinded.)

The BBC reports that anti-chemical warfare troops have entered the site. One man was found alive 50 meters from the blast core. Many firefighters who responded to initial reports of a fire at the site on Wednesday are still missing, thought to have been overwhelmed by the colossal explosions that followed.http://io9.com/heres-how-thos...

From the AP:

The disaster has raised questions about whether dangerous chemicals were being stored too close to residential compounds, and whether firefighters may have triggered the blasts, possibly because they were unaware the warehouse contained chemicals combustible on contact with water. The massive explosions Wednesday happened about 40 minutes after reports of a fire at the warehouse and after an initial wave of firefighters arrived and, reportedly, doused some of the area with water.

On Saturday morning, relatives of missing firefighters confronted police officials at a news conference, the New York Times reports, demanding information about their family members whose names do not appear on official lists of the missing and the dead.

According to the Times, the newspaper Southern People Weekly detailed an exchange between one woman and a police official on its microblog. The post was later deleted.

“They’re only 18, 19 years old,” one woman yelled. “The oldest is only 20 years old. They’re only children.”

“Not a single police officer death has been reported,” a police official responded. “Everyone from our whole police station is gone.”

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

According to a new report Kayla Mueller, the American aid work who was kidnapped and subsequently murdered by ISIS, was repeatedly sexually assaulted by ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Mueller’s parents told ABC news, “Kayla was tortured, that she was the property of al-Baghdadi. We were told that in June by the government.”

Al-Baghdadi is the leader and self-proclaimed “caliph” of the Islamic State and, according to ABC, he personally arranged to keep Mueller in the home of Abu Sayyaf, a high-ranking ISIS official who oversaw the illegal oil trade. Sayyaf was killed in a May raid on his compound and his wife was apprehended.

Sayyaf’s compound was a sort of “safe house” for al-Baghdadi, he would visit the home to meet with Sayyaf. During those visits, he repeatedly raped Mueller.

ABC reports that in addition to Mueller, that the U.S. military discovered numerous Yazidi girls who were also enslaved at the compound. The girls provided the U.S. with a “wealth of information” that was used to piece together Mueller’s last years.

The Yazidi girls, as well as information obtained from Sayyaf’s wife, put to rest conspiratorial rumors that Mueller was a willing “bride” of an ISIS fighter—rumors that had obviously upset Mueller’s family.

The news about Mueller comes on the heels of a long report by the New York Times which documented the systematic rape and abuse of girls by the terrorist organization. That abuse, underpinned by al-Baghdadi’s own “theology,” justifies the rape of non-Muslim women in the name of religious doctrine.

Kayla Mueller would have turned 27 on Friday.

Image via CBS.

“The Iowa State Fair won’t allow Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to give kids free rides on his helicopter on fairgrounds, but the real estate developer has secured a nearby location. The helicopter will take off from a parking lot outside the fair.”

Here is a joke I found on the internet that seems appropriate given what’s transpired this week. Question: What do politicians and diapers have in common? (No, not that!) Answer: They should both be changed regularly—and for the same reason. [cue the drums!] And with that, onto our favorite stories from the week.

“Fantastic Four Blame Game: Fox, Director Josh Trank Square Off Over On-Set Chaos” by Kim Masters

Director Josh Trank, 31, could not resist tweeting on Aug. 6, as the movie was hitting theaters, that he had made “a fantastic version” of the film that audiences would “probably never see.” Though Trank quickly deleted the tweet, his public disavowal of the film at such a key moment enraged 20th Century Fox executives and stirred a pot that had begun to bubble when the director was dropped by Lucasfilm from a Star Wars stand-alone film at the end of April, prompting THR to report that one of the causes was his erratic behavior on Fantastic Four.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/fantastic...

“0 Miles to Wall Drug: A Half-Day at the World’s Largest Drugstore” by Jamie Lauren Keiles

If you miss your first billboard for Wall Drug (you won’t), do not fret, for there are hundreds more. They populate the 650-mile span of I-90 that connects Montana to Minnesota, and each new sighting feels as thrilling as the last, a welcome commercial break from the stress of processing so much big. Sometimes the billboards ask, Have you dug Wall Drug? or implore things like DON’T MISS OUT. Other times they advertise amenities (Hot Coffee 5¢), or assert relevance (WALL DRUG as told by Good Morning America), or shout timely slogans out into the empty plains (YOLO Wall Drug). The first sign for the drugstore was erected in 1936 and advertised Free Ice Water to weary motorists. Before this sign, Wall Drug was a dying pharmacy in the dying town of Wall, South Dakota (population 326, and waning). After the sign, the store survived as a result of a geographic coincidence that happened to situate Mount Rushmore 76 miles to the west. The nationalist road trip pilgrimage site opened in 1941 and provided Wall Drug with a consistent stream of thirsty passers-through. Today, however, the megastore thrives as a destination in its own right, a 76,000-square-foot, self-sustaining monument to something, though the nature of that something is not immediately clear.

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/...

