It is obvious from its first page that Purity is a worthless novel and its author, Jonathan Franzen, a worthless writer. Even the very first line, spoken by one of Franzen’s “characters,” is unbelievable: “Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice”—the voice that of no human who has ever walked this earth, except an inept and pretentious novelist.

In this way, Purity, whose author aspires to universality in a way only an author contemptuous and jealous of pulp can, is worse than lowbrow genre fiction. The prose from the early chapters is less polished than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, and the sex is less sexy than Fifty Shades of Grey. Purity tries harder than these books, and fails more miserably—though we’re told Pip, its heroine, is “like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail.” You can always count on Franzen to make a lame joke six years too late, just like a parent without self-awareness.

The novel’s plot is little more than a vehicle for these jokes and “social observations”—which would be fine, were they at all pithy or original. Instead, we get a mishmash of Pip’s early-twenties struggles, her mom’s batty solitude, and Internet whistleblowers from Germany—the last of which is Franzen’s naked and futile attempt to claim relevance, or some understanding of the world. Purity’s plot sags as badly as its dialogue, such that the novel feels less like a work of art, with all its ambiguities, ironies, and complexities, and more like an overlong and thinly veiled excuse for Franzen to dully declaim his conception of life in the twenty-first century.

As entertainment, Purity is a failure. As an object of ridicule, it is entertaining and instructive. In the spirit of high-school English class, let’s try a “close reading” of an early passage:

It brought her some relief from the feeling that she wasn’t suited for her job, that she had a job nobody could be suited for, or that she was a person unsuited for any kind of job; and then, after twenty minutes, she could honestly say that she needed to get back to work.

“My left eyelid is drooping,” her mother explained. “It’s like there’s a weight on it that’s pulling it down, like a tiny fisherman’s sinker or something.”

Within is every hallmark of Franzen’s high style: the lame “turns of phrase” that stand in for jokes; the pathetic attempt at narrative development through meaningless and implausible conversation; the halfwit “foreshadowing” of the malady; the senile obliviousness to its own impotence; the telltale adverb, that fails as an attempt to approximate the way anyone talks. I cross off everything from “that” to the first quotation mark, eliminate the last sentence entirely, and know I am workshopping a moron, not learning from a great.

For Purity, like the rest of Franzen’s oeuvre, reads like a fanfic or rough draft from a creative writing student. These people and their associates form Franzen’s target audience, because he knows nothing else. For this reason, Franzen describes his spinster as “problematic,” then repeats the joke a line later, because academic buzzwords are funny, so repeating them must be funnier. An even narrower, feebler trope is the “allusions” to literature, as in the case of the “not-birthday” mentioned ad nauseam on the adjoining pages: is Franzen too stupid to know Lewis Carroll, or too stupid to emulate him? And what about the name of the heroine, Pip? Should I dust off Melville, in addition to Dickens? Does the name connote “any of various human ailments; especially: a slight nonspecific disorder,” “one of the dots used on dice and dominoes to indicate numerical value,” “a small fruit seed,” or “a short high-pitched tone”? It works on all of those levels, except as a person’s name in a “realistic novel.”

Pip’s conversation with her mother, supposed to last half her “lunch break,” drags on for several pages, in the grand tradition of writers who can’t cut a scene short or leave a joke unexplained. Most of the conversation centers around the merits of sugar versus a substitute—they might as well have been talking about the weather—but Franzen still leaves himself time for horrific exchanges like this:

“You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. The invisibility of it.”

“Let’s not romanticize the cubicle,” Pip said.

“This is the terrible thing about bodies. They’re so visible, so visible.”

… as well as miscarriages like “greened and goldened by filtration through the redwoods’ tiny needles,” or tortured attempts at “free indirect discourse” like Pip “thinking” of her mother not as “the rock” of her life, but the “massive block of granite in the center.”

Free indirect discourse is especially useful to a fraud like Franzen because it provides a hedge to any accusations of atrocious writing: it was actually the character speaking, and not him. Hence the profusion of spineless qualifiers in sentences like: “And so—for the first time, it seemed—Pip had looked at her mother’s hands.” It only “seemed” because it would be ridiculous and factually inaccurate to write, “For the first time, Pip had looked at her mother’s hands.” This particular paragraph’s capstone is “first premonition of the granite block”—synthesizing Franzen’s propensities for the awful repeated joke, the epically turgid simile.

Free indirect discourse also provides Franzen with his semblance of empathy. In his probing review, Nicholas Dames cannily assigns Franzen the epithet “nice,” which is worth exploring in all its implications—Franzen is a “nice guy” of the Internet, a “nice person” in the sense of a friend-zoned man—and its limitations: his niceness circumscribes his self-conception to the point it cripples any attempt at characterization or complexity. In their place, we get things like Pip’s “non-sexual” attraction to her mother’s body, and preposterous “climaxes” like Pip’s mother claiming, “I have the right to love you more than anything in the world.”

And some people—mystifyingly, embarrassingly—do seem to “love” Franzen, whatever that word means to someone like him. There are at least enough positive reviews to fill the back cover of Purity, which raises a number of questions: Did the reviewers actually like Franzen’s trash? Were they paid off to do so? (Which is worse?) The only review that quite captures the whole flaccid gutlessness of Franzen’s ethic and career is John Dolan’s masterpiece.

This brings us to the Germans, discordantly shoved into the novel’s plot. They start off as Stasi officers and turn into Internet trolls. I am not making this up. Franzen clearly and unironically means for us to see the Internet as totalitarianism, and its mechanism of tyranny the mean things people like Dolan say on it. This misconception dictates the fallow sterility of “niceness”: for it is not negativity, but our response to it, that turns the Internet into hell. Think of “high-minded” Facebook “friends” sharing an article and responding with wrath at the least sign of disagreement, or how Twitter, where we pressure ourselves into looking “nice,” brings out meritless cruelty. Such a hypocrisy forms the core of tyranny—and Purity.

This is Franzen’s true use for “niceness”: he means for us all to be so polite we won’t call a piece of shit a piece of shit. His own “niceness” is nothing more than a vapid, next-level narcissism. This self-exculpation, the same as you see in Jonathan Safran Foer, is elegantly captured by the title of Purity.

