We’ve been enjoying David Fincher and Joe Penhall’s Mindhuntera lot lately—give or take some arguments about Carrie Coon and Fringe favorite Anna Torv—but we have to admit that the show’s theme song leaves a little bit to be desired. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with it; it’s just the kind of dull, vaguely…
After being gone for a long time, it looks like Mulder and Scully’s son is going to play a major role in the upcoming 11th season of The X-Files. That’s according to this new teaser, at least, which was released during the show’s New York Comic-Con panel and features some very X-Files-y teasers for what’s going to…
October 13th, 2017: This weekend I'm in ENGLAND, for the LAKES INTERNATIONAL COMIC ART FESTIVAL, so if you're near the Lake District (which frankly sounds great) - let's hang out and enjoy some comics!
Coming to you from Decatur High School in Texas is what has to be one of the best amateur sports highlights of the year, courtesy of senior Autumn Finney. Finney covered an incredible distance to get to a lost-cause ball in the back, laid out with a dive, and somehow mustered enough power to return it across the court.
I was very excited to watch this but it looks like NBC has done a good job of getting it removed. I found it here if its the kind of thing you are interested in: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3pib8x
As regular viewers of NBC’s wonderful sitcom The Good Place know, swearing is not allowed in that particular afterlife, which leads to benign exclamations like “forking bullshirt.” The same can not be said, though, for the actual set of The Good Place, where swearing abounds aplenty. The show recently posted its …
by Hamilton Nolan on Splinter, shared by Tom Ley to Deadspin
Perhaps you, a non-tech-savvy regular moron, have walked past a “WeWork” location in your city and wondered to yourself, “What the hell is so special about this stupid office space company? Turns out you were right!
On the internet, where nobody agrees about anything, everybody seems to agree about Dril. We associate Dril with Twitter, but he is much larger than that. He is a patron saint of the internet itself—a rare rallying point and muse for everyone, regardless of affiliation or creed. It’s old hat, at this point, to compare…
The premise of this Saturday Night Livesketch that was cut for time isn’t so much that lead actors of supernatural dramas on the CW are oblivious and self centered—well, it’s not just that. It’s also serves as an important reminder that weather and climate aren’t the same thing.
The Pittsburgh Steelers have been the NFL’s most reliable source of post-touchdown fun since the league relaxed its celebration rules, and after a JuJu Smith-Schuster score today, they showed off another move in their arsenal. For the enjoyment of all, Smith-Schuster and Le’Veon Bell put on a choreographed game of…
The dry-as-the-Gobi headline in the Buffalo News calls it “another typical Bills game day,” and let’s go to the video to see the totally normal tailgating activities:
Store-bought cobwebs, blow up ghosts, tacky lighting and corn syrup for carnage — Halloween decorations from your local Party City are so tacky (and boring). Up the ante with a $39.99 store credit to AtmosFX Digital Holiday Decorations. [ more › ]
If you’ve ever driven the Kennedy Expressway to O’Hare—or to the far Northwest Side—you know about this bottleneck. You sail through the Edens junction, and suddenly everything comes to a screeching halt. Traffic crawls along for the next few miles, until you pass Harlem Avenue. Then the highway opens up again. Why does this happen? It all […]
Another high-profile video game is set to arrive in stores in a couple of days—in this case, highly anticipated sequel Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War. (You can read the start of Matt Gerardi’s coverage of the game right here). That means it’s time once again for Conan O’Brien to joke and roll his eyes through another…
We have found it, the stupidest thing in the universe! It’s an FBI report that says that “black identity extremists” are making people hate cops.
I have married two Marines, one of whom served in Fallujah, so I am well aware of what it means to face a hostile population. Only in the instance of domestic law enforcement, I am the hostile population.
I don’t dislike police in St. Louis because black people told me to. I dislike them because they have a habit of fucking tear gassing me every time I see them.
Police in America have more body armor than the Marines gave my husband. That’s not even a joke – during the height of the Iraq war there wasn’t enough armor to go around and we had to buy flak vests for our Marines and ship them overseas. But these motherfuckers back home? Yeah, they’ve got LRADs and APCs and Bearcats and more than enough Kevlar to protect them.
Oh, and at least in St Louis, they might be carrying illegal AKs. They might shoot you with them, and then they will be found not guilty of murder – and that’s in the rare instances they’re charged. Then if you complain about it, they hit you with chemical weapons while screaming SUBMIT!!! at you like that’s not the most disgustingly on-the-nose thing they could think of.
