Did this bear’s appearance in a Colorado hotel lobby make for a spooky sight?

In two separate courthouses in two different states on the same day, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen found themselves staring down the barrel of long prison sentences. In New York, Cohen, Trump's longtime "fixer," pleaded guilty to crimes including tax evasion and breaking campaign finance laws at the “direction of a candidate for federal office.” In Virginia, Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, was found guilty on eight out of 18 charges relating to tax dodging and bank fraud, and a mistrial was declared on the remainder, meaning he could be retried. If Manafort gets convicted of all 18, he could face up to 305 years in prison; Cohen could be subject to 65 years and fines of $1.6 million.

The pair have had the most prominent, most schadenfreude-inducing falls from grace—or at least falls from wealth—in all of Trumpland. But the Tuesday afternoon massacre is also another example of a pattern anyone currently in the president's orbit should pay attention to: No relationship with Trump ever ends well.

That maxim was obvious well before the election—you just needed to ask the hundreds of contractors and laborers Trump reportedly screwed during his time as a real estate magnate. But it's remarkable just how badly fucked every single person who has ever so much as shaken Trump's tiny, weatherbeaten hands has gotten. A short list:

• Rex Tillerson, Trump's first secretary of State, was a respected oil executive before entering the administration, and left it in embarrassing fashion; he'll be remembered mostly for his incompetence.
• Michael Flynn, the general who endorsed Trump early in the campaign and got appointed as the national security adviser, was pushed out after it was discovered he lied about conversations with the Russian ambassador; he's waiting to be sentenced for lying to federal agents.
• Steve Bannon, whose racist version of populism helped inform so much of Trump's campaign rhetoric and helped put him over the top, lost his prominent post as a top White House aide without achieving any of his lofty policy goals. He now mostly rambles on about whatever to media outlets and has recently been hanging out in Hungary with that country's far-right prime minister.
• EPA head Scott Pruitt resigned in disgrace after being outlandishly corrupt even by 2018 standards.
• Health secretary Tom Price resigned after a scandal over his chartered flights.
• Former campaign aide George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents, may now withdraw that plea after Robert Mueller's team recommended he get prison time. Either way, he's still in trouble.
• Cambridge Analytica, the Trump-allied data company, endured a multi-faceted scandal after it was revealed that it used improperly obtained data about Facebook users to help the Trump campaign. It shut down in May.
• James Comey was fired as FBI director after reportedly being asked by Trump for his "loyalty."
• Reince Priebus, Trump's first White House chief of staff, was forced out after presiding over one of the most chaotic West Wings of all time.

That's an incomplete list, and a mostly unsympathetic one to boot. If they didn't suffer humiliation because of their own corruption a la Pruitt, they hitched their careers to an unstable reality star and ended up being contradicted and humiliated in public a la Tillerson. But all of them (save for Comey, who wasn't appointed by Trump) were happy to ride the Trump train to greater power or influence—only to find out that the train was more of a rollercoaster that inevitably ends suddenly in a brick wall.

Being in Trumpworld means subjecting yourself to greater scrutiny from the media and potentially the Mueller investigation, which is how a relative nobody like Papadolous ends up facing prison time. It might mean being promoted way beyond your level of competence, which is how Omarosa Manigault Newman ends up running around the White House with a tape recorder. It means wondering whether you should resign when your boss praises white nationalists or bends over backward to Vladimir Putin.

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Trump can't be blamed for all the misdeeds of his subordinates—Manafort's crimes, for instance, don't involve his work for the campaign. But he unquestionably creates a toxic, unpredictable environment, and it's no wonder that his administration winds up attracting only the very greedy, the very stupid, or the very related to him (with significant overlap between those categories). The smart people are staying as far away from the White House as they can, which might help explain why so many Republican congressmen have suddenly decided to retire. Joining up with Trump means not just dealing with his own mood swings but the backstabbing that is part and parcel of his White House. A White House job doesn't make you a criminal, but you may very well be sharing office space with one.

It's satisfying for Trump's opponents to watch the likes of Manafort and Cohen get cut down to size. Every criminal indictment, every resignation, damages the administration and (one would hope) makes it more likely that Trump will suffer defeats in 2018 and 2020. But then there's the catch, and the sinking feeling: These people, the ones being revealed as grifters of the most shameless sort, are the same people running our country.

Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.

John McCain, who died Saturday after a battle with brain cancer, had been planning his funeral services over the past year. As part of the preparations, the senator asked that former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush deliver eulogies at his funeral. The two former rivals of McCain in presidential contests will deliver the eulogies during a service at the National Cathedral. Former Vice President Joe Biden, a longtime friend of McCain, will speak at a separate service in Arizona.

