When 19-year-old Juanye Jones visited a Daytona Beach hospital Wednesday night, his chief concern was his nagging headache. Doctors ended up finding something a bit more serious, however: a fragmented bullet lodged in his head.

Jones was apparently one of three bystanders hit during a shooting at Bethune-Cookman University Monday night. Reportedly thinking he had just been grazed in the shooting, the teen didn't seek treatment until days later.

"I thought he was in there for something minor and then the police showed up," a witness at the hospital told The Palm Beach Post, "I hear he has a bullet in his head. He had a headache and now he has a bullet in his head."

After discovering the fragments via X-ray, doctors advised Jones to seek further treatment, but according to the Orlando Sentinel, "it's not clear if he ever did."

[Image via Shutterstock//h/t Uproxx]

A couple in Bayside, Queens is accused of kidnapping their housekeeper at knifepoint, allegedly burning her body with a plumber's torch while questioning her about missing cash and jewelry, WCBS reports.

32-year-old Devanand Lachman and 31-year-old Ambar Lachman were arrested earlier this month on charges of felony assault, felony kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment. From NBC New York:

Sources said the couple, who live in Bayside, Queens, believed their maid, 54-year-old Daisy Machuea, stole money and jewelry from them. When she went to clean their home the afternoon of Friday, Feb. 13, Devanand Lachman and another man allegedly burned her with a plumber's torch and repeatedly hit her on the body with an object, according to police and the victim.

Machuea told NBC 4 New York through her friend and housemate, Oscar Ramirez, who translated from Spanish for her, "They kept punching, one guy this side, the other guy the other side."

Machuea denies stealing anything, but says she admitted to the theft at the time to stop the abuse. The three suspects then took Machuea to to her home, The New York Daily News reports, where they stole her and her roommate's cellphones.

Police are still searching for the third assailant, described as about 6 feet tall and 30 to 35 years old with a medium build.

[Images via WABC-TV/NYPD]

Scarlett Johansson, who played an extraterrestrial in Under the Skin but is almost certainly a human being in real life, says John Travolta did not creep her out at the Oscars. People might think that she looks uncomfortable in the photo above, but people are wrong.

She tells the Associated Press:

The image that is circulating is an unfortunate still-frame from a live-action encounter that was very sweet and totally welcome. That still photo does not reflect what preceded and followed if you see the moment live. ... I haven't seen John in some years and it is always a pleasure to be greeted by him.

Johansson totally welcomed the live-action encounter. John Travolta said "Hi," like humans do, and she took pleasure in the greeting.

She adds, "There is nothing strange, creepy or inappropriate about John Travolta."

Of course not.

[Photo via Getty]

Red Bull is famous for selling orange-tinted poison, but over the past few years it has become increasingly well-known in certain circles for hawking a product much less profitable than energized swill: music, and writing about music. This week, a writer found out what happens when a brand dipping its toes into culture writing gets frightened by its own act of mild journalistic aggression.

Last week, British music writer Alex Macpherson (who is, full disclosure, a friend of mine) wrote an article for Red Bull about a team of producers called Future Brown. It was a critical piece headlined "Honest Question: Is Future Brown's Shtick 4Real?" that examines how Future Brown—a "supergroup" of sorts that is the combined efforts of four of underground dance music's most popular beat-makers—ended up putting out a drab album that fails to live up to its lofty art-school rhetoric.

The article was not overly mean or personal. It was, plainly, music criticism—a well-established, albeit dying, journalistic enterprise. But at some point between then and now, Red Bull quietly erased the piece from its website, though it is preserved on Macpherson's Tumblr and still pops up on Google:

But if you click that link, you're redirected to a standard, fluffy interview with the group that takes a sort of wondrous tone, informing the reader that Future Brown is "always looking to the future" and mounting "challenges to commodified beauty."

The tension here is pretty clear. On the one hand, Red Bull is selling Future Brown (and, by proxy, itself) as a progressive band of artists that's helping push music forward. But on the other, in Macpherson's since-deleted piece, it's telling you that there's a nagging emptiness to that argument because Future Brown's music actually isn't very good.

Culture publications are constantly forced to navigate this divide. In the case of music publications, artists are the ones who, theoretically, attract readers. So while most editors and writers would love to write as bluntly as possible about the music they cover, the truth is that the health of every magazine and website depends, to varying degrees, on which artists—and PR firms and labels—feel comfortable enough with your coverage to continue to play ball. A good current example (maybe the most analogous in many ways to Red Bull) is Noisey, Vice's music channel, which runs about as much music criticism as anyone, but is forever wrestling editorially with the fact that Vice—which loves to do things like throw cool, branded parties—must stay in the good graces of a certain set of artists and companies. (It's also in the best interest of publications to have coherent, identifiable taste, which becomes a problem when artists you once stumped for begin to suck. This is partly what happened in the case of Future Brown and Red Bull, which has been supporting and promoting the careers of the group's individual members for years.)

Every single major publication deals with this problem, and has for decades, but it is especially acute now that maintaining the health of a music magazine and/or website is more fraught than ever. In many respects, the quality and viability of a music publication rests on its ability to speak freely and truthfully while not alienating the very people that, essentially, allow it to exist. Some places, for various reasons, are better equipped to hit that sweet spot than others—Pitchfork, where (full disclosure!) I sometimes contribute, has more or less maintained its reputation for unvarnished criticism despite necessarily entangling itself with the artists that it covers.

