So, here is sad white man Jonathan Chait's essay about the difficulty of being a white man in the second age of "political correctness." In a neat bit of editorial trolling, New York teased the column with following question: "Can a white, liberal man critique a culture of political correctness?"

The answer, as anyone with internet access or a television or the ability to see a newsrack could tell you, is a resounding yes, they can and pretty much constantly do. But the second half of the question, and the real point of the column, was left unwritten: Can a straight, white man do this without having to deal with people criticizing him for doing so? The answer, in 2015, is no, and that is what has Chait's dander up.

Earlier this month, Deadspin's Greg Howard posted a video of George Foreman boxing five chumps in succession. It was 1975. Six months earlier, the formerly undefeated Foreman had been knocked out by Muhammad Ali in Zaire. As Howard says, "[the] loss broke something in Foreman...." To prove he was still the fighter he thought he was, he took on five men in an hour, while Ali jeered him from ringside.

A year ago, Jonathan Chait had an extended debate with The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, an incredibly talented writer whose ongoing research and thinking on race and American politics and history have led him to become one of our foremost critics of American liberalism as a credo and philosophy. Chait, a strong believer in the righteousness of American liberalism, could not let it go, and he went on to embarrass himself. A broken Chait is now taking on the entire goddamn Internet, to prove that he's still the important political thinker — and good liberal — he knows he is.

Chait was further incensed when His People lost control of The New Republic, the political magazine where Chait was a columnist and editor for many years. Chait, along with a number of other current and former New Republic contributors, protested the loss of their version of the magazine, but they seemed to be unprepared for the response: It was not universal outrage and grief. Instead quite a lot of people—including, again, Coates—seemed to think that Chait's New Republic had been a hotbed of the most poisonous form of American "liberalism," a place where a cadre of white people with degrees from the best schools debated amongst themselves whether or not black Americans were worthy of equal treatment under the law, and even whether black Americans were genetically equal to whites.

Chait, like many liberal commentators with his background, is used to writing off left-wing critics and reserving his real writerly firepower for (frequently deserving) right-wingers. That was, for years, how things worked at the center-left opinion journalism shops, because it was simply assumed that no one important—no one who really matters—took the opinions of people to the left of the center-left opinion shop seriously. That was a safe and largely correct assumption. But the destruction of the magazine industry and the growth of the open-forum internet have amplified formerly marginal voices. Now, in other words, writers of color can be just as condescending and dismissive of Chait as he always was toward the left. And he hates it.

Following his faux apologia for his support for the Iraq War, Chait, sounding personally wounded, bemoaned those who told people like him to "shut up and go away." His philosophical position is that it is undemocratic—dangerously undemocratic, in fact—to tell Jonathan Chait to "shut up and go away." It might be rude, and personally hurtful to Jonathan Chait, to tell him to shut up and go away (trigger warning: telling Jon Chait to shut up and go away), but he should perhaps try to remember that "shut up and go away" was his own magazine's editorial position towards the entire left for the whole of the Marty Peretz era.

So, to once again answer New York's question, straight white men could (and did) viciously attack "the culture of political correctness" as much as they pleased back in the day, and no one who mattered ever seemed particularly bothered by it. Now, not only is it harder to avoid reading negative feedback from people with different perspectives than you, especially if you engage online at all, but there are actually important people—people with status, who've won awards and hold positions of authority—who listen to those people with different perspectives. Ta-Nehisi Coates is at The Atlantic, for godssake, not In These Times.

These are fundamental attacks on Chait's identity by people he cannot merely dismiss as cranks. Lashing out is only natural. When men like Chait are exposed to criticism of this nature for the first time, they generally respond with operatic self-pity. And then we get a column or an essay or a book about how people who criticize straight white men are Actually The Problem. This is Chait's On Snark. This is his "Digital lynch mob."

Chait is understandably upset that the left is playing dirty by impugning his view of himself as a good, tolerant liberal, on the side of justice. No one wants to hear that the place that they worked for many years was actively fighting for white supremacy! But it's fun to imagine Chait responding to the equivalent of this piece written by a conservative, about liberals. Chait understands the absurdity of the conservative position that to be accused of racism is worse than racism itself. He accurately notes that when conservatives bemoan "political correctness" they are generally upset that they have been asked to be respectful of people of different backgrounds. He simply cannot take that next step, and admit that perhaps his own concern about the proliferation of dangerous anti-speech Marxists and Social Justice Warriors is actually misplaced anxiety about his getting called on his shit.

But Chait is careful not to litter his essay with examples taken from his own run-ins with the PC Police. This is a Serious Essay about Political Correctness Gone Mad, not the whinings of a petulant man-baby. So let's take his argument seriously. How is political correctness hurting America, and liberalism? Apparently, because of social media, the censorious new New Left has moved beyond academia and "attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old." Because you can now be subject to a great deal of abuse and criticism for saying something un-p.c., certain people no longer want to engage in political debates at all. And so, democracy suffers.

It's getting so that white people are afraid to speak their minds:

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.

This is a well-documented and obvious point, only for some reason it says "Under p.c. culture" instead of "everywhere." As I'm sure Chait is aware, women who write cutting and incisive columns about politics are constantly subject to sexist abuse of the sort he never has to deal with, and people of color who write the same sorts of things as Jonathan Chait face similarly endless torrents of racist abuse. Straight, white men, though, are sometimes called racist, which we can all agree is hurtful in its own way.

It's not just angry Twitter nobodies, either! "[Political correctness] also makes money," Chait says, using, as his example, one BuzzFeed post about microaggressions that has "received more than 2 million views." I'm guessing that Chait makes quite a bit more money than the person who compiled that post. In fact, that's true of nearly everyone who is presented as a victim of political correctness in Chait's essay, from millionaire comedian Bill Maher to the anonymous professor at a prestigious university: They all enjoy superior social status to the people who are supposedly silencing or terrifying them. It's hard to see how democracy was significantly harmed by Condoleezza Rice not giving a commencement address.

But if Chait can't prove his thesis, he can at least repeatedly assert it. "While politically less threatening than conservatism (the far right still commands far more power in American life), the p.c. left is actually more philosophically threatening. It is an undemocratic creed."

