IKEA Monkey

On Tuesday night, Jimmy Kimmel used his Jimmy Kimmel Live! monologue to go after Republicans attempting to—yes, again—strip affordable medical coverage from tens of millions of people. More specifically, Kimmel took his anger out on Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA: DC office number 202-224-5824), who, in an appearance on…

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Sam Gandy had never seen anything like it. He was examining brain scans, color-coded to indicate problems. In healthy people, images appear almost entirely blue and green. But several areas on this particular scan were bright red.

Gandy, a neurologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, was studying the brains of retired soldiers and football players, looking for signs of trouble like this. The scan that stood out was of a retired National Football League player who had suffered 22 concussions over the course of his 11-year career. Now approaching middle age, the player complained of memory lapses and a short fuse—symptoms associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a neurodegenerative disease linked to repetitive brain trauma.

Currently, CTE can only be definitively diagnosed after death. But the red areas Gandy saw on his computer screen closely corresponded to the damage that scientists see of the disease in autopsied brains. Gandy’s technique might be the first way to spot CTE in a living patient. If so, what he was looking at could change the future of contact sports—as well as treating the long-term damage they can cause.

Since CTE was identified in the brain of former Pittsburgh Steelers player Mike Webster in 2005, the disease has plunged football into an ongoing brain-injury crisis. A recent study of the brains of 202 deceased former football players revealed that 110 of the 111 who had played in the NFL had the condition. Athletes whose gridiron careers ended at the high-school and college levels also also had the disease, though in lower percentages. (There are limitations to this research—more on that momentarily.)

Coming on the heels of multiple studies suggesting that repeated blows to the head can be bad for the brain—and of CTE being found in soccer players, soldiers, and others—this study only intensified concerns about football: Is the sport, which kicked off another season this month, safe enough for children? For high schools? For anyone?

The fact that CTE can only be diagnosed posthumously makes answers difficult. Researchers can’t say how common the disease really is, because studies suffer from unavoidable selection bias: The brains examined aren’t chosen at random from the general population, or even the overall population of contact-sport athletes and others exposed to repetitive head trauma. Rather, most are donated for study because donors and their families suspected something was wrong.

Researchers also don’t know exactly how CTE starts—though research on concussed mice has offered intriguing clues—or how it progresses over time. They don’t understand why some people who suffer repetitive head impacts develop the disease while others don’t. Nor can they target and test potential medications and therapies.

A reliable in-vivo way to diagnose the condition, says Robert Stern, the director of Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center, is “the goal for all research now with CTE. We’ve learned a tremendous amount through the postmortem data and research. But that’s the starting place.”

Enter Gandy. A longtime Alzheimer’s researcher, he began to study contact sport–related brain disease in the 1990s, when he coauthored a study that found boxers who had fought in 12 or more professional bouts and had a particular genotype were more likely to have chronic neurological deficits.

Three years ago, a 73-year-old retired New York Jets player with memory problems named Dave Herman wanted to enroll in a Mount Sinai clinical trial for an Alzheimer’s drug, but the five doctors who examined Herman—Gandy among them—couldn’t agree on what was ailing him. Three thought he had Alzheimer’s. Two suspected CTE. So Gandy examined Herman’s brain twice using positron-emission tomography (PET) scans—once with a radioactive tracer that binds to beta-amyloid, a sticky protein that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients, and again with a new tracer that binds to tau, a different protein that misfolds, clumps, and forms toxic tangles in the brains of CTE patients.

The first scan came back negative. The second was positive. Herman likely had CTE. Only doctors couldn’t be entirely sure; the scans were lacking in detail, and scientists hadn’t agreed on a postmortem diagnostic standard for the disease, so Gandy couldn’t match with full confidence what he saw in Herman’s scan to the tau tangles seen in the autopsied brains of CTE patients. A year later, however, an expert panel commissioned by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, or NINDS, agreed on what distinguishes CTE from other diseases that also feature tau deposits: In CTE, the neuron-killing protein tangles build up around the wrinkled crevices along brain’s surface, particularly at the deepest points.

Armed with that definition and higher-resolution scans, Gandy was better able to tentatively diagnose the retired NFL player who had suffered 22 concussions, and who also showed neuropsychological testing deficits and diffuse brain damage through separate MRI scans. (The player discussed Gandy’s findings with The Atlantic, but requested anonymity because of the stigma associated with brain injury.) “With the better resolution in the [PET] scans, we could see the localization of the tau in exactly that spot, the bottom of the walls of the wrinkles,” Gandy says. “It looked very similar to what you would expect from a postmortem [CTE] brain.”

