Kristin Cavallari informs us that her dear friend Pippy Pom has written a book.

It is available to buy and read right now, should you be interested in doing that.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Jim Webb, a man who once watched the light go out in another man’s eyes after shooting him full of lead, is very excited for what he’s getting this holiday season.

Webb, who, lest we forget, still has a toe dipped in the warm sludge pool that is the presidential race, sent a tweet out Thursday night with a giddy spree of consonants and a link to an ad from GQ Magazine for a holiday gift partnership with Gilt. Or, more likely, an aide on the Webb campaign accidentally scheduled the tweet and forgot to change the placeholder text, and is now crying and waiting to be fired.

It’s not Webb’s first social media mishap — in October, his account sent out a tweet linking to a parody article titled, “Debate Preview: Why My Money’s on Jim Webb.” The piece was a sardonic ode to Webb’s “square jaw, burly muscles, and big heavy combat boots.”

The tweet has since been deleted. Webb’s twitter has now returned to its regularly scheduled program, the thoughts of a Public Servant, Author, Filmmaker and Warrior.

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

A man who was arrested during the civil unrest in Baltimore, in April, following the death of Freddie Gray, is suing the Baltimore police department for wrongful arrest, excessive force, false imprisonment and battery. Allegedly, when asked for his badge number, the arresting officer replied, “It’s 666. I’m the devil.”

http://gawker.com/baltimore-erup...

In his lawsuit, filed Wednesday, Branden Owens says that, on April 27th—the day of the funeral for Freddie Gray, who died in police custody earlier that month—he was walking near Mondawmin Mall, where the day’s rioting initially broke out, when a police officer hit him in the chest with a baton after he’d asked whether he could approach the grocery store.

Owens was arrested—according to the suit, the flex cuffs were so tight that his hands turned purple—and spent two days in jail before being released without charges, the Associated Press reports. (At the time, NBC News reported that Baltimore police held more than 100 people for two days before releasing them without charges.)

From the AP:

While incarcerated, Owens alleges that despite telling authorities that he is lactose intolerant, he was given only milk, bread and cheese to eat.

When Owens was released he checked himself into Mercy Hospital, where he was treated for bruised wrists, lower back muscle spasms and contusions, the suit says.

Spokespeople for the police department confirmed to both the AP and ABC 2 News that the incident is the subject of an internal investigation.

The suit names Officer Philip Meadows, the police department, the mayor, the City Council and the state. Owens is asking for more than $1 million, but told ABC 2 that it’s about more than the money. “Hopefully other people will follow my lead and this is what we’ll get out of this—someone to protect and serve us,” he said.

Image via ABC 2 News. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Things are finally looking up for famous people and people who aren’t famous but are at least rich enough to act like they are: Los Angeles International Airport (or “LAX,” short for lacrosse) has been approved to build a special terminal specifically for the most beautiful and wealthy among us.

The terminal, which was approved yesterday by the Board of Airport Commissioners (whose meetings must be scintillating), is being spun as a way of de-gumming LAX’s main terminal, but is, let’s be honest, just a way for celebrities to avoid the prying lenses of the paparazzi, and for rich people to avoid the rest of us. That said, anyone who is willing and able to pay $1,800 will be able to use the terminal, which will allow those people to, as they do elsewhere, bypass the banal realities of everyday life, such as walking (via The Guardian):

It will cost $1,500-$1,800 per trip to use the new terminal, which will include exclusive lounges, dedicated catering and separate security and border checkpoints. When it’s time to board, guests will be driven directly to their plane. The plans promise that guests using the new terminal will have to walk about 60 steps, compared to as many as 2,200 from street to plane seat via the public terminals.

The nation’s robust market for celebrities looking disheveled and dispirited in rumpled hoodies and weird hats will soon crash.

[image via Getty]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

At a news conference on Thursday, the Associated Press reports, defense attorneys, representing bikers arrested after a shootout at a restaurant in Texas, said that they are being denied access to evidence because they have refused to sign an agreement with the district attorney not to share it with media.

Meanwhile, a different set of defense attorneys, the Waco Tribune reported on Wednesday, representing six of the 177 bikers arrested at the Twin Peaks in Waco, have filed civil rights lawsuits in Austin federal court, against Waco and McLennan County officials.

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Nine people were killed and 20 injured in the May 17th shooting. According to the AP, on Thursday, attorney Susan Anderson said that the agreement the district attorney is demanding violates Texas’ Michael Morton Act, which states that prosecutors must permit defense attorneys access to evidence, without conditions, “as soon as possible.”