I.e., while The Left still has no real power in American politics and only some small pockets of influence in academia and the media, they still concern me a great deal because they are more likely to wound my pride and sense of self-worth as a good liberal than conservatives are, and so therefore they pose a real threat to democracy.

As we get to the end of Chait's essay, we can tally up the casualties of political correctness. One anti-abortion protester was shoved and had her sign vandalized. A few millionaires were disinvited from college campuses, and performances of two plays were canceled. Various people feel disinclined to engage in online debates. Participants in a Facebook group had to deal with a Bad Thread. And a college student was fired from his school newspaper. That's one person whose life was in any meaningful way made materially worse by the scourge of political correctness, in nearly 5,000 words of dire warnings about the philosophical threat posed by left-wing speech policing.

Do you know who else once called for a journalist to be fired for allowing wrongthink to be published? Jonathan Chait, who in 2009 called for the firing of a Detroit Free Press editor for allowing a columnist with opinions about the head coach of the University of Michigan football team to report on the head coach. The columnist wasn't even as blatantly biased as Chait claimed. Chait merely found the opinions he had expressed distasteful, and he wanted someone punished for them.

Excessive speech-policing by overzealous campus activists certainly happens. But Chait is wildly exaggerating the threat it poses—calling it a "philosophical threat" to liberalism, instead of a minor annoyance people like Chait have to deal with in the brief period just before they officially assume their positions in America's power elite. (This wouldn't be the first time Chait has inflated a perceived threat to America to existential proportions.)

In reality, the single most notable example in the last 15 years of an academic being punished for his speech is probably former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, who was fired not for offending feminists but for claiming that some victims of the September 11 attacks were complicit in the crimes of the American state that provoked the attacks. Just a few years ago, liberal Democratic members of Congress and other officials publicly demanded that Brooklyn College cancel a forum featuring academics who support a financial boycott of Israel. Lawmakers threatened to withhold funding from the school if the event took place. Just this month, Duke University announced that it would not allow a weekly Muslim call to prayer to happen at the campus chapel, following criticism and threats from Christians and evangelical leaders. This is what speech policing in America actually looks like: Like regular policing, it's wielded primarily by people in power against marginalized groups and anti-mainstream opinions.

In Chait's narrative, left-wing political correctness threatened American democracy once before, in the 1980s. But it was vanquished by a brave man from a place called Hope:

Bill Clinton’s campaign frontally attacked left-wing racial politics, famously using inflammatory comments by Sister Souljah to distance him from Jesse Jackson.

That Chait, in 2015, is still praising Clinton's "Sister Souljah moment" as a heroic victory in the war against political correctness is telling. What was that moment but the drawing of a party line against expression deemed offensive? Bill Clinton attacked Souljah for her speech. He performed outrage for the sake of identity politics. The attack on a rapper most Americans had no familiarity with was simply part of Clinton's cynical scheme to signal to aggrieved whites that he was not beholden to the black community. The culmination of that scheme was the execution of mentally impaired black man named Rickey Ray Rector. If that's the variety of American liberalism that political correctness threatens, please direct me to the local thought police recruitment center.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]

Saturday night, after reading Times columnist Charles Blow's account of his son's detainment at gunpoint by Yale campus police, I was transported back to my own run-in with UCLA campus police in 2009. It was a typically relaxed Sunday evening, and I was headed home from the library. As I passed Ackerman Student Union nearing the bus terminal, I was stopped by an officer. "Do you mind if I check your bag?" he asked. "I do, actually," I said.

There had been a string of bike robberies on campus recently and, as the officer explained to me, he wanted to check my backpack for "tools" because I "fit the description" of the thief. I was reluctant, but ultimately gave in. I knew the alternative, and it was not an option. While searching my backpack, I asked the officer for his badge number and said something along the lines of, "If I was stealing bikes, why would I be taking the bus?" The officer detained me for a few more minutes, but eventually let me go. "We just have to be sure," he said.

Once I arrived home I phoned my mom. "What did he think he was going to find?" she said, trying to shroud her obvious worry with laughter. "Tools!" I exclaimed, nervously chuckling along. But we both knew the seriousness of the situation and what could have been.

This is difficult territory to navigate. On the one hand, all students want, and have the right, to feel safe on campus. But it is another thing altogether to have a gun pulled on an unarmed student or, as a black professor, to be viciously accosted for crossing in the middle of the street because construction obstructed the walkway.

Being profiled is not an uncommon experience among people of color at predominantly white institutions. I want the incident Blow's son endured to be an outlier, but it is not. That a gun was pulled on him is. That he was detained by police for something he did not do is not. Writing for the Times, Blow made note of the horrifying reality many black men and women face when placed in prejudiced situations, and of what James Baldwin termed "the price of the ticket":

I am reminded of what I have always known, but what some would choose to deny: that there is no way to work your way out—earn your way out—of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you've done matters less than how you look.

Below are true stories from former college students that were presumed guilty in the eyes of campus police—of lying, stealing, or causing trouble—when, in fact, they were not.

Antwi Akom, San Francisco State University, 2005

It didn't happen to me but it happened to my professor. Dr. Antwi Akom had his two girls in the car as he rushed into the Ethnic Studies building to get a book. Two campus police officers stopped him on his way out and demanded he put his hands up. He told them he was a professor and that his two daughters were in the car waiting for him. The cops grabbed him and as he resisted he was handcuffed and the cops left his children in the car. He spent the weekend in jail. You can read the full story here.

Brandon, Yale University, 2007

It was Halloween at Yale my freshman year, and everybody was in costume and generally drunk and out of control. I had gotten out of my costume and put on normal clothes. In the process of the night, I had lost my wallet, so I didn't have any identification on me and thus couldn't get into any of the residences. There was a gate that closed at 10pm every night (for safety reasons) that was the closest to my room. I decided to scale the gate so I could get back to my room. Someone from campus security caught me doing this and stopped me from the other side of the gate. I could have just ran away, but being the upstanding, if slightly delinquent person I am, I stayed and talked to him. He immediately thought I didn't go to Yale, and that I was trying to break in. He then called the real police. By this point I had a bunch of friends around me (mostly white) including my red-haired Irish roommate who, was just confused as to what was going on. He kept telling them, "Brandon and I sleep in a bunked bed here." The police come and are equally unconvinced that I attended Yale. There's this whole ordeal about checking my social security number since I don't have my license/school id, and finally they figure out that I am, in fact, a student at Yale. Long story short, I had clearly done something wrong by scaling that gate, but what could have been a short reprimand, turned into an hour-long debacle because I'm a black man.