Since then, Gandy’s team has examined and scanned almost 30 combat veterans and former football players. Ten of those patients have clinical symptoms of CTE; of that group, eight have what Gandy describes as “clearly positive scans” for abnormal tau buildup, similar to that of the NFL retiree. The other two “may not have accumulated enough tau for us to see it yet,” Gandy says.

Before PET scans can be used to definitively diagnose CTE—or simply be used with a high degree of diagnostic confidence—more work needs to be done. A handful of cases are suggestive, but not conclusive; many more patients need to be scanned, evaluated by doctors, tracked over time, and eventually autopsied after death to validate the bright-red regions Gandy and his team are seeing on their computer screens. “That’s the gold standard,” Gandy says. “It will take a while to accumulate enough data to feel confident that a certain amount of signal represents a certain amount of tau.”

A number of tau tracers have been developed in recent years, and researchers are still figuring out which ones are the most useful for identifying various neurodegenerative diseases. Two years ago, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, published a brain-imaging study of 14 former football players using a tracer called FDDNP to identify what appeared to be CTE. But that same tracer also binds to amyloid, making it difficult to differentiate the disease from Alzheimer’s.

Gandy uses a compound called Flortaucipir, which binds much more readily to tau than to amyloid. But he cautions that it may not prove to be the best available imaging agent. “Most people who get the scans want a definitive result,” he says. “But we always tell them this is experimental, and we could find out something tomorrow that changes things. ”

Better answers may come from a recently announced seven-year, $16 million study funded by the National Institutes of Health and NINDS that’s aimed at diagnosing CTE—a project the NFL was also slated to fund before backing out amid controversy. Headed by Stern, the project is the largest and most thorough study of the disease ever conducted, and will put former football players through a series of tests including an MRI; two PET scans; blood, saliva, and spinal-fluid collection; genetic evaluations; neuropsychological testing; and clinical examinations and histories.

The goal, Stern says, is to create a reliable clinical tool kit—that is, multiple methods of diagnosing CTE, similar to how doctors detect prostate cancer by using relatively cheap and simple blood tests to determine which patients need more thorough examinations. “PET scans are really good, but are also are really expensive,” he says. “We need other ways of detecting CTE that are really good and less expensive, or not really good and less expensive.”

Stern believes that doctors will be able to diagnose the disease in the living within five years. If and when that happens, it will allow researchers to better study potential treatments. In particular, PET scans may enable them to see if a drug is working. Sometime in the next year, Gandy’s team hopes to have the tau-positive patients from its imaging study participate in a small clinical trial of a new medication that has shown the ability to repair and clear out misfolded tau in animals.

“Once someone has the symptoms of a neurodegenerative disease like CTE, it usually means that there is already damage to the brain, destruction of tissue and atrophy. We can’t get those cells back once they die,” Stern says. “If we see [the disease] early enough, we might be able to intervene in a way that slows down or even stop the disease progression.”

The ramifications for contact sports—especially football—could be equally profound. Youth football participation is declining, and a number of college and NFL players have walked away from the game, citing concern over brain injuries. It’s not hard to imagine someone like Gandy giving brain scans to entire high-school, college, and pro teams. The results might restore confidence in the overall safety of the sport—or further erode it.

“Every fall, I read how fewer and fewer kids are coming out to play high-school football,” Gandy says. “With scans, we could figure out what the risk really is. And we could have informed consent for people who want to get into this kind of activity—be able to say that you have a one in 100, or 1,000, or 1,000,000 chance of getting CTE. But we need to get to the point where every doctor can look at an image and say, ‘that is CTE, no question about it.’ Otherwise, it would be a mess.”

If you’ve ever served tables at Chili’s, you’ve probably had at least 36 jackasses order extra barbecue sauce in a deep, sonorous voice. Hell, maybe you’ve been one of those jackasses—it’d be hard to blame you. The ubiquitous Chili’s baby back ribs jingle is a work of art, a simple, endlessly infectious refrain that…

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CBD—a purified weed compound that won't get you stoned—is used to treat everything from breast cancer to stress relief, and epilepsy to aching joints. Because of its wealth of widely studied medical uses, the extract is as versatile as it is complex—and takes an expert to understand exactly how the wonder drug works.

On this episode of Weed Tech, we met up with David Bonvillain, who runs the CBD company Elite Botanicals. He gave us a tour of his Colorado laboratory to see how CBD gets made from start to finish—and to walk us through the science of what makes the extract so useful and powerful.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg looked out at the first year law class she was about to address at Georgetown Law on Wednesday and smiled broadly after being told the majority of the class were women.

Family is difficult, a set of people with whom we have deeply ingrained connections and from whom we can never exactly escape. Spending time with them can be tense, full of conflicting emotions, and that must certainly only be exacerbated when that family is famous, in business together, or both.