Middle of the damn day in St. Louis. NBD, this isn’t intimidating and stupid, right?
This is a gang of thugs who will march through the town chanting “whose streets? Our streets” because that’s what protesters chanted in Ferguson. These are tiny little men with no more honor than fucking Steve Bannon, trying desperately to preserve their machismo so nobody notices how fucking weak you have to be to need riot shields to face down a few journalists. These are racist scumbags who will tell white protesters that they’re race traitors, idiots in armor who can’t figure out that their job is de-escalation, out-of-control megalomaniacs who can’t handle the idea of a world in which they are not petty tyrants. (And some, I assume, are good people.)
Try to tell me black people made me a radical, get right the fuck out of here. Black people are trying to not die. Black people are not reaching out to white people trying to get us to kill cops. It’s the cops themselves that made me a radical, watching them abuse their power and shit on the Constitution in defense of a few panes of plate glass as though glass was irreplaceable and human life was renewable. It’s the most batshit insane thing I’ve ever seen in my life, and I used to work in a porn store that had a theater in it.
“radical” St. Louis black people.
Here’s a comparison for you: from black protesters in St Louis, you frequently hear Assata’s Prayer:
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
From cops, you hear the following:
“This is an unlawful assembly. You must disperse immediately. If you do not disperse you will be subject to arrest or chemical agents.”
You fucking tell me who the goddamned radicals are when the “assembly” is fifty black people chanting Assata’s Prayer on a public street corner.
If you want me to feel like the police aren’t my enemy STOP SENDING THEM TO GAS ME FOR DOING MY FUCKING JOB AS A JOURNALIST.
If you don’t want people to get het up about how many black people you’ve killed, STOP KILLING BLACK PEOPLE.
A band called The Academic cleverly took advantage of the slight broadcast delay in Facebook Live to construct a loop sampler out of video, so that at any given moment, each member of the band is performing with their past and future selves and bandmates.
We rearranged each instrument on “Bear Claws” to fit Facebook Live’s delay, with each loop getting more complex, adding instruments, rhythms, and melodies. Additionally, by projecting the video live from a soundstage we created an infinite tunnel consisting of all the previously recorded loops.
OK Go is probably kicking themselves for not thinking of this first. See also Piano/Video Phase, David Cossin’s performance of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase with himself. (via clive thompson)
Over the last several years, Jeopardy! has remained relevant by serving as a breeding ground for intellectual personalities. First, there was Ken Jennings, the charismatic brainiac who won 74 games in a row—the show’s longest winning streak—and took home more than $3 million. He’s since published a number of…
Harrison Ford is a slam-dunk late-night interview, his droll humor and stone-faced inability to give a shit leading to all-time great sit-downs with hosts who can keep up, like David Letterman. Watching him shit on Blade Runner 2049 co-star Ryan Gosling has been a blast, but at some point, the facade must crack,…
by Drew Magary on The Concourse, shared by Barry Petchesky to Deadspin
I know you are long since numb to it, and I know every day is worse than the last, but I’d like you to remember just how fucking embarrassing yesterday, October 3, 2017, was for humanity. Behold our gnome-handed buffoon of a president, wearing his finest emergency golf windbreaker, jump-shooting paper towels with a…
THERE IS NO BOTTOM! We are just going to spend eternity falling into the endless abyss of Trump scandal. Every day another revelation bringing further shame upon the country, until we’re ground down into a fine powder that Don Jr. will snort off the ass of an aging catalog model. This is our fate.
Today’s very special episode of Days Of Our Humiliation features Ivanka and DJ, with cameos by perennial favorites Marc Kasowitz and Felix Sater, and a special appearance by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance! Coming to you via special collaboration between WNYC, The New Yorker, and ProPublica.
Picture it: New York, 2006…
The Trump Organization was marketing its fabulous new condo tower, THE TRUMP SOHO. Only it wasn’t really in SoHo — it was actually by the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. And it wasn’t really condominiums, which would have violated zoning regulations. It was a “condo-hotel,” where owners were cordially invited to stay for no more than 120 nights per year. And it wasn’t all that fabulous, if we’re being honest. Since the bottom was falling out of the real estate market, and no one was buying overpriced fake condos near the Holland Tunnel.