Richard, University of California-Los Angeles, 2009

While at UCLA, I was a lead organizer of the protests around fee hikes and was subject to being struck by an officer in the chest with a baton at a rally. When encouraged by mentors to file the police report, I went through the formal process of filing, but didn't want to pursue further for fear of personal harm at their hands.

That semester, I would ride my bicycle back and forth from UCLA to my apartment in Culver City. I would ride past the station twice daily and often saw the officer that attacked me. I feared eye contact, because his smug expression communicated a lot of negative feelings to me. I would see him patrol on foot, in his car, and was once even stopped on my bike by him and his partner. On one occasion, they flashed their light at me to stop and dismount my bike, and asked me to stand against the wall to question me. The officer that struck me stayed in the car, but taunted me with statements about the protests, and that we were "wild", "reckless" and that we risked hurting ourselves and others by organizing rallies. He also accused me of charging him at the rally and that I was "lucky" that UCPD isn't like LAPD, suggesting that I would have gotten worse abuse. They mentioned that bikes were being stolen and that they needed the serial number.

Then they gave me two tickets, for my helmet light and for riding in an undesignated area. I was too fearful to really respond, so I took it all in and accepted the ticket, hoping not to have to interact with them again. For the rest of the year, I rode down Hilgard [Avenue] just to avoid the office altogether. Eventually, the UCPD video popped up online (before being removed), where I was identified by an anonymous commenter and harassed online via e-mail, phone, and through racist comments, calling us "monkeys" for protesting. I can't for sure link the two parties, but my gut feeling told me I was identified by the UCPD.

Jonathan, Rhode Island School of Design, 2006

During my first year at school, I had gone out for a long run and didn't bother bringing my ID keycard. Once I got back to the freshman quad (which is walled in with locked gates) I waited at the door until a classmate walked up and let me in (a pretty frequented practice for most freshman). I was then stopped by two campus police officers. There had been a string of burglaries on campus and they wouldn't let me go until the white classmate who had let me in vouched for me.

Jacqueline, University of California-San Diego, 2004

I went to school in the city I grew up in—San Diego, CA. Although born and raised there, my community seemed light years away from the very wealthy community of La Jolla where my college is located.

Unlike other colleges, UC's typically do not have curfews and such confining campus policies, thus making my encounter with campus police all the more suspicious. During my freshmen year at UCSD I invited friends to campus to hang out. It was between 9 and 10PM and my friend Henry and his two brothers came to campus to visit me. It was a nice night so we hung out in the quad area outside of my dorm. No one was loud or out of order, and at no point did we make any ruckus. Not even 20 minutes after their arrival a tall white campus cop approached me and told me that my Residential Advisor said that we were too loud and that my guests needed to leave campus. I immediately became suspicious as RA's don't typically call the police about such matters. He mentioned that there were reports that we were too loud and that it is too late to hang out outdoors and thus they needed to leave. I had never seen this man and his mannerisms told me he meant business.

I was so confused and angry. After feeling the hostility of the situation I walked my guests to their car. We bid our farewells and they left campus. I ran upstairs to my RA and asked her if she called the campus police and she said she had no idea what I was talking about. I told her about my encounter with the police and she was left stunned. She said she had never heard of such an encounter and that there is no real curfew. It became clear to me that three black men on campus after dark was too much for a predominantly white and Asian campus to handle. At that time, black students made up about 1% of the UCSD student population. Encounters such as these with campus police happened to many of my black colleagues; it made for a very isolating and often hostile experience. One in which you were not protected or completely accepted and treated as a student on campus like everyone else. At one point, nooses were even found in our main campus library. I can guarantee you that didn't make local headlines. Since 2004, the number of black students attending UCSD has increased and the environment has changed a bit. I am just not sure how quickly the system is changing to actually serve and protect the black students in attendance.

[Photo via Getty]

Bowe Bergdahl, the eccentric Army enlistee and final Afghanistan P.O.W. whose release from Taliban custody left detractors screaming for his corpse, may face desertion charges soon. Or maybe not. No one knows for certain just yet. But either way, these blogospheric anti-Bergdahl snuff-porn fantasies will be heard, dammit.

An investigation is complete, and a decision on Bergdahl's fate is reportedly likely to come soon. As we reported last year, when Bergdahl was handed over to Americans in exchange for the release of five Taliban suspects, he was always likely to face some sort of official accountability for how he ended up in enemy hands.

"The circumstances surrounding Bergdahl's disappearance, and the sacrifices of the soldiers tasked with finding him, raise many fair questions about his moral and legal responsibilities and whether he shirked them," we wrote. In all likelihood, he'd face a simple desertion charge, get credit for his time in captivity, and everyone would move on, as satisfied as they could be with an unsatisfying anecdote in an unsatisfying long war.

But fantasies of closure are so much sexier than murky facts, which is probably why the right-wing internet has sizzled for the last 24 hours with rumors that charges against Bergdahl are imminent. They started with retired lieutenant colonel Tony Shaffer, who told Fox News's Bill O'Reilly that the Army was going to throw the book at Bergdahl, but cronies of surrenderer-in-chief Barack Obama were trying to quash that act of bravery, because it would prove embarrassing to the administration somehow:

This was the same Shaffer, mind you, who previously appeared on Alex Jones' radio show—on multiple occasions—to discuss how he had uncovered 9/11 before it happened, but been ignored by higher-ups. (Maybe because it was an inside job?!) Shaffer's sources have also told him that President Obama was in the White House situation room watching our brave heroes die in Benghazi in real time, and that "Obama LIED About Benghazi Attack!!!"

It's unclear whether Shaffer's dubious Benghazi sources are the same ones that fed him yesterday's rumor about the Bergdahl charges, but that latter rumor quickly burned up the internet. Well, the part of the internet that lists heavily to starboard: Fox News, Breitbart, the Washington Times, New York Post, The Blaze, Newsmax... all conservative-leaning, all running with Shaffer's TV hit as Gospel truth, and garnering buttloads of pageviews, without so much as a corroborating statement from other sources.