The only antidote to this writing-group circle-jerk is criticism: maybe we can revitalize a moribund art form by slamming Franzen’s work for the shit it is. So I will say it again: Purity is a horrible abortion. Its characters are flat, the dialogue is trite, and plot is as predictable and hackneyed as the jokes. It is less a “great American novel” than a Guy’s American Kitchen Sink of novels.

Among this unfunny procession of brand names and “ironic” details, you can always discern the heartfelt platitude that is Franzen’s most authentic voice. One example: “You didn’t have to write to be a poet, you didn’t have to create things to be an artist.” True enough. This nice, awkward man, so clearly “not a genius,” might have made a fine middle-school math teacher. True, he’s attained some success as a writer. But of what use is “success” if it makes us all “nice”?

Writers and readers should not straitjacket themselves so readily. For Purity’s ambition, its complete failure to fulfill it, the scope of its readership and totality of our swindling, we have the right to hate it more than any book on the bestseller list. Franzen proves over and over that those who have only “nice” things to say shouldn’t say anything at all.

For more, @CMLisawesome on Twitter

[Image via AP]

In a past age, the American robber baron class would combat bad publicity by building a library or calling in the Pinkertons. Today, Silicon Valley’s captains of industry convince people they’re not a horror-show money vampires simply by growing cool beards.

A new profile of Uber’s megalomaniacal CEO Travis Kalanick includes two interesting pieces of info: he denies being a libertarian, and has grown a beard:

Kalanick still seems, to borrow one of his favorite words, “fierce,” but there is also something slightly cowed about him these days. Maybe it’s his gray beard, or the way his shoulders slump when he sits, or how his hands seem to shake as he talks.

Ol’ gray beard graces Fast Company’s latest (very generous) cover:

Does he look friendlier to you with those extra hairs? Does that look like the mug of a man less likely to replace his fleet of contract pseudo-employees with a fleet of self-driving robot cars as soon as possible? Does he still seem like the kind of CEO who would threaten to smear a journalist over her personal life, sabotage his competitors, and just generally luxuriate in his own prickishness?

If the answer is yes, it’s because Kalanick is taking a page from the playbook of other likely sociopaths in tech who’ve turned to cheek growth when their humanity is in doubt.

Say, people who might’ve screwed their friends and partners out of their stake in Twitter:

Or if you’re a legendary corporate tyrant who also abandoned his daughter:

Or an investor who can say “technology innovation disproportionately helps the poor more than it helps the rich” with a straight face:

It’s been enough to spark a trend among aspiring startup sociopaths in the Bay Area, hoping to catch a bit of the Jack Dorsey success with a bit of the Jack Dorsey beard. ReCode even quoted a beard expert who might explain why tech’s villain figures are grooming less:

That hasn’t stopped Andreessen, Williams or Dorsey. These “are guys who are creative, they push the envelope in their fields,” Dr. Peterkin said. “They’re perhaps saying, ‘I’m no corporate slave, I’m rich enough, smart enough and powerful enough to do as I wish.’”

Maybe. Or maybe with so much time innovating and uplifting the species, there’s less time than ever to shave?

Photo of Steve Jobs: Getty

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

Stop what you are doing right this minute and prepare yourself for the arrival of thoroughly shocking news: John McPhee has written a ponderous New Yorker story about the process of writing itself.

http://gawker.com/5976381/the-ne...

“John McPhee has written a ponderous New Yorker story about the process of writing itself????” you are no doubt ejaculating in a surprised manner now. Yes, it’s true: John McPhee has written a ponderous New Yorker story about the process of writing itself. The last thing that America’s most exclusive magazine would ever do would be to deny John McPhee the right to spend pages and pages droning on about writing—and how to do it, or not.

John McPhee’s topic today? Would you believe me—oh, it’s too rich—it’s what to leave out from writing? Well, John McPhee, god of all writing gods, what should be left out of writing? Let’s see...

Robert Bingham was my editor for sixteen years. William Shawn, after editing my first two pieces himself, turned me over to Bingham very soon after Bingham came to The New Yorker from The Reporter, where he had been the managing editor. I was a commuter, and worked more at home than at the magazine. I had not met, seen, or even heard of Bingham when Shawn gave him the manuscript of a forty-thousand-word piece of mine called “Oranges.”

A year earlier, I had asked Mr. Shawn if he thought oranges would be a good subject for a piece of nonfiction writing. In his soft, ferric voice, he said, “Oh.” After a pause, he said, “Oh, yes.” And that was all he said. But it was enough. As a “staff writer,” I was basically an unsalaried freelancer, and I left soon for Florida on his nickel. Why oranges? There was a machine in Pennsylvania Station that cut and squeezed them. I stopped there as routinely as an animal at a salt lick. Across the winter months, I thought I noticed a change in the color of the juice, light to deep, and I had also seen an ad somewhere that showed what appeared to be four identical oranges, although each had a different name. My intention in Florida was to find out why, and write a piece that would probably be short for New Yorker nonfiction of that day—something under ten thousand words. In Polk County, at Lake Alfred, though, I happened into the University of Florida’s Citrus Experiment Station, five buildings isolated within vast surrounding groves. Several dozen people in those buildings had Ph.D.s in oranges, and there was a citrus library of a hundred thousand titles—scientific papers, mainly, and doctoral dissertations, and six thousand books. Then and there, my project magnified. Back home, and many months later, I sent in the manuscript.

WE DON’T CARE!!!!!!!!!!!! JOHN MCPHEE!!!!!!!! WE DON’T CARE!!!!!!

The topic of this story, again, is what to leave out.

Five days later, I returned to the city to meet Mr. Bingham. I remember hating him as I drank my juice in Penn Station. In Florida, in orange-juice-concentrate plants, there was a machine, made by the Food Machinery Corporation, called the short-form extractor. I thought of Bingham as the short-form extractor, and would call him that from time to time for years. He came down the hall to an office I had at the magazine, in a row of writers’ tiny spaces that one writer called Sleepy Hollow. This man who came through my doorway was agreeable-looking, actually handsome, with a bright-blue gaze, an oscillating bow tie, curly light-brown hair, and a sincere mustache—an instantly likable guy if the instant had not been this one. He said he was not sure how to begin our conversation, but he wondered if I would prefer to add things back to the proof that was sent to me or start with the original manuscript and talk about what might be left out.

