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It's a blue, cold Thursday in January and I'm walking down Rugby Road on the first night of fraternity rush at the University of Virginia, brushing past groups of identical gossiping boys in matching preppy outfits: fleeces, checked oxfords, khakis, boots. "Excuse me," they say politely when our coats touch, then turn back to each other and their offhand drawling: "What was that back there, Bronyfest?" "Not enough of a tobacco enthusiast for that house, I can't just sit around ripping cigs." "I wasn't feeling them, dude, they had, like, a serial rapist vibe."

I am startled at the boy who just threw that out in the winter night to his two friends, because all four of us are crossing the street on our way to Phi Psi, the fraternity whose huge Christmas-lit mansion is a landmark in the middle of the physical fraternity scene in a way that the fraternity itself—until Rolling Stone—was not. But the boys were talking about a druggier, prep-school frat; they're not talking about Phi Psi.

No one here is talking about Phi Psi, at least not "Phi Psi," the figural fraternity or the true, unchecked scourge of sexual assault that it was used to represent. (The frat has since been cleared of charges, with "no basis to believe that an incident occurred.") In fact, if there is a single male interacting with the Greek system—or even one human on campus generally—who wouldn't rather tuck away last semester as a bad dream, I won't hear about it over the next five days. It was enough that Sabrina Rubin Erdely's egregiously misreported gang rape story put everyone at Thanksgiving dinner with Grandma asking about consent mechanics between bites of mashed potato, but there were three undergraduate suicides, too, and Hannah Graham, a first-year girl found dead a month after she went to a party and then disappeared.

It was a lot. Everyone's ready to move on. Rush numbers are robust and steady, both for frats and sororities, which rope in a third of the undergraduate population: the boys in fleeces on the street are just trying to hurry up, bro, and belong. "Those guys are so Southern I felt racist just walking in," one says. "That one dude was gay as fuck," says another. Their elementary language belies both the bigoted underpinnings of the Greek system that are common to every Southern prestige structure—classism, racism, homophobia, sexism—as well as the genuine desire among many participants in these structures to process and transcend the bad blood that stains the corners of their party.

The boys walk into the Phi Psi house, which is—as per usual, and like all the other frats I'll see over the weekend—gently flouting the university rules that mandate a "dry" rush process. I keep going, and a blonde girl representing her Christian student group gives me a set of hand warmers. "Good luck!" she says happily.

I fall into a swarm of girls, also rushing, all in loose staticky curls, high boots, tiny skirts that disappear under black quilted jackets. They line up outside sorority houses, whose doors open for brief minutes, little portals to golden light and a stack of hotties on the stairs who clap their Potential New Members through the entryway in part 49 of 204,583 of the elaborately choreographed (and actually dry) process that is sorority rush. The girls will receive their bids on Monday, and, newly crowned with colors and "sisters," they'll get to attend increasingly elaborate fraternity events until the bender explodes in a series of white-boy mobs and Greek letters on January 31, everyone finally sorted by manner and wealth and vibe.

It was almost a decade ago when I did this, in these same houses: 17, my name scrawled in silver on a name tag, a cowboy boot and a music note glitter-stickered on either side. I was chubby from shots of sweet liquor; I was always trying to dance. By that time I had already endured my first and only attempted sexual assault of college, which did not occur within the framework of the Greek system. Raised in Texas, I found Virginia rush to be warmly effortless in comparison to what my friends were doing at schools farther south, and still it had the same brazen superficiality, the same savage efficiency: it was a process that showed you less who you were than who you wanted to be.

I keep walking. Boys apologize when we get too close. I get to the Corner, the undergrad strip of bars and restaurants, and slip into a wooden booth in everyone's old standby bar, the Virginian. My friend Steph is there; we're the only two non-white people in the place. She asks me how my lap around Rugby went. "Great," I say. "All the boys keep moving out of my way."

"I know!" she says enthusiastically. "Isn't it funny, how nice they are?"

"I used to love it," I say. Around us, girls are dancing on the tables.

"I still love it," she says. "It makes it impossible to hate anything about this place in a simplistic way."

Sabrina Rubin Erdely started looking for a touchstone travesty in June of last year. She interviewed students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Penn, and soon found herself floating south down the prestige river to the University of Virginia: a tradition-heavy school, not unique in its miscarriages of sexual assault justice, but distinct in its particular intersection of public obligation and private interests, bourbon-chugging and obsessive respectability, obedience to tradition and individual intellectual spine.

There, she found a girl she'd call Jackie telling a wild, horrible story of gang rape as fraternity initiation. It was something so violent as to fall out of the unprosecutable "gray area" that many people don't even consider troubling; a brutal crime covered up by institution (male privilege) within institution (the Greek system) within institution (an elite university).

Erdely homed in on UVA, contacting administrators who made themselves less than available. She interviewed students, who talked gamely but grew cautious after word spread about her interview practices: multiple people told me that, for example, after the reporter spent hours talking to the president of the all-male sexual assault peer education group One in Four, she told him that she wasn't going to use anything he told her. The conversation hadn't been juicy enough, sources claim she said; he'd answered her questions "too well." (He was reportedly the one to tape the conversation; Erdely did not.)

Erdely also made a point to interview women who had survived sexual assault at the university, who then started to realize that their stories wouldn't make the cut. What may have been her well-intentioned acknowledgment of the poor state of consent dialogue led Erdely to create a narrative that pushed "normal" assault and its attendant nuances completely off the margins; mild-mannered and articulate rape survivors who spend 30 hours a week conducting peer education appear in the Rolling Stone article as crop-top-clad fixtures of "UVA After Dark," saying things like, "It's a good idea to act drunker than you really are."

November drew closer, and Jackie's story was the one Erdely latched onto, although she never attempted to verify it with UVA administrators once during their email exchanges, and Jackie—perhaps understanding that her story wouldn't stand up to scrutiny—was feeling coerced. Pre-emptive meetings were called all over campus, fraternities started making tighter guest lists for their parties; the week before the article came out, students talked about it in class, making guesses as to which frat would be accused.

And then it was up, and it was a blockbuster: a graphically violent gang-rape lede as the emblem of a preppy cash-and-reputation nightmare institution full of violent frat boys and the spineless, selfish girls who loved them. The shocked UVA student body rallied in favor of the justice they didn't know they had been denying each other. "How could we not believe it?" said Charlotte Cruze, a fourth-year sorority member. " Rolling Stone is a big magazine. She wasn't just a random writer. She'd been here for months. Who was I to doubt anyone's story?"

There was a Board of Visitors meeting, a rally, a memorial. The Phi Psi house was vandalized; people gathered in front of it, marching with "Burn Down the Frats" signs. (Naturally, a miniature backlash followed: male alumni yelled "Nobody wants to rape you!" at marchers and the memorial was vandalized.) The Phi Psi fraternity brothers moved into hotels. One of them, I'm told, cried to a friend, saying he didn't know what kind of an institution he'd become part of. (He might have known, anyway: a woman named Liz Seccuro was very much gang raped at Phi Psi in the '80s, getting closure only when her attacker wrote her a letter decades later, confessing the details that UVA's administration had refused to believe. One dean asked her, while her ribs were still broken, if it had just been "regrettable sex." )

Five years after I'd left the UVA Greek system, I read "A Rape on Campus" as an outsider account about a true problem, written by someone good at cherry-picking. I knew what rape was like on UVA's campus: common, hidden, complicated to adjudicate—just like it is everywhere else. For me, the article exposed more in the tenor of its responses: friends from college prefacing their own rape stories with, "I know this isn't as bad as Jackie's"; my boyfriend on the phone with his former frat brothers having heartbreakingly earnest arguments with their opinions that the piece rang as "fantasy." After the piece came out, I interviewed one of 14 UVA women ever to convict her assailant of sexual misconduct within the school's system—it is likely true that your UVA career would be more at risk for fudging a chem lab report in front of the wrong people than from fucking a near-unconscious 18-year-old—and a handful of guy friends responded to me with not just, "not all men" but also, "not all successfully charged rapists."

So it took me a day or two to admit that I found many of Erdely's details unrecognizable. No one says "UVrApe"; no one I know has ever heard the Rugby Road-themed "traditional fight song" that poetically ("fuck for 50 cents"/"panties on the fence") separated the article's sections. And, in the words of one sorority girl I talked to in Charlottesville: "We knew something was bullshit when she wrote that Phi Psi was a top-tier frat."

Details aside, Charlottesville was reeling. By the weekend, the entire Greek system was suspended. ("Even now, you're blaming women," read an email from one sorority to the Inter-Sorority Council.) While students went home for Thanksgiving, other journalists re-reported Erdely's work, and the story's foundations started to crumble. Ten days after the story broke, Rolling Stone issued a retraction, and the pendulum at UVA swung the other way.

"If you're going to deliberately avoid nuance in your article, you're going to get a reaction to match," an alum told me. Emails calling for mandatory reporting, automatic police involvement and the expulsion of the accused (all terrible ideas) were replaced by emails calling for Jackie's expulsion and a formal apology to the fraternities for the suspension of their civil liberties (equally bad). #IStandWithJackie competed with #FuckJackie on Yik Yak, the anonymous, localized gossip app. Details about the story's process came out: the accused were never contacted, the date of the incident was never double-checked, Jackie was lying, and railroaded into the spotlight on a story that now appears to be a PTSD-laced delusional flashback obscuring the details about an actual, "lesser" assault. ("Was that what rape had to look like to get everyone to care?" asked Maya Hislop, a graduate student.)

By December, "A Rape on Campus" was done for, while rape on campus was still well in sway—further concealed by the powerful, reinforced (and in practice, exceedingly rare) narrative of the falsely accused. Sympathy slid (as it doesn't do in a vacuum) to those poor fraternity men, and the underhanded logic of Erdely's article stuck where the facts had not.

"Was that what rape had to look like to get everyone to care?"

Now the mood among undergraduates at the University of Virginia is exhausted, cautious cynicism, tugging at the Energizer Bunny sincerity that defines student life. There is the sense that, last semester, everyone was forced by someone else to cry wolf: Jackie, Rolling Stone, the fraternities, women, the administration, the students in achingly sincere responses that now seem dissipated into the air.

"The article wasn't right in a factual sense or a justice sense, either," said Charlotte Cruze, across from me at a bar booth, bright-eyed and put-together after 12 hours of rush. "It was about supporting women, but she wrote all the women up as dumb and weak." She tells me what her sorority sister sent to group text the morning of the article's release: "She made us look like sex slaves to the patriarchy."

Erdely did do that, and worse: in trying to expose rape at UVA, she obscured it. The story contained not just factual errors but a fundamental contradiction: a reporter trying to make a cold-blooded fraternity gang rape story both salaciously anomalous and blandly representative at once.