Then this morning, NBC News Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski got what appeared to be confirmation of Shaffer's report:

Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was held captive by enemy forces in Afghanistan for five years, will be charged with desertion, a senior defense officials [sic] tell NBC News. The officials say the charges could be referred within a week.

Wait: How many defense officials? How senior? In what position to know? In his zeal to run something that was already "out there," Miklaszewski didn't answer any of those questions. In fact, he didn't go to the Pentagon for a response. So the Pentagon put out its own response:

Contrary to media reporting, no decision made by Army leadership with respect to Sgt. Bergdahl's case. The process will be respected.

— Rear Adm. John Kirby (@PentagonPresSec) January 27, 2015

The Army Times, meanwhile, did some actual reporting, and found no evidence to support the Bergdahl charge rumors (Despite its name, the paper is an independent unaffiliated news source):

The Army, too, said through its public affairs chief that there was unequivocally no truth to the stories:

Maj. Gen. Ronald F. Lewis: "The reporting from Fox News and NBC on Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is patently false" - @LMartinezABC

— Micah Grimes (@MicahGrimes) January 27, 2015

And by 2:40 p.m., there was no sign of Miklaszewski's story on NBC News's military page. Rather, there was only a sidebar link to a video of the Pentagon's spokesman denying the report:

That would seem to suggest that not even Miklaszewski is fully confident in his report.

Is it possible, in accord with Shaffer's bombastic accusations, that the White House, Pentagon, and Army are all prevaricating? Is it possible that Fox News' resident Benghazi conspiracy connoisseur and Jim Miklaszewski's anonymous military sources will ultimately prove to be telling the truth? Sure, it's possible. Because it was always possible Bergdahl would face some punishment for wandering off base and leading his comrades on deadly search missions. But there's no evidence as yet, and it's unclear why so many people want it to be true so suddenly.

Then again, these are the same people who called Obama to task for not bringing Bergdahl home earlier, until he did, and they did a 180, labeling both Obama and Bergdahl as traitors and typing up elaborate execution fantasies. And when they did that 180, paid political consultants stood ready to fan the Fox-fed flames.

Whatever happens with Bergdahl's military career and discipline, his haters will have their victory. Either the much-expected charges come, and crazy ideologues will persist in believing that their wishes have privileged epistemological status. Or he'll face a slap on the wrist, or no formal punishment, and conservatives will insist that it's Boweghazi: The White House stepped in at the last minute to save his Pashtun-loving butt. And then Bowe will be turned out on the streets, a civilian, probably eager to disappear again in an age of WiFi-speed hatred that will never allow him to. Time will tell whether his liberty-loving antagonists turn out to be more hazardous to his health than the Taliban's guerrilla hordes.

Economic inequality in America has been steadily increasing for three decades. Since the recession, only the very rich have made out well. Now, we have data on the individual U.S. states where the class war is being lost most severely.

A new study from the Economic Analysis and Research Network breaks down our nation's recent economic inequality numbers on a state-by-state basis. The numbers on a national level are bad; the numbers on a state-by-state level are also bad. The situation is bad everywhere. That is the short takeaway from this report, for you busy executives!

But if you're curious where inequality is more bad, you may be interested to learn that—while the rich have captured the majority of income gains since the Great Recession throughout the country—in about a third of the country, the top 1% got all—all!—of the income gains between 2009 and 2012. Specifically, in Florida, California, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a dozen other states.

Another awful and more long-term finding: between 1979 and 2007 (just before the recession) in Alaska, Michigan, Wyoming, and Nevada, only the top 1% saw their incomes grow, while the entire bottom 99% saw their incomes fall. That is spectacularly depressing! Twenty eight years of doom!

One more bit of historical perspective: between the time of the Great Depression and the beginning of the Reagan era—from 1928 to 1979—"the share of income held by the top 1 percent declined in every state but one." From the Reagan era to the latest recession—from 1979 to 2007—the complete opposite has been true. There has been "a rise in every state in the top 1 percent's share of income."

(We need to raise taxes on the rich.)

[The report. Photo: Flickr]

An elderly Georgia couple's plan to buy their dream car off Craigslist ended in tragedy last week. Three days after they went missing, the couple's car was found in a lake. Their bodies were discovered nearby. WSB reports that both had been shot in the head.

Elrey "Bud" Runion, 69, and his wife, June Runion, 66, recently posted a Craigslist ad seeking to buy a 1966 Mustang. Last week, Ronnie Adrian "Jay" Towns,29, responded to the ad and said he had one for sale. The couple agreed on a price for the car—owning a '66 Mustang had reportedly been a dream of theirs—and on Thursday they drove the roughly three hours from Marietta, Ga., to McRae, Ga., to meet Towns.

On Friday, their daughter—alarmed that her parents had failed to show up to babysit her daughter—contacted police. No one had heard from the couple since Thursday afternoon; the last person to speak to the Runions was reportedly Towns.

Towns turned himself in on Monday on charges of giving false statements and criminal attempt to commit theft by deception. Tuesday afternoon, he was charged with murder and armed robbery.

Don't call the fire dept.—it's just a car! Jared Leto's flame car!

TMZ caught Jared Leto, actor who promised over a month ago that he would get a haircut and who has yet to make good on that promise, coming out of a place. "No story there," you're thinking. "Surely we've all come and gone from places—so what?" Hah. You're so dumb you make me sick.

Look at his car:

Flame car, my man!

Jared Leto: Either get a haircut or stop making promises you don't intend to keep.

[image via TMZ]

Defamer Katie Holmes' Clothes Died | Internet Criticize GamerGate as a Woman, and Your Twitter Mentions Look Like This | Newsfeed Zombie Cat Claws Way Out of Grave Five Days After Being Buried Alivehttp://gawker.com/how-to-read-ga...

In a new series, CNN explores all the crazy drug use and sexy sex stuff taking place in Silicon Valley, where people like Greg and Stella, above, go to swingers parties and apparently convince other people to sleep with them, without drugging them or paying them. The series is called, "Sex, Drugs and Silicon Valley." My one-word review: Yuck.