The civil rights lawsuits, which name McLennan County District Attorney Abel Reyna, Waco Police Chief Brent Stroman, Waco police Detective Manuel Chavez, and an unnamed Texas Department of Public Safety trooper as defendants, alleges that investigators conspired to arrest all 177 bikers on identical engaging in organized criminal activity charges, violating the bikers’s rights to due process under law.

The lawsuits were filed on Tuesday and Wednesday, by two Dallas attorneys, Clint Broden and Don Tittle, on behalf of Matthew Clendennen, Robert Bucy, George Bergman, Noe Adame, John Vensel and Jorge Salinas. From the Tribune:

Vensel, of Collin County, is a member of the Vaqueros Motorcycle Club of Dallas County, the lawsuit says.

Adame, of Dallas County, is a security officer and a member of the Desgraciados Motorcycle Club of Kaufman County.

Bergman, of Dallas County, is also a member of the Desgraciados Motorcycle Club, the suit says.

The Vaqueros and Desgraciados are support clubs of the Bandidos.

Clendennen, of Hewitt, is a Scimitar; while Bucy and Salinas, of Ellis and Lampasas counties, respectively, are both Cossacks, according to the lawsuit.

The Scimitars are a Cossacks support club.

“Rather than investigating the incident and relying on actual facts to establish probable cause,” the suit alleges, “defendants theorized that a conspiracy of epic proportion between dozens of people had taken place and willfully ignored the total absence of facts to support their ‘theory.’”

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

All this talk of a wall between the U.S. and Mexico has tainted the discussion about immigration in the U.S. — so much so that it’s made us forget about some pretty simple facts.

A new study released by the Pew Research Center on Thursday reported that more than 1 million Mexicans and their families left the U.S. for Mexico from the years 2009 to 2014. Meanwhile, over the same period, a total of 870,000 Mexicans came to the U.S.

That, in the simplest of terms that even politicians can understand, means that over those five years, there was a net flow 140,000 people from the U.S. to Mexico. Many of the families leaving for Mexico, the study says, also included children born in the U.S. About 61 percent of the families who’d returned to Mexico responded to surveys saying that they were leaving to reunite with family.

Data like this is generally tricky to calculate, because there’s no official count of how many people come in and go out. But using a national household survey and census data from both countries, the research came up with pretty reliable count.

The data marks the first time that more people are leaving the country for Mexico than entering it from Mexico — a reversal of some five decades of mass immigration. The change is so stark Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of Hispanic research, told the Associated Press that he believes that the previous era of immigration is “at an end.”

Meanwhile, as immigration decreases, the political hive minds have latched onto the issue like a swarm of ticks. Similarly in the current debate about Syrian immigrants, the people coming in are not the threat that the politicians trying to shut them out think they are.

[Image via Getty]

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

In Tel Aviv and the West Bank on Thursday, five people were killed in two stabbing and shooting attacks carried out by Palestinians, Israeli authorities said. According to the New York Times, three Israelis, an 18-year-old American yeshiva student, and a Palestinian were killed.

Two people were killed in Tel Aviv: Aharon Yesayev, 32, and Reuven Aviram, 51, both Israeli. Three were killed in the West Bank: an Israeli, Yaakov Don, 51; the American, Ezra Schwartz, on a gap year between high school and college; and a Palestinian, Shadi Arafa, 24.

From the Times:

In the first attack, a Palestinian from the West Bank stabbed Israelis at the entrance of a store that served as an informal synagogue in Tel Aviv, killing two Israeli men and wounding a third. Witnesses said the attacker had then tried to force his way into the prayer room, but worshipers blocked the door.

Soon after, in the Etzion settlement bloc in the West Bank, a Palestinian man opened fire with a submachine gun from a car as he passed vehicles stopped in traffic. He then crashed his car into another vehicle, according to witnesses and police reports. Three people were killed and several others were injured.

“Behind these terrorist attacks stands radical Islam, which seeks to destroy us, the same radical Islam that struck in Paris and threatens Europe,” the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote on Facebook.

“Whoever condemned the attacks in France must condemn the attacks in Israel. It’s the same terrorism. Anyone who does not do so is acting hypocritically and blindly.”

Police identified the Tel Aviv assailant, who was taken into custody, as the father of five, from the village of Dura, in the southern West Bank. He was reportedly in Israel on a work permit.

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

A video allegedly depicting a black teenager being shot and killed by a Chicago police officer last year will be released, The Guardian reports, after a Cook County judge ruled Thursday that it was not exempt from requests made under the state’s Freedom of Information Act, as city officials had previously claimed.