Jackie's story is either atypical or typical. It can't be both. So: which is it? What is actually happening within these fraternity houses at UVA?

It's Friday, the second night of rush, and I'm by the huge gym next to my first-year dorms. A blue bus pulls up, the carriage that will take us all the way down Rugby Road. About 40 white male teenagers dressed like soccer dads shuffle on, followed by me, all my lipstick wiped off so I can "pass."

It's warmer tonight: fleece vests instead of pullovers, boat shoes instead of boots. The boys chug Monster energy drinks in the fluorescent light, check their makeshift schedules on their iPhones, and absentmindedly talk shit. The guy behind me says, "My parents only want me to join the ones with a good reputation." Well, sure. I think about the second-year sorority girl I had coffee with that morning.

"I do want Phi Psi to have a second chance," she said. "So I don't want to sound rude—but, honestly, can you imagine calling your mom and telling her you pledged Phi Psi?"

I can't. And I've been wondering: who is going to pledge there this year? I never knew anyone in Phi Psi, so I've been asking everyone I talk to what the frat is actually like. (Responses include "stoners"; "guys like my buddy Jason, but not cool"; "the least weird of the weird frats"; "engineering school"; "I have literally stolen two handles of vodka out of one of their pickup trucks but that's all I know.") But their big house is crowded with people every night, light blazing from the windows. The other frats have their blinds drawn.

On the bus, I turn around in my seat and ask the two guys behind me what houses they're liking. They rattle off some letters (not Phi Psi) but say it's a long process, who knows what'll happen. "So long," I say sympathetically. "At least it's more fun than girls rush. We can't even drink."

"Technically we aren't supposed to, either," they say. I ask if enforcement has gotten any worse this year due to—we exchange an exhausted look— you know. They say no.

"Cooool," I say. We get off the bus in the middle of Rugby; the boys disappear into the evening.

Now is a good enough time as any to mention that—although I was in a sorority and my boyfriend of many years was in a frat and five years ago I would've been slamming shots at Down Under with the worst of them—I am, for obvious reasons, getting dead air from every fraternity guy I have formally reached out to, even the ones I contact through close mutual friends. The exception is a fourth-year named Win Jordan, a member of Phi Delt, a frat with a dry house and an upstanding reputation. Jordan works with One in Four, the male-to-male peer education group, and has spent much of his free time in the last two years talking to dorms, frats, and sports teams about sexual assault.

What's that like, I asked him. "Apathy is more disheartening than outright resistance," he said.

But Jordan was optimistic about the fraternity system: the fact that it's an enormous grouping of students who are accountable to UVA for their social functions, the fact that recent rule revisions seem to be attempting to use the organizational hierarchy to implement change. Nearly all the frats voluntarily signed a new agreement to operate under a new set of rules: no kegs, no liquor unless under strict conditions, accessible food and bottled water, three sober brothers, outside security, a guest list. (I feel certain that no frat will follow these rules to the letter in actuality, the same way that hazing and underage drinking are technically prohibited but both things are facilitated with relative formality every day.)

"Parties aren't the most important thing about fraternity life," Jordan says—something that many guys have said, sincerely, to skeptical me—and adds that he thinks a better way to facilitate internal change at fraternities is through actual conversations, in the hours when it's just guys hanging at the house. "But you can't sign a paper necessitating that into action."

I ask Jordan whether or not he thinks there's an open admission among frat guys that assault is a problem. He hesitates. "I've surrounded myself with people that believe this," he says. "But it's hard to say."

"It's hard to say," says Charlotte Cruze, when I ask her the same question. "They don't think rape has happened anywhere near them. They think that if there was a problem, we would know. People would tell."

People would tell, we say to each other, about something like this:

"Grab its motherfucking leg," she heard a voice say. And that's when Jackie knew she was going to be raped.

She remembers every moment of the next three hours of agony, during which, she says, seven men took turns raping her, while two more —- her date, Drew, and another man —- gave instruction and encouragement. She remembers how the spectators swigged beers, and how they called each other nicknames like Armpit and Blanket. She remembers the men's heft and their sour reek of alcohol mixed with the pungency of marijuana.

"If it had been a different frat," an undergrad girl tells me, "a place that everyone knows is aggressive—if it had been a scene with a ton of coke on the ground—if there hadn't been those Animal House ripoff details about people who we're supposed to believe are nicknamed 'Blanket,' then maybe. But frat guys from the beginning knew it wasn't true. They knew there was something about it."

The frat boys knew. They just knew Jackie was lying. This "sense of conviction," buoyed in part by selfishness and outright denial, has bothered me from the minute the story came out, through the retraction, through now. "This doesn't fit my experience," these frat boys say.

"Great," I want to tell them. "Then what do you have to lose?"

But anyway, regardless of motivations, the deniers were right: Jackie's story wasn't true. It wasn't true in the larger sense, either, about the real ways that violence—economic, physical, cultural, sexual—is actually protected within the Greek system.

Fraternities do not have a monopoly on rapists: not at UVA, not at any frat, not even the deep Southern ones where upwards of 100 guys live in the house. (The plumbing; one shudders.) But: what the fraternity system does collect together is a group of male teenagers who enter their organization through rites of interpersonal physical violence, and who, military-style, reproduce this violence onto each other's bodies. "Thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, [they] cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1785, about the male children of Virginian slave-owners. The sentiment there is still viable. Fraternities are worth examining as groups of rich, young, mostly white boys who were either born or bred into a tradition of getting away with things they should not.

This doesn't mean rape, of course, but perhaps you'll see how it's related. When I was an undergrad, a frat boy accidentally and infamously forwarded a hazing schedule to his club sports team, an email with the order to give pledges (among other stuff) a "pill/line." The fraternity—an ultra-rich group with a clever dues structure of having members pay nothing while in college but tithe a portion of their income later on—lawyered up, lawyered out. Students died at and after fraternity parties while I was in school: girls fell out of windows; a first-year got in a DUI car wreck during a hazing event; a Southern frat put on blackface. None of them got anything more than probation, none got kicked off campus (though UVA has disbanded some chapters since I graduated) and perhaps more importantly, none of them were effectively shamed by the student population.

What the fraternity system does collect together is a group of male teenagers who enter their organization through rites of interpersonal physical violence, and who, military-style, reproduce this violence onto each other's bodies.

In fact, the reaction to the "antics" of frat boys is much more likely to be the opposite: a blind, cooing Southern protectiveness, one that—crucially—does not at all preclude frat-friendly women from being smart, self-determined, or in control. One year while I was at UVA, during the season where frat pledges walk around looking like someone just dog-collared them in a pile of gefilte fish and basted them with a 40, a sorority girl sent another locally infamous email in which she told girls in her chapter to carry Advil, bottled water and sandwiches to class to administer to the cute little suffering dudes as needed. "Just in case!" she wrote happily. That girl, with her strange priorities, probably pulled six figures at McKinsey straight out of school.

But in a national context, UVA's Greek system is legitimately low-key. Sororities don't haze or send 5,000-word emails about coating your person in Vaseline. Fraternities don't, as they do in other places, force their pledges to beat each other unconscious. Greek students at Virginia are just trying to meet their best men and future maids of honor, just trying to find someone to smoke weed with on a Sunday; they're just trying to follow in their grandparents' footsteps (possible only, of course, if said grandparents are white); they're just trying to put on a neon tank top and hook up with the best-looking rich person they can. "What's the fucking big deal?" they might say, reading this. It's just a good time, isn't it? I met my boyfriend seven years ago at a sorority pre-game; he lived in a frat house and came out much sweeter than me. I, like the majority (but certainly not all) of the current and former UVA women I talked to while writing this piece, never felt unsafe at a fraternity party.

But neither did my college friend Kelly on the night that she was raped. Neither did UVA alum Jessica Longo, forcibly penetrated while unconscious in her own bed, by a guy in a prestigious fraternity who everyone jokingly called "Predator."

"There are guys you know are creepy," Charlotte Cruze told me. "Not just at UVA, I mean, but everywhere. There are guys whose behavior you question. But the thing about those guys, the ones who really warrant your fear—the problem that makes it so hard to do anything about them—is that they would never hurt someone out in the open. They would never, ever tell."

And there's the rub.

If there is a system-specific problem with the Greek system, it is not "the existence of rapists." It's the practices that make these rapists invisible. Many people I talked to cited a well of survivor support at UVA but little acknowledgment that the perpetrators of this violence are embedded within student society. The Greek system is not a hotbed of sexual criminals, but rather a hotbed of people invested in a tradition and lifestyle that inherently allows a tremendous amount to go unseen.

Let's take alcoholism as an example. Imagine a frat is throwing a keg kill, in which teams race to finish off kegs of beer, either for fun or philanthropy. (People who love fraternities are always pointing to how much money they raise for charity, which they do in the way that all rich people do: through events with enormous production costs that involve heavy drinking.) So, say a team of 10 is assigned to do a keg kill for the children. All the boys (or girls!) drink 16 beers on a casual Wednesday, and only one of them is an addict, and nobody will ever know.

It's the same with sexual assault. Multiple university studies have shown it: fraternity brothers are three times more likely to rape someone. Nearly every frat guy I know would dismiss that statistic as some sort of personal attack, because they haven't heard anyone yelling for police, have they? Of course they haven't. They would, almost universally, help someone who was being obviously injured. (Unless it was pledging, and the someone was one of them.) But rape in college is rarely obvious. The broad action—"hooking up with a super-drunk girl"—is so common as to be almost universal; the difference—ignoring her say in the equation—happens secretly and almost always goes unseen.

And again, rape happens everywhere. But at frats at UVA, it happens like this: Two third-year boys dance with two wasted first-year girls at a party; they take them upstairs to their respective rooms, a one-minute walk from "should we do this" to doing it. One girl wakes up proud of the sloppy, fun, brownout sex she had in a top bunk; the other girl wakes up horrified and silent, finds her shoes, slinks out. It'll take her several weeks to even consider that the boy should have listened to her muffled stop it, please stop it. It'll take much longer for her to understand that she wasn't just embarrassingly wasted, that what happened to her was rape. And from the outside, who can know the difference? And who would go out of their way to try?

Which isn't to say that UVA students would necessarily be great at discerning. At a school full of intellectually curious double majors who are genuinely embarrassed to get a B, a few major blind spots—about consent, and the ways that it can be given—may remain.

If there is a system-specific problem with the Greek system, it is not "the existence of rapists." It's the practices that make these rapists invisible.

