IKEA Monkey

Spotify will no longer include the troubled R&B artist R. Kelly on its playlists.

"We are removing R. Kelly’s music from all Spotify owned and operated playlists and algorithmic recommendations such as Discover Weekly," the online music sharing site told Billboard in a statement. "His music will...

The green parts of the leek doesn’t get enough love. Almost every leek-containing recipe tells you that you don’t need them, that they’re too tough, and unworthy of you. This is all false. Though they are a bit tougher than their white counterparts, they have a lot of flavor within those hard-to-break-down cellular…

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New Jumbo Donettes, a regular-sized version of Hostess Donettes mini donuts have started appearing on store shelves in at least some markets.

The new donuts are touted as "more than twice the size of Donettes" and come six individually-wrapped donuts to a 10.5-oz box for $3.99 (may vary).

They come in plain Glazed or Chocolate Iced (with sprinkles) versions.

I reached out to Hostess for comment regarding the new donuts but was told that they don't have anything to share regarding Jumbo Donettes at the moment.

Photo by BrandEating.com.

Last week, we reported on a bizarre campaign ad from ex-coal company CEO and ex-con Don Blankenship who introduced the phrases “China family” and “Cocaine Mitch” into our lexicon. Thankfully, Blankenship, who campaigned on a pro-gun, anti-abortion, pro-xenophobia, anti-Mitch McConnell platform, conceded the West…

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Do you like wings? How about wasting money? Then, boy, do we have the perfect dish for you!

Kim Kardashian's bestie Jonathan Cheban, AKA Foodgōd, apparently helped create a new type of chicken wings for a New York restaurant that are literally covered in gold. During Tuesday's episode of Desus & Mero, the VICELAND hosts discussed the ridiculously lavish dish and how much they hate it.

You can watch the latest episode of Desus & Mero for free online now, and be sure to catch new episodes weeknights at 11 PM on VICELAND.

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So how bad is the pollen this season across the Northeast?

On Monday evening, The New Yorker published yet more proof that the #MeToo moment continues apace: a report containing the testimony of four women accusing the New York attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, of a range of physical and emotional abuses. The story, under the powerhouse co-byline of Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow, was striking—and nauseating—for several reasons, among them allegations of hitting, of threatening, of racism. One of the other reasons, though, was this line: “After the former girlfriend ended the relationship, she told several friends about the abuse. A number of them advised her to keep the story to herself, arguing that Schneiderman was too valuable a politician for the Democrats to lose.”

It’s a common sentiment in politics—the centrifugal forces of “the greater good”—and it is, of course, absurd. Schneiderman, as a matter of policy, may have been a professed ally of women and, indeed, of the aims of #MeToo; that changes nothing about the accountability he bears for his alleged behavior, or about the right of the women to seek a small measure of justice through the telling of their stories. But the absurdity itself was revealing: about the moral compromises so many people are willing to make in the name of broader political progress; about the ways women, in particular, are asked—still, despite it all—to be accommodating and compliant and convenient; about the fickle avenues of our empathies.

Schneiderman, shortly after the New Yorker piece was published—the news cycle is a flat circle—resigned. The notion that the women’s stories about his behavior were somehow a nuisance, though—the notion that things would be so much simpler, macrocosmically, had they kept their experiences to themselves—remains with us. I know that because, shortly before The New Yorker published its story about Eric Schneiderman, the poet and memoirist and essayist Mary Karr published her own story on Twitter. This one was about David Foster Wallace. It was about the writer stalking her and abusing her and, in general, refusing to take no for an answer. As Karr elaborated, in one tweet that reads, in the #MeToo context, as its own form of starkly tragic poetry: “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on.”

The added tragedy of all this—kicked, climbed, son, gun, months—is the fact that Karr was not, specifically, making allegations. As Jezebel’s Whitney Kimball pointed out, “The fact that [Wallace] abused [Karr] is not a revelation; this has been documented and adopted by the literary world as one of Wallace’s character traits.” D.T. Max’s 2012 biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, documented those abuses: Wallace, Max alleges, once pushed Karr from a vehicle. During another fight, he threw a coffee table at her. Karr, in her tweets, was merely repeating the story she has told many times before. A story that has been treated—stop me if this sounds familiar—largely as a complication to another story. In this case, the story of the romantically unruly genius of one David Foster Wallace.

And, so, within the space of a few days, the stories of government officials and prodigious writers tangled together, reminders of the pathological ways American culture approaches power in its many forms. For Schneiderman, it’s political power: the alleged entitlements of one man who claims to serve the higher purpose of the public good. For Karr and Wallace, though, it’s an even more complicated proposition: our insistent fealty to—our implicit faith in—the notion of genius itself. Karr’s #MeToo stories were not so much an open secret as an open revelation. They were not hiding in plain sight; they were, worse, strategically ignored. They were the collateral damage of a culture that prefers convenient idols.