Chris Watts is accused of killing his pregnant wife and daughters.

A very long time ago (2015), our old buddy Tom Scocca posited, convincingly, that there are eight distinct seasons. This part of the year, from August through mid-September, he calls “Yellow Summer,” and ranks as the fifth-best season, which seems fine. After all, it’s muggy and buzzy and gross outside; the air is…

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A very long time ago (2015), our old buddy Tom Scocca posited, convincingly, that there are eight distinct seasons. This part of the year, from August through mid-September, he calls “Yellow Summer,” and ranks as the fifth-best season, which seems fine. After all, it’s muggy and buzzy and gross outside; the air is…

Read more...

IBM also wants its drones to put scarce coffees up for auction.

BROOKLYN, Iowa (AP) — The Latest on the death of a 20-year-old Iowa student who vanished while running last month (all times local):

Back to school can be a glorious time for parents. Your squabbling little ones are no longer underfoot. Routines have returned.

Picking a major might feel like choosing your entire life path. Or it might feel like a placeholder while you figure your shit out. We asked some of the most successful people we know, the past guests of Lifehacker’s How I Work column, what they majored in. They told us how their major affected their career—or if it…

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See what you can get at this price point from Uptown to Bronzeville

Welcome to this week’s installment of Curbed Comparisons, where we explore what you can rent or buy for a certain dollar amount in various Chicago neighborhoods. We’re looking at what you can buy across the city for today’s price: $350,000.

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Uptown

This two-bedroom, two-bathroom home at 4733 N. Malden Street has two spacious outdoor decks at the front and back of the unit. The vintage rehab comes with in-unit laundry, a sunroom, vaulted ceilings, original built-ins, and a master bedroom featuring an en suite bathroom with a steam shower and double vanity. Asking price is $349,900.

Heart of Chicago

A modern home at 2047 W. 21st Place, just west of Pilsen, offers three bedrooms and two bathrooms. One of three residences in the building, this unit comes with a large walk-in closet, heated bathroom floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, and a patio off the master bedroom. It’s listed for $349,900.

Lakeview

In the Southport Corridor, this condo at 1536 W. Cornelia Avenue has two bedrooms and one bathroom. Other than being close to shopping, Wrigley Field, and Boystown, this place comes with hardwood floors, in-unit laundry, a double vanity, and a private deck. Asking price is $329,900.

Bronzeville

This three-bedroom, two-bathroom home in a restored greystone at 4807 S. Forrestville Avenue is full of vintage charm. There is a living and sitting room, original wood and mirrored built-ins, 10-foot ceilings, and a fireplace. Asking price is $330,000.

Noble Square

Although this condo is just one bedroom and one bathroom, the major perk of 808 N. Greenview Avenue is the 800-square-foot outdoor deck that comes with the furniture, a pergola, and lights. It also has in-unit laundry and a heated garage space, and is just minutes from Eckhart Park. It’s listed for $349,888.

• For sale in Chicago [Curbed Chicago]

Her emeralds are FAB.

How can you be a better person? What in your life needs to change in order to improve? When contemplative self-searching nets zero results, it’s best to look outward for inspiration. My search for personal inspiration ends here with Emma, a four-year-old pug from Hermsdorf who ran her way to victory.

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Aidy Bryant.

On the tape, the Princeton boys come off as a caricature of what we would expect from Ivy League men. Suited up in matching black jackets, they look right out of a Mad Men episode. They introduce themselves with breezy self-assurance, with names like Jim, Steve, and Frank. They ooze self-confidence.

Experts say these white lion cubs are quickly and healthily gaining weight. Far be it for Jezebel—a blog staffed entirely by clowns—to question the experts! However, we say that these cuties could perhaps be just the slightest bit more roly-poly.

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I’ve been enjoying The Verge’s series of posts about batteries, not least because it’s not just about so-called “hard” tech, but also how changing technologies change our culture, our social interactions, our range of possibilities. A good example is Tasha Robinson’s essay on how the dead or dying mobile phone battery has become a staple of contemporary horror films — not so much a cliché (although it sometimes veers into that) but a new condition of the genre.