Red Bull is not trying to be Pitchfork. But along with its sister company Red Bull Music Academy, the 74th most valuable brand in the world, has, through sheer monetary force, made itself an important player in the world of music. Red Bull played an integral role in the recent release of D'Angelo's long-awaited third album, and routinely puts on concerts, parties and other events across the globe, some of which—like a block party it threw last summer in New York as a tribute to house music pioneer Larry Levan—are genuinely enriching experiences.

Compared to its monthlong, city-wide takeovers, the journalistic arm of Red Bull and Red Bull Music Academy is less of a presence—the towering Red Bull Music Academy ads that pop up yearly in New York, for instance, don't implore you to read its music criticism. But in music journalism, and thus music, it is a growing entity, because in an industry that has been wilting away for years, money talks.

Red Bull Music Academy routinely flies journalists around the world to report stories and publicly interview musicians (here's another disclosure: I have a small portrait of Erykah Badu pinned up in my living room that I received after having attended one of those "conversations"). It does not do this out of benevolence, but because it has decided that sponsoring the arts, and the people who cover the arts, might be a particularly effective method of quasi-covert advertising.

Writers who take money from Red Bull are, obviously, aware of this dynamic, but Red Bull has carefully positioned itself as a tastemaker and a friend of tastemakers, covering artists and music scenes that music journalists—many of whom pride themselves on championing up-and-coming, or unfairly under-covered or forgotten, acts—might naturally feel passionate about. The implicit statement that Red Bull has made in its foray into music is that it cares about quality instead of popularity—but, crucially, only insofar as that translates into positive coverage with a utopian sort of worldview.

But what happens when this sort of hands-off boosterism collides with a critic's desire to, you know, criticize? Red Bull is apparently in the process of figuring this out. Macpherson tells me that his piece was commissioned by a new Red Bull site, as opposed to the established Red Bull Music Academy site; these are run by different editorial teams, at least in part. Guidelines and plans and editorial strategies for this new site will presumably be put in place at some point, but outright deleting a critical article and redirecting its page to a positive interview does not exactly set an encouraging precedent for what happens when a soft drink brand does music journalism.

It's not that hard to imagine a future where the sort of arrangement that currently exists between Red Bull and the journalists who write for it is more common. Mountain Dew, Adult Swim, and Sour Patch Kids, for instance, already fund the creation of music, and it wouldn't be a very far walk for them to one day fund the coverage of it, too. But brands, institutionally, do not want to foster criticism, or be associated with negativity. The ethics of brands and the ethics of journalists do not align, which is why they traditionally haven't cohabited.

Red Bull probably isn't abandoning music or music journalism anytime soon, and as long as its around offering money to music writers who need it (which is most of them), it will present a moral quandary to those hoping to (continue to) make a living. Am I helping a proprietor of sugary drinks look better by accepting its money to cover something I genuinely care about, or that someone else may not even pay me to cover? If I'm critical, will my article disappear? What about my career?

[image of Red Bull Flugtag via AP]

The pot farm owned and operated by Arthur Mondella, the cherry magnate who killed himself on Tuesday, was reportedly among the largest ever discovered in New York City. The New York Times and New York Daily News report that the grow room—located in Dell's Maraschino Cherries Company's basement, behind a hidden door and down a ladder—spanned 2,500 square feet and could harvest up to 1,200 pot plants.

While the involvement of the factory's other employees remains unclear, investigators believe Mondella must have had at least some help setting up the complex operation, which included 120 growing lamps, dozens of strains of marijuana seeds, 50 books on horticulture, and an irrigation system.

"The way you have to set that up, there's got to be plumbers and electricians working off the books who are very sophisticated,and it wasn't Arthur Mondella, as far as we know, that had that kind of skills," a law enforcement official told The New York Times. The same official said the farm was the largest investigators had ever seen in New York.

As for why Mondella would turn an apparently thriving business into a huge drug operation, authorities and his family remain baffled, though officials suspect a link to organized crime.

"The business was not doing poorly; the business was doing very well," Michael Farkas, the Mondella family's attorney, told the Times. "We were unaware of any major problems in Arthur's life. Somebody knows — but we're all waiting for answers here."

[h/t Newser]

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Leonard Nimoy, the actor best known for his portrayal of Spock on Star Trek, died Friday morning at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.

His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, told the New York Times the actor died from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was hospitalized last weeks for chest pains, according to TMZ, but was released.

Nimoy began his acting career in 1951, playing mostly small roles on television series and in B movies. He gained fame in the mid-60s after being cast as Spock on the original Star Trek series, a role which he'd revisit in eight Star Trek movies and dozens of other multi-media adaptations. He also directed several films (most notably 1987's 3 Men and a Baby), wrote two autobiographies, and released five albums.

He's survived by his wife, two children, a step-son, a brother, six grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

[Image via AP]

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

This morning, a tipster sent us a local Dallas news story about a bride who is upset that her wedding invitations were delivered with the wrong kind of doilies. The tipster suggested that Gawker "make fun" of this bride, who was so distressed by the mixup that she turned to her local ABC affiliate to air her grievances.

Having both read the story and conducted thorough internet research about the bride and her impending nuptials, I see no reason to make fun at all. In fact, I'd like to issue a call to arms. But first, let's look at the facts.