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Ryan Phillippe is facing serious domestic abuse and drug allegations from his ex-girlfriend, who is going after the actor in a bombshell new lawsuit.

BROOKLYN, NY—Claiming the flyer could really stand to tone it down a little, sources said a lost dog poster that began appearing in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood Tuesday was really tooting the dog’s horn. “Friendly, smart, super-sweet BAILEY,” read the poster that reportedly would not shut up about the “beloved and precious” animal that, observers noted, was nevertheless somehow allowed to slip out of the house. “Responds to her name and never, ever bites!” At press time, several sources reported seeing a dog similar to Bailey running in and out of traffic like an idiot.

Irma, a Category 5 storm and still gaining strength, was expected to pass directly over Puerto Rico. It will be much worse than Irma, the governor said.

The first lady accompanied husband President Trump to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday morning.

Cornell University has a hip hop collection with tens of thousands of objects in it: photos, posters, flyers, magazines, etc. Much of the collection is only available on site in Ithaca, NY by appointment, but parts of it have been digitized, like these party and event flyers:

Created entirely by hand, well before widespread use of design software, these flyers preserve raw data from the days when Hip Hop was primarily a live, performance-based culture in the Bronx. They contain information about early Hip Hop groups, individual MCs and DJs, promoters, venues, dress codes, admission prices, shout outs and more. Celebrated designers, such as Buddy Esquire (“The Flyer King”) and Phase 2, made these flyers using magazine cutouts, original photographs, drawings, and dry-transfer letters.

And the archive of Joe Conzo Jr., who photographed groups, parties, events, and the like in the South Bronx in the late 70s and early 80s (but FYI, the Conzo archive interface is more than a little clunky and there’s lots of non-hip hop stuff to wade through):

In 1978, while attending South Bronx High School, Conzo became friends with members of the Cold Crush Brothers, an important and influential early Hip Hop group which included DJs Charlie Chase and Tony Tone and MCs Grandmaster Caz, JDL, Easy AD, and Almighty KayGee. Conzo became the group’s professional photographer, documenting their live performances at the T-Connection, Disco Fever, Harlem World, the Ecstasy Garage, and the Hoe Avenue Boy’s Club. He also took pictures of other Hip Hop artists and groups, including The Treacherous 3, The Fearless 4, and The Fantastic 5.

These rare images capture Hip Hop when it was still a localized, grassroots culture about to explode into global awareness. Without Joe’s images, the world would have little idea of what the earliest era of hip hop looked like, when fabled DJ, MC, and b-boy/girl battles took place in parks, school gymnasiums and neighborhood discos.

And most recently a portion of the Adler Hip Hop Archive, compiled by journalist and early Def Jam executive Bill Adler:

The Adler archive contains thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, recording industry press releases and artist bios, correspondence, photographs, posters, flyers, advertising, and other documents. These materials offer an unprecedented view into Hip Hop’s history and are made available here for study and research.

Fair warning: don’t click on any of those links if you’ve got pressing things to do…you could lose hours poking around.

Tags: Bill Adler   design   Joe Conzo Jr.   music   photography

California Gov. Jerry Brown compared President Donald Trump and his supporters who deny climate change to ancient cave-people.

While far from a done deal, top officials feel quite good about Chicago’s odds compared to competing cities

Despite Amazon putting just about every major metro on the North American continent on notice when it issued a request for proposals for its second corporate HQ, officials from both Chicago City Hall and Springfield are reportedly still bullish on the Windy City landing the lucrative ‘HQ2’ deal. As delegates from both the Emanuel and Rauner administrations tour Amazon’s current Seattle HQ today in a rare moment of city-state cooperation, Greg Hinz of Crain’s reports that Chicago is indeed in the hunt to score what some have called the biggest economic development prize in a generation.

“The good news is that we have all the things they're looking for. Chicago certainly is a top competitor,” Mark Peterson of Intersect Illinois explained to Hinz. Chicago ticks several key boxes on Amazon’s must-have list including a major international airport, a functional mass transit system, the ability to attract young talent, and a commercial real estate market that can quickly deliver a couple million square feet of office space while providing room for future expansion (we’re looking at you, Old Post Office).

With 50,000 jobs and $5 billion in corporate investment at stake, Chicago will face stiff competition despite its leg-up in the aforementioned categories. With just about every eligible municipality licking its chops at the prospect of landing the Amazon deal, economic incentives are sure to play a big role in the tech firm’s selection process. Peterson told Crain’s that Illinois’ Economic Development for a Growing Economy (EDGE) Tax Credit Program will be included in Chicago’s bid and also hinted at the possibility of additional incentives.