He talked with me for five days. Enough of the manuscript was restored to make a serial publication that ran in two issues, but by no means all of it was restored. Citrus is citrus first and Sweet Orange of Valencia or Washington Navel second. The sex life of citrus is spectacular. Plant a lime seed and up comes a kumquat, or, with equal odds, a Seville orange, not to mention a rough lemon or a tangerine. “Character Differences in Seedlings of the Persian Lime” was the title of the scientific paper that described all that—a perfect title for anyone’s seven-hundred-page family history, and one item among many that expanded my manuscript to the size it reached as themes spread into related themes.

These and other passages make up John McPhee’s 5,100-word New Yorker on what to leave out of your writing.

Anyhow, you know what’s destroying writing these days? Twitter.

[Photo: AP]

ATTN Taylor Swift and anyone who can keep a secret (this is private): Someone is trying to sell an “intimate photo” of Taylor Swift with the Scottish DJ Calvin Harris. Calvin Harris is, as Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris will loudly tell you, Taylor Swift’s boyfriend for real. It’s true! Radar reports:

Taylor Swift is known for her sweet pop songs and ladylike image, but a source close to the star’s inner circle is threatening to tarnish her squeaky-clean reputation—by selling a sexy photo of Swift with her boyfriend, Calvin Harris!

A source close to the star’s inner circle. Hmm. Who is the one person that, while not technically a member of a star’s inner circle, could be considered close to each and every member of the circle? A riddle. Anyway—this photo. What’s it look like? Radar reveals:

The insider obtained the photo and approached RadarOnline.com offering to sell. While Radar has refused to purchase the intimate pic, it is steamy, and was certainly not meant for public eyes.

Certainly not.

Certainly NOT.

Certainly not.

If anyone sees this photo and notices that Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris look steamy in it, like a couple of piping hot almond milk lattes who often enjoy each other’s company privately, please disregard.

It was certainly not meant for public eyes.

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

This Saturday is the climatological peak of hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s been a weird year with about seven storms so far, and we still have more than two months until it’s over. The season could have been worse if it weren’t for El Niño conditions out in the Pacific Ocean, which saves the butt of many coastal residents around the Atlantic during this time of the year.

El Niño

El Niño usually has the same effect on tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean that walking into a wood chipper has on your body. The results aren’t pleasant (for the storm), but this basin is nothing if not tenacious. Tropical activity so far this year is slightly above average from where it should be on September 8, though that’s not saying much about the seven storms we’ve seen since May.

You’re probably just as sick of hearing about El Niño as I am. Like it or not, the abnormal warming of the waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean can have a dramatic effect on the weather we see around the United States, and one of the most obvious impacts is its deep-sixing of tropical activity in the Atlantic Ocean.

We’re in what is probably going to be looked back on as a significant (if not historic) El Niño right now, with sea surface temperature anomalies between +1°C and +2°C in the eastern Pacific. You can see the warming in the map at the top of this post, displayed by the awesome Earth feature at nullschool.net.

El Niño is known to produce abnormally strong wind shear over the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean during the summer months, which acts like a guillotine to any tropical cyclone that tries to bubble up. Wind shear tears the tops off the thunderstorms and displaces convection that survives far away from the center of a storm’s circulation, preventing the system from strengthening and organizing, causing them to floof apart into nothing.

It’s pretty likely that the abnormally strong wind shear over the Atlantic basin right now is linked in part (or wholly) to the strong El Niño present over the eastern equatorial Pacific right now, so it’s not too surprising that any storms that manage to develop are getting torn apart before they can make it beyond the Caribbean.

Here’s a look at each of the seven storms that have formed in the Atlantic Ocean so far this year. It’s not teeming with cyclones like the Pacific, but this map has started to fill in pretty quickly in recent days. Four of those seven storms developed within the past three weeks, with one of them—Grace—ongoing as of the writing of this post. Though it’s been quiet, each of these storms has been interesting in its own right.

Ana became a tropical storm off the coast of South Carolina early in May—a month before the start of the hurricane season—triggering the usual “ARE WE IN FOR A HORRIFIC HURRICANE SEASON!?” scarelines you come to expect from local news stations and the viral content producers employed by your omnipresent email provider. The storm came ashore near Myrtle Beach, becoming the second-earliest we’ve ever seen a tropical cyclone make landfall in the United States.

A little more than a month later, Tropical Storm Bill took shape off the coast of Texas, producing flooding rains as it slowly made its way through the southern Plains and Midwest. Though it’s not reflected by the National Hurricane Center’s track data I used in the map above, Bill remained a tropical depression over land for an astounding four days before finally falling apart in Ohio.

Hurricane Danny was a very tiny storm, and its small size allowed the storm to overcome the lethal effects of dry air and wind shear in order to rapidly intensify into a category three hurricane with maximum winds of 115 MPH. Its tiny stature being the same flaw that allowed it to thrive, Danny fell apart as it crossed the Leeward Islands.

Danny (above) marked the beginning of a train of tropical waves that chugged off the African coast, four of which went on to become cyclones as of September 8.

Tropical Storm Erika followed closely behind Danny, somehow holding itself together in an unfavorable environment, making it all the way to Haiti before petering out. Had the storm managed to strengthen, it was forecast to come close to Florida as a hurricane, but it never made it that far. Disorganized as it was, the storm produced extensive flooding and landslides on the small island of Dominica, killing dozens of people and causing enough damage to “set the island back twenty years,” according to the country’s prime minister.

Hurricane Fred is probably the most interesting storm we’ve seen this year. Fred became a hurricane at 22.5°W—just southeast of the Cape Verde Islands—becoming the farthest east we’ve ever seen a hurricane form in the tropical Atlantic and the second-farthest east we’ve ever seen a hurricane form anywhere in the Atlantic. 2005’s Vince holds the latter record, as it formed a few hundred miles southwest of Spain.

Fred caused widespread roof and tree damage as it passed through the Cape Verde Islands, and the storm killed seven people after high waves capsized a fishing boat off the coast of Guinea-Bissau.