"She said it was 'different.' I didn't know how different"

Dallas-area bride-to-be Natalie DeGraffenreid will—god-willing—marry her fiancé Cory Teague in 35 days on April 4, 2015. No thanks at all to Lauren Heymann, owner of the six-year-old stationery firm "Art by Ellie." As DeGraffenreid explained to WFAA-8, Heymann ran out of the specific doilies that she requested for her invitations.

DeGraffenreid hired Arlington-based Art by Ellie to create the custom design, and said she was drawn to an invitation with a doily design. She placed her order in early January; paid her $500 deposit; signed the company's contract; and waited for delivery.

Then came problems.

DeGraffenreid said at first, only half of the invitations she had ordered were ready. And then staff at Art by Ellie told her there weren't enough of the same style of doilies for the entire order.

"When she e-mailed me a few days later and said she didn't have the same pattern— that she was ordering a new one—she said it was 'different.' I didn't know how different," DeGraffenreid said.

This is not a lie or a joke. The doilies are different.

One doily is what DeGraffenreid ordered; one is not. It's all a matter of taste, but: One doily says "a day we will always remember," and the other says [sound of dog pissing on the train of a wedding dress].

This is not what I call satisfactory customer service.

"That means she could give me whatever she wanted... and she did"

DeGraffenreid told WFAA-8 that she does not believe Heymann provided what she ordered, so she hasn't yet paid the remaining balance for the invitations. She said she asked for a refund or discount, but those requests were denied. Instead, Heymann pointed out that Art by Ellie is not contractually obligated to provide DeGraffenreid the correct doilies.

DeGraffenreid told WFAA-8 that Heymann wrote this to her in an email:

We are not under contract for a guaranteed specific delivery date, a specific envelope, or a specific doily pattern with your contract.

As DeGraffenreid translates, "That means she could give me whatever she wanted... and she did."

While specific doily patterns may not have been written out in DeGraffenreid's contract, Art by Ellie's website clearly states, "we wouldn't dream of sending anything to the printers without your final approval." Per the FAQ page:

WILL I SEE THE INVITATIONS BEFORE THEY GO TO PRINT?

Of course; you are involved every step of the way. We work with you to get a feel for your event style and then we begin working on your first round of proofs. The first e-mail will usually contain a few concepts and then we'll go from there, making changes until it's perfect, and we wouldn't dream of sending anything to the printers without your final approval.

I can now conclude that Art by Ellie's website is a lie.

Furthermore, per WFAA-8, "an attorney representing Art by Ellie contacted DeGraffenreid this week demanding full payment of the rest of her bill, with the hope of avoiding any future legal action."

Rude.

"It matters to me. I'm the bride, and I'm the one that paid for it"

Maybe doilies mean nothing to you. Maybe you do not even know what a doily is. Maybe like Dallas Observer blogger Eric Nicholson, this is your assessment of the problem:

One [doily] was done in a swirling pattern of lacy white starbursts, the other in a not-really-swirling pattern of lacy white starbursts.

This is not about Eric Nicholson or you. This is about Natalie DeGraffenreid, who ordered a specific product and made a sizable deposit for said product in good faith. As DeGraffenreid explained, "It matters to me. I'm the bride, and I'm the one that paid for it."

DeGraffenreid is a nurse. Her husband-to-be is a firefighter and a paramedic. They are our nation's heroes, who have no doubt been saving up to make their wedding a day their family and friends will enjoy.

Give DeGraffenreid the right goddamn doilies or let her keep the shitty ones for free.

I have reached out to DeGraffenreid, who has deleted her wedding website in the wake of this controversy, and will update if I hear back.

[Photos via DeGraffenreid's site and WFAA-8]

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

By now, you've probably seen (or even shared) the popular set of photos showing delicious, healthful school lunches from around the world, juxtaposed with a photo of the American equivalent, which of course looks like complete dogshit by comparison. Stop sharing it. The images aren't meant to show actual school lunches, and many versions replaced the original U.S. entry, which didn't seem that bad, with an intentionally gross one.

Before:

After:

The photo gallery first appeared on the Tumblr of east coast salad chain Sweetgreen, to promote the company's donations toward healthy food for kids. Sweetgreen arranged and shot the meals themselves, based on the contents international lunches—these pretty, well-lit, probably organic versions of the dishes were never served in an actual cafeteria (as you'd think people would be able to tell from the same tray and background in every photo).

The meals aren't "fake," they were just presented as representative of the kinds of dishes you'd find in various countries. But things started to get weird when sites began removing that context, replacing Sweetgreen's USA photo with a different one, and adding rants about Michelle Obama. Curse her and her totalitarian program of produce and whole grains!

See, for example, the Daily Mail's story "The School Lunches That Shame America," which does nothing to imply that the Sweetgreen photos aren't from actual school lunches, and an even worse Conservative Tribune post that was called out on Snopes. At least the Daily Mail version sources the gross mystery meat photo—it's tater tot casserole, by the way—to its origins on Twitter; the Conservative Tribune piece doesn't bother.

If America should be ashamed of its school lunches, it's not because they don't live up to a bunch of restaurant-quality food porn shot by an actual restaurant.

[h/t Snopes]

[Owl voice] "Do you like scary movies?"

The Thing. Michael Myers. Pinhead. Jason Voorhees. Owl. What do these menacing characters have in common? The fact that they are mentioned in this blog post, yes—please keep your jokes to yourself—but also the fact that each is a creature filled with the devil's spirit, born to terrorize the innocent and delight in the pain of man. What don't they have in common?