“Talent is its own expectation,” Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest, and he was, of course, correct: There’s a canny tautology to all of this. Genius, a means to godliness and its best evidence, cannot be argued with. Genius cannot be reasoned with. Genius is the answer and the question. It will be heard. It will be respected. Even when it kicks and stalks and climbs up the side of the house at night.

---

Here is the etymology the Oxford English Dictionary provides for the word genius, imported to English straight from the Latin: “male spirit of a family, existing in the head of the family and subsequently in the divine or spiritual part of each individual, personification of a person’s natural appetites, spirit or personality of an emperor regarded as an object of worship, spirit of a place, spirit of a corporation, (in literature) talent, inspiration, person endowed with talent, also demon or spiritual being in general.”

There’s more, but there’s already so much: genius, by definition a male condition. Genius, a male condition that inflects its maleness on the individual soul. Genius, an object of worship. Genius, perhaps slightly demonic. The derivation isn’t surprising on its own (no one would mistake a typical Roman for a feminist). What is striking, though, is that, millennia later, the biases of the language remain with us, tugging at the edges. Genius itself, the way we typically conceive of it, remains infused with the male gaze, or perhaps more aptly, the male haze: It is gendered by implication. It is a designation reserved, almost exclusively, for men. Guess who the first season of that new show Genius is about? I’ll give you a hint: The first name of the genius in question is Albert. The subject of the show’s second season? Pablo.

These dynamics are unavoidably at play when Mary Karr, the famous and celebrated writer, reminds the world of Wallace’s behavior toward her—reminds the world, indeed, that it needed the reminding in the first place. The horror stories had simply been subsumed into the broader story—the “greater good,” as it were—of Wallace’s personal genius: as evidence of his uncontainable passion, of the singular depth of his wanting. He wore his trademark bandana, he once said, not only to keep perspiration at bay, but also because “I’m just kind of worried my head’s gonna explode”; there is a certain romance to the admission. And Wallace has often, indeed, particularly in the popular press, been treated as a rom-comic hero: besotted, helpless, desperate. (Wallace once suggested that the writing of Infinite Jest was a grand gesture meant to impress Karr: “a means to her end (as it were),” he wrote in the margin of a book, seeming to have intended the sexual pun.) There Wallace was, then, thrusting the boombox. There he was, dropping the cards. There he was, refusing to take no for an answer.

One time, Karr recalled, Wallace arrived at a pool party she was attending with her family with bandages on his left shoulder. She thought perhaps he had been cutting himself; it turned out that the wounds being hidden had come from a tattoo Wallace had gotten: her name, and a heart.

“Wallace did not hear subtle variations in no,” Max notes in an excerpt of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story; “he knew only one way to seduce: overwhelm. He would show up at Karr’s family home to shovel her driveway after a snowfall, or come unannounced to her recovery meetings. Karr called the head of the halfway house and asked her to let Wallace know his attentions were not welcome. Wallace besieged her with notes anyway.”

In another section of the book: “A month later, in May 1992, Wallace packed up what little he had and drove to Syracuse,” Max writes. “He had rented a first-floor apartment in a house around the corner from Karr and a few blocks from the main campus. It was in a typical graduate-student neighborhood, full of warping clapboard houses and semi-kempt lawns and right across from the food co-op. But being near the woman he loved made all the difference.”

At the release of Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, The New York Times conducted an interview with Max. One of the questions was this: “What was it about his feelings for her that created such trouble for Wallace?”

That created such trouble for Wallace. This is the bias at work. Here, once again, is the male genius centered while the female genius is relegated to the margins. Karr is there, as a slight character, in Max’s biography of Wallace; she’s there, too, as a kind of human predicate, in interviews about him, in assessments of his literary contributions, in effusions about his genius. And often, too—the world can be so myopic that it can fail to see the genius sitting right in front of it—she is directly asked about him: what he was like. What it was like. How it was to have had, for a brief time, the privilege to spin around such an axis. “Sometimes people go on and on about David Foster Wallace,” Karr noted last year. “As though my contribution to literature is that I fucked him a couple times in the early ’90s … Everybody in America owes me a dollar who read Infinite Jest.”

This is the thing we do to women in a world of biased idolatry. Women’s stories get treated as one of Wallace’s trademark footnotes might be: decorative, dexterous, whimsical, trivial. Pretty afterthoughts. Optional. (The book, after all, is already so long.) Meanwhile, the less heroic elements of the male stories—the fact, say, that David Foster Wallace referred to the female fans who attended his book tours as “audience pussy,” or that he wrote in a letter to a friend of a day spent “unpacking, trying to write, chasing tail,” or that he pushed Mary Karr out of a vehicle—get lost in the fog of genius. And in the blunt transactions of fetishized talent. “It isn’t that I doubt that Wallace uttered the sexist remarks attributed to him in any literal sense,” one fan of the author put it. “Rather, I cannot bring myself to believe that Wallace’s interpersonal cowardice comes close to overshadowing his many acts of monumental literary courage.”