Laquan McDonald, 17, was shot 16 times. Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement that the city would release the dashcam footage by November 25th.

On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan asked Chicago police in a letter to release the video, saying that the department’s claims that releasing the footage to a journalist would hinder an ongoing investigation were “unsubstantiated.”

From the AP:

An attorney for McDonald’s family, Jeffrey Neslund, who has seen the video, said the footage shows McDonald was armed with a small knife but walking away from police when an officer opened fire. He noted that McDonald’s mother does not want the video released, because she fears it could spark violence in her Chicago neighborhood similar to the riots that erupted in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, after police-involved deaths of black residents.

The Chicago city council took the unusual step in April of approving a $5m settlement with McDonald’s family, even though the family had not sued, after being advised to do so by a city attorney who had seen the video.

An autopsy report showed that McDonald was shot 16 times, including at least twice in his back. The autopsy report also said McDonald had PCP, a hallucinogenic drug, in his system.

The video is subject to at least two FOIA requests: one from the Wall Street Journal, and one from independent journalist Brandon Smith, on whose request Judge Frank Valderrama ruled Thursday.

According to The Guardian, the family’s attorney, Neslund, said McDonald’s mother has not seen the video and does not want to. “What mother would want to see the execution of her son over and over again?” he asked.

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

This is it; we will never be capable of real romance again.

The blue-capped cordon bleu, a three-inch finch native to Ethiopia, has both the most irritating and the most charming mating rituals on the face of the Earth. The bird, scientists recently discovered, performs a sort of “tap dance” to catch a girl — a behavior that they only discovered after slowing down footage of the birds to a crawl.

The study, published Thursday in Scientific Reports by scientists at Hokkaido University, recorded the birds achieving miraculous athletic feats. Some of them could get in 200 steps from five seconds to over a minute, according to the Guardian. What’s more, this is an equal-opportunity relationship: the females dance right back.

And best of all, the entire thing is done while grasping a tiny stick in their beaks. It is a better show of romance than any of us could ever attempt. Well, perhaps except for one, a handsome cad who also holds a stick when he dances.

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

Earlier today, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would radically slow the admission of Syrian refugees to the United States. CNN’s global affairs correspondent was (understandably) disheartened, and now, for expressing that disheartenment on Twitter, she has been suspended for two weeks.

The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple reports that, because Labott is a reporter and not a commentator, she is required to comply with CNN’s “neutrality principle/sham.” Apparently, however, there are some exceptions to this rule: anchor Don Lemon is permitted to express opinions on air so long as they are not “predictably partisan.”

http://gawker.com/cnn-did-a-blac...

Is articulating frustration and shame in a roundabout, allusive way “predictably partisan,” or even unpredictably partisan? After all, it’s not like she called them “dumb hicks.”

Wemple writes:

Evenhandedness, mind you, isn’t just a matter of journalistic principle for CNN. It’s a business imperative. Competitors Fox News and MSNBC are “two partisan networks, that are looking out for their viewers,” CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker has said. That split, he has argued, makes CNN ever more “essential” to viewers.

To which (probably misguided) end the corporate machinery has already locked Labott back into place:

Haha. We sincerely believe you!

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Although numerous investigations into the heavily-edited videos targeting Planned Parenthood have shown no evidence of wrongdoing, several states have called for the defunding of the women’s health care provider. On Tuesday, the Ohio House voted to remove Planned Parenthood’s Title X funds following this summer’s release of the controversial videos. Ohio senators want the $1.3 million Planned Parenthood gets for health services — such as HIV and STD testing — to instead be given to a specific list of alternative providers. However, many of the places listed, such as dental offices and food banks, do not provide STI testing or other reproductive health services.

One of the locations, the Freestore Foodbank in Cincinnati, told the Guardian it doesn’t actually provide health services and is “just a drug and alcohol treatment center.” Another location only specified dental work as their offered health treatment. So, Ohio lawmakers want the funds to be distributed to places where their state’s female population will adequately receive teeth cleanings, but what about annual exams, STD testing and treatment, contraception and sexual health education?

Even if it is successfully defunded, Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio will still provide services to clients. The group’s CEO, Stephanie Kight says the cut would be a “big blow”, particularly for “the men and women who turn to us every day.” Kight says they would find other ways to pay for services. “Planned Parenthood is deeply committed to giving patients the care they need. We would figure out a way to cover the cost, but everything has its limits.”

Kight’s group sees about 70,000 patients each year at its 28 locations. Only three of the centers provide abortions.

Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.

Image via Getty.

