A Belarusian currency speculator named Pavel Boguslavovich Belogour is buying up huge swaths of tiny Vermont—thousands of acres of the Green Mountain State, and even patches of land over the border in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. At first, Belogour, who goes by “Paul,” was received as something of a novelty. An idiosyncratic character with long hair and scant online footprint, he had amassed a small fortune in the largely unregulated world of foreign exchange trading—and then came to Vermont to spend it in eccentric ways. He bought a maple sugar farm, an entire marina, and a plot of undeveloped wood, where […]
Tarpley Hitt
57 posts
The world’s youngest crypto billionaire donated approximately $1.5 billion to a COVID relief fund and other charities—paid out almost entirely in a selection of meme cryptocurrencies named for different dog breeds that then tanked in value. Vitalik Buterin, whose personal fortune first surpassed $1 billion early last week, donated several kinds of cryptocurrencies, three of which are dog-themed and created largely as jokes: Shiba Inu (SHIB), Akita Inu (AKITA), and Dogelon (ELON). The gifts were collectively valued around $1.5 billion at the time they were made. But within hours of the transactions, the meme coins’ prices plunged—in no small part due […]
Two of the richest candidates in the race for New York City mayor—ex-Citigroup executive Ray McGuire and Obama-era HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan—have no idea how much a house costs in Brooklyn. In New York Times interviews that could have been cut from an Arrested Development blooper reel, McGuire and Donovan low-balled the borough’s median sales price by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Both believed the median price hovers around $100,000 or less. In reality, it is $900,000. McGuire, whose financial disclosures revealed that Citigroup will pay him $5.7 million in annual installments until 2025, guessed that the median price ranged from […]
When the Australian state of New South Wales announced last week that two local residents had contracted a “double mutant” strain of COVID-19, they provided only a few details about the infected couple. The man and woman were in their 50s, officials said. They’d contracted a concerning variant from India known as B.1.617.2. And while infectious, the man had visited four BBQ joints, two of them franchises of the grill supply store “Barbeques Galore.” The announcement drew national attention, in part because it preceded a new lockdown on residents of the greater Sydney area, as health officials remained uncertain of how […]
On first look, the campaign website for Charles Peruto Jr., a bombastic Republican attorney running to oust progressive Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, seems fairly standard, similar to those of many conservative candidates. There is the section on “issues” like the opioid crisis and Black Lives Matter. There is one listing endorsements from various cops and judges. And a page titled “Enough Is Enough!” in which he says he’s running for one simple reason: public safety. But then, there is a section, titled “The Girl in my Bathtub,” in which he has to explain the death of a woman at his […]
Leading up to his debut Saturday Night Live performance on Saturday, Elon Musk has spent weeks plugging Dogecoin, the joke cryptocurrency named for a meme about a talking dog with bad grammar, in an apparent bid to boost the coin’s popularity. But early Friday morning, Musk pivoted from promotion to circumspection. In a tweet sent at 12:24 a.m., the Tesla CEO quote tweeted a TMZ video titled “Elon Musk Says Dogecoin Could be the Future of Cryptocurrency.” In the caption, he warned followers to be careful with their cash. “Cryptocurrency is promising,” he wrote, “but please invest with caution!” The tweet […]
Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian founder of Ethereum and vocal proponent of a wealth tax, became the world’s youngest billionaire this week, after a bull run pushed the cryptocurrency’s price up to nearly 350 percent its value at the beginning of the year. The 27-year-old’s fortune is held in Ether, the Ethereum blockchain’s native token, rather than dollars or another currency. Buterin owns approximately 334,000 Ether, which were trading for just above $3,415 per coin on Wednesday afternoon. At that value, his wallet is worth about $1.14 billion. The gangly, somewhat elfin founder is Russian by birth—born in a small, nearly 1,000-year-old […]
Since mid-April, the United Metro Energy facility in Brooklyn has had a squadron of oil workers stationed outside—alternating shifts so that men are there 24 hours, seven days a week—striking for better pay and benefits from the company’s owner: grocery store billionaire, twice-failed mayoral candidate, and right-wing shock jock John Catsimatidis. The workers, a coalition of mechanics, terminal operators, and service technicians, elected to go on strike on April 19, following years of delayed negotiations on a union contract, which they voted to form back in 2018. “We are out there every single day, around the clock,” said Assaf John, who […]
The mountain hamlet of Crested Butte, Colorado, covers less than a square mile and, at an elevation of nearly 9,000 feet, it is taller than it is wide. So when a Chicago-based billionaire began quietly buying up its historic buildings, residents took note. “I was alarmed that someone would come in and buy up so much commercial property in the community,” former Gunnison County Commissioner Jim Starr told The Daily Beast. “That had not happened before. We’ve got few owners who own two or three different commercial properties. But the scale of this was larger than what we have seen previously.” […]