When I was in college, Valentine's Day brought a shower of white flyers plastered to columns and bulletin boards all over the school, featuring Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, with a big red heart in between. "TJ <3 Sally," the flyers read. Most people—and granted, this was seven years ago—thought these "love notes" were sweet. Were they? Can a slave say no to her master? Can a frat boy really say with a straight face that they're sure no one's ever been taken advantage of in the house?

It is hard for young privileged Americans to reconcile their good intentions with the violence that has facilitated their lifestyle. Students at UVA love their school sincerely. They remember their founder as a bastion of modern ideas and forget he owned humans as property. They are history majors who'd like to focus on the positive: the gorgeous brick buildings, but never who built them, or the fact that UVA as an institution purchased slaves too. The erasure of suffering exists in every transaction of power, on Grounds as it is in America. In just weeks, UVA has found millions of dollars to fund infrastructure improvements that will satisfy stakeholders who want something to be done about "the rape problem." The school has also spent a decade ignoring a vocal, sustained campaign for them to pay their hourly employees a living wage.

I believe that UVA students understand these fundamental inequities—if in a buried, conflicted, self-effacing way. Sorority bid day this year was on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a coincidence which set Yik Yak buzzing: "The running of the white girls," one poster wrote. "March of the Canada Goose." As the girls ran out to meet each other, shrieking in their T-shirts and clutching matching balloons, someone wrote, "Nameless Field right now is the sound of white privilege."

"Chill," someone replied. "Colored girls get into sororities too."

The "colored girls" do get into sororities, and the "colored boys" get into fraternities too—just not the ones that Rolling Stone cared to mention. The UVA Greek system is segregated, not just unofficially but explicitly. The unmarked but almost totally white system is the school's default: the Inter-Sorority Council and Inter-Fraternity Council are the largest student organizations on campus, with no mention of race anywhere on their literature. Shoved off to a corner somewhere are the Multicultural Greek Council, for "Latin, Asian and local" fraternities and sororities, and the National Pan-Hellenic Council, for historically black Greek organizations.

No broad segment of the American population experiences sexual violence at the rates that black women do. And yet, before and after Rolling Stone's bombshell, guess which of the above councils were never invited to the Board of Visitors meetings, to national press conferences, even to sit down for a talk? Would it surprise you to hear, after all this exhaustive media coverage, that the first reported rape at the University of Virginia occurred in 1850 and concerned three male students who took a seventeen-year-old Charlottesville slave girl out into the woods?

The students—George Hardy, Armistead Eliason, James Montadon—skipped town and never faced formal charges. The slave girl's name is lost now, like Jackie's real one will be.

Here is the difference between the way UVA treats its black Greek community and its white one. White sororities and fraternities all occupy enormous mansions leased to them in perpetuity for (often) a dollar per year. Black sororities and fraternities don't have land access at all; not one of them has historically owned a house. White frats throw parties downstairs from their bedrooms and keep the good liquor under their desks upstairs; black frats have to rent spaces every time they want to to party, and they always pay security and often fork out for a staffed bar. The new regulations that IFC organizations are groaning about are nothing compared to the normal way black frats, and black frat brothers, have to carry on.

And, although the black Greek community—like the white one—is stocked with members who are actively trying to address and acknowledge sexual assault in their midst, Sabrina Rubin Erdely didn't acknowledge them with a mention. Neither, in the aftermath, did UVA. Nor has almost anyone reporting on "campus climate" or institutional changes.

White sorority girls I talked to brushed off the idea that fraternities had any excess of power. "She wrote it up like we feel lucky to get into a frat party? Please," one girl told me. But a second-year black student named Kiana grows quiet when I ask her what her first UVA drinking experiences had been like. Had her best option for procuring alcohol been—like mine was, and so many other girls' is—to ease her way into a fraternity and bat her eyes for booze?

"I couldn't get into the frat houses," Kiana says. "I didn't know anyone. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt once and I thought I looked nice, but then I saw other girls in tube skirts and halter tops and I realized— that's why I'm not getting in. As a black student, you come to see what places you can and can't access, and I was like, I guess this just isn't for me."

Kiana quickly adds that no one was outright malicious. I tell her: don't worry, I understand. I, along with a half-black girl, made up the entire melanin cohort of one pledge class in my very white sorority; the experience was fine except for when girls would fall all over themselves trying to demonstrate that the two of us made them "diverse."

I ask Kiana about her response to the Rolling Stone piece. "I immediately thought it overwrote the presence of people fighting against sexual assault all over the school," she says, "And what made it worse was that nobody contacted the historically black Greek organizations. Nobody invited our council presidents to the conferences. We weren't even given the chance to defend ourselves. That's how little they cared."

Kiana adds, "I don't believe this piece would have had as much national attention if the woman at the center was black."

"Nobody contacted the historically black Greek organizations. Nobody invited our council presidents to the conferences. We weren't even given the chance to defend ourselves. That's how little they cared."

UVA has made national news in the last four years mostly under circumstances in which a white girl was dead or victimized. There was Yeardley Love, a beautiful lacrosse player and sorority girl, beaten to death in 2010 by her violent and sociopathic boyfriend. (The racial dimensions of George Huguely's sentencing are not lost on anyone in either Greek system: "A white guy from DC who absolutely committed the horrible crime he was accused of, and he's not going to be in jail for much more than 20 years," said Charlotte Cruze, grimly.) Hannah Graham, this year, her face all across the news followed by her dreadlocked murderer. Shelley Goldsmith, a second-year attending UVA on the same merit scholarship that brought me there, dead last fall from a molly overdose in DC. Jackie, now.

There have been black girls, black women, dead and raped and murdered on the same streets in Charlottesville. Forget the national media: very few students know names like Sage Smith, the black, transgender 19-year-old who disappeared in 2012 on the main drag of town.

"We've had this conversation over and over within the black community," says Kiana. "Would anyone look for us if we were missing? And we're not sure."

She talks about how black enrollment has dropped at UVA. She wants to help more with recruiting, but worries that she's selling a facade. "The good impact this school has had on our education is real," she said. "But we know the environment we're in."

The environment is one in which a white student will argue against affirmative action in front of black classmates by saying, "My family thinks charity is the best way to help people"—one in which, on the night of the 2012 election, two black girls went walking past the bar rented out by the college Republicans and got a cigarette thrown at them, along with a hissed "nigger." There was no administrative acknowledgment of that incident. There has been no administrative response to the public Yik Yak rants calling the students at a #BlackLivesMatter protest "farm equipment" and "proof of why affirmative action as a joke." Police came to the post-RS Slutwalk to keep the girls safe as they crossed the crosswalks; they came to the Eric Garner protests to police. And the extra police presence now promised by the UVA administration to protect women will likely fall unequally: a lot of it on (I'd guess) minority "townies" and black male students, who are already followed disproportionately when they walk around town.

All weekend in Charlottesville, this is what I'm thinking: it's so difficult to get anyone with power and lax accountability—the true American dream, if we're honest—to ever give any of it up. But the rest of the world is coming. " Rolling Stone showed how many people were waiting for proof of what they've already experienced," says Maya Hislop, the graduate student. "It was the same with Trayvon Martin." This is the thrust behind Erdely's article, the reaction, the backlash to the reaction: Someone is finally trying to hold privilege and power accountable for itself.

But how? Not with a story that's not fact-checked.

I sit with Hislop at a coffee shop one sunny afternoon. "[UVA president] Teresa Sullivan is trying to keep her donations, and no one has admitted, this whole time, that we don't really know about what to do about sexual assault. No one has admitted that this isn't a problem that can necessarily be 'solved' with 'swift action,'" she says, adding, "Activism is seen as unproductive here. People don't think of demanding things. They think: you cajole. You pay."

She tells me about watching her undergraduate students react to the piece: the defensiveness, the anger that their school was being represented in a way that erased everyone who was actively trying to do good. "Then," she says, "they started to realize, I have a friend that's been through this. I have a friend that's been through this too."

She tells me about a sexual assault peer education group meeting that happened soon after Erdely's article was published. "These two very young fraternity members came, and they were so lovely. They kept saying they wanted to help, but didn't know how. They didn't know where the problem was. They couldn't see it."

"I've reached a place of just trying to help black students," says Maya. "That's what I'm here for. I am involved with issues of sexual violence, because it's interconnected—everyone wants to say that violence happens somewhere else—but with the Greek system, I think they should just disband it." She looks around calmly. "Everything they love is founded on everything I hate."

So what are rape survivors at the University of Virginia actually left with?

A recent alum and survivor articulates a basic hope: first, simply, that students who have been raped and assaulted are able to understand that what happened to them was wrong. She is still involved in peer education, still gets texts from students at 4 a.m. "We're at a point where a lot of survivors can acknowledge that their assault was bad," she says. "But not that it was wrong."

The alum, who asked to be anonymous, tells me that she's tired of the rhetoric surrounding this issue, the signs that sprung up all over grounds saying PROTECT OUR WOMEN. "I have felt incredibly patronized by the idea that schools aren't doing enough to protect women," she says. "That's not the problem. Schools aren't doing enough to ensure equity."

They're not. One change that would be effective in both a symbolic and practical sense would be if national Greek organizations relaxed the prudish facade imposed on sorority chapters: the live-in house mom, the prohibition on drinking and house parties, the rules against boys sleeping over. Top-down moralism obscures the fact that sex and drinking are not in themselves bad or shameful, and get much more dangerous when female agency surrounding those subjects is redirected to the sticky turf of young bros. (The national sorority organizations have now asked UVA chapters to refrain from participating in boys bid night, which is notoriously wild. The girls are surely still going to party, but now, prohibited from moving in obvious packs together, they will be much less safe.)

"I have felt incredibly patronized by the idea that schools aren't doing enough to protect women," she says. "That's not the problem. Schools aren't doing enough to ensure equity."

There are also many common-sense things that could be done to improve the adjudication framework at UVA. For one, the committees that hear internal sexual misconduct allegations should be composed of people who are independent from the university, not (as they currently are) stakeholders in the school. There are bills currently in the state legislature that would require administrators and staff to report alleged assaults to the police, who would then (if other bills pass) have to report to the commonwealth attorney: these "reforms" are unwise and unwanted, and would decrease the already-small percentage of women who report their assaults. College girls who are raped don't want to be dragged either legally or personally. They don't want to "ruin the life" of a "good kid" when "stuff just got out of hand." For the most part, they just want to not have to look at their rapist when they go to class.

And, though the proper procedural adjudication of sexual assault is vital, in the end it's just disaster control. I still remember what this UVA survivor told me: that law and justice aren't the same. Affirmative consent laws are immensely tricky. Even in a bias-free vacuum, there's no way around the essential difficulty of one person's word against another.