Luckily, the Trumps weren’t being honest! Per The New Yorker,
Business was slow, but the Trump family claimed the opposite. In April, 2008, they said that thirty-one per cent of the condos in the building had been purchased. Donald, Jr., boasted to The Real Deal magazine that fifty-five per cent of the units had been bought. In June, 2008, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka, alongside their brother Eric, gathered the foreign press at Trump Tower in Manhattan, where Ivanka announced that sixty per cent had been snapped up. “We’re in a very fortunate position where we have enough sales, and now we are strategically targeting certain buyers,” she said.
Now if Vanky — who has a history of doing just exactly the same thing! — and Deej had just padded the numbers by five or ten percent, we might call it fibbing. But two years later they’d only managed to sell 15.8% of the condos, so we feel comfortable labelling this one a giant fucking lie.
And we all know lying’s a sin. But sometimes it’s also a CRIME. Like when your contract says that you have to sell 15% of the units in your fake condo building if you want to hold on to buyers’ deposits in 2008, so you tell them ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED, even though you don’t hit the mark for another two years. And while you’re probably in the clear if you tell potential buyers, These units are going like hotcakes! you might face criminal prosecution if you make false statements like, We’ve sold 60 percent of these units!
And if you left an email chain saying, Don’t worry that we lied about the condo sales, no one will ever find out!, YOU’RE A COMPLETE IDIOT.
In one e-mail, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them. In yet another, Donald, Jr., spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the e-mail chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the e-mail.”
Yes, DJ almost went to jail for crimes he admitted via email in 2010. And he was still stupid enough to collude with the Russians over email in 2016. BUT WE DIGRESS.
The People are represented by two equally important groups
Back in New York, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Major Economic Crimes Unit was slowly building a case against Ivanka and Don Jr. The Trump kids were represented by their own criminal defense team. But in May of 2012, Poppy Trump’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz went to visit Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance to discuss the case. By sheer coincidence, Mr. Kasowitz had donated $25,000 to Cyrus Vance’s reelection campaign in January of that year. And in another striking coincidence, Mr. Vance ordered his staff to drop the case against the Trumps shortly after the meeting. (Everything went to hell in that office after Adam Schiff retired!)
To be fair, Mr. Vance returned the $25,000 to Mr. Kasowitz before meeting with him in May. But in yet another coincidence, after the charges against the Trumps were dropped, Mr. Kasowitz hosted a fundraiser for Mr. Vance which netted more than $50,000.
Hmmmmm. That’s quite a lot of coincidences! But that has NOTHING to do with Mr. Vance deciding to give the $50,000 back. Four years later. After he was contacted by reporters about this story.
And in another coincidence, guess who was involved in the Trump Soho deal?
Their partners on the project included two Soviet-born businessmen, Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif, who ran the Bayrock Group, a real-estate-development firm.
Oh, look! It’s the family’s Russian fixer Felix Sater and Trump’s bazillionaire Kazakh gangster pal Tevfik Arif!
Superfans will remember Sater, who most recently came to our attention for promising to coordinate with Vladimir Putin’s team to get Trump elected. Via email, of course, which was published in the New York Times, of course.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Mr. Sater wrote in an email. “I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”
During the election campaign, Sater was hustling to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Was he hustling in 2008 for Russian buyers who would be happy to pay cash for “condos” that were only available one-third of the year?
Also, too, HOW THE HELL IS THIS GANG OF LOWLIFES IN CHARGE OF OUR COUNTRY?
The Trumps managed to stay out of jail. But they never did find buyers for their fake condos. The New Yorker reports,
The Trump SoHo went into foreclosure in 2014 and was taken over by a creditor. Only a hundred and twenty-eight of the three hundred and ninety-one units in the building have sold. That comes out to around thirty-three per cent.
It took another two years for the Trump Organization to broker the sale of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But eventually they did find a Russian buyer.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (dubiously) said Chicago has "the strictest gun laws in the country" as she deflected talk away from gun control today. [ more › ]
Store-bought cobwebs, blow up ghosts, tacky lighting and corn syrup for carnage — Halloween decorations from your local Party City are so tacky (and boring). Up the ante with a $39.99 store credit to AtmosFX Digital Holiday Decorations. [ more › ]
"I think you can overdo it. We have to really appeal to that sensible center." [ more › ]
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (dubiously) said Chicago has "the strictest gun laws in the country" as she deflected talk away from gun control today. [ more › ]
"Get here soon though, because Avondale teeters on the edge. Hipster ‘hoods nibble at its borders, poised to spill over." Poised, you say? [ more › ]
Deep-dish fave The Art of Pizza has now officially opened their second outpost. [ more › ]