Of course, Owl is real.

According to the New York Daily News, a two-foot-tall owl is haunting a small town outside of Amsterdam, where it, reportedly, "likes to gouge the flesh of its human victims." From the Daily News:

Dubbed the "terror owl," the 2-foot-tall nocturnal raptor especially likes attacking the elderly and the disabled residents at an assisted-living complex in the village.

At least 20 people have been mauled there and some injuries required stitches, spokeswoman Lieselotte de Bruijn said Thursday.

Clearly another thing that sets "terror owl" apart from its horror film associates is that "terror owl" is uninterested in the glamor being a villain affords, foregoing sexy teens and focusing the majority of its terror on the elderly and the disabled. You almost have to admire him, this "terror owl."

One victim, Niels Verkoojen, told Dutch news that his confrontation "was like having a brick laced with nails thrown at your head." A colorful description of a cold, ruthless, and you have to imagine somewhat cute act—exactly what "terror owl" deserves.

According to the Daily News, the town has applied for a permit to catch the endangered "terror owl."

Good luck, my friends.

[image via Shutterstock]

Kid Rock's Instagram is under siege. It has been invaded by crazed Beyoncé fans (which is all of them) wielding the bumblebee emoji with great force.

In a new Rolling Stone profile, Kid Rock said some things about Beyoncé that you might expect an old white man to say about Beyoncé:

"Beyoncé, to me, doesn't have a fucking 'Purple Rain,' but she's the biggest thing on Earth. How can you be that big without at least one 'Sweet Home Alabama' or 'Old Time Rock & Roll'? People are like, 'Beyoncé's hot. Got a nice fucking ass.' I'm like, 'Cool, I like skinny white chicks with big tits.' Doesn't really fucking do much for me."

Yes. Hmm. Kid Rock is objectively wrong about in first part of that quote, and subjectively wrong in the second part. (Although, "Doesn't really fucking do much for me" is my attitude about most things.)

Anyway, the Beyhive, fresh off of terrorizing the owners of beyoncepictures.org (personally one of my favorite organizations in the world), decided to exact revenge on Kid Rock by attacking the comments of his Instagram. This is what his entire account looks like right now:

It's kind of pretty, isn't it?

The Beyhive, quite predictably, has not confined itself to just Rock's most recent photographs.

At one point I just started scrolling indiscriminately (Kid Rock is a power Instagram user) and clicking on photos at random to see if the Beyhive had built a colony there.

Here's a photo from over a year ago:

And 20 weeks after that:

I stopped scrolling at 98 weeks:

Time for Kid Rock to shoot his phone in the face and call it a day.

Mark Halperin's attempt to "grade" the performances of various Republic 2016 contenders who spoke at CPAC is one of those moments when the veil briefly lifts. He grades each candidate on "substance" and "style," and then presents an "overall" grade that is... not an average of the other two grades. It is clearly completely arbitrary, though his "overall" grades tend to track the "style" grades more than the "substance" grades. In other words, Halperin is outright revealing that, for him, "substance" (whatever he means by that) is simply a quality a politician must perform, not something they must possess, and it is a quality that he deems less important than "style."

In the spirit of fair play, let us grade Mark Halperin:

Mark Halperin does not understand politics. The worst thing about Mark Halperin is not that he's a soulless, cynical hack who portrays Washington as a clash of personalities rather than a clash of interests. It's not that he ignores substance and finds the results or efficacy of policies to be less interesting than determining who's "winning" and who's "losing." The worst thing about Mark Halperin is that he's not even good at doing those things. The most offensive thing about the existence of Mark Halperin is that he's the worst possible version of himself. Overall: F.

Two hours before forcing a shutdown, the House of Representatives agreed to a temporary funding deal for the Department of Homeland Security on Friday night, the Guardian reports. The deal will fund DHS for a week before we have to go through this whole thing all over again.http://fortressamerica.gawker.com/the-department...

Earlier on Friday evening, more than 50 House Republicans turned on Speaker John Boehner and voted with Democrats against the initially proposed deal, which would only have extended DHS's funding for three weeks in the first place, according to the Guardian. Republicans broke ranks to punish Boehner for his capitulation to President Barack Obama's decision last year to introduce immigration reforms by executive action.

From the New York Times:

The speaker was rescued by Democrats, who supported his offer of a weeklong extension because they believed it would lead to a vote next week on full funding for the department through the fiscal year, without any provisions related to President Obama's executive actions on immigration included in the House's original legislation. A spokesman for Mr. Boehner said the speaker had made no promises or deals with House Democrats to guarantee such a vote.

The White House announced that the president signed the weeklong extension—passed by a vote of 357 to 60—about 10 minutes before funding was to expire at midnight, the Times reports.

"We should have never fought this battle," the Times quoted Senator Mark S. Kirk (R-Illinois) as saying. "In my view, in the long run, if you are blessed with the majority, you are blessed with the power to govern. If you're going to govern, you have to act responsibly."

[Photo credit: AP Images]

"Net neutrality" will be the law of the land following the Federal Communications Commission's vote to reclassify broadband Internet services as public utilities. Please take some time this week to thank the outspoken citizens who made this possible. These heroes of the open Internet are regular folk, just like you and me, with names like Microsoft, eBay, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Congrats to a major industry on its lobbying victory!