You might think I'm being too harsh, but I urge you to watch the video about swinging in San Francisco, where in addition to Greg and Stella we meet this guy, Ben Fuller, who organizes partner-swap "Bronze Parties," and yeah, but no.

Seriously, San Francisco? These are your party people? This is is how you have fun? I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Nevertheless I highly recommend watching the swinger party video just to see the extremely uncomfortable expression on host Laurie Segall's face whenever Ben Fuller is talking.

All told there are six videos in the series. There's one about polyamory, featuring a woman techie who in addition to dating two guys and one woman is also engaged to a third guy, who is, in turn, dating three other women. Good luck with that!

There's an interview with a guy who dropped acid with Steve Jobs; a video about how people in the Valley today use LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs because they help you solve problems, which is totally true; and one about smart drugs, which supposedly improve your cognitive abilities, which sounds ridiculous.

Finally, there's the best one of all, where Mike Judge, creator of "Silicon Valley," talks about sad geeks who take drugs because they need "something to show they're not nerds."

It only took a few hours for a Nashville jury to convict two former football players accused of raping an unconscious Vanderbilt student in a sickening attack captured on a cell phone video.

Brandon Vandenburg and Cory Batey were both charged with five counts of aggravated rape and two counts of aggravated sexual battery after university officials discovered surveillance camera footage of the men dragging an unconscious woman into a dorm room.

But until she saw cell phone video of the attack, the woman testified, she believed she had just passed out drunk and even tried to protect Vandenburg.

She testified last week that Vandenburg—her boyfriend at the time—told her the next morning that he'd taken care of her after she got too drunk and threw up.

But instead, the prosecution established, Vandenburg actually spent the evening encouraging his friends to rape her and allowed Batey to urinate on her body afterwards, prosecutors said.

It took "just a few hours" for the jury to find both men guilty on all counts, ABC reports. Two other players, Brandon Banks and Jaborian McKenzie, are still awaiting trial.

[image via AP]

On Tuesday night, Georgia executed Warren Lee Hill—an inmate with an IQ of 70—who was unable to prove he had a mental disability under Georgia's strict legal standard.

Georgia is the only state that requires defendants to prove an intellectual disability beyond a reasonable doubt, the strictest standard of proof, and one Hill was unable to demonstrate in court.

Hill was already serving a life sentence for murdering his girlfriend in 1985 when he killed a fellow inmate in 1990, earning him a spot on death row.

He was originally scheduled to be executed by lethal injection in 2012, but managed to postpone three times—until the Supreme Court declined to grant him a stay of execution Tuesday afternoon.

He was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital and pronounced dead at 7:55 p.m. He did not take a final meal or make a final statement.

"Today, the Court has unconscionably allowed a grotesque miscarriage of justice to occur in Georgia," Hill's lawyer, Brian Kammer, told reporters. "Georgia has been allowed to execute an unquestionably intellectually disabled man, Warren Hill, in direct contravention of the Court's clear precedent prohibiting such cruelty."

Laugh with Amanda Peet. Love with Amanda Peet. But if Amanda Peet gives you advice on something, you do the goddamn opposite.

The uninitiated might think Amanda Peet—a famous actress who I really liked in Igby Goes Down—knows a thing or two about a good project.

But Amanda Peet, who also married to Game of Thrones co-creator David Benioff, proved last night on Conan that her professional judgment is not to be trusted.

"I thought [Game of Thrones] was a terrible idea. Terrible," said the Saving Silverman star. "Silly. Like Dungeons and Dragons but real with real people. It's like, uh..."

The rest of her highly suspect sentence was actually cut off by the audience's groans, but eh, you knew better than to listen anyway.

Say a prayer for James Caan's divorce attorney, who is rapidly carving out a highly specialized niche for himself—James Caan divorces.

This week, Caan filed for divorce from his fourth wife, Linda, demanding joint custody of their 16-year-old son.

Sounds like a lot of work! But the petition was probably not very difficult for his divorce attorney to draft—it's Caan's third time suing his wife of 19 years for divorce.

It's also the sixth time Caan's filed—according to E! he had already been divorced three times before he met Linda.

After (probably) drafting the divorce papers from memory, Caan's attorney also requested termination of Linda's financial support. The pair do not have a prenup and Caan's lawyer's kids are definitely going to private school.

[image via AP]

A Stanford University swimmer was caught raping a drunk, unconscious woman near a fraternity house earlier this month, Santa Clara county prosecutors say.

According to reports, 19-year-old Brock Allen Turner was arrested early Jan. 18 when two students riding bikes across campus spotted him on top of an unconscious woman. They tackled him to the ground while another student called authorities, the LA Times reports.

Turner—who swam in the 2012 Olympic trials and was reportedly heavily recruited by Stanford—was released after posting a $150,000 bail.

This week, he voluntarily withdrew from the university, which barred him from reentering the school's campus. The school also reportedly deleted his profile from the swim team's website.

On Wednesday, prosecutors are expected formally charge him with five felonies, including rape and sexual assault with a foreign object.

[image via Stanford]

Amanda Bradford just launched a dating app called The League, which is designed to be used by beautiful, ambitious, intelligent people — you know who you are! — while keeping out the riffraff. Are you in our league? No surprise that some people find this app silly. Or sad. Or offensive. But don't you dare point that out, because Amanda Bradford does not tolerate haters and will use her algorithm to ban you from The League, forever.

Allow me to explain. On Jan. 22, Business Insider ran a story about Bradford and The League, describing the app as "a more selective Tinder that's only for the most interesting and motivated single people," and saying that Bradford "wants to match tons of power couples." To get in, you have to be "carefully selected by Bradford's team using an are-you-cool-enough algorithm her tech team built." If you get in, you can invite one friend, but "All other singles have to wait in a virtual line and hope they're top-notch enough to join The League's elite pool of prospects," Business Insider reported. These are young San Franciscans who live in the Marina and Pacific Heights and hang out at The Battery, the members-only club for techies.

On Monday of this week, a guy named Victor Ng made a bitchy little crack on Facebook about the story, pointing out that a woman whose League profile appeared in the story was a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, and that, as a fellow CMU grad, "I am thoroughly embarrassed."

Ng also pointed out that this "elite" person had listed such "elite" interests as Zara, sushi, snowboarding and Crate and Barrel. "They should rebrand this app `The Basics,'" Ng snarked.

