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Clash Over Phone Hacking Article Preceded Exit of Washington Post Editor. In mid-May, the newsroom editor, Sally Buzbee, clashed over whether to publish an article about a British hacking scandal with some ties to the chief executive, Will Lewis. Buzbee informed Lewis that the newsroom planned to cover a judge’s scheduled ruling in a long-running British legal case brought by Prince Harry and others against some of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids. Lewis stated that the case involving him did not merit coverage.
When Buzbee said The Post would publish an article anyway, he said her decision represented a lapse in judgment and abruptly ended the conversation.
I think I’m going to have to go supersize.
Morgan Spurlock, ‘Super Size Me’ documentary director, dies at 53. Morgan Spurlock, a documentary filmmaker whose Oscar-nominated “Super Size Me” chronicled a month of watching his body swell and health decline while eating only McDonald’s meals, launching a highflying career that later imploded after he acknowledged past incidents of sexual assault and harassment, died May 23 at a hospital in New York City. He was 53.
Where did Justine Go?
Drawn to a Hare Krishna ashram for its yoga, meditation and vegan meals, she’s still figuring out what went wrong. Ms. Payton didn’t think of herself as part of a larger story about the popularity of alternative spiritual practices in the splintering religious landscape of 21st-century America. She hadn’t yet parsed the borderlines separating willing self-abnegation, mental illness and abuse. She craved transcendence, and like an increasing number of Americans, she didn’t find it in Christianity or another historic monotheistic religion.
Exactly how stupid was what OpenAI did to Scarlett Johansson?
We ranked it. It's #6, so you know - somewhere between Musk and Uber.
Big ships in even bigger waves.
Ships rolling in the sea. Just for fun.
The children who remember their past lives
What happens when your toddler is haunted by memories that aren’t hers? In Louisiana in 2000, 2-year-old James Leininger would wake screaming, repeating the same phrases to his baffled and disturbed parents: “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” Over the following year, a story unspooled in memories and drawings: He was a World War II pilot whose plane took off from a boat, and he died when he was shot down by Japanese forces. James offered names of people and places, and his account would ultimately become one of the most prominent and thoroughly documented “cases of the reincarnation type,” or CORT, ever recorded.
Avalanche!
What the heck bro! Here are 16 videos of avalanches (no audio needed). Just for fun.
In Defense of Never Learning How To Cook
Finding independence in a perfectly cooked egg I found it while walking through the home-goods section of T.J. Maxx, the American retail equivalent of the Garden of Earthly Delights, at 8:00 on a Tuesday night in 2015.... Somewhere among these novelties I spotted a carelessly abandoned gadget calling itself the Dash Rapid Egg Cooker. The cashier who rang me up did not share my enthusiasm for the cheery cockiness of its packaging, which proclaimed that it “Perfectly Cooks 6 Eggs at a Time!” Baffled, she asked me a question, the answer to which would have embarrassed anyone but me: “Don’t you know how to boil water?”
The unluckiest generation
Here’s why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned with capitalism Millennials have had such a tumultuous start in the workforce, they have been nicknamed the “unluckiest generation.” They are struggling to navigate the most unaffordable housing market since the early 1980s. And that’s before anyone talks about the larger challenges of climate change, wars and political partisanship and paralysis.
Piloted with precision
Parents Are Highly Involved in Their Adult Children’s Lives, and Fine With It New surveys show that today’s intensive parenting has benefits, not just risks, and most young adults seem happy with it, too.
"The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the righteous"
A Marketplace of Girl Influencers Managed by Moms and Stalked by Men The troubling interactions on Instagram come as social media companies increasingly dominate the cultural landscape and the internet is seen as a career path of its own. Nearly one in three preteens list influencing as a career goal, and 11 percent of those born in Generation Z, between 1997 and 2012, describe themselves as influencers. Content warning: Instagram Child Pornography
The person on your block you should fear the most is...
The guy at the keyboard (gift link) Are you bummed you weren’t around when the Stasi ruled? Do you wish you could’ve been one of Mao Zedong’s millions of neighborhood snitches? Maybe watch the Red Guards drag off your least favorite aunt?
Not to worry, the bad old days are back — thanks to Nextdoor.com.
If you like it, don't put a ring on it.
For older women with money, it’s yes to love but ‘I don’t’ to marriage. Money is, of course, only one of many considerations. But for many, the answer is clear: Date, fall in love, even live together. But make it legal? No thank you.
This is the good news story you needed on the last day of the year.
The Washington Post Revisits Stories from This Year to See Where They Are Now In January, I posted this thread about Devon Henry, a Black Virginia contractor who was hired to take down a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery when no one else would. In doing so, Henry took on significant risk with workers walking off site, being told his business would be ruined, and having to wear a bullet-proof vest to work every day. An update is the 5th story at the gift link above.