Because telecom and cable companies vociferously oppose regulation of their terrible, anti-consumer practices, it's easy to paint the net neutrality fight as pitting greedy and self-interested corporations against earnest and sincere activists. But that's reductive and wrong. The biggest hint that that isn't the correct lens through which to view this fight is that the earnest and sincere activists won the fight, and the corporations lost. That isn't just a Washington rarity, it is a Washington impossibility. No, net neutrality won (pending future court battles) because the earnest and sincere activists represented a different group of greedy and self-interested corporations.

The FCC received a record four million public comments on their net neutrality proposal. The overwhelming majority of those comments supported the basic tenets of net neutrality. The New York Times quotes one excited activist: "This shows that the Internet has changed the rules of what can be accomplished in Washington." It has, though not quite in the way he means. The net neutrality fight shows that the Internet industry can consider its political influence to be on par with that of older, more established industries. Those public comments would have meant nothing at all if they hadn't represented a policy priority also shared by Google, one of the largest and most influential corporations in the world. And even Google wouldn't have beaten Verizon and Comcast alone—it lost the last time it had this fight, in 2010. Google had to make like a real global megacorporation and form an alliance with its ostensible competitors in its own field in order to present a unified front to official Washington — just as energy, healthcare, finance and telecommunications companies have been doing for decades. The corporate Internet grew up, formed a cartel, and won a major policy battle.

Don't get me wrong. Regulating broadband as a utility is (in my opinion) the correct policy. This is as close as Washington gets to a victory for the forces of "good." I would just urge everyone to keep in mind that the forces of good in this instance won not because millions of people made their voices heard, but because the economic interests of a few giant corporations aligned with the position of those millions of people. And I say that not simply to be a killjoy (though I do love being a killjoy), but because if anything is to change, we musn't convince ourselves that actual victory for the masses is possible in this fundamentally broken system. Please don't begin to believe that the American political establishment is anything but a corrupt puppet of oligarchy.

American politicians are responsive almost solely to the interests and desires of their rich constituents and interest groups that primarily represent big business. Casual observation of American politics over the last quarter-century or so should make that clear, but if you want supporting evidence, look to the research of Vanderbilt political scientist Larry Bartels, and Princeton's Martin Gilens and Northwestern's Benjamin Page. Gilen and Page's conclusions are easily summed up: "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."

Political battles are won when the rich favor them. America's rich have lately become rather progressive on certain social issues, and those issues have rather suddenly gone from political impossibilities to achievable dreams. This is why same-sex marriage is an inevitability and marijuana decriminalization seems more likely than ever, but we can't dismantle megabanks or raise the estate tax. This is why healthcare reform couldn't happen without the buy-in (and buying off) of the bloated, awful healthcare industry and the doctor cartel. (And speaking of the doctor cartel: One of the few major political issues where the ultra-rich seem to have trouble getting their way is immigration reform, but there are plenty of wealthy professionals who rely on protectionism to keep their incomes elevated.) This dynamic explains the entire "education reform" project, which is an attempt to dismantle and re-create the American public school system, dreamed up (and almost solely supported) by the wealthy elite, most of whom have no education expertise or experience in urban public schools.

We have net neutrality for the same reason that copyright terms will be extended indefinitely forever and the Defense Department will keep being forced to buy incredibly expensive planes that don't actually work: Because a large industry had a strong opinion on the subject.

Photo: Google's Eric Schmidt enjoys a beverage at the 2010 World Economic Forum in Davos.
Credit: AP Images

Police in Massachusetts have charged an 18-year-old honor student with involuntary manslaughter for her alleged role in the death of classmate Conrad Roy, 18, who took his own life last July.

According to prosecutors, Michelle Carter of Plainville, Massachusetts "strongly influenced" Roy's decision to kill himself, privately advocating he poison himself with carbon monoxide while publicly expressing concern about the missing teen's whereabouts and safety. From The Boston Globe:

After writing one friend to say, "I'm losing all hope that he's even alive," Carter texted Roy, "Let me know when you're gonna do it," according to a police report.

Carter, now a senior at King Philip High School, had a "full understanding" of the suicide plan, and in the days leading up to Roy's death "not only encouraged Conrad to take his own life, she questioned him repeatedly as to when and why he hadn't done it yet," the report said.

Emphasis added. Prosecutors say at one point Roy expressed concern for his family and became scared, exiting the truck he was later found dead in. According to court documents, Carter told Roy "get back in."

In the months after his death, Carter mourned Roy over social media tweeting "Such a beautiful soul gone to soon" and "#WeCanEndSuicide."

I will never understand why this had to happen

— Michelle Carter (@michyc47) July 16, 2014

Carter, who was 17 at the time, has now been charged as a youthful offender and faces up to 20 years in prison, but her attorney says there was no crime.

"They're trying to claim there is manslaughter when they freely admit the boy took his own life," attorney Joseph P. Cataldo told The Standard-Times. "You can't have it both ways."

[Image via WBZ-TV//h/t Huffington Post]

Pawnee, Indiana was a place of hope and absurd dreams. It was a place where meager, government officials with outsized personalities could stimulate change—no matter how small. With Leslie Knope and her eccentric band of misfits on the case (yes, even Jerry), everything seemed just a little more possible. So as we bid farewell to Pawnee—"First in Friendship, Fourth in Obesity"—may we never forget the most important lesson of all: to always "treat yo self."