Nor can many people. Genius, after all, is a powerful force. (Talent is its own expectation.) A fealty to genius is its own kind of faith: in transcendence, in exceptionalism, in the fact that gods, still, can walk among us. And genius, itself, becomes its own kind of infrastructure. We have organized our art around its potential; we have organized our economy around its promise. We have oriented ourselves according to the light of its stars—and so when they flicker, even momentarily, we lose ourselves. And: We defend ourselves. We delude ourselves. We choose not to question the makeup of the firmament. It’s so much easier that way. “Something I’ve noticed since Wallace’s suicide in 2008,” Glenn Kenny wrote in The Guardian a few years ago, “is that a lot of self-professed David Foster Wallace fans don’t have much use for people who actually knew the guy. For instance, whenever Jonathan Franzen utters or publishes some pained but unsparing observations about his late friend, Wallace’s fan base recoils, posting comments on the internet about how self-serving he is, or how he really didn’t ‘get’ Wallace.”

I’ve noticed something similar—not only with Wallace, but also with other members of our flawed fraternity of acknowledged geniuses. Last week, I wrote about Roman Polanski’s ouster from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, on the grounds that the director long ago pled guilty to the drugging and raping of a 13-year-old girl. (Many more women, since the plea, have come forward to say that he abused them as teenagers, as well.) My inbox was instantly flooded with bitter indignation, with angry defenses of the status quo: But his movies are so good. Could you make movies like that? Don’t you care about art? Some things are transcendent. Bitch.

The genius-bias is a strong one. The male haze is so very hazy. It’s been there with Polanski. And with Junot Díaz. And with Norman Mailer. And with J.D. Salinger. And with so many, many more: writers, athletes, actors, directors, artists, the people who take it upon themselves to tell us who, and what, we are. It is everywhere. It is there in our literature and our businesses and our music and our soft entertainments. It is there in our habits of thought. It is one more thing that is, as has been said, water.

In 2012, four years after the death of David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr wrote of him—and his loss—in her poem “Suicide’s Note: An Annual.” Wallace was not fully gone, the poet suggested; he could not be. He was too big, too much, too present. He—his words, his life, the transcendence of his genius—had inscribed themselves into the world’s very physics. Karr’s lines went, in part, like this:

I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite

           your best efforts you are every second

alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,

     each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.

Her poem concluded: “We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain.”

Hello, my babes, and welcome back to Will It Sous Vide?, the column where I usually make whatever you want me to with my immersion circulator. This week we’re turning our collective consciousness to one of my favorite taco fixings: juicy, tender, crispy carnitas.

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Following a stellar performance as both host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live, Donald Glover capped off the weekend by dropping a surprise Childish Gambino track that pretty much guaranteed he’d be dominating the trending topics on Twitter. The Hiro Murai-directed video for “This Is America” is a…

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The world’s most expensive costume party was held in New York City last night, as musicians, actors, models, and assorted rich, skinny people gathered at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art by invitation of Anna Wintour and Vogue magazine for the annual Met Gala. This year, attendees placed their bets on Pope Francis’…

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While carrots are available all year round, the best season for carrots is in the spring, and in the spring you can often find carrots with their feathery green tops still attached.

(Cue Bugs Bunny chomping on a carrot, “what’s up doc?”)

If you happen to buy carrots with carrot tops, I urge you to think twice before throwing the carrot tops away! You’ve paid for them, and if they are still fresh and green, you may as well use them, right?

Continue reading "Carrot Top Pesto" »

A state regulator has issued a scathing report calling Lincoln Towing Service “unfit” to hold a license to operate.

The Illinois Commerce Commission’s report on Lincoln Towing, released last week, follows a two-year investigation into the company, which has been cited numerous times by the state...

Wil Wheaton is part of a select group of people who managed to emerge from childhood stardom relatively unscathed. After starring in films like Stand By Me and going through his awkward teen years on the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Wheaton managed to continue having personal and professional success by…

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Don Blankenship, the convicted criminal running in the Republican primary for US Senate, has found what he seems to think is a surefire campaign strategy: Running against Mitch McConnell, who is actually from Kentucky, and reminding West Virginia voters at every opportunity that McConnell is married to Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, whose father, James Chao, was born in China. Last week, Blankenship suggested that McConnell was untrustworthy on China — as opposed to just generally untrustworthy, which everyone agrees on — because don’t all those people know each other?

“I have an issue when the father-in-law is a wealthy Chinaperson and there’s a lot of connections to some of the brass, if you will, in China,” Blankenship said.

“I read in books that people think he’s soft on China,” he added.

BOOKS! Does Blankenship really want to claim association with those instruments of Satan? Also, what the fuck are you talking about? The Chinaperson is not the issue here. Also, the preferred nomenclature is Asian. Shut the fuck up, Donny, you’re out of your element.

Nonetheless, Blankenship’s campaign doubled down on the insistence that McConnell’s marriage to Chao is some kind of national security threat, issuing an insane press release explaining why it was also perfectly cromulent to call McConnell “Cocaine Mitch” in a campaign ad:

Mitch McConnell and his family have extensive ties to China. His father-in-law who founded and owns a large Chinese shipping company has given Mitch and his wife millions of dollars over the years.