The most honest ways of addressing sexual assault have very little to do with rules and punishment. They start with early education about consent and bystander intervention, two ideas that are in no way limited to preventing rape. Sex education should be frank, practical, emphasizing safety and pleasure. (As an undergrad girl told me easily, "If you're drunk it's not good anyway.") In high school, a conversation about how alcohol will alter your behavior in college. In a dream world, a gradated drinking age where students can buy beer and wine at 18 so teenage girls won't—not that I'm speaking from experience—rip six shots before leaving their dorm rooms to create a "buzz" that will last all night. In college communities, support for your friends who have been hurt, and uncompromising disdain for your friends whose behavior might hover near the line.

Because that's how to stop a rapist in the Greek system: not to give his future victim an extra bottle of water, but to internally cut him off. Informal community policing works in the interstices that the criminal justice system will never be able to touch.

It's telling, still, that the best and most practical idea I heard all weekend is predicated on the worst, most misogynist impulses. From a sorority sister of mine whose actual sister—also a UVA alum—is now a police officer who works with victimized women: "Make it a taboo for frat boys to hook up with blackout girls," she said frankly. "Make it so that it's a safety thing for them. Make it so they will do anything to avoid a girl 'crying rape.' Give them a hand signal they can use at parties. Make them say, 'Bro. Protect yourself. She's wasted. You never know what she's going to say in the morning.'"

The two of us looked at each other, cringing.

"I was so offended when my sister brought this idea up," my friend said. "And then I realized it doesn't matter the motivations that would make it work, as long as it worked. As long as it made a difference in what actually happens at the end of a night."

It's Monday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I'm sitting at the top of the hill that overlooks Nameless Field, which is where the screeching tutu-and-balloons madness of sorority bid day is about to take place. The rushees are gathered in a nearby gymnasium, awaiting the final results, and their future sisters are lined up on the grass. Guys are assembling, some with popcorn, all of them in their same hungover Ken doll uniform of fleeces, khakis, boots.

Crowds of girls start pouring in from above and beside the field, crossing the road, grouped by the color of their trappings: red and green, black and gold, bright blues, dark maroons. Numbering in the hundreds, they are astonishing in a group; a fleshly murmuration, squads of them fluttering thickly down the hill in ball caps and glitter and spandex and sneakers, their long straightened hair flying behind them, the balloons they carry bopping into each other overhead. All told, this was the biggest rush in Virginia ISC history.

The bros are pulling out their lawn chairs, sipping their beer. "Bet that black girl's a token admit," says one of them, watching a dark-skinned girl in gold leggings run down the hill. His friend says he thinks every sorority is required to have one. They talk about the "sick blowjobs" that this one sorority is known for.

A few latecomers in tutus and rave onesies run down the hill, and a dozen guys start chanting, "Fall! Fall! Fall!" One girl actually does it—she's tumbling head over foot. She stands up at the bottom of the hill and takes a huge bow. All of us, me included, clap wildly.

The new pledge classes come sprinting out of the building where they've received their bids; they assimilate into the crowd; they scream, hug, cry, chant, take pictures. It looks like drunk summer camp, and after a few minutes, the girls dissipate. The bros—lacking a formal framework to communicate with these harpies on fire with sisterhood, these girls who are so tired of being polite in heels that they're all going to be rude as hell at bars tonight—start ambling back to their dorms and their houses. One half of the sorting has happened, the other half is still to come. Soon the frat boys will be in mixers with all of these new sisters; they'll dress up like Navahoes and Cowboy Bros, they'll fuck in costume, drunk in a way as to make everything a bit confusing, and if they stick with it they'll have Greek letters on the cake at the country club wedding seven years down the line. The balloons float into the pale pink sunset. A dog is overwhelmed at the intersection and barks all the way home.

Images via AP.

Prolific political blogger and former New York City resident Andrew Sullivan announced today that he is stepping away from blogging. His announcement comes nearly exactly ten years after the last time he announced that he was stepping away from blogging.

Today, Sullivan writes, "I’ve decided to stop blogging in the near future."

Why? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

In the wee hours of February 1, 2005, Sullivan wrote: "After much hemming and hawing, I've decided to put the blog as you've known it on hiatus for a few months."

Why? The simple answer is that I want to take a breather, to write a long-overdue book, to read some more, travel to Europe and the Middle East, and work on some longer projects. Much as I would like to do everything, I've been unable to give the blog my full attention and make any progress on a book (and I'm two years behind). It's not so much the time as the mindset. The ability to keep on top of almost everything on a daily and hourly basis just isn't compatible with the time and space to mull over some difficult issues in a leisurely and deliberate manner. Others might be able to do it. But I've tried and failed. Besides, this is my fifth year of daily blogging - I was doing this when Clinton was president and Osama bin Laden was largely unknown - and I've always thought it's a good idea to quit something after around five years or so. Before it becomes a chore. Before you become numb.

Sullivan's next post, a roundup of emails from readers thanking him for his many years of blogging, went live fewer than 48 hours (or four "sessions of passion") later. Later that night, he liveblogged the State of the Union.

In the month of February, 2005, following his announcement, Sullivan went on to publish 52 additional blog posts, totaling nearly 13,000 additional words. In March, 2005, he posted 47 posts, totaling 14,000 words. In April, he announced that he had "given up on [his] decisions to drastically reduce [his] blogging commitments." Instead, he said, he'd stopped blogging in "the early hours," though he was now getting up earlier and blogging "post-coffee in the morning."

As you can see in the accompanying screenshot of Sullivan's Dish archives, in the nine months following Sullivan's 2005 announcement that he was stepping down from blogging, he updated The Dish 1,564 times.

Andrew Sullivan is not retiring from blogging.

Hot trend alert! If you are a veteran diva with millions of fans, several No. 1 singles, and a closet full of trophies but still feel the need to assert your superiority over the little brats popping up to snatch your wig and the crown attached to it, get them back by complimenting their gowns. It's the perfect way of saying, "I see you...but I'm not looking too closely or really listening, peon."

Madonna did just during an interview that ran earlier today on Australian TV's Today. Interviewer Richard Wilkins said, "You are the undisputed queen of pop, the music business," and Madonna beamed in response. She's still got it. She knew that, of course, but she never gets tired of hearing it.

"But there are all these princesses swirling around," he continued. "Taylor and Katy and Miley and Kylie and etc."

"It's good to have princesses," said Madonna. "Means there's lots of pretty dresses around."

You may recall Aretha Franklin's answer when asked about what she thought about Taylor Swift during a Wall Street Journal interview last year:

"OK, great gowns, beautiful gowns."

Ice. Cold.

Madonna, on the other hand, singled out Taylor as one of the princesses that she likes. "I think she writes some really catchy pop songs," she said. "Can't get them out of my head." Sounds like more of a hinderance than anything, but OK.

You can watch the entire interview below (via Boy Culture). In it Madonna proposes a drinking game to Wilkins. It is not nearly as on-point as her shade game.

Fortress America Report: Taliban Captured an ISIS Leader That Bush Released From Gitmo | Defamer PSA: Nobody Is Putting Women in Your Beloved Ghostbusters Movie | Newsfeed "Ready For Your Abortion Date?": Man Hits Pregnant Girlfriend With Carhttp://gawker.com/how-to-read-ga...

The Taliban, bane of America's post-9/11 Afghanistan operations, said Wednesday that they captured Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a renegade insurgent and ex-Guantanamo detainee who was in Afghanistan recruiting for the Islamic State, the latest parry in a messy internecine conflict between violent Islamist regimes.

The independent Pajhwok news agency of Afghanistan reports that Khadim—who had previously been identified in the media as an ex-Taliban footsoldier who sought revenge against the U.S. after his detention in Gitmo—was arrested, along with 45 armed followers, after attempting to turn local militants against the Taliban and win their allegiance for ISIS's attempts to build a global caliphate:

A tribal elder in Kajaki, Abdul Ahad Masoomi, also a member of the provincial reform committee, told Pajhwok Afghan News that harsh differences had recently surfaced between local militants and Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim group.

"Mullah Khadim, who claims allegiance to Daesh (Arabic acronym for IS) forcibly assembled local residents on Thursday last in the Kakaji's Azan area and told the people that Mullah Omar no longer exists and they should now support him."

...A senior official in Helmand said Mullah Rauf had been one of Mullah Omar's close aides. He was detained during Taliban's last year in power in northern Afghanistan and was handed over to the US.

Rauf's work was the latest in an ambitious expansion program that ISIS has reportedly pursued ever since consolidating its power in a large area of Syria and Iraq. Many former Al Qaeda militants have pledged fealty to the new jihadis on the block, and reports even suggest ISIS has approached Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's successor as the nominal Al Qaeda leader, to renounce the Taliban in Afghanistan and back ISIS as the future of Islamic governance.

But Rauf, 33, is an especially interesting character. He spent seven years in Guantanamo Bay as Prisoner No. 108 and was released by the U.S. into Afghan custody in 2007. According to documents released by Wikileaks, Rauf was designated a "medium" risk and slated for transfer out of Guantanamo as early as 2004. Analysts said Rauf had admitted to involvement with the Taliban's illicit opium trade and identified him as one of "two cell block leaders attempting to instigate and influence the rest of the cell blocks to disregard orders, make noise, refuse food, and commit suicide."

One analyst added in Rauf's record: "For a simple Taliban foot soldier and bread deliverer, detainee manages to exhibit leadership qualities by conducting speeches and instilling fear into those who cooperate with [U.S.] personnel."

A later Newsweek report, however, suggests that Rauf had been more than a footsoldier: He was identified as the head of "Mullah Omar's elite mobile reserve force, fighting regime opponents all over Afghanistan." About a year after the U.S. repatriated him to Afghanistan, Rauf escaped from house arrest and emerged to terrorize Afghans who had cooperated with the U.S.-led coalition. "He will be very important in the future," a Taliban commander said of him in 2011.

On Wednesday, a Taliban commander told Pajhwok that the fate of Rauf and his army "would be decided by Taliban religious leaders and judges." Then again, the Taliban likely can't be trusted to give a fair assessment of ISIS's strength in Afghanistan. Two weeks ago, they were claiming Rauf was their friend.

"We know Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim," one Talib leader told the New York Times in mid-January. "He was a member of the Taliban, but now he is sitting at home."

UrbanBaby.com has a reputation as the message board of choice for wealthy, sophisticated, hateful east coast urbanites. What is the real lineage of anonymous UrbanBaby posters? Why, they are glad that you asked.

• "I'm a descendant of one of the founding families of Fairfield, CT. I'm a member of the DAR with 3 patriot relatives. I have 3 Ivy league degrees. I married a second generation Italian and I absolutely kept my last name!"
  "Oh one of the found families of Fairfield, CT??? I'm super impressed."
  "If you knew anything about revolutionary war history, you would be impressed."
  "I do, and I'm not. Sorry."