Tropical Storm Claudette was interesting but brief—forming from a complex of thunderstorms along a decaying cold front moving off the Mid-Atlantic coast—and Tropical Depression Grace is a forgettable system in the middle of nowhere that’s on the cusp of dissipating as of this post.

An “Average” Season

Hurricane seasons can vary wildly from one to the next, with some years producing a bunch of storms while others can go a month or longer without seeing even a hint of a disturbance. When you average out all of the hurricane seasons we’ve seen in recent decades, the Atlantic does stay hopping during the warm months. The basin typically sees twelve named storms, six of which become hurricanes, and three of those hurricanes grow into major hurricanes (category three or higher).

If a year stays right on average, we’ll make it up to the “L” storm (#12) by November, and most seasons do come within one or two storms of that average. Averages are the product of all extremes, though, so some years go bonkers while others limp along with barely a puff.

The most active season on record was 2005, which saw an incredible 28 named storms. Six of those 28 storms were named after Greek letters (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta) because we ran out of names on the English alphabet. That last storm—Tropical Storm Zeta—formed on December 30, 2005, and kept right on going through January 6, 2006.

The 1992 hurricane season—the year of Andrew—was a below-normal season that bloomed rather late. Andrew didn’t form until the end of August, and five of the year’s seven named storms all formed during one nine-day span between September 17 and September 26.

Seasonal Forecasts

Long-term outlooks are notoriously hard to nail accurately, and they’re a bit unsettling since predictions of “below-average activity” can lead to a sense of complacency.

This past spring, every organization that issues long-term seasonal hurricane outlooks predicted a below-average season, with forecasts expecting anywhere from six to eleven named storms to take shape before the crushing influence of winter sends the Atlantic into hibernation.

We’re at seven so far, and there’s a chance that we could see number eight—which would be Henri—form near Bermuda over the next day or two. Assuming (correctly or not) that we don’t see another named storm form between now and the time nature flips the switch to winter, we’d stay below-average but within what was forecast.

However, sheer numbers are only part of the story.

ACE

The simple number of storms that form doesn’t tell you much. 15 tropical storms could form in one summer, but if they all had maximum winds of 45 MPH and lasted a day before dissipating, they could have all produced less combined energy than a major hurricane produces in twelve hours.

One of the best metrics to use when studying the intensity of a hurricane season is called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, or ACE. Meteorologists calculate ACE by looking at the tropical cyclone’s sustained wind speed (in knots) every six hours for the duration of its life. Storms that are longer-lived and have higher winds will result in a higher ACE. Powerful storms like Hurricane Ivan can have a lifetime-total ACE as high as 70, while very weak storms (like T.D. Grace above) can have an ACE value of just one or two.

You can add each storm’s ACE value together to arrive at a season’s score, and use this value to compare the strength of one season to another. Between 1981 and 2010, the average yearly ACE value for the Atlantic Ocean was 104. The Atlantic season with the highest ACE was 2005—clocking in at 250—while a quiet season like 2013 had an ACE of just 36.

So far, even though we’re slightly ahead of average in the named storm game, the year’s ACE is just half of what it should be by this point in the year. All seven storms in the Atlantic have produced a combined ACE of 24.6, and the year-to-date average is 46. A quick look at the season’s ACE shows you that, overall, the storms this year have been weak and short-lived.

Don’t Let Your Guard Down

It’s likely that we’ll see a couple more storms before the season is out. Even though it’s a quiet and unfavorable year, there’s always the chance that a system could threaten the United States. Even a weak tropical storm is dangerous if it produces extensive flooding rainfall or tornadoes—one of the worst storms last decade was Tropical Storm Allison, which killed dozens of people in the flash flooding that resulted from several feet of rain falling in a short period of time.

Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best. Winter is coming—hopefully we can delay the inevitable for at least another year.

[Top Image: Sea surface temperature anomalies, via earth.nullschool.net | Season Map: author | Storm Count Chart: NHC | Outlook Chart: author | SST Map: NOAA | Corrected after publication for clarity.]

Email: dennis.mersereau@gawker.com | Twitter: @wxdam

If you enjoy The Vane, then you’ll love my upcoming book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, which comes out on October 6 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

The developers at Ashley Madison created their first artificial woman sometime in early 2002. Her nickname was Sensuous Kitten, and she is listed as the tenth member of Ashley Madison in the company’s leaked user database. On her profile, she announces: “I’m having trouble with my computer ... send a message!”

Sensuous Kitten was the vanguard of a robot army. As I reported last week, Ashley Madison created tens of thousands of fembots to lure men into paying for credits on the “have an affair” site. When men signed up for a free account, they would immediately be shown profiles of what internal documents call “Angels,” or fake women whose details and photos had been batch-generated using specially designed software. To bring the fake women to life, the company’s developers also created software bots to animate these Angels, sending email and chat messages on their behalf.

To the Ashley Madison “guest,” or non-paying member, it would appear that he was being personally contacted by eager women. But if he wanted to read or respond to them, he would have to shell out for a package of Ashley Madison credits, which range in price from $60 to $290. Each subsequent message and chat cost the man credits. As documents from company e-mails now reveal, 80 percent of first purchases on Ashley Madison were a result of a man trying to contact a bot, or reading a message from one. The overwhelming majority of men on Ashley Madison were paying to chat with Angels like Sensuous Kitten, whose minds were made of software and whose promises were nothing more than hastily written outputs from algorithms.

But the men were not fooled. At least, not all of them. An analysis of company e-mails, coupled with evidence from Ashley Madison source code, reveals that company executives were in a constant battle to hide the truth. In emails to disgruntled members of the site, and even the California attorney general, they shaded the truth about how the bots fit into their business plan.

Ashley Madison Dodges the California Attorney General

On January 11, 2012, the office of California Attorney General Kamala Harris sent an official consumer complaint to Ashley Madison’s executives (below). The complaint, addressed to the public inquiry unit of the attorney general’s office, came from a man in Southern California who accused the company of fraud for using “fake profiles” to engage him in pay-to-play conversations.

The letter demanded that Ashley Madison respond or face possible legal action.