“Bernie Sanders Can’t Save Black People” by Greg Howard

I, and other people, too, tend to believe that racial injustice is different from economic injustice; that black Americans are poor because of racism, more than that racism is the result of black Americans being poor; and, further, that racism is the driving force behind the capricious and fluid idea of race. It is racism that has led to layers upon layers of policy that keep blacks as a social underclass being conceived and executed; racism that has led to policies like redlining, which still exist, in various forms, today; racism that has led to things like segregated neighborhoods and schools; racism that has led to millions upon millions of minorities today being corralled in ghettos; and racism that has led to the average white household having 16 times the wealth of the average black one in 2015. Black people aren’t systemically oppressed because they don’t have money; they don’t have money because they are systemically oppressed, because the American voting public is in favor of them being so.

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/bernie-sanders...

“A Guide to the Christian Vlog Community Where the Biggest Blessing Is a Baby” by Allie Jones

If the idea of parents profiting off of a (real or imagined) pregnancy seems immoral, know that Sam and Nia are not the first good Christian vlogging couple to do it. Plenty of young, attractive mommies and daddies with Jesus in their hearts and expensive cameras in their hands have been live-vlogging their reproductive successes for years now. Babies are a gift from god, these vloggers will tell you, and they are also the most surefire way to rack up views and subscribers on YouTube.

http://gawker.com/a-guide-to-the...

“Ramiro Gomez’s Domestic Disturbances” by Lawrence Weschler

Such questions, of the relative worth and value of human lives, are at the very heart of Gomez’s interventions. I admired their directness. Art is a conspiracy between artists and rich people, one of Kurt Vonnegut’s characters once said, to make poor people feel stupid. These days, it can feel as if art is instead a conspiracy among artists, dealers, curators and the otherwise art-school indoctrinated to make the rest of us feel clueless. The immediacy of Gomez’s address was part of why I found his work so refreshing. ‘‘An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way,’’ Charles Bukowski declared. ‘‘An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.’’ And though not pitched principally to intellectuals or theorists, Gomez’s work often plumbed profound depths beyond its simple, placid surfaces. ‘‘The purpose of art,’’ James Baldwin said, ‘‘is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.’’

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/mag...

“Stunned by the Watts Riots, the LA Times Struggles to Make Sense of the Violence” by Doug Smith

Forty-five years later, I looked back on how they told Los Angeles’ most tumultuous story of that era, and my first reaction was, “How could this coverage have won a Pulitzer Prize?”

I’m not suggesting the work was unworthy. I read the stories with admiration for the reporters’ newswriting skill and for the courage of many white reporters who headed into the conflict zone.

But as the coverage continued day after day, it became apparent how unprepared these journalists were to probe the complex social currents that ignited and fueled the upheaval.

Read the story here.

“The Teflon Toxin” by Sharon Lerner

Concerns about the safety of Teflon, C8, and other long-chain perfluorinated chemicals first came to wide public attention more than a decade ago, but the story of DuPont’s long involvement with C8 has never been fully told. Over the past 15 years, as lawyers have been waging an epic legal battle — culminating as the first of approximately 3,500 personal injury claims comes to trial in September — a long trail of documents has emerged that casts new light on C8, DuPont, and the fitful attempts of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with a threat to public health.

Read the story here.

Oprah’s Angels: 65 Families, One Big Storm, and the American Dream by Peter Moskowitz

Moving on from Katrina was not only about forgetting, but about reconvincing the rest of the country, that everything was okay—that despite the billions of dollars of aid bungled by FEMA, despite the blatant racism exhibited by local, state, and national leaders after the storm, life would not only return to normal after Katrina, but somehow be better. And reaffirming the essential fairness of America required people like Oprah Winfrey and Angel Lane.

http://www.amazon.com/Oprahs-Angels-...

[Image via Getty]

According to documents provided to the New York Times and ProPublica by Edward Snowden, AT&T and the NSA have maintained for decades a “highly collaborative” relationship that has facilitated the government agency’s ability to spy on enormous quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States.

One document, the Times reports, applauds AT&T’s “extreme willingness to help.” Another reminds National Security Agency officials to be nice to AT&T employees when visiting their facilities: “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.”

In September 2003, AT&T was the first of the NSA’s corporate partners to enable a new metadata collection capability that was described as essentially a “‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, it was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system.”

From the Times:

AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the N.S.A. access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T.

The N.S.A.’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency.

And furthermore:

In 2011, AT&T began handing over 1.1 billion domestic cellphone calling records a day to the N.S.A. after “a push to get this flow operational prior to the 10th anniversary of 9/11,” according to an internal agency newsletter. This revelation is striking because after Mr. Snowden disclosed the program of collecting the records of Americans’ phone calls, intelligence officials told reporters that, for technical reasons, it consisted mostly of landline phone records.

It is not clear whether these programs are still operational today, the Times reports. One NSA document from 2013 states that AT&T’s “corporate relationships provide unique accesses to other telecoms and ISPs.”

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