The company was implicated recently in smuggling cocaine from Colombia to Europe, hidden aboard a company ship carrying foreign coal was $7 million dollars of cocaine and that is why we’ve deemed him “Cocaine Mitch.”

Before we get to that cocaine idiocy, let’s unpack that “Chinese shipping company”: James Chao came to the United States in 1958. The shipping company he runs is based in New York. So yes, a total Chinese shipping company. The cocaine line comes from a 2014 Nation article about drugs having been found on a Chao-owned ship in Colombia, which is one hell of a stretch, but may be enough to convinced some very low-information voters. We can’t stand Mitch McConnell, but Yr Wonkifact would rate that line “Pants on Fire” if we ever wore pants.

Blankenship was back yesterday with a new ad about “Chinapeople”: claiming McConnell has “created millions of jobs for Chinapeople” and has been given “tens of millions of dollars” by his “China family.”

What in the world did I just watch pic.twitter.com/4eudpGAxp0

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) May 3, 2018

Swamp captain Mitch McConnell has created millions of jobs for China people. While doing so, Mitch has gotten rich. In fact, his China family has given him tens of millions of dollars.

Blankenship objects to Republican opponents — all of them swamp people — “childishly calling me despicable and mentally ill,” too. And his monotone delivery doesn’t sound heavily sedated, no sir. The ad closes with Blankenship promising jobs for “West Virginia people,” then hoisting up two very blond little girls and proclaiming he’ll “ditch cocaine Mitch.” Not deranged at all!

Don’t worry about all the race-baiting, though, because it is only nationality-baiting, you see. About an American citizen who’s lived here since 1958. Blankenship explained to Roll Call,

We’re confused on our staff as to how it can be racist when there’s no mention of a race. There’s no race. Races are negro, white caucasian, Hispanic, Asian. There’s no mention of a race. I’ve never used a race word.

Also, he is not touching you. He’s not touching you. Why are you so upset, he is not touching your Chinaperson skin.

In other Blankenship developments, Mother Jones published an excellent story on Blankenship’s campaign, which has tried to spin his involvement in the 2010 explosion of the Upper Big Branch mine into, of all things, a reason to vote for the guy whose coal company’s lax safety procedures killed 29 miners. Out here in reality-world, Massey Energy, with Blankenship as CEO, had an extensive record of ignoring safety for the sake of increasing coal production, and that led to a coal dust buildup and the explosion.

But in Blankenship’s imaginary world of dark conspiracies against energy producers, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) faked the investigation into the explosion to justify its war on coal, an out-of-control federal government leveled fake charges against him because he only wanted American energy independence, and the justice system that sent him to prison for a year was rigged, just like Donald Trump says it is, so you need to elect Don Blankenship to the Senate to eliminate the Deep State:

Blankenship contends he was scapegoated for the disaster because of a series of personal vendettas—because he had called out the Obama administration’s regulatory excess; because he had clashed with then-Gov. Manchin (who said that Blankenship had “blood on his hands” after the explosion); and because MSHA’s leadership had close connections to the union Blankenship crushed during his rise to power.

Along the way, Blankenship added all sorts of other dog-foghorns, saying that the federal prison he was in was just packed with undocumented aliens, and running an ad prominently featuring all the black judges who conspired against him to help “Hussein Obama” put him away. Hey, it’s not Bankenship’s fault that Joe Manchin is the only white face in the ad — he just happened to agree with all those black people.

In the course of reporting the story, Mother Jones reporters went to an advertised Blankenship meet-the-candidate event in a diner, and were ejected by Rob Cornelius, the county GOP chair — audio of that little episode made for a nice promo for the article, which ran yesterday on World Press Freedom Day:

It's World Press Freedom Day! So we celebrated by publishing a story for which our reporters were kicked out of a leading Senate candidate's public event with a pile of insults. pic.twitter.com/athIxHqMmy

— Monika Bauerlein (@MonikaBauerlein) May 3, 2018

It’s a hell of a good longread on the history of the Upper Big Branch disaster, Blankenship’s role in it, and his incredibly cynical attempts to ride his crime into a Senate seat by exploiting the Trump strategy of claiming the justice system is rigged. As we say, read the whole thing.

With the primary coming up on Tuesday, Blankenship appears to be fading against the other two Republican candidates, who are horrible in their own ways, but less stridently evil than Blankenship. But the polling in West Virginia has been sparse, so there’s really no telling what the actual results will be. And in the meantime, Blankenship is doing his level best to remind people he’s the pro-blonde-children candidate who’ll protect the state from hippie journalists and too much freedom of the press. And he’s doing it all without mentioning race at all.

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[Mother Jones / CNN / NYDN / CNN / Roll Call]

If there is one universally accepted truth, it’s that celebrities are not real people and we should stop relying on them for anything resembling insight, compassion, or honesty. When two famous people say they’re friends, it’s best to interpret that not as them being genuine confidants, but rather that they…

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With a Carolina Herrera cape.