  "Jealous. While your family was plowing the fields in some Eastern European hell hole, my family was part of the aristocracy in the new world. I can see why you are attacking me."

• "Two direct lines of royalty in our lineage, Hapsburgs and British. My family has been in this country for 400 years and I grew up thinking everyone had streets in MA named after them. I am friends with several famous folks and have childhood photos of myself with heads of state. I speak several languages. But there is not one person in NYC who knows all of these things about me. Most people know one, perhaps two. I am seriously understated."

• "English and titled mom here. Hilarious to me that Americans think they are upper class because their family members attended a school for two generations prior to them. They ignore the fact that they were peasant immigrants. Our land and titles go back 800 or more years. I sent a link for this thread to friends back in London and we've been laughing all night."

• "Married to former professional athlete. I have an Ivy degree. We are fine but definitely not making any more major money; but we did well with savings"

  "Professional athlete is trashy."

  "When you see his ten inch dick, you'll wish he was your kind."

Gawker readers, please feel free to list your lineage in the discussion section below.

[Photo: Flickr]

Lauren Conrad may seem like a harmless pile of jewel-toned tank tops layered, one on top of the other, into the shape of a great gal who just wants to live her dream of designing bold statement necklaces and reasonably-priced headbands for Kohl's®, but please sit down and calmly listen to what I am about to tell you: She is actually a G.D. liar who can't even be honest about what her favorite metallic hue has always been.

In a recent interview with the lifestyle blog Cupcakes and Cashmere, Lauren recommended that we all buy some hair accessories, namely Bando's Rose Gold Model Bobbi Pins ($10 for a set of eight—an unreasonable price). Here's how she explained why she likes these bobbi pins in particular (emphasis added):

I love my short hair and have had so much fun cutting it (again...and again). But I can't do a ton of styles with it. While I'm learning to style my shorter 'do, I like throwing in a few pretty pins to hold the choppier pieces in place. Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue, so these Bando pins are right up my alley.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue, says Lauren Conrad. Not white gold, not yellow gold, not spangold. Rose gold.

Rose. Gold. Has. Always. Been. My. Favorite. Metallic. Hue.

This is the biggest freakin' lie I have ever heard in my entire life.

Does Lauren Conrad have a rose gold engagement ring that was presented to her sometime during the year 2013 by her now-husband William Tell? Yes.

But has rose gold always been Lauren Conrad's favorite metallic hue?

Please. I think you are forgetting that your high school experience where you wore silver necklaces every day was captured on film, Miss Lauren.

Roll tape.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue, says LC in 2015. But that's a freakin' lie because I saw her wearing a silver necklace in her Laguna Beach casting tape in 2004.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue, coos the Lauren Conrad of today. But that's a freakin' lie because I saw her wearing a silver middle finger ring while talking on a cordless phone to Stephen.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue sings Lauren Conrad to the cupcake blog. But that's a freakin' lie because I saw her wearing a silver necklace when she was putting on makeup next to Lo (Lauren Bosworth).

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue trills Lauren Conrad about the bobby pins. But that's a freakin' lie because I saw her shoving a silver three piece jewelry set in the face of a Getty photographer in 2005.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue says Lauren Conrad. A lie. A LIE.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue says Lauren Conrad, who thinks that just because she has short hair now she can change her whole identity and erase her past. But that's a freakin' lie because I saw her wearing flashy yellow gold chandelier earrings at a Sprint Pepsi party for Ocean Drive magazine.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue says Lauren Conrad. These [rose gold] Bando pins are right up my alley. But that's a freakin' lie—they are not right up her alley—because I saw her in 2006 wearing a nameplate necklace with her name and a nameplate necklace with her boyfriend Jason's name and neither of them were rose gold.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue, whispers Lauren Conrad, looking into the mirror and crying. Maybe she can delude herself into believing that's true. That a rose gold engagement ring was the metallic hue she really did want. That her husband knows her well enough to know what precise tones of metals she likes. But that's a freakin' lie because I saw Lauren shedding mascara-blackened tears on an episode of The Hills in 2008, and she was wearing a gold necklace that was not rose gold.

Rose gold has always been my favorite metallic hue

Give me a break.

Sorry to be real.

[Photos via Getty, Laguna Beach, The Hills, Tumblr]

Defamer Carol Brady: I'm 80 and I'm Fucking a Chiropractor from Fort Lauderdale | Drugs Scientology Warns Kids Against "Moon Gas" and Other Street Drugs | Newsfeed "Mentally Ill" 17-Year-Old Girl Shot Dead by Texas Police

A San Francisco public defender says she was placed under arrest and handcuffed to a wall for around an hour because she tried to stop police officers from questioning her client without a lawyer present.

Deputy Public Defender Jami Tillotson was inside a San Francisco courthouse when she reportedly heard police were in the hallway outside, interviewing a man she was representing on a misdemeanor theft charge.

There, she found plainclothes officer Brian Stansbury taking pictures of her client and tried to stop him, asserting the man's right to have his attorney present during any questioning.

Via CBS:

The video shows Deputy Public Defender Jami Tillotson refusing to step aside as a man identified as San Francisco Police Inspector Brian Stansbury tries to take a cellphone picture of him in a hallway at the Hall of Justice on Tuesday.

"I just want to take some pictures, ok? Then he will be free to go," says Stansbury on the video. Tillotson refuses and Stansbury then tells her she can either step aside or be arrested for resisting arrest, according to the subtitles on the YouTube video.

Tillotson, an 18-year veteran of the public defender's office, is calm throughout the video and does not resist officers. She continues to assert she is representing her client as she is led away.

Public Defender Jeff Adachi told reporters Tillotson was eventually handcuffed to a wall for close to an hour while Stansbury photographed and questioned her client.

She was charged with resisting arrest, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

This week, the Seattle Police Department issued an apology to a 70-year-old black veteran who was arrested last summer when a female officer apparently falsely accused him of threatening her with a golf club.

William Wingate, a 69-year-old Seattle man who regularly used his golf club as a cane, was standing on a street corner last summer when Officer Cynthia Whitlatch pulled up next to him.

In a exchange captured on her police cruiser's dash cam, Whitlatch accused Wingate of threatening her with his club, repeatedly warning him, "You're being audio and videotaped."

But as the police department conceded, there's no evidence at all—much less a recording—showing that Wingate threatened Whitlatch in any way. Via a Seattle Police Department press release:

The City Attorney's Office and SPD took a second look at this case and recommended that it be dismissed.

Deputy Chief Best personally met with the man, returned his golf club, and offered an apology for his arrest.

Video of the man's arrest was just released to a media outlet as a result of a public disclosure request. It is being published on the SPD Blotter in the interest of fostering better police transparency.

Wingate had actually ended up pleading guilty to the misdemeanor charge of unlawful use of a weapon in exchange for two years of probation, which were dismissed early.

Not dismissed, however, was Whitlatch, the arresting officer.

The officer who made the arrest received counseling from her supervisor, a course of action that the department believes to be an appropriate resolution.

No secret that disconnecting from Comcast is the worst, but to add insult to injury, the company actually started insulting one couple who tried to end their cable service earlier this year.

Lisa and Ricardo Brown—now known to Comcast employees and postal workers as "Asshole Brown"—were reportedly having financial difficulties when they decided to cancel their monthly cable service.

But according to blogger Christopher Elliott, who first reported the couple's account, the company didn't make it easy: "Instead of complying immediately, a representative escalated [Lisa's] call to a retention specialist, who tried to persuade her to keep the cable service and sign a new two-year contract."

Lisa was eventually able to cancel her service, but things would never be the same, envelope-wise—the piqued phone representative immediately changed the couple's account name to "Asshole Brown."

Brown says she went public with the story after trying—to no avail—to get the company to stop calling her an asshole every month. After Elliott contacted a representative on their behalf, the company reportedly apologized to the couple and offered to refund them full two years of cable service.

[image via AP]

After a long weekend of promoting Acura on Instagram, Alec Baldwin was reportedly downgraded from first class to economy on his flight home. He was supposedly overheard declaring that with coach as his witness, he'd never fly Delta again, but could he running out of airlines to swear off?

Via the NYDN:

Baldwin had been booked on a Delta flight out of Salt Lake City International Airport to Kennedy with his pregnant wife Hilaria, and their 16-month-old baby, Carmen. But according to a source on the flight, the family - who were weighed down with lots of Louis Vuitton luggage - switched flights last minute and ran into problems.

"He got kicked out of first class since they had changed planes," said our spy, "I guess there weren't as many first class seats (on the new plane). So he and Hilaria and the baby moved back to coach. He was pissed and was overheard saying he will never fly Delta again."

Now, tanks to this week's Delta Disappointment and that little incident with American Airlines/US Airways, it looks like Baldwin's only commercial options with first class seats are Virgin and United.

Flight attendant on American reamed me out 4 playing WORDS W FRIENDS while we sat at the gate, not moving. #nowonderamericaairisbankrupt

— ABFoundation (@ABFalecbaldwin) December 6, 2011

But Virgin only flies to 21 cities and United is great, but only if you don't respect yourself or your belongings.

So what's a Baldwin brother to do? He already "retired" from "public life"... seems like it's time to quit public flights too. TV stations play 30 Rock reruns every single day. Fly private, Alec Baldwin. You've earned your Gulfstream wings.

Yesterday afternoon, San Francisco police discovered a suitcase containing dismembered human remains. Not long after, more body parts were found scattered nearby.

Police received a call just after 4 p.m. local time about a suspicious package in the South of Market area. Amid piles of trash, responding officers found a roller-type suitcase inside of which were the "dismembered body parts of a human being," police spokeswoman Officer Grace Gatpandan told the San Francisco Chronicle. KGO reports the bag contained a human torso. A search of the area turned up more body parts.

According to Gatpandan, the race and sex of the victim isn't yet known. "Investigators are still searching to determine if there are any other body parts in the area," she told the Chronicle. "This was an extremely gruesome crime scene."

Gatpandan also said homicide detectives have identified a suspect. "We do have people of interest that homicide investigators are speaking to, as well as using surveillance cameras," she said, according to KGO.

Here's all you need to participate in the web's sloppiest shoe fetish: Your own two feet, a phone with a camera, a fresh pair of Nikes (though anything will do in a pinch), and a few snack packs of messy, gloppy, sexy pudding. Are you ready?

Start filming the shoes. Allow the camera to contemplate their sensual appeal: crisp laces, exclusive colorway, soft leather upper. When sufficient time has passed—you'll know when you're ready—introduce the pudding, slowly and with care, showing off its packaging and label. Then take the container in your hands, rip it open, and deposit the soupy payload in your sneaker's throat.