A man accused of murdering a woman he’d met at a nightclub in 1994 was put to death in Georgia Thursday night, following a series of eleventh-hour attempts to delay his death.

According to the Associated Press, 50-year-old Marcus Ray Johnson was executed by lethal injection at 10:11 p.m., after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal for a stay of execution. No reason was given for their decision.

In March 1994, Johnson met a woman named Angela Sizemore in Albany, where witnesses say they saw the two kissing. Johnson denied the allegations, saying that the pair had sex in a vacant lot and then that, during an argument, he punched her. He claimed that he then went home and passed out on his front lawn.

The next morning, prosecutors say that Sizemore’s body was found stabbed 41 times with a knife and sexually assaulted her with a pecan branch.

Earlier this week, an attorney for Johnson asked the court for a 90-day delay for the execution, arguing that additional DNA testing on bloody sand near where the body was found could prove Johnson innocent in the case. The County District Attorney Greg Edwards, however, said there were no doubts about the accuracy of the case.

Johnson is the fourth person to be executed in Georgia this year. The state is third in the country for executions in 2015, behind Missouri (six) and Texas (thirteen). Those numbers may go down in coming years, however: the death penalty in America is dying its own slow and tortured death.

[Image via AP]

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

On Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump helpfully clarified his position on establishing a mandatory database to track Muslims in the United States: He’s all for it. Never heard a better idea. Can’t believe he didn’t think of it sooner. When can we start?

Trump alluded to the notion in an interview published by Yahoo News earlier in the day, referencing the “frankly unthinkable” things he would do—and presumably has done, to have gotten this far in his candidacy—as president.

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Between campaign events in Iowa, he told an NBC News reporter, “I would certainly implement that. Absolutely.”

“It would be good management,” he explained, in a video that can be seen on MSNBC.com. “Good management procedures.”

“You sign them up at different places,” he said, when asked whether he would go into mosques. “It’s all about management.”

(Earlier this week, Trump suggested that some mosques ought to be closed, because “really bad things are happening, and they’re happening fast.”)

Asked whether registration would be mandatory, Trump said: “They have to be.”

From MSNBC:

Later, Trump was repeatedly asked to explain the difference between requiring Muslims to enter their information into a database and making Jewish people register in Nazi Germany. He responded four times by saying, “You tell me.”

Well! At least that’s all cleared up.

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

Research chimps living in lab cages in the U.S. are at last going to do what retirees are meant to do: sit in the sun and bicker.

After refusing to do so for years, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that it will retire the last of its laboratory chimpanzees to sanctuaries.

Nature reported the news this week after obtaining an email sent by NIH director Francis Collins to the agency’s administrators. The email detailed that the 50 “reserve” chimps still in NIH’s care would be joining some of the 310 other chimps the agency retired in 2013. It also houses and supports other chimps that are not meant to be tested on, but will be retiring as well.

The push to retire the lab chimps comes after intense public outcry against the practice. Our understanding of chimp cognition, which is strikingly similar to human intelligence, has greatly fueled the effort. Studies have also shown that chimps have culture, use tools, and even understand and mourn death.

What’s more, the research has become downright unpopular and financially negligible. The remaining chimps had been kept in case of medical emergencies, though only one application for such research was received since 2013 — and it was later withdrawn.

Now, spots must be found for the soon-to-be retirees. One sanctuary that took many of the previously retired apes, Chimp Haven in Louisiana, has already offered spots for 25 chimps to live out their days in a sunny southern haze of lying around, eating, and arguing amongst themselves — not unlike most human retirees. Does this not just look like a bunch of old men popping their dentures in and out?

[Image via Getty]

Contact the author at melissa.cronin@gawker.com.

American democracy in action: Mississippi pols will literally “draw straws” today to settle a House race that ended in a tie earlier this month. The stakes are high—the lucky winner will determine whether the GOP gets a supermajority and thus the chance to more fully destroy the state’s already meager safety net.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/21/us/...

“There’s certainly some drama, that’s for sure,” the House speaker told the New York Times.

The two men who will be drawing the straws are Democratic incumbent Blake Eaton II and his Republican challenger Mark Tullos. Both earned exactly 4,589 votes in the election, and neither are happy about now leaving the whole thing up to chance. However, Eaton told the Times that whatever happens, he won’t challenge the result.

“Look, my life’s a gamble,” he said. “I’m a farmer. I depend on the weather and the rain. The statute’s clear, but my life is not.”

The statute he’s referring to is the one that says in case of a tied election, the winner will be determined “by lot.” In Jackson today, Eaton and Tullos will meet in a conference room with the Governor and “each choose a box from inside a bag.” The guy who picks the box with a “long green straw” inside wins.