These canopy beds and racecar-style sofas are far from midcentury modern

The front page of Wayfair greets visitors with a bright selection of generally homey, often midcentury-inspired furniture and decor. But this is the tip of the iceberg: The online-only home goods retailer, the largest of its kind, sells more than 10 million items, from beds and coffee tables to chicken coops and fireplace mantels.

If you order your search by recommended items—the default setting—you’ll mostly see pieces from companies with names reminiscent of places in New England, like Andover Mills, Alcott Hill, August Grove, and Langley Street.

There’s nothing too surprising at first, unless you’re shocked by button-tufted headboards available in tan, light gray, and dark gray. Click through 120 pages of Wayfair search results, though, and things start getting weird: $35,000 hardwood twin canopy beds, modular polyester sofas made of cubes, and fish skin chairs—“artistically wrapped in authentic fish skins.”

Wayfair knows its stranger items are compelling. In September, it tweeted a picture of the enormous Faviola Reclining Sectional in black and red, head rests and leg rests in various states of extension, which looks a little like if the Transformers were sofas starring in an adult film. “This is what furniture should look like,” the tweet read. It’s sold by Orren Ellis, a brand with 20,576 items listed on the site.

Wayfair’s tweets later went back to gallery walls and platform beds. But because the internet is bottomless, in the best and worst ways, those willing to click for hours will be rewarded with platinum and lucite. Read on for the some of the most unusual finds from the depths of Wayfair.

Everly Quinn Knorr Panel Bed, $6,199.99

Lounge here with a box of chocolates and a pack of cigarettes to channel the vibe of your favorite Columbo murderess.

Segis U.S.A. Highway Chaise Longue, $2,599.99

These chaise longues “undulate to form seats.” Okay!

Williston Forge Natacha Modern Inverted Cone-Shaped Table, $102.99

Impart an undertone of violence to your living space with this accent table’s sharp tip.

ModShop Lucite Palm Beach Dining Table, $5,199.99

There are no secrets around the dinner table when clear lucite is in play.

Noir New York Sideboard, $2,722

Daring shards of fir adorn this sideboard, which is named after New York for some reason.

Michael Amini Chateau De Lago Upholstered Platform Bed, $3,107.99

This bed bills itself as French regency style, but with “elements that the 18th century French designers had not thought of,” like Swarovski crystals and velvet-lined drawers. Sensual.

Sandler Seating Cocoon Balloon Chair, $9,299.99

This “acoustic seating unit” seems like a decent place to count your bitcoins in peace.

Habersham Biltmore Cornelia’s Cloister Canopy Bed, $35,929

Is this bed haunted? Yes. Will sleeping in it bring you nightmares about Victorian twins left to fend for themselves after their parents’ death at sea? Almost definitely. Is it still worth the $36,000? Absolutely.

Astoria Grand Bermuda Traditional Living Room Collection, $9,899.97

Nothing is more traditional than platinum.

Serge De Troyer Collection Fish Skin Slipper Chair, $3,099.99

Match with the fish skin accent stool, end table, and ivory lounge chair to delight the most elegant sailor in your life.

ModShop Eden Rock Sofa, $3,799.99

Brushed brass and linen is a powerful combo.

Fleur De Lis Living Churchman Queen Canopy Bed, $5,299.99

This “dreamer’s paradise” is fashioned with red-hot irons by American blacksmiths, so if you’re into that kind of thing, prepare your linens.

OI Furniture Cellular 3Scape Sofa, $4,899.99

For true believers in our modular future, a confusing but lovable sofa.

Doctors are just like everyone else: They’re on Twitter. For many of us, Twitter has become a global watercooler, where professionals come to discuss ideas and hot topics, just like any other subset of Twitter. Debates over new articles, medical education, and policy are common and—somewhat extraordinarily given the medium—often civilized and informative.

Gennady Golovkin got back to his knockout ways on Saturday. We have full results as it happened, including the co-feature that saw Cecilia Braekhus defend her titles.

Gennady Golovkin has defended his WBA (super), WBC and IBO titles, scoring a second-round knockout of Vanes Martirosyan on Saturday. Golovkin took a hard shot in the first round, and was all business in the second, absolutely obliterating Martirosyan with a combination that saw five or six punches land completely flush. Martirosyan went down, and the 10-count brought the end of the bout.

In the co-feature, “The First Lady,” Cecilia Braekhus, defeated her opponent, Kali Reis, to retain her WBA, WBC, WBO and IBF welterweight titles. It was a thrilling contest, and the first ever women’s professional boxing match to be televised by HBO.

Braekhus was dropped in the seventh round, briefly, when she took a hard right straight in the midst of a combo. Her knee buckled, and it was just enough to count as a knockdown.

You can see the Golovkin knockout below:

Golovkin was originally scheduled to face Canelo Alvarez in a rematch after they fought to a draw in September 2017. But Alvarez tested positive for a banned substance and backed out of the fight in advance of being handed a six-month suspension by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.