[In the past,] it was possible for a horror movie to isolate its victims by taking them slightly outside the warm glow of civilization. Classics like 1960’s Psycho, 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or 1980’s The Shining dropped the protagonists at remote houses. With no access to landlines, the characters in those movies were so removed from help or contact with the outside world, they might as well have been stranded on the Moon. Even as of 1999’s The Blair Witch Project, it was plausible that a group of tech-savvy young people would venture into the woods without cellphones or a GPS tracker, and have no way to alert anyone else when their situation took a bad turn. But with upward of 75 percent of Americans owning smartphones, and upward of 95 percent owning cellphones of some kind, modern horror films have to work harder to keep their characters from summoning the police the second a maniac starts waving a chainsaw in their direction.

These days, a dead phone doesn’t just cut users off from emergency services; it also cuts them off from the conversation, the daily flow of online life that so many of us use as our primary form of contact with the outside world. In that sense, the need to kill a victim’s battery before killing the actual victim is becoming less of a predictable cliché, and more of a way of building the stakes and establishing sympathies. Horror movie audiences may find it hard to believe in Cloverfield’s group of friends fleeing a Godzilla-sized monster through the streets of New York, but they can certainly believe in a guy coming away from a party with a drained phone battery and obsessing over the need to make one last phone call before the night’s over.

Robinson talks about how this trope taps into real-world anxieties about being unable to communicate or connect with other people, whiling away necessary power with frivolous uses, and technology letting us down in key moments, but she also gestures towards something else; a peculiar sort of wish-fulfillment. She imagines a high-tech horror film in which unplugging becomes a form of escape. But we’re already longing for a retreat from our devices, notifications, internet drama, and everything that comes with it. Isn’t part of the uncanny quality of the battery death trope that it’s giving us what we want, just in a distorted form?

Tags: movies   phones

"Home Improvement" star Zachery Ty Bryan is sick of his fellow Hollywood stars pushing their political views on their fans.

As A$AP Rocky's "Praise the Lord" begins blaring through the speaker, Matt Maxey smiles. "Turn it up," he says, pointing his finger to the sky. Maxey is animated, kinetic. But he isn't just dancing; he's bringing the song to life. Every move has meaning.

This summer, my family has been spending a month at the beach. It’s been like a daydream come to life: bright days and languid evenings spent with family, including a sparkly 3-year-old and her serene new baby sister. My granddaughters. I started picturing—and pining for—this kind of family gathering, the three-generation kind that includes grandchildren, as my 60s loomed and my two daughters entered their 30s with no obvious plans for baby-making. I’d kept to a pretty brisk schedule when I became a mother; I had both of my girls before I turned 30. But now those girls, like so many other women their age, seemed to me to be acting as if they had all the time in the world to decide about kids. I didn’t think they had all the time in the world—and, more to the point, I knew that I didn’t. As my joints started creaking and my knees stiffened up, I started to worry that by the time grandbabies came along, I’d be too old to enjoy them.

I tried to keep my mouth shut about my eagerness for grandchildren. The subject did come up several times with my younger daughter, but that’s because we were writing a book together on the topic of 20-somethings and their life choices, which made the conversations seem impersonal and therefore relatively conflict-free. I learned the hard way not to raise the subject with my older daughter, after I asked, on the eve of her first marriage, “So, how do you think you two will decide about having kids?” She told me, in no uncertain terms, to back off. I’d thought it was an innocent question, that we were close enough to be able to discuss these things. But I learned that on this topic, there’s no such thing as an innocent question.  

Here’s how to give parenting advice to adult children

The longing for grandchildren is something my friends and I talk about among ourselves, but we’re afraid to say anything to our kids for fear of angering or alienating them. Almost as worrisome is that in working so hard to hold our tongues, our silence could be misinterpreted as disinterest, or as unwillingness to be actively involved grandparents when the opportunity finally arrives. So is there any safe way for parents to raise the subject with their adult children?

Don’t even try it, the psychologist Karen Fingerman told me by email when I asked what advice she’d offer to would-be grandparents. You might introduce tension and even drive a wedge between you and your children, she wrote, which could have a direct effect on the quality of your relationship with the grandchildren you eventually have.

“Grandchildren are a ‘contingent’ relationship,” wrote Fingerman, who heads the Adult Family Project at the University of Texas at Austin, “contingent on a middle generation who is really the key to that tie. In general, in adult families, the generation that ‘owns’ the decision is the one that should be driving that decision. In some families, grown children may discuss this subject with their parents. But for many individuals, fertility is deeply private.”

Fertility can also be a topic tinged with grief, anxiety, and pain. If would-be grandparents are disappointed that the grandchildren they yearn for aren’t materializing on schedule, they should stop for a moment to consider the very real possibility that their children are disappointed, too, to see that their family-building isn’t shaping up quite the way they planned.

How Long Can You Wait to Have a Baby?