"Knope Springs Eternal: 'Parks and Rec' Ends Its Brilliant, Satisfying Seven-Season Run" by Andy Greewald

But what they never did was settle. Parks and Rec was utterly unique among significant sitcoms of the past 30 years because it measured happiness not in the intensity of its characters' retreat from the world but in their wild, open embrace of it. Parks was a show about misfits coming together to do more than lick wounds and eat Chinese food. To borrow Leslie Knope's words from last night's finale, their mission was to fight, scratch, and claw "to make people's lives a tiny bit better." It was about celebrating the merits of "small, incremental change every day." Few comedies have been so unfailingly clever about highlighting the absurdity of day-to-day existence, the frustrations caused by petty bureaucracy, hurt feelings, and the perpetual scourge of other people. But for Parks, these observations weren't a punch line. They were a challenge.

http://grantland.com/hollywood-pros...

"Outside Man" by Jesse Katz

At the end of 2013, Budnick walked away from Hollywood, voluntarily ending his association with Green Hat and the writer-director at its helm, Todd Phillips. Under almost any other circumstances, someone with Budnick's credentials would have cashed in his connections and launched his own production company, making the leap from salaried executive to points-on-the-back-end mogul. That he did not was headline-worthy in the industry trades, even more so because Budnick was chucking it all for a cause that was not a disease or disaster or far-off humanitarian crisis but a stigmatized population close to home: the half million Californians incarcerated or under control of the criminal justice system.

https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-03-01/sco...

"Practicing Islam in Short Shorts" by Thanaa El-Naggar

There are many like me. We don't believe in a monolithic practice of Islam. We love Islam, and because we love it so much we refuse to reduce it to an inflexible and fossilized way of life. Yet we still don't fit anywhere. We're more comfortable passing for non-Muslims, if it saves us from one or more of the following: unsolicited warnings about the kind punishment that awaits us in hell, unwelcomed advice from a stranger that starts with "I am like your [insert relative]," or an impromptu lecture, straight out of a Wahhabi textbook I thought was nonsense at age 13.

http://truestories.gawker.com/practicing-isl...

"Creative Disobedience: Q&A with Jeremy Suyker" by Pauline Eiferman

Artistic production in Iran is complicated in that the government doesn't really try and support creation. So people do what they can. There's a fantastic energy. People meet and create shows together. And because it's a pretty small network, you get to know everyone pretty quickly. It's all very DIY—there's a strong artisanal sense to all of this. And that's what I was interested in: the crafty side of art there. However, when I came home and showed this work, it was immediately simplified by the media. It was hard to explain it to people who were looking for the exciting narrative of censorship and illegal art. I feel like the media is happy to keep a very simplified image of Iran that opposes the bad Islamists and the nice little artists. What I was really interested in and what I photographed was how artists were able to creatively surpass censorship, and find a balance inside the confines of the law.

http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/creative-...

"How to Live Forever" by Tim Wu

I suspect, however, that most people seeking immortality rather strongly believe that they have a self, which is why they are willing to spend so much money to keep it alive. They wouldn't be satisfied knowing that their brains keep on living without them, like a clone. This is the self-preserving, or selfish, version of everlasting life, in which we seek to be absolutely sure that immortality preserves a sense of ourselves, operating from a particular point of view.

http://www.newyorker.com/business/curre...

"The Secret Lives of L.A.'s Bottle-Service Girls" by Jason Duaine Hahn

Navigating the clanking champagne bottles and swaying bodies are the gears that power the machine: the bottle girls. They're soldiers in smoke- and booze-filled trenches, who happen to look like they just stepped out of a Victoria's Secret catalog. Aside from providing the eye candy that draws in punters, bottle service girls serve drinks, make conversation, and witness all of the celebrity hook-ups that Perez Hilton would kill to know about—which also makes them custodians of Hollywood's best-kept secrets (a job worthy of a very good tip).

http://firstwefeast.com/drink/secret-l...

"Who Killed Tony the Tiger" by Devin Leonard

Kellogg still spends more than $1 billion a year on advertising, but it no longer has the same hold on breakfast. The sales of 19 of Kellogg's top 25 cereals eroded last year, according to Consumer Edge Research, a Stamford (Conn.) firm that tracks the food industry. Sales of Frosted Flakes, the company's No. 1 brand, fell 4.5 percent. Frosted Mini-Wheats declined by 5 percent. Meanwhile, Special K Red Berries, one of the company's breakout successes in the past decade, fell by 14 percent. Kellogg executives don't expect cereal sales to return to growth this year, though they hope to slow the rate of decline and do better in 2016. But some Wall Street analysts say cereal sales may never fully recover. In Battle Creek, so-called Cereal City, that would be the equivalent of the apocalypse.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/...

"A Boy Among Men" by Maurice Chammah

And then it happened. One night after the last count before bed, John says, his cellmate suddenly attacked him, pulling down both of their pants and wrestling him onto the bottom bunk. John tried to resist, but he was less than 140 pounds, and next to David's bulk of more than 200 he stood little chance as this powerful man forced his way in, slowly and painfully and in silence, without a condom or lubricant. John would later estimate that it lasted seven minutes. When David was finished, he told him to keep quiet. John obeyed; though still a fish, he had been down long enough to know that snitches suffer fates worse than rape.

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/02/25/a-b...