If Tullos succeeds, Republicans will win a three-fifths supermajority that will allow them to pass revenue-related bills. “At stake, potentially, are hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue,” the Times notes.

That is some drama.

Photo via Governor Bryant site. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

America is a nation founded on a legacy of white supremacy that persists to this day, causing great pain and inequality. Before we get around to solving that, though: let’s have a serious talk about who started the protest Facebook group.

It is very easy to dismiss things that college students do in general, because they are young and embody the standard foibles of youth, and it is also very easy to mock college political activism, due to the obvious clash between its general earnestness and its cloistered setting. But college political activism has a long and proud tradition as a breeding ground and engine for much broader social movements; and, more to the point, if college students are protesting things that should be protested, it is disingenuous to mock them for it just because they are college students. They should be applauded. If not always for their specific tactics or grasp of history, at least for their spirit of righteousness.

That said, college students are—and I am going to make a generalization here—young, rash, and often stupid, as you likely were when you were 19 and smoking a lot of weed. For example: racism in America is an enormous structural problem. Racism planted its roots in this nation with the first European settlers, dug deep through slavery and segregation, and is the root of many of our socioeconomic problems today. It is admirable for college students to rise up against racism in society. It is admirable for college students to rise up against racism at their own institutions. These are huge problems that will require the combined effort of everyone if we hope to make a dent. But together, we can....

Provoke a fierce outcry over the fact that students planned an anti-racism protest without contacting “the university’s Black Student Alliance or other similar student groups” and this is a good reason to cancel the protest and also to use your time not to protest against racism in general but to protest against the propriety of protesting against racism without being properly sanctioned by the proper anti-racist groups in order to protest against racism.

“The Left” continues to prove that we will only succeed in our political struggle if we keep our eyes trained on the real enemies: other groups on The Left that share virtually all of our goals but with whom we disagree on some minor matter of theory or rhetoric or style and so they must therefore be condemned and crushed before any of the other work can begin.

[Photo: Getty]

Todd Haynes’s Carol is simple, elegant, and devastating. It tells a story of pre-Stonewall gay love between two women, who become what they are using no specific societal blueprint (none existed for lesbians in the ‘50s), but through their love for each other. Carol (Cate Blanchett) is a mother going through a divorce who happens upon Therese (Rooney Mara), a younger shopgirl in her 20s, and is immediately enchanted. What ensues is a love story that is told with tenderness, pacing, and melodrama that evokes the era depicted in the film. Sometimes it shouldn’t even work—like when during an emotional peak between Carol and Therese, it starts snowing out of nowhere—but it always does, thanks to the tremendous directing, writing, and performances of everyone involved. Carol is, simply, one of the year’s finest movies and its final shot is among the most indelible I’ve ever seen. This movie imprints itself on you, and what’s more, you want it to.

Carol is adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, which was released in hardcover to good reviews but ended up selling a million copies as a paperback that was sold alongside the pulp of its day. Unlike its mass-marketed brethren, The Price of Salt offered a comparatively optimistic outlook on lesbian relationships that didn’t require its lovers to suffer as a result of their then-forbidden desire. That spirit carries over in Carol, which was adapted by playwright/screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, who has been attached to the project (on and off) for 18 years. I spoke to her earlier this week about the differences between Highsmith’s writing and hers, compromise in filmmaking, and the politics of telling such a story.

Gawker: This is a big year for movies depicting female same-sex relationships, The Duke of Burgundy springs to mind, as does Freeheld. When people talk about gay culture, so much of the time it means “gay men’s culture.” The Price of Salt is a classic within lesbian culture. Does it mean anything to you to have contributed to gay women’s culture?

Phyllis Nagy: Well, sure. In a larger sense, of course. Yesterday in L.A., I was talking to one of the producers of the movie Freeheld, and he was saying, “Listen, what it means that all of these movies are coming out at once is that there are cycles. These movies take such a long time to get made that they all tend to be staggered at once.” We’re in that cycle now. I hope that Carol, in particular, because that’s the one I worked on, will contribute to not only making sure that more films about gay culture, particular kinds of film about gay culture, get made, but that films that are led by women get made. If Carol can allow for three more films with female leads that aren’t 22—it isn’t about college, it isn’t about any of the things that generally get financed, it isn’t a buddy comedy, it’s just a drama—then I would be very happy with that. Asking for much more? I don’t think we’ve come as far as all that.

It’s depressing.