Mr. Peterson is joined by Deputy Mayor Bob Rivkin, World Business Chicago chief Jeff Malehorn, mayoral confidant Michael Sacks, former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, and Chicago Department of Planning & Development Commissioner David Reifman in what has been described as more of a fact-finding mission than an outright sales pitch at Amazon’s Seattle base of operations today. Chicago’s coordinated city/state proposal must be submitted before Amazon’s October 19th deadline.

• Chicago a 'top prospect' for Amazon headquarters [Crain’s]
• Chicago courting Jeff Bezos to land Amazon’s coveted second HQ [Curbed Chicago]

Lara Croft is traveling to the Devil’s Sea to finish what her dad started, and all she needs is a backpack, two handguns, and a perfect ponytail that survives all manner of adventures.

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This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

According to Wikipedia, Robert Paxton Gronkowski was born on May 14, 1989, in a small town in upstate New York.

Now, you know how your history professors always told you that Wikipedia wasn’t a legitimate source to quote in your papers in college? They were right. That one sentence alone contains three inaccurate facts: The first is the claim that Gronk’s first name is Robert, the second is that his middle name is Paxton, and the third is that he was born.

None of that is true. This Football God’s whole name is Gronk, and he entered the world as an adult, much like Venus rising out of the ocean on a seashell, fully grown. The first most significant moment of Gronk’s life — well, the actual first moment of his life — was Thursday, April 22, the same day as the 2010 NFL draft. A cruise ship pulled up to a dock in Miami and Gronk emerged completely naked, save for a football helmet on his head and a pair of cleats on his feet.

He made his way down the gangplank to the dock, where Bill Belichick greeted him. Belichick gave Gronk the cut-off-sleeve sweatshirt off his back and instructed his new prodigy — who knew nothing about social norms, such as wearing clothes, or how to do anything besides play football, really — to tie it around his waist so as to be more decent. Then Belichick put Gronk on a private jet and took him back to Foxboro.

Sure, some of you may have heard the fake news that Gronk played football at Arizona State. Some of you may even think you witnessed it. This didn’t happen. It must’ve been some weird, group hallucination. Maybe you all need to lay off the ayahuasca, but hey, I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.

If Gronk’s origin story were a movie, what followed upon his arrival in Foxboro was a montage along the lines of Will Farrell in Elf learning how to ride the subway, or the kids in Stranger Things taking Eleven to school. Gronk learned to interact with the broader world around him all while honing his skills as an elite catcher of touchdowns. The dude has come a long way, but he’s had to learn so much about how to be a person that sometimes, he still short-circuits. And tweets things like this:

The reason I’m telling you Gronk’s origin story (which everybody already knows) is because on Sunday, the second-most significant moment of his life occurred: Gronk caught a pass from his best friend Tom Brady for his 69th touchdown in the National Football League.

For those of you who have better things to do than make juvenile jokes with other sportswriters on Twitter all day long, let me explain to you why this is so significant. 69 is a sex joke, and we’re all 13-year-olds, so whenever your phone battery is at 69 percent, or it’s 69 degrees out, or your bill comes to $69.69, you’re supposed to say, “nice.” Gronk thinks 69 jokes are particularly funny, so when he got to 68 touchdowns last year, everyone was like, “Oh, this next one is gonna be good.”

And then he took a particularly nasty hit from Earl Thomas, ruptured a disk in his back, and had to have surgery. The NFL world groaned — not only was this terrible news for Patriots fans, but football fans across the country would have to wait at least a season for Gronk to hit his magic number.

Well, folks, the wait was worth it. Delayed gratification is a thing, and the definition is: “Gronk’s 69th touchdown, which he caught in the Patriots’ September 17th game against the Saints.”

Not only that, but, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com, Gronk’s stats are actually littered with 69s. The touchdown isn’t all we have to celebrate: He’s also at 69.4 yards per game, and his catch percentage is 69.6 percent. What are the odds? I can only chalk it up to divine intervention. If Gronk’s story truly is a Greek myth, Zeus is up there on Mount Olympus, drinking a High Life in his La-Z-Boy with his feet up on the coffee table, watching football and patting himself on the back for orchestrating such a momentous occasion.

Look, I know this sounds like one big joke, and that’s probably because it is.

BUT.

I think we really need to step back and appreciate how truly nice these stats are. They won’t last; barring something catastrophic, Gronk will eventually catch another touchdown, and then he’ll just be at boring old 70. He did hurt his groin — LOL — after he caught that magical touchdown pass, but it’s supposedly not that serious (and, if there ever were a time to have an injury that could sideline him for a little bit, this would be it).

The world is cold, cruel, and soul-crushing, so it’s important to appreciate the small things that bring us joy. Gronk’s time at 69 touchdowns is one of those special events. Someday, years in the future, we’ll look back on the week or weeks that we are currently experiencing, here, together, with Gronk, and sigh, saying to each other, “Remember the 69th Festival of Gronkulus? What a blessed, nice time that was.”