"The Brief Life and Private Death of Alexandria Hill" by Brian Joseph

Nationally, no one tracks how many children are in private foster homes, or how these homes perform compared to those vetted directly by the government. As part of an 18-month investigation, I asked every state whether it at least knew how many children in its foster system had been placed in privately screened homes. Very few could tell me. For the eight states that did, the total came to at least 72,000 children in 2011. Not one of the states had a statistically valid dataset comparing costs, or rates of abuse or neglect, in privately versus publicly vetted homes.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/...

[Image via NBC]

Supporters and allies of the slain Boris Y. Nemtsov have expressed fear that the opposition leader's killing may have come at the behest of the government, the Washington Post reports. The government, meanwhile, has suggested that Nemtsov may have been martyred by other members of the opposition.

"There is only one conclusion," Nemtsovally Vladimir Milov, who the Post describes as an opposition leader and ally of Nemtsov's, reportedly wrote on his blog. "The murder of Boris Nemtsov is connected to the authorities."

"The personal perception of safety has just been enormously shattered. No one considered that someone could be just shot down. The regime was used to imprisoning people," said Leonid Volkov, with whom Nemtsov had been organizing a rally originally scheduled for Sunday. "It's a new era in Russian opposition politics."

"It's not decided, but it could go both directions. Toward more cruelty or actually some change in the regime, as well, if we figure out how to use this momentum," Volkov said.

Meanwhile, the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General's Office released a statement enumerating several theories about the killing, including the possibility that Nemtsov—a former deputy prime minister—was martyred by other members of the opposition, the New York Times reports.

"The investigation is considering several versions," the committee said, suggesting that the murder might have been "a provocation to destabilize the political situation in the country, where the figure of Nemtsov could have become a sort of sacrificial victim for those who stop at nothing to achieve their political goals."

"The president noted that this cruel murder has all the signs of a contract killing and carries an exclusively provocative character," the Krelmin said in a statement. "Vladimir Putin expressed his deep condolences to the relatives and loved ones of Boris Nemtsov, who died tragically." According to the Post, a Kremlin spokesman said that there was no reason to believe that other opposition leaders would be killed.

According to the Times, the investigative committee's statement also referred to the possibility that Islamic extremists were responsible for the killing, citing Nemtsov's position on the Charlie Hebdo shootings. On Saturday, state-run news outlets reported that investigators had found a car that they believe was used in the shooting with license plates from Ingushetia, a Muslim-majority province in the Caucasus, the Post reports.

The Times also reports that about two weeks before his death, Nemtsov met with Yevgenia Albats, the editor of New Times magazine, to discuss research he was conducting on Russia's involvement in Ukraine.

"He was afraid of being killed," Albats told the Times. "And he was trying to convince himself, and me, they wouldn't touch him because he was a member of the Russian government, a vice premier, and they wouldn't want to create a precedent. Because as he said, one time the power will change hands in Russia again, and those who served Putin wouldn't want to create this precedent."

Miami Gardens Police Chief Stephen Johnson was arrested—and immediately fired—on Friday for soliciting a prostitute in Dania Beach, NBC Miami reports. He had called the number on an ad placed by authorities.

The ad was placed on backpage.com, according to a Broward Sheriff's Office arrest report. Johnson called the listed number, arranging to pay $100 for a half-hour with two prostitutes.

Johnson arrived at the designated hotel room, where he was met by two undercover detectives, NBC Miami reports. He handed over the money and was arrested.

"We remain committed to excellence and integrity on every level," the department said in a press release. "We will not allow Mr. Johnson's bad judgment to reflect negatively on the hardworking officers of the City of Miami Gardens and the residents they serve on a daily basis."

Miami Gardens became notorious last year for its insane stop-and-frisk practices. Earlier this month, officers shot and killed Lavall Hall, a 25-year-old man suffering from mental illness.

[Image via Broward County Sheriff's Department/Miami Herald]

"If two people come together," my mother began, "who've never had any power except by the way of abuse, it's going to be bad. Both of us had power exerted over us as children. I eventually learned that as an adult, I was still doing the dance, seeking out abusive relationships. That doesn't mean it was my fault. But I played a role. And your father was abused by his father and, as an adult, he became a rage-aholic, exerting power over others."

"Mom, should you be telling me these things?" I ask.

My mother left my father 27 years ago but the trauma has remained. Now, when I tense up at the sight of no one, I wonder if trauma is hereditary.

Two years ago, my mother packed up her life on the west coast, where she lived for ten years, and moved back east. She settled in Boston, put everything in storage, found an apartment the size of a public restroom, and went about finding work.

My mother steals things, books in particular. When I'd return from another scholastic summer she'd always peruse my new books first. She'd relish in having raised a bookworm for a daughter and browse the latest additions to my bookshelves. Years before relocating to Boston, she'd lifted a book by David Adams called Why Do They Kill: Men Who Murder Their Intimate Partners. Adams' father murdered his wife (Adams' mother) and Adams eventually founded Emerge, the first abuser education program in the country. I'd taken some feminism and domestic violence courses and his book sat on, what my roommate endearingly referred to as, "the rape shelf" in our kitchen.

Once in Boston, my mother looked up Emerge and eventually began volunteering there. In the past two years, she has earned state certifications in Batterer Intervention. She sits in on batterers' groups and listens to them as they tell their stories—why they hit, what drove them to that point. Sometimes she will call me afterwards and fill me in on all of the ridiculous, funny, and tragic things said by these men. Her official role as a volunteer is to manage the database: she takes written hard-copy files dating back to 1977 and enters them into the computer. She often spends hours reading the histories and testimonies of these men who beat and/or killed their intimate partners. (It's rare for a batterer to have only one victim in his or her lifetime.) She speaks to me with a familiarity and ease not just as her daughter, but as a comrade. Her work in social services dates back to the 1970s. In college, and years after, I volunteered as a rape crisis counselor. So when we talk, we use shorthand for abuse and, yes, there's laughter.