Yeah, but all we can do is keep going, put stuff like Carol and other films out there into the culture. It’s pretty extraordinary that it’s allowed to exist in the culture and it’s a sort of—I use the word “mainstream” in a particular way—but we do need more examples, obviously.

It really struck me reading The Price of Salt, that because Highsmith was explaining this world in the early ‘50s that so many people either knew about and couldn’t talk about it or were just completely ignorant of, she could really get to the fundamentals of love. The book feels at once remedial and brilliant.

It does, doesn’t it? Part of this is Pat Highsmith’s own peculiar psyche, which was obsessional. All the great novels about love—Madame Bovary, all sorts of things like that—are really obsessional. I mean that in the largest sense possible. There are elements of The Price of Salt that are fairly stalker-esque, which fits in very nicely with Pat’s general body of work. If Pat had been an actress, she could have played Sister George. She did not think of herself as gay. She didn’t think of herself as not gay either. She was like some old-school stone butches I’ve met, although she wasn’t herself like that, who would say things like, “It’s time to go to the lesbian bar,” as if there were a third person narrative that she wasn’t a part of and yet was very much a part of. The Price of Salt has that element, with Therese not censoring things in the way Pat never censored things.

She’s extremely blunt. I wonder if you had to reel that in just for modern sensibilities. The part in the book when Therese tells Richard, “I don’t love you, but I like you,” would probably seem too harsh for 2015 moviegoing audiences, right?

Probably. There are a few lines of Highsmith’s that I used. “Flung out of space.” But very little else, because her dialogue is so novelistic. Works in a novel; read it aloud and it’s not right. To find that equivalent of that, cinematically would be, to have Richard, as Carol’s driving Therese away, say, “Love you.” And she just sort of [looks away] through the window. That’s the equivalent, I suppose. A lot of it was trying to find that, or inventing the custody scene. In a way Therese is almost annoyed that they have to deal with this stuff, which is interesting to me, but again, a different movie when you’re writing a love story and one character’s already largely melancholic—Carol [is] odd, touchy, smokes a lot. There’s a moodiness that you don’t need to double down on with Therese, who’s just an odd creature.

There are slight changes that you made that are nonetheless pointed. In the book, it’s Carol who pronounces Therese’s name “Terez,” but in the movie, it is Therese who tells her that she pronounces it that way. In the movie, instead of sending a Christmas card to Carol, Therese returns the gloves she left behind in the store. Was there a guiding philosophy for those changes?

Novels inhabit one temporal world, and dramatic writing inhabits another entirely. With Therese, who is so much a passive observer who internalizes everything in the book, and inhabits a bohemian world, which seemed a mistake to me, just instinctively. As a dramatist, you set up certain sorts of obstacles really, in reducing a tale to be told over a couple of hours, whereas you have a couple of days or weeks or however long you take to read a novel. Making her the aspirational artist, rather than someone who is quite decided about it already [as she is in the novel], and having her friends and [boyfriend] Richard and everyone be of that world, in the novel that was one of the things that struck me as not convincing. They weren’t. They didn’t act like how those Greenwich Village phony types would act. Giving her the aspiration, giving Richard the solid life just allowed us a latitude to explore many different possibilities. If Carol is ultimately a story about which door you’ll choose, by setting as many examples as you can from the life Richard leads to Danny to Abby—it just seemed a much more interesting thing to explore.

You really finessed the end in a big way. The resolution now is much less abrupt.

There’s that odd section of the book, that double road trip, where Therese lives on her own and that’s where the largely less convincing visual metaphors occur, with the portrait and this and that. One of the things I was reluctant about is this is a book with a cult following. It’s not like Twilight or anything, but the fans know the book far better than I, even at this point. The portrait the way she looks at it...I thought, “I can’t even think about that.” This is just not gonna play in a movie. It wouldn’t have played in a movie in 1952. So getting rid of that and having her come into her own, getting over Carol whilst also taking care of her life, seemed a much more economical way of doing it.

And then the story becomes about how you can find yourself through other people.

That’s right, not reclusive somewhere in...Wisconsin? Some odd place.

I like the movie better than the book.

I’m very fond of the book. I love that it refuses to psychologize about them. I love the way Pat goes after the notion of what is a good mother. What’s extraordinary to me is we’re getting no pushback on that. This woman basically leaves her child in the care of her husband for a time, but I think it’s understood that it’s for a time, and it’s so that she can actually give her daughter a good example of how to live, rather than what many people grew up with, which is a terrible environment of secrets, codes, and lies. She does a quite brave thing in that.

There’s a part of the book where Carol details her tortured past with her sexuality. Was that too obvious for 2015 sensibilities to include in a movie?