Take a deep breath. Calm your nerves. You've been waiting a long time for this, and you'll want to savor the moment.

Now put your foot in the shoe.

Move it around.

Feel the squishy chocolate between your toes.

Isn't that nice?

Use other ingredients if you're feeling adventurous. Fancy tomato sauce?

Cover your entire outfit in pudding.

Take a saw to your sneakers if you must.

To paraphrase a common refrain from the comments sections of these videos: What the fuck did you just watch?

If so-called "unboxing" videos, in which omniscient offscreen narrators slowly and sensually open sealed boxes containing pristine new products, are the late-night Cinemax to society's collective tumescence over consumer goods, the videos above are something like BDSM. To the young man (unsurprisingly, based on anecdotal observation, this proclivity belongs almost exclusively to young men) who destroys a pair of Dunks with a host of viscous foodstuffs and then uploads the video to YouTube, expensive new shoes are objects to be idolized, but also dominated, microwaved, humiliated, slashed with a kitchen knife, willed into submission. Yes, like virtually every other seemingly inexplicable thing on this great big internet, pudding sneakers are about sex.

The videos achieve their unique and unsettling vividness by incorporating elements of two other fetishes: "wet and messy" or "sploshing," a well-documented preference for sex covered in Jell-O, shaving cream, baked beans, et al; and sneaker destruction, which, as a Vice interview with a "seasoned shoe destroyer" detailed earlier this year, is exactly what it sounds like.

Sneaker culture is as fertile ground as any for fetishism. Its most ardent exponents regularly fixate on limited runs and brand-new colors with near-sexual intensity, waiting in long lines and paying exorbitant prices to pick them up, and it's not difficult to imagine some Hypebeast comment-section regular literally masturbating into his Nikes. (Indeed, those videos exist if you're looking.) Multiply that obsessive impulse with the sadism behind crush videos, add a touch of wet and messy, and pretty soon you're filling your size 10s with all the banana pudding they can take.

I asked lovinsneax1, an astoundingly prolific YouTuber—he has destroyed hundreds of pairs of sneakers over the past five years using everything from chocolate to a blow torch to his own urine—to help explain the appeal. "In general it's all about trashing sneakers for me," he emailed in slightly mangled English. "The newer and more expensive the better. I can't tell you why, it's just that I enjoy—also in a sexual gratification—trashing sneakers, especially Adidas and Nikes." (In the interest of protecting his offline identity, I didn't ask lovinsneax1 where he lives.)

Though he created two of the pudding videos above, lovinsneax1 insisted that grub doesn't hold any particular fascination for him; it's just one weapon in an arsenal of many. There are certainly more efficient means than food if utter destruction is the only aim: in this video, for instance, he melts a Nike Air Max 90 over an open fire; here, a different guy pulverizes an Asics Tiger with an M-80 firecracker. And when you mess around with food, you have to deal with what comes next.

"Playing a pair with food ruins them entirely as everything starts to mold within a few days, even after cleaning. So the only chance is to bin them directly ;-)", lovinsneax1 wrote. "Why food? It's just one way to trash them. After killing dozens of pairs it's just the alternation. I love to kill a fresh pair, independent of the method. Can be buy burning, cutting, ripping, writing, muddying or messing up with food."

In one memorable video, lovinsneax1 is in red and white Nikes, flirting with the edge of a wooded creek. Gingerly, he dips in, then scoops a bit of mud with one foot and smears it on the toe of the other, dragging them both through the dirt a bit, and dips in again. After a few more minutes of dipping and smearing, we realize this is all a tease. Lovinsneax1 plunges ankles-deep into the water, and the cameraman, wearing a clean pair of Air Force 1s, starts breathing excitedly.

The bucolic setting is unexpected, but until this point, you're still watching a relatively ordinary sneaker destruction video. Only after a jarring, Godardian jump-cut is the awful truth revealed: a mass grave dozens of sneakers deep sits in the underbrush just beyond the shore, and now the Air Force 1s are stomping all over it.

That video alone would have cost hundreds of dollars to produce if the sneakers were purchased new, and there are hundreds of other clips like it. Fortunately for lovinsneax1, he doesn't have to pay for all of them. Most of the shoes, he said, are donated by fellow enthusiasts who enjoy watching him work, though he admitted that he's still spent "a lot" of money on what can only be a very expensive hobby. (He declined to give a precise figure.) Some shoes are tortured beyond the point of wearability after he's done with them; others he continues to take out in public. "I thought [wearing trashed sneakers] would cause attention," he said, "but in fact nobody really cares."

If you didn't already know what you were watching, you might mistake his vast collection of films for the work of an obsessive video artist. At anywhere between five and forty minutes each, they require patience, and after watching dozens of clips over the past several weeks, I'll confess an uncomfortable thrill at seeing such gleaming commercial goods so thoroughly battered. Lovinsneax1 sometimes scrawls all-caps slogans in Sharpie on his prospective victims, lending the appearance of anti-consumerist agit-prop: "FUCK SNEAX." "BYE BYE." "DRECKS." "KILL ME." Slyly, on a pair of Adidas: "JUST DO IT."

His intention isn't so subversive. "It's because it's despiteous to write on an expensive, fresh sneaker," he said, sounding more like Instagram rich-kid Param Sharma than Barbara Kruger or Ed Ruscha. "There are lots of people who would love to wear such a pair but can't afford. Maybe it's this objection which makes it that horny to use a sneaker for something completely different than just wearing." He doesn't continue his passion through the lens of art, he added, but he would be open-minded if a gallery came calling.

If that last quote about people who can't afford sneakers makes you angry, all the better for lovinsneax1. "I also like to read all those comments from people who can't understand and who suggest to donate these shoes," rather than destroy them, he said. "No, I just love to trash them...:-)"

[Image via Lovinsneax1/YouTube]

At least two people were killed and 60 more were injured after a gas truck exploded Thursday morning near a maternity hospital in Mexico City, according to Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera.

UPDATE 1:40 p.m.: Mancera has revised the death toll to two. At least 60 people were injured in the explosion.

UPDATE 10:44 am: The death toll from the blast reportedly now stands at seven, including four infants.

At least 7 killed, including 4 children, in explosion at maternity hospital in Mexico City, mayor confirms pic.twitter.com/8VdIPRnheZ

— Rodrigo (@RodrigoEBR) January 29, 2015

UPDATE 10:17 am: At least two people have died in the blast, according to officials who spoke to CNN. An unknown number of people remain trapped in the building, which is reportedly on the verge of collapse.

The explosion reportedly took place as a truck was supplying gas to the hospital and a hose burst, causing a leak.

Explosión GRAVE en el Hospital materno infantil Contadero. URGE APOYO DE AMBULANCIAS! pic.twitter.com/MWhtGMpaoU

— Adrián Rubalcava (@AdrianRubalcava) January 29, 2015

BuzzFeed, the prosperous and successful New York-based website geared toward millennials, is respectable and likeable in many ways. It is a competitor of Gawker, though it dwarfs us in its size and reach, and we take interest in reporting on its foibles and successes.

The story of BuzzFeed, as told even in critical news stories and defensive internal memos, is one of progress or even redemption. Founder Jonah Peretti and editor-in-chief Ben Smith eagerly confess that the site was originally a distribution plant for shareable crap, no matter how meaningless or parasitic said crap might have been. Now, it has come to public understanding that its true purpose is to be a journalistic enterprise, that the work it produces is journalism, and it has hired an impressive array of impeccable editors, writers, and reporters—even an ex-professor. Last year it submitted entries to be considered for the Pulitzer Prize.

This respect lasts until you read it. Or until you read the pieces it sends ricocheting around the social web. My usual BuzzFeed reading is restricted to the works of a few acquaintances, whose posts I enjoy greatly. But on Jan. 21, three viral pieces—much talked about, in a positive manner, on Twitter—made it into my browser. They were what the new, improved BuzzFeed is proud of, and they were not good. I will discuss them here.

1) This Is What One Man Learned From Wearing Makeup For a Week, by Isaac Fitzgerald

"Are you wearing makeup?" My regular bartender, Hugh, looks at me incredulously as he hands over a beer and a shot.

"Yeah, what do you think?" I throw back the whiskey.

Here we have a familiar character in BuzzFeed books editor Isaac Fitzgerald, an impetus for my colleague Tom Scocca's essay "On Smarm." Fitzgerald has been up to great things since his arrival in New York, like contributing to an essay collection about living in New York a few months after he moved here and, in this most recently published piece, writing the line: "Makeup isn't a silly hat or an ill-chosen shirt… it's your face."

For this project, Fitzgerald modified his usual drag-king gear (beard, flannel, boots) and tried on a different sort of costume. The objective of Fitzgerald's aesthetic undertaking seems to be that he has taken on the burden of wearing makeup... to see what it is like... to... be... a woman? To be different? To suffer? To have soft skin? On Day 5 of applying ever-escalating amounts of cosmetics, he gets called a faggot, after getting drunk and stumbling into a stranger, i.e. doing an asshole straight-guy thing while incidentally wearing a fully made-up face. The experiment is muddled for everyone involved, including the person who calls him a faggot.

There is no point to a piece such as this. In the tradition of Black Like Me and the first reel of Mel Gibson's What Women Want, it is stuntertainment at its worst: doing something a large swath of the population does every day as if it's a remarkable act. "Brave Man Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before—Takes the Bus to Work For a Week—Here's What He Learned." Or: "Here's What I Learned From Wearing Pants For a Week" (from the archives, written in the '20s, by a female journalist).

It's easy to write this sort of thing, and cheap (in BuzzFeed's case, all the makeup was furnished to them). It's writing about yourself, but with an obtrusive twist to focus on. What's harder is doing reporting on real things that happen in the lives of other people, or writing honestly and bravely about something that has happened to you that could be of help to readers. That takes maturity and patience, which are two things missing from this article.

At the end of the experiment (which is peppered with numerous mentions of Fitzgerald's girlfriend, to remind the readers that yes—he's straight), our author reveals he doesn't like makeup. The straight white man remains the straight white man. Women continue to wear makeup. Nothing is learned.

2) The Trouble With "It" Girls, by Anne Helen Petersen

On the cover of the February issue of Vanity Fair, Rosamund Pike gives her best icy blue-eyed Grace Kelly. The cover's intro — "From Bond Girl to Gone Girl to 2015's It Girl" — is banal: Pike's beauty here is the real draw.

BuzzFeed's Anne Helen Petersen writes about celebrity gossip, a fine topic. In a former life, Petersen was a professor, and her writing does not belie this fact: Her tone oscillates between condescension—presuming that her readers need historical definition and context for irrelevant fact—and misguided conviction: saying things outright that might seem like opinion or analysis but are simply incorrect.