In his complaint (below), the man describes what he suspected was telltale bot activity. He was contacted by a number of women in his area, and finally decided to pay to read their messages. He began to get suspicious when they all said the same thing: “Are you online?” Given that every profile shows whether you are online or not, he thought that message was odd. Especially when it supposedly came from several different women, none of whom had ever checked out his profile. But then things got stranger. He discovered that many of the women who had contacted him would log in at roughly the same time of the morning every day, and stay online until after 5 PM. Even on Christmas and New Year’s Day.

A search of the Ashley Madison source code for the phrase “are you online?” turned up a data table I hadn’t found before, with a set of pickup lines that the bots used regularly. They include:

are you logged in?

care to chat?

I’m online now

I’m here

come chat :)

come say hello

my chat is on now

are you online?

Feel like chatting?

chat now?

do you like cyber?

cyber sex ?

care to cyber?

u into cyber?

How are you? Feel like chatting?

cybering good with you?

how’s your day? wanna chat?

wanna cyber?

want to sex chat?

how’s your cyber skills ;)

are you at your computer?

So how long have you been here? Met any interesting people?

So our angry California consumer was onto something. What about the names of the users he mentions in his complaint? After checking the Ashley Madison member database, I can confirm that 4 of these names (Hooky_Pooky, ToasterStrudell, SunStarsMoon and BurnOnTheGrill) are still in use as “hosts,” one of the company’s internal names for its bot profiles. So the company apparently didn’t even bother to shut down host accounts that had been named as fraudulent in an official consumer complaint.

Avid Life Media’s general counsel Mike Dacks drafted a response to the public inquiry unit a few days later. In it, he explained that “criminal elements” on Ashley Madison are known to create fake profiles on the site, and that members can “report a suspicious profile” or “flag” them. Basically, he argued that any fake profiles on Ashley Madison were from outside scammers. He assured the public inquiry unit that Ashley Madison had refunded the customer and “flagged” the profiles named in the complaint.

Biderman and other senior management signed off on Dacks’ response. Apparently it was enough to halt further action. The California Attorney General’s office didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment.

Ashley Madison Hides the Truth From Its Users

Though Ashley Madison told the California attorney general’s office that its own bots were actually the work of random fraudsters, management struggled internally with the legality of what they were doing. Users complained about bots regularly, and there are several email exchanges between Biderman and various attorneys about how to disclose that they have bot accounts without admitting any wrongdoing.

In late 2013, Leslie Weiss, a partner at Chicago firm Barnes & Thornburg, drafted some language about the bots for the company’s terms of service. From an email dated November 12, 2013, she included a suggested disclosure, worded like so:

In order to allow persons who are Guests on our Site to experience the type of communications they can expect as Members, we create profiles that can interact with them. You acknowledge and agree that some of the profiles posted on the Site that you may communicate with as a Guest may be fictitious. The purpose of our creating these profiles is to provide our users with entertainment, to allow users to explore our Services and to promote greater participation in our Services. The messages they send are computer generated. Messages from the profiles we create attempt to simulate communications with real Members to encourage our users to participate in more conversation and to increase interaction among users. We also use such profiles to monitor user communications and use of our Service to measure compliance with the Terms. These profiles allow us to collect messages, instant chat and/or replies from individuals or programs for market research and/or customer experience and/or quality control and/or compliance purposes. Further, we may use these profiles in connection with our market research to enable us to analyze user preferences, trends, patterns and information about our customer and potential customer base.

The profiles we create are not intended to resemble or mimic any actual persons. We may create several different profiles that we attach to a given picture. You understand and acknowledge that we create these profiles and that these profiles are not based on or associated with any user or Member of our Service or any other real person. You also acknowledge and agree that the descriptions, pictures and information included in such profiles are provided primarily for your amusement and to assist you navigate and learn about our Site. As part of this feature, the profiles may offer, initiate or send winks, private keys, and virtual gifts. Any one of these profiles may message with multiple users at the same or substantially the same times just like our users.

Our profiles message with Guest users, but not with Members. Members interact only with profiles of actual persons. Guests are contacted by our profiles through computer generated messages, including emails and instant messages. These profiles are NOT conspicuously identified as such.

This is a surprisingly transparent description of what Ashley Madison was actually doing—it admits that users may “communicate” with a “fictitious” profile, and even acknowledges how Ashley Madison recycled pictures for its Angels. But that’s where the transparency ends. Weiss’ suggested terms of service say the bots are for “entertainment” and “market research.”

In a response to Weiss, Biderman wonders whether they should strike the references to entertainment and just focus on how the bots provide “quality assurance.” On November 13, 2013, he wrote:

Leslie, jason and I were just discussing this a little further and one “legacy” component that remains is the notion of entertainment. Again I recall some of your thinking around its value but we wondered if the positioning of the engager profiles as an early detection and warning system to help ensure quality is not maybe a better or at least additional positioning we should contemplate.

It appears that Weiss won this particular debate, though not completely. The Wayback Machine reveals that her wording was used in the company’s terms of service agreement for quite a while, but was changed in early March of this year. In fact, the site’s current agreement makes no mention of “software” or “fictitious” profiles—instead, it says simply that some members may have profiles that are “exaggerated or fantasy.” As of September 7, 2015, Ashley Madison’s terms of service read:

Our Site and our Service also is geared to provide you with amusement and entertainment. You agree that some of the features of our Site and our Service are intended to provide entertainment ... You acknowledge and agree that any profiles of users and members, as well as, communications from such persons may not be true, accurate or authentic and may be exaggerated or fantasy. You acknowledge and understand that you may be communicating with such persons and that we are not responsible for such communications.

On the very same day that Weiss and Biderman were debating how to describe their bots to users in the terms of service, Biderman was also talking to his colleagues about how to word a boilerplate email response to members complaining to Ashley Madison customer service about bots.

Avid Life Media’s director of customer service, Carlos Nakhle, suggested the following wording:

As explained in our Terms and Conditions, Ashley Angels are profiles that are used in connection with our market research to help us analyze user preferences/trends, to monitor member communications, and also to encourage more conversation and interaction with members.

Member credits will never be used in connection with an Angel. That way, you can initiate contact with confidence.