Despite Saturday’s main event coming together at the last minute, it was always going to be a hugely important match for Golovkin, as it was his 20th consecutive defense of his world championship titles. He is the longest-reigning current world champion, and now has tied Bernard Hopkins for the most consecutive title defenses in the middleweight division.

That record has stood for 13 years, and Golovkin will still need another fight to break it. But he’s also faced what is generally regarded as tougher competition than Hopkins. Fans would still like for Golovkin to face Canelo Alvarez — that rematch has to be made at this point. It would be extremely disappointing if it doesn’t.

If Golovkin can turn that draw into a victory, his legacy will be set in stone.

Below, you can see the round-by-round live blog and below that, a full list of results for the card.

Gennady Golovkin def. Vanes Martirosyan via KO in Round 2

Round 1: Good jab from Martirosyan to start. Golovkin, though, responds with a huge two-punch combo, a wide hook, and a pair of left straights. They tie up halfway through the round, and are separated. The pace has slowed down a bit. Nice left jab from Martirosyan. Golovkin has a left jab of his own. And then another. Oh, a big, short left hook from Martirosyan lands flush on the jaw of Golovkin, who can’t hit the counter. He’s fine though, and the round comes to an end.

Round 2: Golovkin was ... perhaps caught napping near the end of that first round. He comes out with a left jab, and hooks a huge right uppercut that does serious damage to Martirosyan. Golovkin is trading here. He eats a hard jab, but he’s mad now. He comes in swinging hard, and lands over and over again, and Martirosyan is done. He’s out, flat on his face, and the referee counts it out. Wow!

Cecilia Braekhus def. Kali Reis via unanimous decision (97-92, 96-93, 96-93)

Round 1: Reis is aggressive right after the bell, misses with a big left. Braekhus ducks under another, and they tie up. Braekhus lands nice with the left double-jab combo. Decent round from both competitors, really, with nothing big landing. Both are trying for the jab into the one-two.

Round 2: They tie up and Braekhus connects with a hard left hook as they separate. They tie again, and this time it’s a stiff right hook that connects as they separate. Braekhus lands a nice one to the body, and then circles away from the counter from Reis. Right to the body from Reis. They tie up again, and Braekhus gets a right straight right on the jaw, and then the double left jab again. Definitely a Braekhus round.

Round 3: Reis lands a big right hand early in the round, and Braekhus definitely took some damge. Braekhus connects with a right of her own, then blocks a short jab and just dodges a winging, heavy hook from Reis. Some shots to the body from Reis when they clinch up. A more active round for Reis, but she didn’t get a ton done.

Round 4: Good body shots from Reis, but Braekhus responds with the left jab that keeps pushing Reis back. Braekhus is stringing together some strong combinations. She eats a left straight, but connects with one of her own. They tie up and the round ends. It’s all Braekhus thus far.

Round 5: Reis keeps winging her left hook, but she’s eating a stiff jab every time she tries to put a combo together. Braekhus is just so active, her combos are so crisp. Not everything is landing flush, but though Reis isn’t looking overwhelmed, it’s starting to build. Braekhus has all five rounds so far, or should.

Round 6: Huge left uppercut from Braekhus JUST misses. Reis is coming forward, but she eats a right hook. Reis tries to take her corner’s advice and be more active, but Braekhus’s counters are just brutal. Reis is hanging, but barely.

Round 7: Reis is so rattled by the left jab that she’s eating multiple right hooks to the side of the head. Braekhus throws and lands a nice body combo. And wow! Reis throws a hard overhand that lands flush and Braekhus buckles, just enough to qualify as a knockdown. This is an interesting turn! Braekhus is adamant that she’s fine and has recovered, but that hit from Reis was big.

Round 8: The smart thing for Braekhus would be to close the door in this round. Reis lands a nice pair of hooks that are partially blocked. Right jab from Braekhus connects. Left overhand from Reis misses, and she eats a right hook from Braekhus. Reis connects right at the end of the round with a big right hand that hurts Braekhus! It’s not a knockdown, but she did damage. And Braekhus’ corner is telling her to stop trading with Reis.

Round 9: Braekhus is keeping some distance now. She lands a nice left hook, but she trades with Reis again, and eats a right straight. Left jab from Braekhus lands. Braekhus wants to keep being active, and she probably has the rounds in the bag to win it, but she doesn’t want to coast. Big right from Reis is just blocked by Braekhus.

Round 10: Uppercut from Braekhus lands and Reis is hurt a bit. Reis seems to have slowed down a little bit, perhaps running out of gas as the fight nears its end. Big uppercut from Braekhus misses. Not much lands in this round. It was a close one, but it was probably Braekhus’.

Fight card results

Gennady Golovkin def. Vanes Martirosyan via KO in Round 2
Cecilia Braekhus def. Kali Reis via unanimous decision (97-92, 96-93, 96-93)
Ruslan Madiev def. Jesus Perez via unanimous decision
Ryan Martin def. Breidis Prescott via unanimous decision
Jesse Rodriguez def. Armando Vazquez via KO
Brian Ceballo def. Nam Phan via unanimous decision

Celebrities and fashion people: they’re just like us! In the sense that they hate putting on clothes and going outside, that is, and also that they love to talk shit about one another. Such is revealed in a BOMBSHELL REPORT declaring that the upcoming Met Gala is a “tedious” “boring” affair full of Mean Girls-esque…

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Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Sunday, May 6. All times are Eastern. 