Her most recent piece, about the blurry definition of an "It girl" in the mainstream media over the last century or so, reads much like a term paper, with hoary references to the rhetoric of choice and the rise of postfeminism not grounded in fact. In order to write authoritatively on a topic that is not convincingly based in reality, Petersen attempts to mask her banal opinions under an academic facade: since she has her Ph.D. in this stuff, she is automatically correct. But the problem is that she's not. Take this passage about Chloe Sevigny from the "It girls" essay:

Sevigny wasn't beautiful, exactly, or sexy, per se; she was different, and indifferent, and that's what made her It. Sevigny's It-ness manifested a particular sort of abrasive, even erudite hipness. So much about her seemed to scream "fuck you, I contain multitudes," yet the profile attempts, as profiles must, to unite that multiplicity under a single theme: It-ness. In so doing, the New Yorker transformed an unruly woman like Sevigny, with her nontraditional looks and unfamiliar club-kid ways, into a digestible rhetorical pile of It.

Petersen is referring here to a 1994 profile of Sevigny in the New Yorker by Jay McInerney. The profile was indeed, as Petersen describes it, seminal: It put Sevigny on the map; it made her a low-grade celebrity at the age of 19 (mind you, McInerney was already on the map. And you need someone on the map to put you on the map). Petersen's argument that Sevigny "wasn't beautiful, exactly, or sexy, per se, she was different," is a reach when you consider that Sevigny was a thin, blue-eyed, blonde-haired teenager from Darien, Connecticut who came to New York City to act and model.

But to Petersen's main point, Sevigny's "It-ness" was in no way intrinsic to the actress, something apart from her public image. It was manufactured, like all things having to do with the Downtown-to-Hollywood axis of fame. Petersen's reading is worrisomely wide-eyed for a critic of celebrity culture. Jay McInerney writing in the New Yorker was not "transforming" Sevigny into anything. He was participating in her ongoing branding and creation—there is no "multiplicity" at which for Petersen to point. Chloe Sevigny, in 1994, was a dumb scenester teenager from Darien, and McInerney masterfully placed her in the cultural context of the time.

I become more skeptical about Petersen's credibility when she reaches further back into history to defend her shapeshifting thesis. In writing about the journalist Dorothy Thompson as a potential "It girl," Petersen says: "Thompson was a former suffragette and what my granddad would call a total pistol: stubborn and aggressive; sexy not for her body, but her mind."

Poor Thompson, reduced to a crass physical description and with an epitaph from Petersen's grandfather to boot. The woman who interviewed Hitler (and was later barred from Germany by the Führer) and wrote one of the best Harper's articles of all time really deserves better. However, Petersen's description of Thompson is not what is most alarming, but her posthumous appellation of the journalist as an "It girl" under her gelatinous definition of the term: "In the 1940s, however, 'It girl' took on a new valence: a smart woman, usually one of few in her field, who played by men's rules with wit, cunning, and style," Petersen writes, introducing Thompson. But including Thompson on her list is just wrong.

Thompson was profiled in the New Yorker in 1940 by Margaret Case Harriman; the piece was indeed called "It Girl." But that's because "It" was the nickname Thompson's husband, the journalist Sinclair Lewis, gave to her, due to her proclivity to talk about nothing but international affairs (she was one of the few Western journalists to report from Nazi Germany, and worked from Europe for much of her adult life). Harriman explained:

She is sometimes a difficult guess because of such proclamations, and because scarcely any talk that is not concerned with the international situation interests here. Her husband, Sinclair Lewis, has a name for the international situation as it relations to Dorothy; he calls it 'it'… Sometimes, dropping in for a friendly visit, he waits alertly in the hall, listening to the buzz of voices from the living room, where Miss Thompson is talking to Vincent Sheean, Raymond Gram Swing, John Gunther, or other cronies. When one of these friends wanders into the hall, Lewis corners him. 'What's she talking about—it?' he asks. If the friend nods, Mr. Lewis tiptoes away.

Yes, Thompson was an outlier in her field in terms of gender, but she is an "It girl" of popular persuasion only in Petersen's mind. Petersen acknowledges that Thompson doesn't exactly fit into her over-arching thesis:

Lewis referred to the "international situation" (the burgeoning conflict in Europe) in relation to Thompson as "It," thereby rendering her the It girl. It's a play on the term, but it fostered a connotation of uniqueness, even brashness, that clings to contemporary uses of the phrase.

Petersen should know better. She's doing a lot more here than "clinging" to the contemporary use of the phrase—she's bending facts to fit a murky thesis. Thompson would not approve.

It's clear Petersen cares about her topic of choice greatly. But her arguments, perhaps still too fiercely rooted in a more forgiving academic context, suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the media works and rely too heavily on loosely sourced historical blind spots. Clearly, the target audience for her pieces are those who want to read about celebrity and gossip—which are available in ample supply elsewhere on BuzzFeed—but feel superior to both while doing so. It's a neat kind of pseudo-intellectualism that the site's readers and editors seem to love, but it doesn't stand up to close speculation.

3) This Is Why I Pause Before I Speak, by Nathan Pyle

I have recently started to pause before responding. This is new for me. I'm starting to think this pause might be the most important moment in the conversation.

Every now and then some Bible verses pop up on BuzzFeed. It's curious—why are there Gif-illustrated passages from Ephesians next an article called "19 Movie Monsters That Look Like Penises And Vaginas"? I'm all for the democratic disbursement of content. I work at Gawker! I take the high with the low, and I love that contemporary websites are more and more able to fund high-octane reporting off of mindless, highly trafficked content.

But more offensive to my sensibilities than, say, an article on penis and vagina monsters is Christian content on an otherwise secular website. It would be one thing if these pieces were informed by the writer's Christianity—sure. Having a plurality of voices is wonderful. But on BuzzFeed, these articles are more or less in the vein of straight-up Christian publishing, not too far afield from the work of Colton Burpo.

The Biblical content comes under the byline of a writer and graphic artist named Nathan Pyle, whose writerly aesthetic is less C.S. Lewis than the greeting card aisle at Duane Reade. His past articles have included an illustrated submarine ride into racism and what he thinks about when he prays. Simplicity is his bailiwick.

In his piece from last Wednesday, Pyle discovered how to talk to other humans. He writes, with animated illustrations: "I have recently started to pause before responding. This is new for me. I'm starting to think this pause might be the most important moment in the conversation." Next slide: "I like to my imagine my view of the world is always obscured by a tinted box. I can't see clearly because of this box. It is my own self-interest." It goes on. In short: Other humans have other perspectives, and listening to them is good. Presumably these are lessons some people are learning from BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed is extremely wealthy. It received a $50 million investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz last August, valuing the company at $850 million dollars; late last year it was projecting $120 million in revenue. Less easy to reckon with is the company's store in "prestige," the measure that earns a media outlet respect from other media outlets and the people whose opinions are formed by those media outlets—people often in a position to make decisions about where and how to spend advertising money, if not people who are in search of media properties to purchase themselves.

Monstrous raw traffic figures like BuzzFeed's will always give a publisher the ability to sell space to advertisers, but prestige gives it a different, and more lucrative pitch—not just the promise of higher-income, better-educated readers, but the currency that comes with a recognizable name. Most digital media companies, Gawker Media included, accept that the audience size that gets a salesperson's foot in the door with an advertiser is often at odds with the kind of "prestige" work that sharpens his pitch. This is one way of understanding BuzzFeed's free spending on well-known and highly respected writers and editors among its 700-odd employees: An investment in quality to offset the growing inanity of the content that increases its audience size.

But quality, an attribute of work itself, doesn't necessarily translate to prestige, an outcome of the way people talk about work. More importantly, perhaps, prestige does not necessarily guarantee quality. (Anyone who reads the New York Times' op-ed columnists knows this.) You can't fake quality—take it from us; we've tried—but prestige is essentially all fake: Take a sponsored stunt and give it the weight of a transformative personal experience. Take a Wikipedia article and give it the ambition of an academic treatise. Take the Oatmeal and pretend it's Shel Silverstein.

These pieces are built for attention, not rigor or insight or the other traits we associate with quality. They're geared toward the young and facile, teenagers who need reminding of the existence of other humans, college students for whom the veneer of intellectualism is the equivalent of rigor, men for whom gender nonconformity can make a powerful statement. This makes sense for Buzzfeed, whose audience, like that of many web publishers riding the social-sharing boom, skews young. So the site has a business reason to publish such pieces: to educate its core demographic, alongside the requisite One Direction listicles and recipe fails. They are popular, and give off the outward appearance of quality. But they certainly don't fit into the site's own narrative of soaring journalistic content. Nor do they invite criticism or debate. The only option for feedback is to like them, share them, or mark them as a "FAIL." Not exactly a robust experience.

If there were other options—a button that says "stop mansplaining to me," for example—BuzzFeed might find the reaction to its pieces quite different. Literally hundreds of millions of women and gender-nonconforming men are better qualified to explain the politics of makeup than Isaac Fitzgerald. So why is he, a white man, explaining it to the tune of a million page views on BuzzFeed? Anne Helen Petersen is an untrustworthy and overwrought writer on celebrities in a field laden with tabloids, yet she cranks out an essay per week on the subject. And Nathan Pyle—I'm not sure what he is—is somehow qualified to explain racism, simplifying issues that are only becoming more complicated, and nuanced, with each horrific news event related to them.

The three pieces I've discussed here are by white writers. BuzzFeed has been bullish about its diversity effort; I have greatly admired executive editor Shani Hilton's vocal, honest and transparent plans to increase her staff's diversity in an industry that seems to think the concept means hiring people who graduated from state schools. She is doing a much better job than Gawker at this, and Buzzfeed is a better outlet for it—one that, at its best, genuinely reflects and engages with the web's many different communities.

Take, for example, this essay about makeup and queer identity by BuzzFeed Beauty Editor Arabelle Sicardi. It was posted to the site an hour after Isaac Fitzgerald's piece, also in the site's Style section. "Makeup is by no means natural. That's the point. If I work hard to survive, you will pay attention when you see me, and you will see the work," Sicardi writes. "Because it is work: to survive, when others would wish otherwise." It's a beautiful essay, and although it's not clear if it's a reaction piece or a companion piece to Fitzgerald's, it's no matter: Sicardi's work far surpasses her colleague's in terms of thoughtfulness, voice, and general contribution to the canon of internet posts.