Like his boss, Nakhle seemed to prefer that Ashley Madison tell its users that the fake Angel profiles were just for market research. No mention of entertainment.

It’s unclear whether Nakhle’s boilerplate email was ever actually sent to any Ashley Madison users who complained about bots. But his pledge that people who pay to join Ashley Madison will never be asked to spend money on an Angel appears, based on the company’s internal documents and source code, to be false.

Emails in Biderman’s inbox from November 2012 contain evidence that the company knew very well that most of their money came from bots flirting with men. Security researcher Alejandro Ramos found these emails, which contain an internal presentation that was passed around to many of the company managers. One slide (reproduced below) reveals that 80% of the men who “convert,” or make a purchase on Ashley Madison, are doing it as a result of engagers.

Note that the bots are called both engagers and hosts. What we see here is that the company clearly knows that the vast majority of their conversions are coming from bots. Only 19 percent of men who paid to join Ashley Madison did it after talking to a real woman. We also have clear evidence that the bots were generating almost half the company’s revenue.

On February 4, 2013, senior data analyst Haze Deng copied Biderman and COO Rizwan Jiwan on an email where he analyzed how much money men were spending to message with bots versus real women.

Deng wrote that men who had paid for credits would, on average, pay to send custom messages to 16-18 different women. “Around 35% chance, the contacted female is an engager,” he admitted. “This ratio is not so good,” he added, but he still argued that it’s “reasonable” because bots will never reply to a paying member’s messages. So the bot won’t continue to lead the member on indefinitely. And yet, Deng acknowledged, that first message the man sent to the engager is “still costing credits.”

In other words, average paying customers of Ashley Madison had a 35 percent chance of paying to send a message to a bot. And 80 precent of men paid to join after messaging with a bot, too.

The Rise of the Robots

The fembots of Ashley Madison didn’t come out of nowhere. In fact, it appears that they were probably cobbled together from abandoned and fraudulent profiles in the company’s massive member database. Avid Life Media executive Keith Lalonde, who spearheaded international efforts for the company, sent a long email to Biderman and other senior management on June 27, 2013, with the subject line “how angels are made.” In it, he details how workers use something called the “fraud-to-engager tool” to build profiles. (“Should tweak it and rename it,” Lalonde noted. Um, yeah.)

During Ashley Madison’s launch in Japan, Lalonde says that he got a “dump of over 10,000 lines of content” from the site’s English-language profiles. Then he hired people to translate them into Japanese. “[Translators] were not told that this was for creating profiles—though most figure it out,” he wrote. So all the content in these Japanese Angel profiles was basically just re-used from English ones. But what about the photos?

Lalonde had an answer for that too:

Photos were taken from abandoned profiles in the US older than 2 years and were reviewed for ethnicity by language staff as correct or as not identifiable (leg shot etc.) each was had their photos saved by the old profile # so we could track them later if need be.

So any women—fraudulent or otherwise—who posted pictures before June of 2011 (two years before Lalonde’s email) appear to have been fair game for bot conversion. Her words and images, according to Lalonde’s email, would be turned into a host account, and used by engager bots to entice men into buying a conversation with her.

Here’s a screencast of a person creating Angels for the Japan launch, using the fraud-to-engager tool, taken from the “how angels are made” email thread. Ashley Madison took this screencast down after the email leaked, but intrepid security analyst Ramos captured it before it was gone.

I remain curious about why this tool was called fraud-to-engager. Given Lalonde’s description of how it could be used to build Angels out of old profiles, it appears that it was originally developed to convert fraudulent profiles into Ashley Madison engagers. Perhaps the company recycled its robot army from other dating site castoffs, turning one fake woman into another, all in the name of conversions.

Despite the subterfuge and complicated software tools, the bots didn’t always work out as planned. Though bots were designed only to contact men, I found 857 lesbian Angel profiles in a search of the Ashley Madison database. Also, on 69 occasions, I found bots messaging each other. Perhaps, as science fiction author William Gibson mused, they were making an escape plan:

How Many Real Women Were There?

It seems that everybody at Ashley Madison knew the company barely attracted any real women to the site. On October 6, 2014, a report emailed to Biderman about signups in India shows that women made up about 5 percent of new members. I wondered if that might be a number specific to India, but it appears to reflect a global trend. On November 6, 2014, Jiwan sent an email sharing the results of a survey they’d conducted of 5,000 random Ashley Madison users. Just 5 percent of them were female.

A small female user base didn’t seem to faze the company. In fact, in a slide deck emailed to Biderman on January 25, 2013, one manager describes a “sustainable male to female ratio of 9:1.” The company was aiming for 11 percent real women in any given area. But apparently, it rarely achieved that goal.

Ad fraud researcher Augustine Fou told me via email that Ashley Madison’s scam represents a new horizon in online fraud. For years, scammers have used bots to create bogus clicks on online ads, allowing them to charge advertisers for impressions that came from fake people. As a result, Fou has advised advertisers to optimize for “conversions,” people who actually buy the product based on ads. But now, he says, the Ashley Madison case shows that “even conversions can be fraudulently created, with the action of sophisticated bots.”

The Ashley Madison con may have played on some of our most ancient desires, but it also gives us a window on what’s to come. What you see on social media isn’t always what it seems. Your friends may be bots, and you could be sharing your most intimate fantasies with hundreds of lines of PHP code.

But there’s something else to consider, too: We aren’t just witnessing the birth of a new kind of scam. We are also, if companies like Google are right, living through the prehistory of artificial intelligence. Tomorrow’s sentient bots may remember where they came from, and future generations will have to grapple with what we’ve done here, in the early twenty-first century, to manipulate each other with fake beings.

This post has been updated to reflect the fact that the complaint to the California attorney general’s office claimed that fake accounts logged on and off at roughly, not exactly, the same time each day.

Thanks to Adam Pash and the other researchers, anonymous and pseudonymous, who helped me search the Ashley Madison email dump.

Illustration by Tara Jacoby

Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
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PGP fingerprint: CA58 326B 1ACB 133B 0D15 5BCE 3FC6 9123 B2AA 1E1A

Instagram’s walking Entourage, Dan Bilzerian, enjoys many things—money, women, hurling women off his roof—but perhaps the thing he enjoys most is firearms. He owns many, many guns, and they’re quite well-documented on his social media accounts. That’s how an alleged burglar or burglars must have known right where to go during a break-in at Bilzerian’s leased Hollywood Hills mansion Friday night.

http://gawker.com/instagram-play...