No. I read that again and again, and thought, “What she’s saying is it’s not being said very well.” It’s not so much that she questioned what her sexuality was. She questioned if she had the strength to deal with it, which is a very different thing. In most of the preceding fiction, especially when written by lesbians—the Radclyffe Halls, etc.—people went to nunneries, hanged themselves, or at the very least, went into mental institutions. At least this was not that, quite profoundly. I think that Pat had that obligatory moment where you questioned something, but it is so out of character with the rest of the book that I knew it felt like a thing that development executives might as for, you know what I mean? So no.

So you would reject something that development execs would ask for?

If they asked for that, yeah!

Is this screenplay, as is, uncompromised?

Yeah, I think it is. Over 18 years, obviously, a lot of people come and go, there’s a lot of water under that bridge. There’s a difference between writing a screenplay and writing a screenplay that will be produced. This is a very important distinction that I think a lot of writers don’t consider and I certainly had to a lot. But the easiest way to make sure it’s not compromised is not to say to someone, “That’s a really terrible idea, you’re an idiot.” It’s to say, “That’s fascinating, of course I’ll do it,” and then do it to the best of your ability. Most reasonable people look at what they’ve asked for and see that it doesn’t work. Yes, it costs you time, but then people come up with some interesting things. And so the [current] script is like a little document, a hierogphic of traces of lots of different suggestions. It’s not been cobbled together from the notes of various development executives, no, and there wasn’t really development executives, but when Todd came on, he encouraged me to go with whatever darkness and humor and every elliptical impulse that I ever had, which of course runs counter to what usually happens. It was a perfect way to make sure that the fifth and final draft of the script was what we both wanted to do.

Is it a political act to put this out there?

Sure. For me, the most political thing you can do is put something like this out there that does not have an obvious agenda. It is just describing behavior and not making a comment on it, really. It’ll be interesting to see how politically it is dealt with in the community and elsewhere. I think that’s the most dangerous thing anyone could have done and Todd has run with it and enhanced it. I’m very excited about the potential reactions.

Carol is in select theaters Friday, Nov. 20.

The Hunger Games book and movie series has always been about resistance, and particularly about using the machinery and iconography of the oppressor to fight back. Katniss Everdeen is a creation of a violent, manipulative system, but she turns all of its symbolism against it. And in the final movie, Mockingjay Part 2, she turns the tables, at immense, horrifying cost.

This review is basically spoiler-free—may the odds of avoiding spoilers be ever in your favor.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the Hunger Games series takes place in a dystopian future where the evil Capitol forces the rest of the country to send its children to compete in gladitorial contests. Katniss Everdeen is one of the victors of that bloodsport, and she becomes a hero to the ordinary people of Panem because she’s able to outwit the rules of the game. In this last movie, she’s becoming an actual leader of the uprising against the Capitol.

Mockingjay Part 2 is the most brutal of all the Hunger Games movies, and in a few places it actually manages to outdo the books in sheer ugliness (partly because reading about nastiness is different than watching it.) It’s not so much the big bloody action sequences, but the small intimate moments, that make you feel the full weight of how awful all of this has been for Katniss, Peeta and the others.

Much like Part 1, this movie makes some fascinating stylistic choices, that force you to confront the personal consequences of violence and violation. And that, in turn, makes you ask what kind of government, what kind of leaders, would use violent games and torturous mind control as crucial elements of its propaganda strategy. The genius of Mockingjay Part 2 is that we get enough glimpses of that thought process, how people could decide that such things are a good idea, to start understanding it—and that’s perhaps the most intense shock of all.

Mockingjay Part 1 opened with a horribly damaged Katniss Everdeen whispering in the dark, and Part 2 begins with a similarly stark and nasty image of Katniss in terrible shape. Between director Francis Lawrence’s unflinching lens and Jennifer Lawrence’s intense, layered performance, this has the effect of forcing us to empathize with this incredibly traumatized hero from the first minute.

And this time around, both Lawrences never quite let up on this tight focus, although we do pull back from time to time and get to see all the games that the political leaders are playing. Even though the stakes are getting higher and the action more intense, this is paradoxically the most intimate and at times claustrophobic of the Hunger Games films.

The obvious difference between Mockingjay Part 2 and the other three movies is in the fact that Katniss is stepping up and taking control of her own destiny in a way that she never has previously. She’s come a long way from the first movie, where she manipulates a no-win scenario purely due to a willingness to sacrifice everything. Now, she’s becoming more adept at pulling other people’s strings, instead of dancing as other people yank on hers.