So here’s to you, Gronk, oh large adult football son of the sea. I raise my glass filled with vodka and water in salute of your very nice achievements.

Everyone does not have more friends than you, even though, as a study at UBC Vancouver indicated, plenty of people believe their friends all have more friends. Everyone is not going to parties you’re not invited to, meeting a wide array of people across all backgrounds and slices of life, who come together in a rich…

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Trump’s presidential memorandum in March implementing his travel ban also solicited a study on refugees from the Department of Health and Human Services—in retrospect, a bad idea for his purposes, as research tends to support the notion that admitting refugees is a good thing to do.

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Healthcare say that the Graham-Cassidy Bill, the latest iteration of the Republican legislative effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, will be, for women, the worst version of the bill yet.

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The attention to detail is extraordinary.

Here’s a creative flightpath:

That’s a real, live route taken by an airplane over Texas on Sunday, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware. It took off from the West Houston Airport in Harris County, flew around for 2 hours 35 minutes, and landed there.

FlightAware has another niche in the college football ecosystem: It’s great for internet sleuthing while fans and reporters try to track down coaching candidates’ movements later in the fall and winter. This leads to some flight-tracking pranking, but you can avoid that by being diligent.

These kinds of artful flightpaths are most commonly the result of testing for commercial airliners. In 2014, Boeing unveiled a Seattle Seahawks-themed plane that saluted the franchise’s fans — the “12th man” — with this path:

The first FlightAware-recorded activity for the plane that drew the Texas logo was on Sept. 9, when it left from an airport in Austin (you guessed it) and flew to West Houston. The plane is a Piper Cherokee, with four seats and a single engine, so it’s not a commercial liner itself. It’s registered to Cowlin Aviation LLC.

This is an extremely good Longhorns logo. Compare it to this:

And the pilot drew out all of Texas, just for bonus points.

The world I want to live in is the one where rich Texas and Texas A&M fans get into a war of flightpath-drawing on their private jets.

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Chicago's legendary Riot Fest is a marriage of Slam Dunk and what Reading and Leeds Festival used to be when headliners were more Linkin Park and Metallica than Kasabian and Muse.

This year, the biggest bands playing were Taking Back Sunday, Paramore, Jawbreaker, Nine Inch Nails, and New Found Glory, alongside a sprinkling of hip-hop acts. Riot Fest is made up of all sorts, many of them wearing Black Flag vests and oversized trucker caps. And because Americans have no drinking culture, as a Brit, stumbling around half-drunk, you're acutely aware of sobriety at every turn.

Besides the best punk line-up of the year, there was plenty more to enjoy this year, from women riding motorcycles on a tightrope accompanied by a trash metal soundtrack, to kids devouring weed edibles by the To Write Love on Her Arms stand. One night, I lost my friends because I came across a guy from a southern state with a black pig in a pentagram choker, bucking on its leash to At the Drive-In. "You can pet him—he's friendly," the owner told me, writing the pig's Instagram details on a Zimbabwean note.

This is the tone of Riot Fest. These are the things I overheard.

I don't care if you drove us here; you can't go to bed, you fucking loser, it's 8 PM. Go sleep in the grass. You're always an embarrassment at these things.

[Musician upon ending his set] Love yourself!

I just got back from tour with Neck Deep, it was pretty gnarly.

My mouth has never tasted more like a goat's asshole as after those noodles from last night.

[A man wearing a band vest] Sleeves are bullshit.

There are no bigger fakers than Green Day. Have you heard Billie Joe and his fake fucking British accent?

Man A: FIDLAR is a little depressing.
Man B: What the fuck, Steve, you can't even read, I'm not listening to your bullshit.

Legit I saw Andrew W.K. sitting on a keg looking very not party earlier.

The bad fashion here is contagious. I saw a big fat guy yesterday with overalls and no shirt. God bless America.

We did so much Molly for the first time ever that no one could explain the entire night.

Red Hot Chili Peppers are the shit, but what I'm saying is I wouldn't be wearing their shirt in public.

You know who I'm glad is not playing again? Tenacious D.—Fuck that Jack Black, man.

Man A: If I wear the same outfit here every day but change the shirt, can't go wrong.
Man B: No dude, you fucking stink like ass, I'm sorry.

The Fall of Troy is still gnarly.

Man: My boys are playing tonight. They've been my boys from way back when.
Woman: You keep saying that but you barely know them.
Man: They're my [boys].
Woman: Please shut up.

I got this vegan tattoo but I'm only really half meat, half vegetarian now. *points around to the seven-inch word "vegan" across her shoulder blades*

I've been drinking since 9 AM and now I'm having to hold your fucking head up to listen to emo.