Gold for Whom?
The ACLU of Delaware filed a complaint arguing that too many Deaf children are being referred to Deaf schools. When the ACLU of Delaware filed a complaint against the Delaware Department of Education earlier this month, calling for the investigation into the Department's treatment of Deaf children, it raised some eyebrows. When they argued that the state was keeping Deaf students from the Least Restrictive Environment by sending them to the Deaf school, more eyebrows were raised. When they further argued that Listening and Spoken Language, a trademarked certification for oral-only education given out solely by AG Bell association, designated by some in the Deaf community as a hate group and who claim they can "make Deaf people hear", was the "gold standard" for Deaf education...well, you can imagine what happened next....
She'll take the town by storm
Nicaragua’s dictator goes after Miss Universe As Nicaragua has marched steadily toward dictatorship in recent years, its government has attacked opposition politicians, the Catholic Church, journalists and universities. Now it’s going after the beauty queens.
I heard crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch
A surfer wanted to catch waves from Hurricane Lee. A shark bit his face. Around noon, he watched a six-foot-long spinner shark leap out of the water 20 feet away and fall back in, barely missing another surfer. Sumersett was terrified but stayed in the water. Several other surfers, including the one nearly bodied by the spinner shark, seemed unbothered.
He kept surfing.
He saw another shark fin in the afternoon.
Kept surfing.
Around dusk, he watched three sharks “come swimming through the waves like dolphins do.”
Kept surfing.
Five minutes later, he saw three different sharks doing the same thing.
Kept surfing.....
A deep betrayal
For Michael Oher, understanding the truth of the document he signed when he was 18 was, he says, a final, deep betrayal. Michael Oher, a former NFL player whose story was told in the 2009 movie “The Blind Side,” filed court documents Monday alleging that a Tennessee couple he once called mom and dad had falsely claimed that they had legally adopted him when he was a struggling teenager.
Oher further alleged that Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy had him sign conservatorship papers that he didn’t realize would give the couple power to make business deals for him.
As a high school student in 2004, Oher signed the paperwork, believing it was part of the adoption process, according to his petition filed in a Tennessee probate court. He realized in February that the paperwork stripped away his rights, the petition says.
I was looking for a new direction in life.
She hired him as a caregiver for her family. They fell in love. Sanhai’s husband had died a few years earlier of a heart attack, leaving her to raise her two sons as a single mother. Not long after they relocated, the family faced another crisis in 2014: Sanhai’s father had a stroke, sending her on a desperate search for a caregiver. Her job as a scientist was demanding, and Sanhai needed someone to tend to her father — who moved in with her family after the stroke — as well as help out with her two sons, then 16 and 10.
Double secret probation.
I was on campus when ‘Animal House’ debuted. It changed everything. Although “Animal House” was a professedly anarchic comedy that identified with the freaks, the misfits and anyone wanting to fight for their right to party, the movie ironically helped crystallize a new strain of cultural and political conservatism that started on campuses and ran all the way up to the National Mall and Wall Street.
In other words, “Animal House” is where the 1960s finally and decisively turned into the 1980s.
How the union dies
Maybe this quiet fading, engineered by a company with time and money to burn, is how the union dies. A billionaire who doesn’t want to be called a billionaire, who blusters when his company’s service workers get likened to the blue-collar worker who raised him — this is the chasm between our putative national values and our daily reality. We want to believe in a middle-class America where hard work weaves its own safety net. But millions of workers don’t earn enough money to cover basic expenses.
The Most Hated Man in Hollywood
The reviews are in on you sir, and they are not good. On Monday, GQ published a story from freelance film critic Jason Bailey summarizing Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav's rapid and shameful ascent from anonymous executive to widely loathed cultural villain. Bailey's key observation is that Zaslav seems neither to care about nor especially like movies, which makes his leadership of such a powerful company a tragic outcome for everyone who does.
Within hours of the article's publication, readers observed that the piece had been heavily edited and its sharpness sanded down. Shortly after the edited version of Bailey's story went live, GQ deleted the entire blog from its website.
Beyond the rainbow.
Finding a visual way to represent an inner identity can be complicated. (WaPo Gift) For much of American Sign Language's history, those who have had the most power to disseminate signs have been straight, White, cisgender people. The rise of video-based social media is allowing ASL to spread more rapidly and is empowering the Deaf queer community to exert more influence over American Sign Language.
Face-eating leopard eats own face, burps.