A recent survey of young adults commissioned by The New York Times in collaboration with the polling group Morning Consult found a fair amount of dashed expectations on the subject of childbearing. The National Center for Health Statistics had just reported that the nation’s fertility rate is at a record low, at 60.2 babies per 1,000 women of childbearing age. So the survey team wondered: Where have all the children gone?

They polled 1,858 men and women ages 20 to 45, half of whom were already parents. About one-quarter of the respondents said they were going to start having children, or had already started having them, later than they wanted to; a similar proportion expected to have fewer children in total than they’d originally hoped. Earlier this year, the Times conducted another survey, this time with the forecasting company Demographic Intelligence, that found something similar: that the gap between the number of children women said they wanted to have (2.7, on average) and the number they expected to have (1.8) was the largest it’s been in 40 years.

The main reasons for this lowering of expectations were financial. In the Morning Consult poll, respondents indicated that child care is too expensive (64 percent), that the economy is too uncertain (49 percent), or that they just, for unspecified reasons, think they “can't afford more children” (44 percent). Some respondents said they were having fewer children than they’d originally hoped because of what might be termed “quality-of-life” decisions: They found that they wanted to devote more time to the children they already had (54 percent), wanted more leisure time to themselves (42 percent), or were already struggling to find the right work-life balance (36 percent).

These surveys show that adult children have likely already given the question a lot of thought. If they have decided not to have kids, as 24 percent of the nonparents in the Morning Consult poll had, then having their parents ask about it just puts them on the defensive. If they haven’t decided yet, as was the case for 34 percent of the nonparents, asking about it just adds pressure they don’t need. And if they want children but have had to temper their expectations, either because of financial hardship or troubles conceiving, raising the topic could bring up painful feelings of disappointment and regret that they’d just as soon keep to themselves.

So is there anything parents can say to lighten their kids’ burden, or to make them think differently about having children? Is it better for parents and their adult children to talk about this subject, or better not to?

I posed these questions to The Atlantic’s family-centric Facebook group, Homebodies, and the consensus seemed to be that the best technique is to keep your mouth shut. As one group member, Suzanna Kruger of Seaside, Oregon, wrote, “That’s nobody’s business but the couple planning on having children or not. It demonstrates a SEVERE lack of boundaries for people to pressure their adult children to have grandchildren for them.” Kruger, a high-school biology teacher and single mother of two girls, ages 13 and 7, had a suggestion for the older generation: “If you want grandchildren, go volunteer in an elementary school classroom or become a lunch buddy at the middle school.”

Fingerman, too, mentioned volunteer opportunities as a way to create the grandparent-grandchild relationship older adults might be yearning for, without having to drag their kids into it. “The key,” she wrote, is for the parents “to own their feelings and find ways to deal with their desires,” such as by working at a local school or becoming a mentor through programs like Generation to Generation.

“No one but a couple knows what’s happening in their bedroom and in their doctor’s offices,” wrote another member of the Homebodies Facebook group, a young mother from Tel Aviv named Inbal. (She asked to be identified only by her first name; she says she still feels a lot of shame about her infertility.) “So often parents broach the subject and don’t think about the pain that the couple or their child might be experiencing because they’re trying [to have a baby] and it’s not working out.”

It’s to avoid this possibility that Maureen Kelly, the medical director of Society Hill Reproductive Medicine, in Philadelphia, told The New York Times last summer that no one should ask young people whether they plan to have children, when they want them, how many they’ll have, or anything else about baby-making. “This includes mothers, sisters, close friends, acquaintances and other family members,” Kelly said. “This is a highly personal topic and should be considered off limits unless someone brings it up.”

Still, silence can create its own problem. When Inbal and her partner went through the stress and grief of infertility, they did so without their parents’ knowledge, which they now realize would have been a comfort. “We had no idea,” wrote Inbal, now the mother of a toddler conceived through IVF, “how to ask for and get the support we needed from our parents, whom my partner and I are both very close to.”

Deborah Tannen has some ideas about how Inbal might have raised the subject. “For mothers and adult daughters, it might be helpful to realize that knowing what’s going on in somebody’s life, for most women, is treasured, and they feel hurt when they realize they had not been told something important,” says Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University. That makes it possible to raise a difficult topic like infertility with a simple statement: “I don’t want you to feel like I’m keeping anything from you.”

For men and women alike, conversations between intimates always take place on two levels, Tannen says: the message (the literal meaning of the words) and the meta-message (what it means about the relationship that you say these words, in this way, at this time).