Amanda Bradford (photo) did not appreciate this! For she too is a graduate of the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, as well as the even more prestigious Stanford Graduate School of Business, and she is the CEO of a company that just raised $2.1 million in seed funding to create this world-changing, power-couple-forming app. Furthermore, t

he woman that Ng was mocking happens to be one of Bradford's best friends, and she is also a CMU graduate, not to mention "insanely talented,"and "gorgeous, smart, creative and an inspiration." Also, that woman's profile was a fake. They created it just to show a generic example of what a profile on The League might look like. But presumably both women really do love Crate and Barrel, and as far as I'm concerned they should not have to apologize for that, because who doesn't love tasteful but remarkably affordable furniture?

So Bradford posted a comment under Ng's post and informed Ng that he is a douchebag and that her data scientist will use their algorithm to filter him out and now he would never get at any of those elite ladies on The League. Zing!

Ng responded by pointing out how ridiculous it was for a CEO to be investing so much time and effort into responding to a silly little wisecrack about her app's lousy marketing, while adding that he grew up on food stamps, put himself through Carnegie Mellon with loans and scholarships, and is in a happy relationship with a wonderful dude, but thanks for making sure none of those elite women on The League will stumble across him!

Perhaps realizing that her behavior was not CEO-like, Bradford took down her comment. Ng, who had saved it, put it back up.

Then he added this little bon mot as a kicker:

San Francisco: It's junior high school, but for adults.

PS: yes, I do realize that this is all great publicity for The League, and I half suspect that the whole Victor Ng thing was a stunt organized in order to help this sad little dating app rise up out of the noisy crowd of dating apps. If that's the case, then I tip my hat to Amanda Bradford. Well played, Ms. Bradford. Well played.

PPS: If you want to learn more about The League and see photos of these charming women in action at parties, click on this New York Times article.

In a 2013 interview with Joe Fassler, horror fiction maestro Stephen King reflected on the magnitude of a novel's introductory sentence. "An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story," he said. "It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this." The first sentence sets the stage—however long or short the text—and hints at the "narrative vehicle" by which the writer will propel the book forward. King continued:

[C]ontext is important, and so is style. But for me, a good opening sentence really begins with voice. You hear people talk about "voice" a lot, when I think they really just mean "style." Voice is more than that. People come to books looking for something. But they don't come for the story, or even for the characters. They certainly don't come for the genre. I think readers come for the voice... An appealing voice achieves an intimate connection — a bond much stronger than the kind forged, intellectually, through crafted writing.

There are thousands of classic opening lines in fiction—A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison come to mind—but often the most well-known are not always the best. First sentences, of course, have different functions—to amuse, to frighten, to mystify—and the mechanics a writer uses to achieve this connection vary from genre to genre. In looking for the best opening lines, we took all of this into consideration. What follows are the 50 best. These are the sentences that say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.

"The time has come."

—Dr. Seuss, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

—Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

"They shoot the white girl first."

—Toni Morrison, Paradise

"Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs."

—Lynda Barry, Cruddy

"An abandoned auto cout in the San Berdoo foothills; Buzz Meeks checked in with ninety-four thousand dollars, eighteen pounds of high-grade heroin, a 10-gauge pump, a .38 special, a .45 automatic, and a switchblade he'd bought off a pachuco at the border—right before he spotted the car parked across the line: Mickey Cohen goons in an LAPD unmarked, Tijuana cops standing by to bootsack his goodies, dump his body in the San Ysidro River."

—James Ellroy, L.A. Confidential

"It was raining in Richmond on Friday, June 6."

—Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem

"The man who had had the room before, after having slept the sleep of the just for hours on end, oblivious to the worries and unrest of the recent early morning, awoke when the day was well advanced and the sounds of the city completely invaded the air of the half-opened room."

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Dialogue with the Mirror"

"Pale freckled eggs."

—Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

—Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

"Don't look for dignity in public bathrooms."

—Victor LaValle, Big Machine

"I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station."

—William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

"The magician's underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami."

—Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

"You better not never tell nobody but God."

—Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists."

—Roberto Bolańo, The Savage Detectives

"Chris Kraus, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker and Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old college professor from New York, have dinner with Dick _____, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère's, at a sushi bar in Pasadena."

—Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

"See the child."

—Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

"Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board."

—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his."

—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

"He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eyes that's halfway hopeful."

—Don DeLillo, Underworld

"On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope."

—Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

"I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I'm old, and you said, I don't think you're old."

—Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

"A screaming comes across the sky."

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

"Some real things have happened lately."

—Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted

"Your father picks you up from prison in a stolen Dodge Neon, with an 8-ball of coke in the glove compartment and a hooker named Mandy in the back seat."

—Dennis Lehane, "Until Gwen"

"We wanted more."

—Justin Torres, We the Animals

"An ice storm, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight, as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption of light but by some chemical reaction within the glossy ice; as if the source of all blueness lies somewhere up here in the north—the core of it beneath one of these frozen fields; as if blue is a thing that emerges, in some parts of the world, from the soil itself, after the sun goes down."

—Rick Bass, "The Hermit's Story"

"The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida."

—Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

"Since it's Sunday and it's stopped raining, I think I'll take a bouquet of roses to my grave."

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses"

"When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand."

—Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead

"No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that his home was one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent mountainside, where the Zend tongue is not contaminated with Greek and where leprosy is infrequent."

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins

"In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together."

—Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

"Her father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone out through the kitchen window at two or three in the morning to visit the birds."

—Edward P. Jones, "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons"

"A cradle won't hold my baby."

—Daniel Woodrell, "Uncle"

"My first and favorite task of the day is slaving over the Iliana Evermore Fairy Castle."

—George Saunders, "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror."

"One September evening when Walter Lasher returned from the city after a hard day's work and was walking to his car in the station parking lot, a man stepped out from between two cars, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face."

—Stephen Millhauser, "The Slap"

"A woman has written yet another story that is not interesting, though it has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting."

—Lydia Davis, "The Center of the Story"

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo..."

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination."

—Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

"It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not."

—Paul Auster, City of Glass

"Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar."

—Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

"Unlike the typical bluesy earthy folksy denim-overalls noble-in-the-face-of-cracker-racism aw shucks Pulitzer-Prize-winning protagonist mojo magic black man, I am not the seventh son of the seventh son of the seventh son."

—Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle

"Nobody died that year."

—Renata Adler, Speedboat

"'You are full of nightmares,' Harriet tells me."

—James Baldwin, "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon"

"The cage was finished."

—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon"

"Here is a weird one for you."

—David Foster Wallace, "Signifying Nothing"

Apple just earned more profit in a single quarter than any company, ever, and the hacks in Silicon Valley press are fawning all over CEO Tim Cook and praising his genius. But you know what? They're right. Tim Cook is a brilliant CEO. He may, in fact, be way better at running Apple than Steve Jobs was. Let's discuss.

When Cook took over in 2011, most people figured Apple would lose some of its magic. In a way that's true. Apple is less interesting without Steve Jobs. Its events are not as exciting. Cook doesn't have the cult leader charisma that Jobs possessed.

But holy crap can this guy make money. Apple generated nearly $75 billion in revenue last quarter, and kept $18 billion in net profit. Apple now has $178 billion in cash, enough to buy a lot of huge companies, like Intel, outright.

Key to all of this is the iPhone. Apple sold 75 million of them in the holiday quarter. As for Apple's other products, "Some are up. Some are down. But they're all just sideshows to the iPhone's center stage," as VentureBeat puts it. Sure, Cook has made mistakes, like the iPhone 5c, but those have been relatively insignificant.

The real news is that the iPhone is now almost eight years old and it keeps getting better and this shows no signs of slowing down. The iPhone is even crushing it in China. What you don't see are all the zillions of little calls and decisions that Cook has had to make correctly in order to produce a quarter like the one Apple just reported.

When Cook took over, the conventional wisdom was that he would be perfectly fine, but bland, and that Apple's momentum would carry the company for a few years and then things would start to fizzle out. I was one of the people who believed that. I was wrong.

In fact, Apple is booming. Here's an interesting figure. The last quarter when Jobs was officially the CEO of Apple was the holiday quarter of 2010. In that quarter Apple reported revenues of $26.7 billion and net profit of $6 billion.

That's right: Apple today is roughly three times its size when Cook took over.

Also, look beyond the numbers. Look at culture. Cook got rid of some assholes, like Scott Forstall, who was tight with Jobs but hated by everyone else.

Cook also has come out and said what everyone knew, which was that he's gay. He's been a strong supporter for LGBT rights and led 5,000 Apple employees who marched in the San Francisco Gay Pride parade.

He has expressed a commitment to sustainability, and when some dickhead challenged him about this at a shareholder meeting and said Apple should focus only on making as much profit as possible, Cook told him that Apple would do what was right and that if the guy didn't like it he should get out of the stock.

Cook has also ramped up Apple's philanthropy, something that had languished when Jobs was in charge.

Losing Steve Jobs was a terrible thing. And, as everyone pointed out, Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs.

But at this point in Apple's history, the challenge is not so much about inventing huge new products and generating excitement and suspense at events. Rather the challenge involves improving a mature product and operating at a massive scale. For that job, Cook turns out to be the perfect person.

Page Six reports that an incident involving Emile Hirsch is under investigation after the actor allegedly assaulted Paramount exec Dani Bernfeld at Park City's Tao Nightclub early Sunday morning.

The alleged attack, first reported Sunday, reportedly occurred around 3:30 a.m. during the Sundance Film Festival, when an anonymous source tells Page Six he or she saw Hirsch "aggressively picking on Dani." The source continues:

"He got even more aggressive and aggro. He pushed Dani up against a table, and then he put her in a headlock."

Another source claims that Hirsch "attacked her from behind" and put her in a "chokehold."

"He completely blindsided her after he'd been shit-talking and was already led away from her once."

According to an earlier report, no arrests were made that night, though police were called and spoke to Hirsch before sending him home.

Park City police confirmed to Page Six that they are investigating the incident. As of Tuesday, no charges had been filed.

[image via Getty]

The 1%-vs-99% inequality dynamic that plagues America's economy as a whole extends to the world of higher education. And the richest universities in America had a great year last year.

This is not all that surprising, considering the fact that prestigious universities play a key role in the creation and perpetuation of America's ever-more-entrenched class system. It is only right that those catapulted to great wealth and power by elite universities would give something back, so that their own children might also be able to achieve outsize wealth and power one day. Last year was a record one for donations to colleges: a total of $37.5 billion, up nearly 11% from the year before. Of course, most of that was not going to your local community college. Inside Higher Ed notes that "The top 20 colleges in fund-raising brought in more than $10 billion. That means that 28.6 percent of the total was given to fewer than 2 percent" of schools.

The biggest recipient of all: Harvard, with $1.16 billion in donations. Stanford was second, with about $930 million, followed by USC, Northwestern, and Johns Hopkins. "Meanwhile," the Wall Street Journal says, "schools in the middle of the pack are getting a smaller slice of the philanthropic pie, as they may not have such active, wealthy or well-connected alums."

College really is a training ground for the real world—the rich get richer and etc etc. Not much to say about all this except to point out that if all that money had been donated to real charities, tens or hundreds of thousands of human lives could have been saved, but instead we have the Stanford Alumni Association.

[Photo: Flickr]

Don't forget: Gawker is publishing less often to the front page. Read about the change here. Happening elsewhere: TKTK At the Times, Race Beat Exchanged for Bronx Courts | Defamer Tom DeLonge Pens Note to Fans: "I Follow the Light...I Follow Passion" | Newsfeed Jordan Agrees to Trade Terrorist to ISIS in Exchange for Captured Pilot

Andre Perry is 32 years old. He's a commercial photographer, lives in Brooklyn, and loves fashion. He's also black. A month ago, Perry was stopped at a subway station by an undercover officer with the New York City Police Department. He was interrogated about his two-finger ring, arrested, and charged with possession of a deadly weapon—"metal knuckles."

"I'm not saying those are your intentions, but you could hurt somebody with this," the arresting officer says in a video recorded by Perry on his cell phone. Still, Perry was given the additional charge of "intent to injure." The crime carries penalties from a community service to a year in jail on Rikers Island.