BuzzFeed would be better served if it published more work like Sicardi's and less like Fitzgerald's. Virality is easy; given the right kind of platform and network, it's not hard to come by prestige. But quality is hard. Here, in a small, quiet snippet, we have it. BuzzFeed doesn't seem to want to wait for the kind of success that would come with developing, nurturing and promoting smarter content, even if it's at the expense of pageviews—or reputation. Instead, it ends up pandering to its locked-in audience, appearing to tackle thorny topics and securing the prestige that accompanies that appearance. BuzzFeed has already captured the adolescent and the undergraduate sensibility who appreciate that content. What happens when those readers grow up?

[Image by Jim Cooke]

Let us all bow our heads and say a prayer for Don Thompson, fired this week as CEO of McDonald's merely because he was bad at his job, and his company is bad, and performing badly.

There is a (true) theory of corporate management that (accurately) describes why CEOs of big companies are paid so much, and also why they get hired and fired seemingly as frequently as losing NFL coaches. Horace Dediu describes it like this: "They demand and are unquestionably given absurd pay that has no relationship to performance. Such pay has no relationship to performance because it isn't designed to reward performance but to account for the risk of arbitrary and very public sacrifice. Boards (and hence shareholders) are deliberately hiring a scapegoat for sins as yet unknown."

In this formulation, CEOs are paid 331 times what their average workers are not because of their magical management skills, but because they can one day be sacrificed to the gods of the free market, thereby cleansing the corporation itself and the rest of its managers from blame for when things inevitable go wrong. Some CEOs are good and some CEOs are bad, but shit happens regardless, and when it does, they will be fired, so they gotta get that $$$ as fast as they can. Assured eventual public humiliation demands rich compensation.

Don Thompson lasted less than three years at the head of McDonald's. During that time, the company's stock price went down, sales declined sharply, and the company was hit with legal rulings ordering it to clean up its labor practices—which, by the way, became the target of a huge national protest campaign, during the tenure of Don Thompson. There is little evidence that Don Thompson, who was paid almost $10 million in 2013, was a "good" CEO.

That is beside the point. The real question is not whether Don Thompson was worth $10 million a year. The real question is whether anyone can be a "good" CEO of a company like McDonald's, without changing its food quality, its worker pay policies, its menu, its ubiquity, its encouragement of sloth in the populace, its sickening branding—everything about it, essentially. Can you be a good CEO of a bad company? It seems doubtful. But we won't learn the answer from Don Thompson, a bad CEO.

[Photo: AP]

Reminder: Gawker is posting less often to the front page. Read about the change here. Happening elsewhere: Defamer Lindsay Lohan Served Her Community by Letting People Follow Her Around | Morning After I Can't Stop Watching This Madonna Impersonator's Existential Crisis | Newsfeed Dad's Plan to Replace Daughter's Vodka With Water Completely Backfires

Redlands, CA, March 2003

Stacy may or may not have "kind of" had sex. She told Meg, James, and me one morning before class as we stood casually by the lockers, cradling paper-bag covered books close to our chests.

"Last Thursday," she said. "And now my period is a day late."

"What do you mean, kind of?" I asked, certain that Sunday school had taught her nothing, and maybe a quick health lesson could clear this all up before the bell. What she described was pretty much second base. I rolled my eyes.

Stacy was a sucker. She'd been talking about her wedding since middle school. While the rest of our group sat sulking and shit-talking in the back of the auditorium during chapel, she sat up front and sang all of the worship songs. And now, she took off her promise ring for the first guy who said "I love Jesus." I wished I could have said I was surprised.

Meg reached into her locker and pulled out a yellow spiral notebook. It was slim and bent. Spelled out in Sharpie on the cover, and positioned next to a smiley face sticker, was a title: Love Lives, Rarr! Names of approved authors were documented in a small column on the left-hand side of the cover: Morgan + Meg, and + Stacy and + James + Kristen and also + Becky + Jessica. She passed it to Stacy.

"I didn't want to say anything," Stacy's entry began, "because I didn't want you guys to think I'm a whore. He didn't cum, he just put it in for a minute. But we didn't use a condom. Anyway I'm pretty much still a virgin under technicalities. And yes, we're getting married and we're madly in love."

The Walk Home From the Subway After Work, October 30, 2009

This story ends a week ago when a pigeon hit me in the face on West 99th. I was thinking about music and exodus. I was thinking about confessing, and wondering if it would help, if I could ever be clean.

I've started collecting dead birds. The steps in front of my building, 105th, 114th, the steps behind my building. Sometimes it is only a wing. Once there was blood. Sometimes I don't notice them until I've passed, and I stop to decide if she was number four or five. I do not consider anything else about the bird. Andrew says it's like the beginning of a horror movie, when the main character sees omens in everything, knives seem to shift themselves in the kitchen and curtains breeze without wind. I know this is Biblical. I know they are plagues and I am also a plague. I never learned what to do to make them stop, or when it will end, or who should be set free.

The Yellow Notebook

Like everyone else in high school, we wrote notes. They were standard: J looks cute today; I can't believe Mr. H told me to be quiet in government class; I just discovered this new band The Clash they're so punk (something Stacy would have said); I'm hungry where should we go for lunch?

Honest-to-god crushes and significant romantic developments related to said crushes were absolutely reserved for discussion in The Yellow Notebook. Since Stacy had a steady, fairly boring boyfriend, Jared, she didn't often have much to say. But that was too bad for her. Once, when she tried to slip in some comments about that week's Gilmore Girls episode, I immediately wrote, "The Yellow Notebook is not the place for Gilmore Girls gossip." It was strictly business.

By lunchtime that day, it was clear that Stacy had really committed to the idea. Instead of asking us to lend her money, like usual, she demanded we pay for her lunch because she was "eating for two." And by that afternoon, it was clear that I wasn't going to let this go any further.

Still a virgin, and stranded at Christian school without sex ed, I knew nothing about pregnancy tests—which one was best, or whatever. But somehow after school we—rather, I—managed to scrape money together to buy one, pile into my car and head to my house where we could put the invented crisis to rest over a couple of iced teas: Meg and I smirked condescendingly as we waited in my room, Stacy an absolute wreck a few feet away, behind the bathroom door.

Sitting cross-legged in a tiny circle on the shag rug in my room, Meg calmly read every instruction on the pink and white package before handing it over to Stacy and sending her to the bathroom. She stood up and walked out silently, eyes focused soberly on the carpet, and closed the door to my room behind her.

The Friendly Place

This was around the time I read The Bell Jar and discovered Bette Davis on Turner Classic Movies, drowning in the suburban aesthetics and pocked with Biblical cautioning. I saw birds in the orange groves and felt my eyes glaze over.

Redlands, California is known for its oranges and churches. In Redlands, the houses line up in clean rows. Front yards are neat green squares. The sun is involved in every day, pressing on spotless sidewalks, the tops of shiny cars. Eyes glaze with tracts of artificial grass. Shit is extremely pleasant.

The city of Redlands has two names: The City of Churches and The Friendly Place. Neighbors consult one another about lawn care methods. Things and people in The City of Churches are ideal. Neighbors do not let neighbors see them cry.

The first time I went into the house next door, I realized it was exactly like our house, but everything was in reverse- rooms on the left were instead on the right, the staircase was on this end of the house instead of that end- and everything smelled different. There are only three houses on my street, and they are repeated like this one two three one two three one all the way around the cul-de-sac.

House number five brings us white chocolate bark at Christmas. House eleven is where we get Girl Scout cookies. When I was younger, we had block parties during the summer. We stuck a grill in the middle of the block and chatted politely with people we usually only waved at. We did this twice. Since then, everyone keeps to themselves. There are people inside these houses, but they are too unimportant to name here.

My parents are these people. One Sunday morning after the 3 a.m. showing of Jezebel, I woke to the sound of my father cutting the grass at the same time as the neighbor father. They discussed types of fences and gossiped about other people on the block. I heard the neighbor father give my father advice on how to trim the ivy around our doorway. Later I asked if we could keep the ivy growing wild around my window, almost creeping in through the sill to choke me.

This is all about assimilation, how it feels to sink into a place, to become the orange groves. Dogs wake up. Mothers make coffee to sit in van cupholders. Somehow, after a time, carpools arrange themselves.

The Other Thing

Stacy's test was negative, and we allowed her to put on a show of relief for a moment before I moved our lives along. "Now can we talk about prom?"

"You guys, our lives are so ironic!" Stacy wrote in The Notebook the next day, following my morning entry, which began "STACY ISN'T PREGNANT so I'm gonna talk about Jake and his beard."

"When I talked to Jared he was happy and relieved. But he felt embarrassed that I told you guys that his penis was big and that doing it was difficult. I still haven't thrown away the test. It's in my car, and I don't know what to do with it!"

This was the beginning of the end with Stacy. Soon afterwards, I only saw her between classes. She wanted whatever she already had, and I wanted that other thing, whatever it was.

Last week a friend asked, "Do you think about it a lot? Sin?"A daughter of two socially-conscious liberals, from a home where fundamental organized religion was "frowned upon," her mouth was wide open when I told her that I literally constantly think about sin. It makes me feel sick. It feels so good to be bad.

Redlands, CA, Spring 2006

Things heated up with the temperature. Spring predicted rebellion: James finally came out, we all became fairly interested in the science of giving blowjobs, and we didn't just laugh at the rules of our Christian Academy—we totally ignored them. It was Stacy's pregnancy "scare" that first got me thinking: What will we be like without rules?

The power of God, Bible class said, would help us battle these desires and pursue lives that were humble and pure. If you want to cry, pray harder, we were told. Imagine my delight in finding the power of God in a blue and white pill. Imagine James's relief in finding out that the power of God was something lifted from his chest.

When James came out to his parents, he told me, he was sitting across from them at a booth in Coco's, where we often used to go to have omelets and chicken fingers and pie, and watch the old people. "I'm gay," he said. They said no, he probably wasn't sure, maybe he should sleep with a few women first and figure it out, did he even know what it meant? He told me at that point he clarified: "I have sex with men!" using his stage voice, inviting gray heads throughout the restaurant to turn and stare.

When I started taking Prozac, I got an itchy feeling. Now, as an adult, I describe this as "anxiety." Back then, I described it by the way I rolled around on the white carpet in the living room, unable to do anything else. I tried three medications that summer. I did not read any of the seven books for 10th grade Honors English Literature. I wasn't even sure if I would make it back to school in the fall.

All I really wanted was rain. To wake up and not see blue skies. For flip-flops to be inappropriate. To acknowledge the mothers who were drunks, the eighth graders on cocaine. The Bible says to confess, but everyone else says make your dark hide and slither, make it a warm beer and a cigarello on a ledge above Interstate 10, overlooking the park.

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015) and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Coconut Books 2016). She lives in Brooklyn and at morgan-parker.com.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]