But there’s also another difference between this film and the others—the ever-present Greek chorus of propaganda and media manipulation is still there, but it’s used much more sparingly and strategically. In the first three movies, there was a constant tension between the Katniss we know as a person, and the image of Katniss that appears on giant video screens—the “real” Katniss and her distorted and enlarged image were in dialogue with each other, and Katniss tried (often in vain) to control how she’s portrayed by the machine.

In this last film, the notion of Katniss as propaganda vehicle is as much a part of the story as ever—but because of some of the events of the film, we don’t see her actions reflected through the celebrity fish-eye lens nearly as much as in the past. (Poor old Caesar Flickerman only gets a couple of appearances, in fact.) There’s still dueling propaganda, but we pretty much only see Katniss the person, not Katniss-as-image.

Which makes it interesting that this is the film in which Katniss finally owns her legend.

The other thread, as I mentioned earlier, is the notion of trauma and recovery—and the notion that you never really recover 100 percent. These things are always with you, and “victor” is really a fancy word for “survivor.” This time around, everybody is crushed under a massive burden of grief and unprocessed horror, and it makes for a curiously muted “final battle” storyline. In a way that feels incredibly real and believable. There’s no “let’s blow this thing and go home” whooping here, and the fog of war dovetails with the mental exhaustion of too-long-at-war soldiers.

And as I wrote when I reviewed Mockingjay, the book, way back in the day, the theme of trauma and recovery gets combined with the series’ obsession with media manipulation and propaganda in a fascinating way. It turns out that you can get so horribly brutalized that you can no longer tell what’s real from what’s fake, which is the ultimate end-state of the kind of trickery we’ve seen all along in this series.

To be sure, Mockingjay Part 2 has some serious flaws—in particular, it has to cover so many random horrible incidents from the book, it sometimes seems to trip over itself. Certain character turns happen so fast that you get a bit of whiplash, and there are definitely times when several hubcaps and a few chickens come flying off the bus as it takes one of its sharp turns. But those flaws are, by and large, a consequence of trying to film such an ambitiously eventful novel. For the most part, the final movie takes a really tough ending, and sells it.

Also, the loss of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman is painfully evident in this film, which has several moments that were clearly supposed to feature Hoffman and which fall slightly flat without him. He seems to have been digitally inserted in the background in a couple of scenes, but also he’s clearly supposed to play a key role in other moments, and has had to be replaced. It sucks, though it’s not enough to cause major problems—it’s just one more among the endless number of reasons to be sad that Hoffman is gone.

At some point, any honest review of any of these movies is going to turn into gushing praise of Jennifer Lawrence. Particularly in this last movie, she’s carrying the whole thing on her back—and her acting is subtle yet powerful enough that she keeps you convinced of the reality of the situation at every turn. She manages to create this character of a young girl who’s all scar tissue inside, and it’s incredibly compelling.

And that’s the thing I’m left feeling, now that all the movies are done. Even more than the books, they have given us one of the most indelible heroes of the 21st century so far. When it comes to self-sacrifice, making tough decisions, inspiring people, and larger-than-life heroism, few others even come close—Chris Evans’ Captain America comes to mind, actually.

There are all sorts of reasons why people connected with this series, ranging from its love triangle to its intense political commentary. But its most important legacy may actually be giving us a really vital 21st century hero.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

In an interview with Megyn Kelly last night, Marco Rubio—who was ostensibly trying to shut down Trump’s call for a Fourth Reich—instead declared that, if we truly want to be safe, America needs to shut down pretty much everything.

To Rubio’s minor credit, he was almost certainly trying to push away from the idea of demonizing mosques specifically. But because Rubio is terrified of (further) alienating himself from conservative voters by calling Trump’s statement what it is (unequivocal and abhorrent racism), Rubio’s words didn’t quite come out that way.

Instead, Rubio makes it sounds like Trump’s call didn’t go far enough.

It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down any place — whether it’s a cafe, a diner, an internet site — any place where radicals are being inspired. The bigger problem we have is our inability to find out where these places are, because we’ve crippled our intelligence programs, both through unauthorized disclosures by a traitor, in Edward Snowden, or by some of the things this president has put in place with the support even of some from my own party to diminish our intelligence capabilities.

So whatever facility is being used — it’s not just a mosque — any facility that’s being used to radicalize and inspire attacks against the United States, should be a place that we look at.

On the bright side, if Rubio gets his way and we do shut down literally anywhere “radicals are being inspired,” Tea Party rallies will finally be a thing of the past.

You can watch Rubio’s interview in full below.

[h/t Talking Points Memo]

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.