"I was transferring trains at the Union Square. Walking from one platform to the other, I stopped to take a photo to post to Instagram," says Perry. "Out of nowhere, two guys approached me and started asking what I had on, pointing to my hand. I told them it was a ring."

That's when he says the plainclothes cops showed him their badges and he immediately started recording the interaction using his cell phone. Over the course of the two-and-a-half-minute video, Officer Jonathan Correa informs Perry that he's wearing a weapon, frisks him and escorts him to a precinct. The video ends just after the officer places Perry in handcuffs.

Laws on metal knuckles vary, of course, by state but most have some statute on the books that prohibits their possession. Some, like South Carolina, make possession illegal only if "used with the intent to commit a crime," while states like California, Michigan, Illinois, and Vermont prohibit the possession, sale, and use of brass knuckles. California is the only state that makes an attempt to define brass knuckles in its statute. California Penal Code section 21810 defines metal knuckles as:

"...any device or instrument made wholly or partially of metal which is worn for purposes of offense or defense in or on the hand and which either protects the wearer's hand while striking a blow or increases the force of impact from the blow or injury to the individual receiving the blow. The metal contained in the device may help support the hand or fist, provide a shield to protect it, or consist of projections or studs which would contact the individual receiving a blow."

New York state has no such definition. Without it, enforcing the law is up to each officer's interpretation.

Over the last 10 years, 80's hip-hop aesthetics have reemerged in mainstream fashion, including multi-finger rings. Designers for Lanvin, Givenchy, and Eddie Borgo—to name a few—have all included multi-finger rings in their collections and celebrities from Rihanna and Solange to Lana del Rey and Lauren Conrad have worn them.

Hip-hop icons like LL Cool J and Big Daddy Kane pioneered this trend with their elaborate four-finger ring designs in the 1980's. Perhaps no wearer is more memorable, though, than the character of "Radio Raheem" from Spike Lee's 1989 Do the Right Thing. Radio, played by Bill Nunn, owned the central scene from the film using his rings to illustrate the cosmic battle between love and hate. Coincidentally, the character is choked to death by NYPD officer later in the film.

"It's not uncommon to see people walking around the city with two-finger rings," says Joshua Kissi, men's style expert and co-founder of New York City-based creative agency Street Etiquette. "The trend has come and gone but it's really back strong, especially for people who want to reference the 80s."

Kissi says that, despite the general popularity of the rings, he's not surprised to see the NYPD interpreting them differently when on black bodies.

"If there was a girl walking through SoHo with the same ring on, she wouldn't have even be stopped—let alone questioned and arrested," says Kissi. "It's clear that some people can wear items like Air Jordans and certain jewelry and be considered fashionable and creative, but when people of color do it, it 's dangerous."

During the encounter last month, Andre Perry can be heard telling Officer Jonathan Correa, "I feel so degraded right now."

Correa, who currently has a lawsuit pending against him from a previous arrest in 2013 involving a weapons possession case, replies, "You shouldn't. You gotta understand I'm doing my job."

Ronald Kuby, a prominent New York City civil rights attorney, agrees that Perry's arrest was reasonable.

"The law does not change in response to fashion trends," says Kuby, "and with almost all possessory offenses, one has to simply know that they're in possession of an item, not that it's illegal. Looking at what Andre possessed, it strikes me as the exact kind of thing the court would want to stop you from having."

Still, Perry feels that the officer took his race into account when making the judgement call between whether there was a ring or a deadly weapon on his fingers.

"I feel like I was profiled. Some people have no idea how easy it is for a black man to get a criminal record," he says. "Now I have to go through the legal system. I'm not some thug and had to spend the night in jail with real criminals and, while I was there, the officers were joking about all of it. The one who took my mugshot joked that I could post it to Instagram."

The NYPD has long been plagued by charges of harassment, misconduct and brutality with "broken windows" policing—exemplified in its controversial Stop and Frisk program—at the center. A 2013 federal class-action lawsuit put the city of New York on trial for unconstitutional and race-based stops. The city ultimately lost that case and, during the trial, two officers revealed that they had quotas for making stops, citations and arrests, and that they were specifically instructed by superiors to stop young men of color like Perry. [Representatives from the NYPD did not respond to requests for comment on this story.]

There were more than 6,000 arrests for criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree made in New York City last year, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services. Blacks and Latinos account for more than three-fourths of those arrested. And, coincidentally, questionable arrests like Perry's are used in defense of Stop and Frisk. The program is touted for its effectiveness in taking concealed weapons off the streets. The number of criminal weapons possession arrests—which includes everything from firearms and switchblades to stun guns, slingshots and metal knuckles—is central to making that case, even if it includes fashion crimes.

As for what's next? Kuby says that state officials will ultimately have to convince retailers to stop selling items like Perry's ring, pointing to a spate of similar arrests made in recent years for popular knives. An analysis done by the Village Voice last year found that white suspects who were found by police to be carrying knives were significantly more likely to be let go than blacks.

"A large number of people, many who work with knives, were being arrested for possession of gravity knives. The knives were being sold by large chain stores, even sporting goods stores," Kuby says. "Finally, the DA's office persuaded merchants to stop selling them because they're illegal to possess. I guess the DAs haven't quite caught up to the fashion industry."

Until then, two-finger rings are still for sale at retailers including Barneys, Bloomingdale's, and Bergdorf Goodman.

After reviewing Perry's ring, the Manhattan District Attorney's office decided to drop the charges against him " in the interest of justice." Perry says that's he's consulting with attorneys and planning on filing a lawsuit against the NYPD in the coming weeks for unlawful arrest.

If Perry wins his case or it's settled, he will join the ranks of more than 10,000 New Yorkers who, over the past five years, have successfully sued the city to the tune of nearly half a million dollars. For the 2015 fiscal year, the city budget has set aside $674 million to pay judgements and settlements for claims like Perry's.

"This is something that should have never happened to me," Perry says.

Donovan X. Ramsey is a multimedia journalist whose work puts an emphasis on race and class. Donovan has written for outlets including MSNBC, Ebony, and TheGrio, among others. Currently a Demos Emerging Voices fellow, he's on Twitter at @iDXR.

[Photo via Universal Pictures; Image by Tara Jacoby]