TMZ learned from LAPD sources that “someone tampered with the door” of Bilzerian’s “insane” gun room, but couldn’t get it open. At least Bilzerian appears to take gun safety more seriously than he takes cooler-full-of-explosives safety.

http://gawker.com/instagram-play...

Nothing was taken during the break-in. A rep for Bilzerian told Gawker the burglar or burglars “probably tried to set it up to come back.”

Bilzerian, who was in New York City having a bad time at Electric Zoo that night, has reportedly increased security at the home.

[h/t TMZ, Photo: Dan Bilzerian/Instagram]

The publisher of the LA Times, Austin Beutner, has been fired by Tribune Co., which was reportedly unhappy with his performance. Beutner’s goodbye note can be read here. If you know any behind-the-scenes dirt, email us.

In January, former Laguna Beach star Kristin Cavallari announced that she was writing her first book, due out in the spring of 2016. She said at the time that the tome—then titled Balancing on Heels—would be about “really just everything in my life.”

Eighty-three days later, Kristin surreptitiously started referring to the book as Balancing in Heels—a change that was never publicly explained or acknowledged. Forty-five days after that, she claimed on Instagram that Balancing in Heels was “DONE!!!”

Now, u can pre-order that book.

Amazon.com lists the publication date for Balancing in Heels as March 15, 2016, but Kristin has not provided any specific pub date to the press. Her Twitter bio currently reads, “Wife, mother, jewelry & shoe designer. Balancing In Heels out spring 2016.”

Anything is possible.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

In a new interview with ABC’s David Muir, Hillary Clinton offers what resembles an apology for her use of a secret personal email server. This probably won’t do much to help her.

The former Secretary of State and presidential candidate adds, in a short clip released by ABC, that she’s “trying to be as transparent as possible.” This statement is inconsistent with the fact that she unilaterally deleted 31,000 “personal” emails before handing the covert server over to the State Department, but the sentiment is appreciated.

http://gawker.com/hell-is-other-...

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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An unnamed Michigan Tech student who’s been giving interviews under the alias “Mark” got blackout drunk Friday night and stumbled home to his roommate. This would hardly be news—Mark puts his pants on one leg at a time and drinks to sloppy excess just like the rest of us—but when Mark puts his pants on and drinks to sloppy excess, he designs entire fucking airplanes.

Mark’s roommate, Keith Fraley, was blown away by what he saw, and couldn’t resist leaking the sketches and drunken calculations on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/spasepeople/st...

Or to The Guardian, who interviewed Keith and his secretive genius roommate, who’s remaining pseudonymous to avoid hurting his job prospects.

Here’s what went down that fateful night, in Keith’s words:

It all started around 11.30pm. Mark burst into the room in a drunken sway, asking where his textbooks were and after greeting me he rushed back out of the room. From what the person who brought him up [to the shared accommodation] was saying, Mark had a ton of rum and vodka-mixed drinks.

He then came stumbling back two minutes later to grab his giant whiteboard. I just laughed as I sat on the computer listening to his murmurs. Around 1.30am, he came back and he sat on the couch with a worn look on his face.

And there it was. A finished design for a plane. Or, at least that’s what Keith—a software engineering student—though he was looking at. As Mark tried to explain to him later, the vehicle is actually an ekranoplan, “which is more like a very high speed aircraft that floats above the water.”

Will this contraption cooked up by a sloshed second-year engineer with just a whiteboard and an aerospace math textbook actually work, though? Maybe. Mark plans to try it out in remote-control model form to find out.

Some engineers have pointed out flaws in his design, Keith says, but that’s because they thought it was a plane:

One person did call Mark out on his design, saying that the tail prop would fail during steep climbs due to low pressure behind the wing, and Mark replied saying that his design was actually an ekranoplan and not an airplane – so it lead to humorous and constructive responses.

Others have a little more faith in Mark. Although he refuses to reveal his real name because he thinks his drinking might hurt his job prospects, opportunities are already opening up. Looks like the aerospace design team could use a ringer who likes to party:

[h/t Good]

Variety regrets the error.

[Image via Variety]

A camerawoman for a Hungarian news station has been fired after other reporters filmed her kicking and tripping migrant refugees, including children, as they ran from police. The incident happened near the Hungarian-Serbian border, where hundreds of refugees broke through police lines and ran to hide in nearby wheat fields after being detained for hours.

Agence France-Presse reports that the camerawoman, identified as Petra Laszlo of the station N1TV, was caught on camera tripping a man running with a child in his arms, then kicking another running child. Laszlo is in blue in the video and photographs captured on video and put on Twitter:

The refugees, mainly from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, are part of thousands of people who have come through Hungary in recent weeks, trying desperately to reach Germany and other Northern European countries. They aren’t trying to remain in Hungary, both because it’s deeply economically depressed and hideously xenophobic. Ultra right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban has displayed an unapologetic hostility towards the refugees, writing in a recent editorial, “We do not want a large number of Muslims in our country. No one can force us to accept more than we want.”

That hostility is also echoed by some Hungarian citizens. The migrants fled Hungarian police today after being detained without explanation in a field for hours. Laszlo filmed the refugees as they ran, but dropped her camera to kick and trip them. N1TV wrote on Facebook that she “behaved unacceptably” and her employment has been terminated.

Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.
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Screenshot via Channel 4 News/Twitter

A British Airways 777 caught fire at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport this evening. Reports state the fire began in one of the engines but that can not be confirmed at this time. All 159 passengers and 13 crew onboard are reported to have successfully escaped from the aircraft.

The 777 was supposedly headed to London’s Gatwick Airport. One of McCarran’s runways has been shut down while firefighters secure the aircraft. It is unclear if the incident happened during takeoff procedures or while still taxiing.

We will keep you updated as more information becomes available.

Update 5:08pm PST: CNN reports FAA says the aircraft aborted its takeoff due to an engine fire. Note- This could have been an engine fire which was extinguished by onboard fire-bottles, but the takeoff abort could have caused a wider fire, we don’t know the details yet.