My mother greatly enjoys her role at Emerge, and she's learned a lot. I've noticed how much lighter she appears when talking about abuse now—including her own.

But she is human, and it is not always easy.

Last year, my mother opened up to me about a time my father raped her during their marriage. We'd just come home from my grandfather's funeral. My father's father. She'd always been close with her ex-husband's family, in part because her own had been so dysfunctional. That night as our muddy shoes dried in the bathtub, she cried on my bed about the violence of their marriage. It was the week before Christmas.

Maybe it's something about the holidays: it's one year later, and here she is, again, in my home, crying about this time in her life. A chapter I'd assumed was closed. But maybe that is my own way of dealing with this kind of rupture—that of my parent's marriage. My thinking is: their marriage is over so anything that occurred within it has also reached an end. But this is not the case.

My father and I have an okay, at times estranged, work-in-progress relationship. Whenever he makes an effort to reconcile with me, he has a way of complicating the very gesture of compromise. For example, even though he'd said he was coming to visit the week between Christmas and New Years, he somehow ended up visiting on a different date altogether—one that coincided with my mother's visit.

Only until fairly recently has my mother stopped communicating with my father. She was an excellent co-parent during my childhood and well into my twenties. But after I began grad school and fell ill, after what went from a mysterious unknown ailment to an absolute, definite diagnosis with no cure, and especially after she began her work with batterers, she stopped all forms of communication with him. She's declared her boundaries loudly and my father now lives outside of them.

"It was like 30 years ago, and I got terrified, like he was going to hurt me."

We're in my kitchen and I've braced myself. I've just told my mother that my father's visit would overlap with hers. I can tell she's going to breakdown at any moment. When she does, the first thing I notice is how similarly we both cry. We freeze, gasp, and then howl.

Instead of getting frustrated or tired or overwhelmed—as I have in the past—I remained calm and bore witness. I listened. I tried not to be a needy daughter and instead a daughter who's trained in rape crisis. I reminded her that she is safe. I told her that my only job was to remind her that she is safe. It was only when I said this out loud to her that I believed it to be true. You are my mother. You are safe. There is no fear here.

I need my mother to tell her story because her narratives have become my own. Beauty marks, fingers, ways of speech, memories—it has all become so jumbled that it's a struggle to pick out what belongs to whom.

My father is guilty of many things with me, but not sexual abuse, not rape. He was not my abusive husband. He is my father. He is my mother's batterer. At times, I feel myself reacting to him not as his daughter but as a witness of my mother's. When he speaks and gestures, I imagine her presence with us, reacting, scowling, perhaps cringing or covering her face.

After 30 years it is now hitting me—how unsurprising and damn-near natural it is that my mother's victimization, at the hands of my father, was also my abuse. Like everything else, my mother's sheer being has an immense effect on me. It is a totality. Consider this: it is no exaggeration when I say that she dreamed of me before I was born. I don't mean she had girly flights into maternal fantasies. I mean one night in 1981 she dreamt that her sister, Linda (my namesake), was looking inside of her with a light and said, "Toni, I think there's a little girl in there."

If I am my mother's child, then her scars are mine, too. Just like her thick hair and my lion's mane. Just like my occasional southern drawls are hers. Just like her flirtatious, sideways grin and my disarming smile. We are a breed of charmers.

I used to write about the generations of black women I come from. I used to read Corregidora. For years I obsessed over William Faulkner's passages on the not-whores of New Orleans. It never occurred to me that I didn't need to go that far back.

I look up, taking a break from writing this, and see a card from her. It's a picture of a kitten. Underneath the image she writes, BE GOOD LOVE MOMMIE. I smile.

Linda Chavers is a writer who lives in New Hampshire. Her mother's favorite food is chitlins, she does not like the "Free Hug" people at Harvard Square, and she reads the dictionary for pleasure.

[Illustration by Tara Jacoby]

Two days after it first went missing from a West Hollywood hotel, Lupita Nyong'o's pearl-encrusted Oscars dress was recovered by police on Friday, apparently abandoned as "almost worthless" by the thief.

TMZ reportedly gave police the location of the dress after being tipped off by the thief himself, who discovered the gown's supposedly natural pearls were fake and returned it to the hotel.

"They found the dress inside of this black garment bag hidden behind a garbage bag under a counter," said a police spokesperson on Friday. "We will maintain custody of the dress until we have a representative from the company or the victim show up to claim it."

According to TMZ, the thief said he contacted the site because he wanted to expose "Hollywood's fake bullshit." Assuming the pearls were authentic, Fortune previously estimated the dress to be worth $150,000.

[Image via Getty Images]

A car thief threw a brick at the window of a car outside Gerry Brady's pub in Drogheda, but the brick bounced off the window and hit the car thief in the face, the Irish Independent reports.

"You should have heard the garda laughing when they saw the video," Brady said. "They were in stitches. Credit to them, they were straight out when we called and found the guy within minutes."

Here is a longer version of the video, with a much more dramatic build-up, and some fine editing apparently done by Brady. It is titled, "The Thick With The Brick."