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On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration will require any food outlet with more than 20 locations—meaning restaurants, movie theaters, grocery stores, fast food joints, amusement parks, your Creameries Coldstone, your Aunties Anne, your Oranges Julii—will have to list the calorie counts for each of their menu…

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More than 200 flat-Earth enthusiasts descended on West Midlands, England, this past weekend to "engage freely in deep and meaningful discussions," according to the Flat Earth Convention UK.

Hundreds of people attended the annual March for Immigrant and Workers’ Rights in Seattle yesterday. They were met by a counter-protest organized by the Proud Boys, a far-right organization for sad white men. That should be all the context you need to enjoy this video:

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Vice President Mike Pence appeared at an event in Tempe, Arizona, on Tuesday,

The cheerleaders told the New York Times they felt as if the arrangement amounted to “pimping us out.”

In a report published by the New York Times on Wednesday, Washington NFL cheerleaders detail the story of a 2013 trip to Costa Rica that many of them say crossed a line.

The team’s group of 36 cheerleaders took a trip to Costa Rica for a calendar photo shoot, but several say they felt objectified and that the team was “pimping us out” for male sponsors.

A day after the publication, Washington team president Bruce Allen released a statement:

“We are immediately looking into this situation and want to express how serious we take these allegations,” Allen said. “Based on the dialogue we’ve had with a number of current and former cheerleaders over the past 48 hours, we’ve heard very different first-hand accounts that directly contradict many of the details of the May 2 article. I can promise that once we have completed looking into this matter, if it is revealed that any of our employees acted inappropriately, those employees will face significant repercussions.”

The Times report says a group of suite holders and sponsors were invited on the trip and given exclusive access to the photo shoot that made the cheerleaders uncomfortable:

For the photo shoot, at the adults-only Occidental Grand Papagayo resort on Culebra Bay, some of the cheerleaders said they were required to be topless, though the photographs used for the calendar would not show nudity. Others wore nothing but body paint. Given the resort’s secluded setting, such revealing poses would not have been a concern for the women — except that (Washington) had invited spectators.

A contingent of sponsors and FedEx Field suite holders — all men — were granted up-close access to the photo shoots.

After the shoot, the report alleges nine of the 36 cheerleaders were chosen by male sponsors to be personal escorts at a nightclub that night:

“So get back to your room and get ready,” the director told them. Several of them began to cry.

“They weren’t putting a gun to our heads, but it was mandatory for us to go,” one of the cheerleaders said. “We weren’t asked, we were told. Other girls were devastated because we knew exactly what she was doing.”

Their participation did not involve sex, the cheerleaders said, but they felt as if the arrangement amounted to “pimping us out.” What bothered them was their team director’s demand that they go as sex symbols to please male sponsors, which they did not believe should be a part of their job.

According to the report, the cheerleaders felt the extracurricular requirements put them in unsafe situations:

“It’s just not right to send cheerleaders out with strange men when some of the girls clearly don’t want to go,” one cheerleader who was there said. “But unfortunately, I feel like it won’t change until something terrible happens, like a girl is assaulted in some way, or raped. I think teams will start paying attention to this only when it’s too late.”

Washington senior vice president for operations Lon Rosenberg and president of business operations Dennis Greene were reportedly in attendance at the nightclub. One cheerleader told the Times it showed that management condoned the situation. Greene is still listed as a member of the team’s front office, Rosenberg is not.

Many of the allegations were denied by Stephanie Jojokian, the director and choreographer for the Washington cheerleaders. She said the women were not required to go to the nightclub, nor were they chosen by sponsors.

The report says several women elected not to return to the team the following season because of the trip to Costa Rica, which made them feel “worthless and unprotected.”

The publication of the Times’ story comes just weeks after the newspaper reported former New Orleans Saints cheerleader Bailey Davis filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after being fired. Last week, Davis and another former cheerleader, Kristan Ware, proposed a settlement that would ask the league to “prepare a set of binding rules and regulations which apply to all NFL teams.”

Earlier in April, the Times also published a report detailing how “groping and sexual harassment are common” parts of the job for cheerleaders. The latest details of the trip to Costa Rica hammer that point home and further illustrate the need for reform of the way cheerleaders are treated in the NFL.

Jeff Bezos is super rich, $131 billion kind of rich. Business wise, an admirable drive, some incredible ideas, and a very forward looking mind, playing three dimensional chess some might say. And yet, when considering what he might do with his fortune, he was a bit disappointing.

The only way that I can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it, […] the most important work that I’m doing.

Blue Origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune, I am currently liquidating about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I plan to continue to do that for a long time. Because you’re right, you’re not going to spend it on a second dinner out.