“Criticism and caring often exist in the same words,” says Tannen, whose books include You’re Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation. “A mother might think she’s just offering advice or help, and a daughter might hear it as criticism.” And both would be right, she says. The mother is speaking out of love, but criticism is implicit too, since “someone doing nothing wrong does not need advice or help.”

Tannen said would-be grandparents can raise the subject of grandchildren cautiously, as long as they’re sensitive to the potential double-edged nature of the words being used. “Try to cut off at the pass the implication that you are disapproving or that you are making an indirect request,” she says. “Start with something positive: You have a great life and I’m full of admiration for the way you have organized it, or you have such a great career, or you keep such a beautiful house, or you have such excellent judgment— whatever you know your daughter takes pride in.”

But Tannen is cautious about offering a script, because “what is the right thing to say to one person could be the wrong thing to say to another.” She also thinks the odds are good that the adult children already know exactly how their parents feel about grandchildren. “I’ll bet anything that many adult children of parents who think they’ve never broached the topic will tell you that their parents have made their feelings clear.”

My daughters certainly would tell you I’d made mine clear, even though I worked hard not to dump my late-life baby lust into their laps. After that first misguided question to my older daughter, 10 years ago, I never asked either one a direct question about childbearing. But kids know their parents so well that it doesn’t take much for them to read our minds, even when we’re not literally saying anything. Texting a long-single daughter too quickly to see how a first date went, or looking around for a room that could work as a nursery in a just-married son’s new house, can speak volumes.

My younger daughter tolerated my unspoken questions, and I tried to focus on other things—my career, my husband, my mentorship of a teenage girl—as my internal grandma-clock ticked away, until my daughter found the right guy and the right moment in her own life to start a family. And today, as I watch my 3-year-old granddaughter cavorting with her parents in the gentle waves of the Delaware Bay while I sit on a sand chair with her three-month-old sister on my lap, I’m glad that I—mostly—held my tongue during the years I was so, so eager to get to this lovely, long-imagined place.

City council meetings are pretty mind-numbingly mundane events, but every once in a while, tempers flare, passions run hot, and a concerned citizen launches into a fervent speech about legalizing happy endings or whatever. Usually, residents are the ones who take things on a bizarre turn—but at a meeting in small-town Florida on Monday, that honor went to the mayor.

Somehow, what started as a normal budget hearing for the Hallandale Beach City Commission devolved into an argument about anal bleaching, the Miami Herald reports. It all started when Mayor Keith London dissed a citizen as a "simple mind," and Commissioner Anabelle Lima-Taub called him out for, basically, being a dick. She went after the mayor, saying that London didn't have a college education and had never "worked for a living"—and that's when things ran fully off the rails.

“Was it getting my sphincter bleached? Is that what I earned my income for? No, that would be you," London said. "Congratulations. Sphincter bleaching is a very up and coming business.”

As you can see at around the 3:20 mark in this painfully awkward video of the meeting, the room went silent:

London's weird attack seems to be a veiled reference to Lima-Taub's family business—her mom runs a spa that sells skin-bleaching cream, the Herald reports—but it still doesn't really make sense. The idea that you could somehow make money off of bleaching your own asshole, and that you'd accuse somebody of doing so in front of a roomful citizens during a city hearing, is plain weird, not to mention just highly inappropriate for someone who holds a public office.

Apparently London has a history of saying extremely bizarre shit during his tenure in local government. Earlier this year, a video surfaced of him asking a city employee if he "sucked dick" in prison, which is just about as uncomfortable to watch as Monday's meeting—and yet, like a car crash, basically impossible to look away from.

Lima-Taub told the Herald that, understandably, London's weird tirade about anal bleaching made her pretty uncomfortable, and that this isn't the first time he's crossed the line: She claims he's "made comments" about her "derriere" before. This time, she said, she's not just going to let what she's called a #MeToo moment go.

"I don’t shy away from anything,” she told the Herald. "I’m going to try to empower the women who are going through what I went through."

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Buttery clams with burst tomatoes and fresh herbs, ready in minutes with the power of your broiler. Read More

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By this point we all know the deal with the Madden series, and really any sports game that has annual editions. Games of any kind should not be forced to come out every year, because that’s not long enough for programmers and developers to build a good, working game. That much is a truism. But because updated rosters…

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Nicole He has built a voice-controlled game called Enhance in which you speak commands to zoom & enhance images to look for secret codes, just like a detective on a CSI TV show. I bet if you try this in your open plan office, your coworkers will look at you like you’re nuts for a sec but will soon gather around, shouting their own commands at the computer. After all, everyone wants to enhance:

Tags: Nicole He   video   video games