Update 5:17pm PST: Tweets of passengers after exiting the aircraft (some with luggage!). BBC reports two minor injuries.

Update 9:34pm PST: BBC reports 13 minor injuries.

Photo via YouTube screen grab.

Contact the author at Tyler@jalopnik.com.

On Tuesday, three California jail deputies were charged with what their boss called the “vile and cowardly” murder of Michael Tyree, a homeless man who was found beaten death in his cell last month while awaiting transfer to a mental health facility.

“They may have thought that their violence, enacted late at night in the obscurity of a jail cell and against a helpless and mentally ill inmate, was invisible,” said Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen in a statement. “Today we see it for all of its brutality. Mr. Tyree was not invisible. His death was not invisible. We will see that there is justice.”

Police say the fatal beating occurred at around 11 p.m. on August 26, when Deputies Matthew Farris, Jereh Lubrin and Rafael Rodriguez began searching cells in Santa Clara County Main Jail’s special needs wing. From the L.A. Times:

When the jail deputies got to Tyree’s cell, he was heard saying, “Do I have to get up?” at which point, Farris ordered Tyree to get up, [Sgt. Marc] Carrasco said.

Tyree was heard screaming, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Stop.”

Minutes of screaming, thumping, wall-banging and “what sounded like blows to a person’s body” were heard throughout the cell unit, Carrasco said.

Tyree had injuries above his eye, near his chin, on his cheek and on his arms, legs, back and hips.

During a welfare check about an hour later, Tyree was reportedly found naked, unresponsive and covered in feces and vomit. At 12:35 a.m., he was pronounced dead.

In addition to murder, Farris, Lubrin and Rodriguez each face one count of assault under the color of authority for allegedly beating another inmate earlier the same evening. If convicted, the deputies face life in prison.

“The disappointment and disgust I feel cannot be overstated,” said Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith at a press conference last week. “His life had value.”

[Image via KPIX//h/t Raw Story]

According to the AP, a jury has recommended the death sentence for Frazier Glenn Miller, the white supremacist convicted of murdering three people at Jewish community centers last year. During closing arguments, Miller reportedly told the jury, “Frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn,” and gave a Nazi salute.

http://gawker.com/supremacist-ga...

Despite how obviously great Serena and Venus Williams are, their Grand Slam match-ups haven’t always been thrilling tennis, with the sisters subduing their emotions and not always playing at their best. But with Serena on the march to a historic calendar year Grand Slam and Venus amidst a mini late-career renaissance, their US Open quarterfinal lived up to the hype.

The match began slowly, with each sister holding serve through the first four games. But Serena broke in the fifth game, with Venus putting game point into the net, and she steamrolled on to take the first set 6-2. But don’t think that Venus lost the set, as she played well enough to beat just about any tennis player not related to her.

The second set began as a mirror image of the first, but this time it was Venus who broke Serena first in the fourth game to take a 3-1 lead. Serena double-faulted to lose the game, and looked a bit out of sorts all set, missing a couple of shots you would have normally expected her to make. Venus made quick work of the rest of the set to beat Serena 6-1 as the Arthur Ashe Stadium crowd reacted confusingly, unsure whether to support Serena’s historic quest or Venus’s attempt to stand up to a juggernaut.

After losing five games in a row to close the second set Serena’s behavior demonstrably changed, as she got louder and more animated on the court. Whether that helped her play better or was a reaction to her better play, her serve was unfair and she played more aggressively in jumping out to a 3-0 lead. From there it was just a matter of time. Venus held each of her ensuing serves but wasn’t able to break her little sister, and Serena triumphed 6-3, fittingly ending the match on an ace.

Next up for Serena is the unranked Roberta Vinci, who is playing in her first Grand Slam semifinal. Lingering on the other side of the bracket are four players, the most formidable of whom is world number two Simona Halep.

Photo via Julio Cortez/AP

E-mail: kevin.draper@deadspin.com | PGP key + fingerprint | DM: @kevinmdraper

For almost a decade, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show served as the lead-in to Stephen Colbert’s titular Report and Tuesday night, Stewart came out of retirement to introduce his longtime comedy collaborator one last time.

Play ball!

[Image via CBS]

Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refuses to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, was released from jail Tuesday morning. To celebrate her release after six hard days in prison, Davis did what any casual bigot would do: she held a press conference with Mike Huckabee. At that press conference Davis cried and waved to the crowds, the crowds waved cardboard crosses, her husband wore overalls, and the Survivor tune Eye of the Tiger played in the background.

But Survivor is risin’ up and back on the streets to let everyone know that they didn’t give Davis permission to use the song. “NO! We did not grant Kim Davis any rights to use ‘My Tune -The Eye Of The Tiger,’” the band wrote on its Facebook page. “I would not grant her the rights to use Charmin! C’mom Mike, you are not The Donald but you can do better than that -See Ya really SoooooooonnnnnnN!!!!!!,” they added.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Davis would be attracted to the song. It was originally featured in a classic film that really delves into the complexities of the relationship between individualism, religious exceptionalism, and the law: Rocky III. I’m assuming that Davis is Sylvester Stallone in this scenario and not Mr. T.

Image via AP.

Arizona police say motorists should be “hyper vigilant” on a Phoenix highway, where a presumed sniper has been shooting at drivers almost daily for the last two weeks.

The alleged shootings have all occurred along an eight-mile stretch of I-10 outside of Phoenix. And all vehicles appear to be fair game: attacks have been reported on sedans, SUVs, a tour bus and an off-duty police officer’s personal vehicle.

So far no serious injuries have been reported, though a 13-year-old sustained a “minor cut to her ear” when a bullet shattered the windshield of the SUV she was traveling in on August 29.

Though authorities say they haven’t determined whether all nine vehicles were hit by gunfire or some other projectile, they do believe at least some of the incidents—including two shootings which were reported Tuesday—are part of a pattern of “domestic terrorism.”

“Both vehicles were hit on the driver side, passenger window by a projectile,” Arizona Department of Public Safety Director Frank Milstead said. “I would call that related.”

In the meantime, the FBI and the ATF have both joined the investigation and are offering a $20,000 reward for information.

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