Revenge served ice cold. Top L.A. law firm outs former partners’ racist, sexist emails. Last month, Lewis, Brisbois, Bisgaard and Smith, one of the nation’s largest law firms, was rocked by the announcement that two top partners who ran their labor and employment practice, defending corporations against harassment and discrimination lawsuits, were starting their own boutique practice and taking as many as 140 colleagues with them. The shock inside the’ downtown Los Angeles headquarters soon gave way to anger as the recently departed partners embarked on a press campaign that portrayed their former employer as a profit-focused legal mill that ground down the aspirations of its lawyers. In an extraordinary move, the law firm's management team directed the release of scores of emails in which Barber and Ranen used vile terms for women, Black people, Armenians, Persians, and gay men and traded in offensive stereotypes of Jews and Asians.
Fringe of the fringe
Aaron and Christina had never attended school when they were children. Until a few days earlier, when Round Hill Elementary held a back-to-school open house, they had rarely set foot inside a school building. Both had been raised to believe that public schools were tools of a demonic social order, government “indoctrination camps” devoted to the propagation of lies and the subversion of Christian families. Christina and Aaron were supposed to advance the banner of that movement, instilling its codes in their children through the same forms of corporal punishment once inflicted upon them. Yet instead, along with many others of their age and upbringing, they had walked away.
Go be a lighthouse keeper, do!
Want to own a historic lighthouse? The U.S. government is offering at least 10 lighthouses to the public and government agencies as demand for the once-critical maritime facilities declines due to technology such as GPS. Some of the buildings, which can be centuries old, have colorful histories — and some are even said to have ghosts.
Ringmaster, Outrageous, Controversial, Scandalous, The Master of Trash.
Jerry Springer has passed away at age 79. When others went low, he went lower. Cheating spouse reveals. Baby daddy reveals. Teenage stripper reveals. Racists, badasses and brawlers. Springer, who died Thursday at 79, mined the depths and put what he dredged up on his show.
“Who Has Midlife Crisis Money?:
Millenials are hitting middle age. In August, The Times asked our 40-ish readers how they felt about their lives, now that they are — chronologically, at least — in midlife. Over 1,300 people responded in less than a week. One of our questions was about whether they had experienced a midlife crisis and how they would define the term.
Many people said they felt they couldn’t be having a midlife crisis because there was no bourgeois numbness to rebel against. Rather than longing for adventure and release, they craved a sense of safety and calmness, which they felt they had never known.
Divorce isn’t contagious.
Why are people treating me this way? After 13 years of marriage, I was expecting sympathy, empathy and kindness from this group of married people who no doubt knew, or at least could imagine, how hard this all must have been for me. As the dinner conversation ventured into the ”what’s life like now” part, more of the wives started leaning in my direction, fists tucked under chins as they eagerly awaited the details of first dates and new furniture purchases — the enthusiasm I had for my new beginning....
A DNA test revealed the CEO is my half brother …
Ask a Manager has a live one: My dad gave the whole family DNA ancestry kits for the holidays, and it turns out the CEO of the company I work for is my half-brother....About a week after I got my results, an email went out from the head of HR stating that all staff had to take a refresher training on nepotism. The training also included a new clause that said something like “staff are not entitled to privileges personal or professional if familial relation by genes or marriage to executive or management staff is known or unknown or discovered during employment.”
The Worst Art Job Listing Ever Created
What exactly is this job you ask? Well..... Art World Family. That’s the phrase that inspired me to click on the listing for an Executive Assistant position on NYFA’s classified listings, curious about what this mysterious organization Art World Family was. I never heard of it before. Was it some sort of nonprofit for families in the art world, a notoriously low-paying (for most jobs), healthcare-less, and not exactly family-friendly industry? A childcare service? A program offering art education to families?
Two souls, one body
Solomon Perel, a German Jew who outwitted the Nazis by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II, an extraordinary story of survival that was dramatized in the 1990 film “Europa Europa,” died Feb. 2 at his home in Givatayim, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.
Well, that's rich. Or is it?
What does it mean to be rich in America, where the elite need to re-earn their position anew each day and
experience the demands of wealth without its promised sense of security and ease?
NAH LLC
White contractors wouldn’t remove Confederate statues. So a Black man did it. He didn’t seek the job. He had never paid much attention to Civil War history. City and state officials said they turned to Team Henry Enterprises after a long list of bigger contractors — all White-owned — said they wanted no part of taking down Confederate statues.
Today in magic beans
“Everything I have came from $800.” On Twitter, the men touted themselves as financial sages in a community known to fans as FinTwit. Two launched a Discord server, Atlas Trading, amassing more than 230,000 members who avidly followed their stock tips. They appeared on podcasts that soared in popularity with the bull market, and showed off luxury cars on Instagram. The ‘FinTwit’ Influencers now face charges in $100 Million Scheme.
Get married in a small room, standing before a mirror.
I want a silent wedding reception. My fiance and I are planning our wedding. As the bride, I’m planning on making certain requests of my guests, to make sure that my special day is as perfect as possible. For example, I’m asking that my guests wear exclusively yellow at the ceremony.