I saw a Pikachu belly button ring on a stand over there that I want to get before Say Anything, it's pretty random.

Girl: Have you seen Jawbreaker before?
Man: Of course, countless times.
Girl: Interesting, they haven't played for 20 years.

Swearing is awesome. Fuck!

Say Anything's Max Bemis: This song's about break-up sex.
Teen boy 1: Oh god, can we please leave.
Teen boy 2: Stop being so fucking miserable for five minutes.
Teen boy 1: I'm allowed to feel sad.

Is it excessive to say I live for ska?

Ska is lifeblood.

Girl 1: Is that lizard man?
Girl 2: Who the fuck is lizard man?
Girl 1: He's that guy dressed as a lizard, with green tattoos all over his body. He works at the circus and does stuff with Nine Inch Nails somehow. My friend Brenda says she fucked him, apparently.
Girl 2: Get your picture with him.
Girl 1: Omg no, I need to be plum drunk as a skunk for that shit.

Did you see the pigs earlier? You know pigs are hard fuckers. Like, they will fuck and then they will fuck you up and then they will fuck you too.

What's your favorite song? Mine is the one that goes, 'Punch in the face, punch in the face, uhhhh punch in the face.' It's catchy.

Man A: Who wins in a fight in 2017, though? Jesse Lacey or Adam Lazzar?
Man B: Do you need to ask that question? You see how he still fucks with that mic swing? He will crack you and Lacey in the balls with that mic, no question. Any day, any way.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

White supremacist and convicted mass murderer Dylann Roof has petitioned to remove two lawyers from his defense team.

Or does she have the elan to make this work?

66-year-old William Reed was born colorblind. For his birthday, his family bought him a pair of Enchroma sunglasses, which allows wearers with red-green colorblindness to see colors. His reaction when he puts the glasses on for the first time is something else, especially when you consider how grumpy and curmudgeonly he starts out. I lost it when he started rubbing and clapping his hands together and waving his arms…he is feeling all of the feels right there.

Update: Here’s a nice video explanation of colorblindness and how those glasses work for some people.

(thx, david)

Tags: color   crying at work   video

Officer Michael Hamill, 28, of the Gainesville Police Department got pulses racing earlier this week after posting a selfie with fellow cops.

Departing Equifax chief security officer Susan Mauldin was a college music major, according to a now private profile, fueling scrutiny of the credit bureaus.

For a tiny fraction of the world's elite, a billion dollars isn't much. A billion dollars is a startup buyout in Silicon Valley. A billion is what Chinese industrialists make building the fake version of iPhones and fidget spinners. It's a nice chunk of change, sure, but $1 billion will only see you flying around in a Gulfstream or a Cessna, or some other piddly nothing-to-write-home-about jet.

For Gulf State royals and a handful of Russian Oligarchs, "rich" means a very different thing. This elusive clique of multibillionaires buy up large commercial jets from Boeing or Airbus and adorn them with handwoven carpets, wood paneling, and gold everything. It's a privileged world that's near impossible to get inside unless you happen to be the aviation photographer hired by the plane's interior designer to capture the fit out. At least, that's how Nick Gleis gets in.

Gleis has made a career out of photographing the planes of the super elite. Originally trained in landscape photography by Ansel Adams, Gleis fell into aviation photography almost by accident. He's been doing it for more than 30 years now and has photographed somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 planes. VICE spoke to him from his home in Virginia.

VICE: Hey, Nick, tell me what you love about planes.
Nick Gleis: Well, basically, I couldn't care less. Airplanes do nothing for me. I don't see airplanes as anything other than a piece of transportation. Instead, my passion lies in photographic images. I just find that the interiors of executive aircraft allow me to take my level of photography up another step.

Right. What do you mean by that?
What I mean is that when you board an executive jet, its quality is beyond what the normal person really understands. An executive airplane can have virtually anything on it—anything a fancy house, apartment, or castle has in it. The difference is that you're flying at 500 miles an hour, so weight is an absolute factor. Imagine your dining room table—on the ground you probably can't pick it up, but in these planes, you can pick one up in each hand. The aircraft has to have the same ambience and functionality, except everything needs to be lightweight, and with a quality that you almost need a microscope to see. That just blows me away.

OK, let's rewind a bit. How did you get into this job?
About 30 years ago, I was working for a photography company out in Burbank, California. I was 27 years old, and the commission was from a company called Tiger Air, and they had a Boeing 727-100 that they were putting an executive interior in. The company I was working for got the commission to do progress photography every two weeks. It takes a year or two to complete these airplanes, and at the end, they needed photos of the final product. I got to do those ones.