Going to space is a great dream but I’m not sure it’s the only thing worth spending billions on. And I’m not the only one.

This is just depressing. Whatever people want to say about the Pierre Omidyar, the Gates couple and Warren Buffett, at least they are able to see issues & problems larger than themselves to solve for the vast bulk of humanity. Not for a tiny sliver for their entertainment. https://t.co/3UPMNG5YRQ

— Anjali Ramachandran (@anjali28) May 2, 2018

On a planet in crisis, with civilization itself at stake, a man with a $131 billion fortune decides glorified space tourism is the best way to spend his whole fortune.

"Converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it."https://t.co/LJs3EKfueW

— Alex Steffen (@AlexSteffen) May 1, 2018

Great discoveries have come out of our space dreams and accomplishments, I’m sure many more will. Just look at what Elon Musk has done in a few years. Bezos’ comment was, at the very least, tone deaf. If he’s such a great leader, he should also lead for the greater good now, not just for far away dreams of space.

Tags: Amazon   Elon Musk   space

This has been a tortured administration for doctors. The respective scandals of physicians Tom Price, Ronny Jackson, and Harold Bornstein are raising questions for the profession about how it polices itself—and about what role doctors should play in the political process.

On Tuesday, in contradiction to his previous statements, Bornstein claimed that he had taken dictation from then-candidate Donald Trump himself in his health assessment. (This was the letter to the American people that bore Bornstein’s name and that said that Trump’s “physical strength [was] extraordinary” and that he “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”)

“He dictated that whole letter. I didn’t write that letter,” Bornstein told CNN. Trump has not yet responded publicly to confirm or deny the claim.

How unusual would this be?

My editor asked me this question—and if such an act could cost Bornstein his medical license. I thought the answer was obvious, but then a reader on Twitter asked much the same: “What does this mean, as a doctor? Is this against standards and regulation?”

Yes. It is. For a patient to dictate his own assessment is not just rare, but unheard of. If a doctor offers to let you dictate your own assessment, seek a new doctor. It is unethical, unprofessional, and dangerous.

In a basic, elementary-school ethical sense, it is always wrong to sign one’s name to the words of someone else. Even if you entirely agreed with the words, and could have foreseeably written them yourself, it would be misleading to imply that they were yours.

At the very least, doctors’ assessments must be their own words. A doctor does rely on a patient’s reports in reaching that assessment, of course. The doctor may write that a person has no problem with headaches, for example, if the patient denies having headaches. But at least then the doctor is acting in good faith, to the best of her knowledge.

The absence of headaches would also be a reported fact in a medical record, in a section distinct and different from the doctor’s subjective assessment. Even if a patient lies throughout an interview—denying any sort of symptoms or medical history—it is up to the doctor to synthesize and decide what to make of everything in the ultimate assessment.

If what a patient is reporting to a doctor aligns with what the doctor can examine physically, a doctor will typically proceed under the presumption that people are generally honest with their doctors because they want help. For example, people want headaches to go away, so they don’t lie about not having headaches. Dishonesty prevents help. But the dynamic changes when a person is undergoing evaluation for purposes of a job. Here the skepticism bar is raised. For example, in many jobs it is insufficient for a doctor to simply ask about recreational drug use. Instead they administer a urine test.

There is no formal demand for empiricism in the evaluation of a president or presidential candidate. I’ve argued previously that there should be. A committee of appointed and accountable physicians could administer a battery of tests and use a transparent evaluation process to ensure that a candidate was able to execute the duties of office, and that the American people were at least aware of any potential issues, so that could be factored into voting, or removing a person from office.

Without such a process, we are left with the opaque assessment of individual doctors. Both who have cleared Trump for office have now been disgraced, raising questions for the American people, much less the global community, about the president’s fitness.

Still the most relevant question is not about Trump’s health. Nor is it an ethical question about the actions of Bornstein. What matters most are the actions of Trump, now the most powerful person in the world. If he indeed dictated this letter—and this is well supported even by a glancing linguistic analysis—then it is his ethics that should be called to question.

Whether or not Harold Bornstein loses his medical license is not material to all but a few hundred gastrologically afflicted residents of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Billions more people are implicated if this letter is evidence of Trump’s willingness to lie to circumvent and subvert a critical vetting process, to baldly misrepresent himself by using people like Bornstein for his own gain. The relevance of Trump’s actual health status—whether or not he takes a medication for hair loss, and if his body-mass index does indeed qualify him as “obese”—all of this sort of data pales compared to what such an act of forgery would say about his morality; his sense of honesty, transparency, decency, and accountability; his actual fitness to serve as president of the United States.

Women have the power to turn it all around—because they are the relationship navigators.

Though Janelle Monáe is still hush-hush about who she’s dating (Tessa who?), I’m happy to report that I have the scoop on the true love of her life. This relationship is essential to the multihyphenate’s identity as a singer, songwriter, actor, and person who keeps her pants off the ground. I am speaking, of course, about the years-long love affair between Janelle Monáe and her suspenders.