My fiance has been supportive, but he angrily rejected my other request: that our guests remain silent throughout both the ceremony and reception (to ensure that the focus remains on us)....
Perhaps the gentleman would like the "Poo Driver"
Prune Juice and vodka! What could go wrong?? Bon Appétit magazine known for it's exquisite taste and innovations in cuisine has a few recipes they'd like you to try....
What if your friends’ art sucks?
We were here to “Make friends, not art!” Well, that sounds fun. But what if your friends’ art sucks? Documenta was always a pacesetter — and this year’s edition certainly put its finger on a larger shift, seen too in our museums, our art schools and our magazines, away from aesthetic ambition and intellectual seriousness and toward the easier comforts of togetherness, advocacy and fun. If your friends’ art sucks, that’s actually no big deal — because being together matters more than doing something well. And if the German press say your friends’ art sucks, that’s OK, too — reassuring, actually, as evidence that this rotten colonizers’ world has no place for us.
Reply 'Yes' to Donate
How a Record Cash Haul Vanished for Senate Republicans Party leaders, including Senator Mitch McConnell, are fretting aloud that Republicans could squander their shot at retaking the Senate in 2022, with money one factor as some first-time candidates have struggled to gain traction. The N.R.S.C. was intended to be a party bulwark yet found itself recently canceling some TV ad reservations in key states.
The story of how the Senate G.O.P. committee went from breaking financial records to breaking television reservations, told through interviews with more than two dozen Republican officials, actually begins with the rising revenues Mr. Scott bragged about last year.
Unpaywalled
What if we call it Boisterous Boundaries?
What is 'quiet quitting,' and how it may be a misnomer for setting boundaries at work Popularized on TikTok, 'Quiet Quitting' is closing your laptop at 5 p.m. Doing only your assigned tasks. Spending more time with family.
“I am tired of being the head of the harem.”
Social Media Was a C.E.O.’s Bullhorn, and How He Lured Women Dan Price was applauded for paying a minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle company and criticizing corporate greed. The adulation helped to hide and enable his behavior.
CW: sexual assault
Now in high fashion: Prison fixers.
Want to Do Less Time? A Prison Consultant Might Be Able to Help. For a price, a new breed of fixer is teaching convicts how to reduce their sentence, get placed in a better facility — and make the most of their months behind bars.
Escape to Baja.
No, really. A U.S. murder suspect fled to Mexico. The Gringo Hunters were waiting.
Officially, they’re the International Liaison Unit. But they’re known by another name: the Gringo Hunters. The unit now catches an average of 13 Americans a month. Since it was formed in 2002, it has apprehended more than 1,600. Many of those suspects were inspired by one of America’s oldest cliches: the troubled outlaw striding into a sepia-toned Mexico in the hope of disappearing forever.
It's a merry life?
Retiring to cruise ships to avoid cost of land living The Burks have grown frustrated by the mounting costs of living on land, they said....
Ursula Bellugi, Pioneer in the World of Sign Language, Dies at 91
A pioneer in the study of the biological foundations of language who was among the first to demonstrate that sign language was just as complex, abstract and systematic as spoken language Dr. Bellugi and Dr. Klima, who died in 2008, demonstrated conclusively that the world’s signed languages — of which there are more than 100 — were actual languages in their own right, not just translations of spoken languages.
Non-paywalled
I'm Deaf And I Have 'Perfect' Speech.
Here's Why It's Actually A Nightmare. Hearing people would probably think I’m the lucky one ― the success story ― because I can talk. But I agree with my [Deaf] friends.
I want to marry a lighthouse keeper. Just not that one.
Terrible Tilly, Oregon’s Legendary Lighthouse, Is for Sale From a distance, the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse looks like a real-estate investor’s dream...
Taking Flight
You've probably never seen anything like this before. Six members of the vertical dance troupe BANDALOOP dance on...skyscrapers.
Do You Know Who That Worker You Just Hired Really Is?
It was as if a “Seinfeld” plot met John le Carré. Kristin Zawatski, 44, who works in information technology, in a department of about 70 people, was helping to conduct a virtual job interview. She said she was impressed by the candidate’s sharp understanding of the technical skills required for the position. But about 15 minutes into the conversation, one of her colleagues muted the video call. “The person answering the questions isn’t the person on camera....."
‘DNA Doesn’t Lie. People Lie.’
After discovering six adopted brothers and sisters, these siblings believe their story is more than a sprawling family secret The last infant came and went when Bob was 9, and soon his memories of the transient babies faded. It wasn’t until decades later, when he sent a tube of spit to Ancestry, that he would be confronted with undeniable truths about his upbringing and his family. Not pay-wall version.
Content warning: Child trafficking
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