And from there you became the luxury plane guy?
No. I saw that this was an ongoing opportunity, so I found a company operating out of LAX by the name of Garrett AiResearch, and they were one of the largest completion centers in the world. They were doing the interiors of like 40 airplanes a year. I mean, it was huge. I went down to AiResearch, and I begged and pleaded for more work. And you know what they say, the rest is history.

So you begged your way into the job, but you say you don't care about planes. What motivated you?
Money.

Ah, of course. I imagine it's a good paycheck?
Can be, yeah. The bottom line is: Would you rather be one of a million wedding photographers, or would you like to be one of three aircraft photographers?

The second one. So you've now been doing this for 30 years. Have you seen changes in elite plane fashion in that time?
What's happened with the aircraft industry is that they've become more and more conservative. The days of opulence are fading quickly. The Saudi royal family airplanes are very businesslike. They are, I want to say, currently like the interiors of BMWs. They're very nice, don't misunderstand me, but they don't have the flair that designers put into 747s in the 80s and 90s.

So today you aren't seeing things like that jacuzzi-looking sink?
Exactly. That sink is made of abalone; you just don't see design like that anymore. The thing that you see in the middle the faucet—If you put your hand on the right side cold water would come out; if you put your hand on the left, warm water would come out. If you touched the middle, a middle temperature came out. That entire faucet structure came seamlessly from one piece of aluminum.

Tell me about the world's richest people.
I find that the super rich are generally very nice people. They're not condescending assholes like some American celebrities are. The Kardashians, for example, they are very rich, but they're not rich like the rich I deal with. They're paupers in comparison. The rich that I deal with are very formal and very private. They're aware of who they are, and they're aware that everybody in the world would like to get next to them. So they don't tend to embrace strangers, but they do it without being impolite.

Having said that, they are very demanding because they're paying for the best. They expect results. If something goes wrong and they don't like it, you won't hear from them; you'll hear it from their representatives. The higher up you go, the nicer they are, which again is different from American celebrities. I'm appalled at the crap that those guys get away with. They have no class whatsoever. They think that flying around in their little Gulfstream aircraft is hot stuff, but they just have no clue what it's really like.

Are you saying that out of personal experience?
Oh absolutely, yeah. I've done a lot of celebrity's airplanes.

Tell me about the rudest celebrity you've dealt with.
I can't. But I can tell you the person who I like the most, and that's probably Tom Cruise. The people who manage his aircrafts are clients of mine, and he would always ask, "Hey, how are you doing?" and say, "Nice to see you." Cruise is a private man, but he's always very polite, and he makes the time.

You've received a bit of criticism for dealing with people who earn their money in various unethical ways. How do you resolve that in your own mind?
I just don't pay any attention to it because it's a lie. The Telegraph published an article claiming that I'm the chosen photographer for African dictators, but that's just not true. I don't go to countries where they'll shoot me. I don't care how much money they've got. I'm not going to Iran or Iraq or any of those places where they'll shoot me. Even Saudi Arabia is very closed. A royal family member has to approve my visa to get in, and then I would be in a compound; they're not going to let me wander around. So that's all fine. Dubai and the United Emirates are just about as Westernized as you could possibly get. So that's all OK. But I wouldn't deal with some crazy dictator. I wouldn't do it.

Do you like your job?
Look, I'm one of the most fortunate human beings who has ever walked the planet. I wanted to do this from the age of 20, and much to my parents' disappointment, I'm still doing it today. I just love taking photos. In fact, the only time I'm really happy is when I'm taking pictures.

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Also, check out more of Nick Gleis's work on his website.

Anthony Weiner, the former Congressman who pleaded guilty to sexting a teen in a scandal that re-opened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails just days before the most contentious election in modern American history, is now blaming his downfall and illegal behavior on the teenager.

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Developer Sterling Bay has taken the wraps off of its plan for the sprawling industrial site

Sterling Bay, one of Chicago’s busiest developers, has unveiled its plans to transform the 30-acre riverfront site which previously housed the A. Finkl & Sons steel plant near the affluent Lincoln Park and Bucktown neighborhoods. Dubbed Lincoln Yards, the plan will deliver a number of new low- to mid-rise buildings which would presumably deliver a mix of uses such as office space, retail, and housing. According to the Chicago Tribune, the ambitious project could cost upwards of $10 billion and take a decade to complete.

The timing of the reveal does not appear to be a coincidence. While Sterling Bay’s formal announcement is sparse on specifics and details for the master plan, Sterling Bay managing principal Andy Gloor tells Tribune reporter Ryan Ori that the group is seeking Amazon’s attention. Chicago has been highlighted by numerous outlets as a strong candidate for Amazon’s coveted HQ2 which the company says will house 50,000 employees and represent billions of dollars in new investment, and the former Finkl Steel site is one of the most prominent redevelopment opportunities in Chicago that is certainly large enough for a corporate headquarters.

In addition to numerous new buildings, renderings of the proposed Lincoln Yards campus also reveal a lush riverfront and a 606 extension. Previous drawings suggested that Sterling Bay had been planning a new Metra stop and an extension of the popular 606 pedestrian trail, and the new renderings help to solidify such plans.

No timeline is mentioned in Sterling Bay’s announcement, however the developer has moved quickly on other high-profile developments such as the under-construction global headquarters for McDonald’s in the Fulton Market area. What Sterling Bay does reveal is the talent behind the new master plan. Firms tapped for the project include SOM, Boston’s CBT, Nelson\Nygaard, and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.

The project is one that should certainly grab the attention of Jeff Bezos and Amazon exces. With a combination of key location along the riverfront, planning from highly qualified and experienced firms, and Chicago’s continued growth in tourism and new corporate investment, it’s highly likely that Sterling Bay will be able to lure a high-profile tenant to the campus. And of course, if City Hall has anything to do with it, it’ll be Amazon moving into the area.

Sterling Bay

Sterling Bay

• Lincoln Yards [Sterling Bay]
• Chicago developer aims at Amazon with $10B vision for former steel plant site [Chicago Tribune]
• New offices, Metra stop, and 606 extension previewed in Finkl Steel redevelopment plan [Curbed Chicago]

Retro Ramblings remembers when, in the 80s, eating at Pizza Hut was an experience and not just a matter of grabbing a bite at a fast food joint.

From the moment you walked in the place, you knew it was something special. You knew this was going to be something you’d remember, and it all started with the decor. The interior didn’t look like a fast food joint with it’s huge, sprawling windows, and cheap looking walls, or tiled floors. When you walked in, you were greeted by brick walls, with smaller windows, that had thick red fabric curtains pulled back, and a carpeted floor. It just felt higher-class than walking into McDonalds or Burger King.

The booths were high-backed, with thick padded vinyl seats and back rests. The high backs was also different from your usual eating out experience. These high backs gave you a sense of privacy, which was great for a date night. Also great for a date night were the candles on the tables. Those little red glass candles that were on every table, and were lit when you got to your seat. It was a little thing, but when added to everything else, it was quite the contribution. Your silverware was wrapped in a thick, cloth napkin that beat the heck out of the paper napkins everyone else was using at the time. And you could always count on the table being covered by a nice, red and white, checkered table cloth.

Pizza Hut was the #1 eating-out destination for me as a kid. My family never ate out much, so even McDonald’s, Arby’s, or Hardee’s was a treat. But Pizza Hut was a whole different deal. Did I enjoy eating salad at home? No way. But I had to have the salad bar at Pizza Hut. Did I normally eat green peppers, onions, and black olives? Nope…but I would happily chow down on a supreme pizza at Pizza Hut. And the deep dish pan pizza…you couldn’t get anything like that in rural Wisconsin, nor could you easily make it at home. Plus it was just so much food…you could eat as much as you wanted and there were still leftovers to take home. Plus, with those high-backed booths, you could play paper football without having the extra points go sailing into the next booth.

Tags: food   pizza   Pizza Hut

You were going to have to wait until 10:30 PM Wednesday to find out what new stoned NYC antics Broad City's Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer get up to in season four, but Comedy Central decided to drop the first episode a little early online, shedding some light on how the duo first met.

After more than a year's hiatus since 2016's 4/20 episode, we find Abbi and Ilana in 2011, where their reality forks, and a missed train determines whether or not they meet and become friends or have the worst day of their lives. The episode, called "Sliding Doors," is a play on a 1998 Gwenyth Paltrow flick of the same name with a similar idea revolving around a cheating boyfriend. In the Broad City version, we live out the same day in two alternate realities with Abbi and Ilana, where dresses and ponytails are snatched, jobs and roommates are lost, and Bevers boasts six-pack abs.

And, because Broad City does not shy away from its deep distaste for Trump, we also see the two raving about the Obamas and predicting an imminent female president. This, of course, foreshadows the dour emotional state awaiting our heroines in the wintry first months of 2017, where the rest of season four takes place, according to Entertainment Weekly.

"In winter you get—I mean, maybe not everyone—but you tend to get a little bit more sad and it's a little bit more lonely and a little bit more, 'What am I doing with my life?' kind of mentality than when the sun is out," Jacobson told EW of the new season. "You know, these characters are getting older, and you start to get to a point—or at least I did—when you're in New York and you're in your mid to late 20s and you're like, 'What the fuck, what do I do?'"

Check out the start of what Glazer has teased as a bit of a "darker" season online now before it airs on Comedy Central every Wednesday at 10:30 PM.