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have nearly doubled their controversial land holdings in Hawaii, after buying almost 600 acres on Kauai from a non-profit for $53 million. The deal, which closed on March 19, according to deeds first reported by Pacific Business News, comprises three parcels, including the remote northern waterfront known as Larsen’s Beach. The road to the beach was not included in the sale, and the public still has access. Zuckerberg’s other Hawaii property also fronts a public beach, but as The Daily Beast has reported, it’s accessible by a single labyrinthine road. The couple bought the property from […]
In advance of his controversial hosting gig on Saturday Night Live, Elon Musk has combined show promotion with a crypto plug for one of his favorite investments—the meme currency Dogecoin—which immediately shot up. At about 2:20 a.m. Wednesday morning, Elon Musk tweeted about the episode he will host next week: “The Dogefather,” he wrote. “SNL May 8.” Within minutes, the price of Dogecoin, which Musk has frequently plugged, jumped from $0.26 to $0.31—a leap of nearly 15 percent. Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency started as a joke based on the old meme of a Shiba Inu in 2013. Despite its trolly origins, […]
In the two years since the Food and Drug Administration approved the first synthetic ketamine treatment, drug developers, VC investors, and rich guys who like Burning Man have been scheming for ways to convert psychedelics from a stoner pastime into a private enterprise. On Tuesday, New York-based company MindMed will start trading on the Nasdaq, becoming the second psychedelic company ever to go public on a major American exchange. The debut comes six months after Compass Pathways, a drug developer focusing on the psychoactive compound in shrooms, became the first, reaching a market cap of $1.33 billion. A third company is […]
German investor Christian Angermayer—a 42-year-old billionaire who bears a not-negligible resemblance to Jared Leto in Blade Runner 2049—has made a fortune betting on a host of sci-fi-sounding finance fads. Among them: space travel, crypto, psychedelics, movies, weed, SPACs, and “life extension.” Those ventures have done pretty well for him. In the past year alone, seven companies Angermayer’s family office funded went public, raising a combined $1 billion; another 10 companies are slated to issue IPOs this year, according to Bloomberg Wealth. But in a recent profile, Angermayer cited a single experience as having paved the way for his billions: doing hallucinogenic […]
On the eve of Oscar weekend, a picket line formed outside the Chateau Marmont, the prominent after-party locale where Jay-Z and Beyoncé held post-Oscars bashes for years, to host an alternate awards show. The group stood around a long red carpet, decked out with balloons, to nominate the classic Hollywood hangout for “worst performance.” It won—there were no other nominees. The Friday night ceremony marked more than a year of a widely publicized boycott against the hotel, after it fired nearly 250 employees last March. Just weeks before the firings, hotel workers had been starting to form a union, but no […]
Fox News host and right-wing hanger-on Sean Hannity shelled out $5.3 million for a beachfront house on the south end of Palm Beach—less than three miles from Mar-a-Lago, property records show. The buy makes Hannity the latest in a long line of conservative media figures to set up shop in the wealthy south Florida town, sometimes called Billionaire’s Row. After Joe Biden’s inauguration in January, Donald Trump moved there to his 17-acre estate with three bomb shelters and a 20,000-square-foot ballroom coated in gold leaf. Ann Coulter and recently deceased Rush Limbaugh called the place home for years. Roger Ailes died […]
After private equity billionaire Robert Smith admitted to a 15-year tax fraud scheme to hide $225 million from the Internal Revenue Service, he signed a rare non-prosecution agreement with law enforcement, allowing him to avoid any charges and return to civilian life. But while Smith attends birthday parties and New York Times conferences, the man he hired to help execute the fraud faces federal charges and up to 14 years in prison. On Thursday, a grand jury in San Francisco indicted Smith’s long-time attorney, 82-year-old Carlos Kepke, on charges of conspiring with the CEO to defraud the IRS. If found guilty, […]
It’s been a grueling year on Wall Street—working from home for six-figure salaries, as millions entered unemployment or poverty—and the boutique investment firm, Houlihan Lokey, is thanking its entire financial staff with a very special perk: an all-expenses-paid “global getaway.” The vacations, announced by the company internally and leaked on Instagram and Twitter by the finance meme account Litquidity, make for a fairly steep step-up from free coffee or Bagel Fridays. The trips can be redeemed by everyone from junior analysts to administrators in the U.S. corporate finance division at a range of preselected destinations across North America, Europe, and Asia. […]
For his upcoming movie, The House of Gucci, director Ridley Scott secured some of the best known names in Hollywood—Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, and Al Pacino—to play members of the notorious fashion family. But some descendants of the $15 billion brand’s founder have their silk-lined lingerie in a twist. In an interview with the Associated Press, Guccio Gucci’s great-granddaughter, Patrizia Gucci raged that paparazzi shots from the set of the biopic—which focuses on the 1995 murder of her cousin—don’t do the high-powered, fabulously wealthy clan justice. She said Pacino—who has an Oscar, two Tonys, and two Emmys for playing […]
A new book on the Sackler family—the secretive billionaires who kept America in steady supply of OxyContin—contains private emails that show the heirs complaining about how hard their lives were as they tried to downplay and shift blame for the deadly opioid crisis that left nearly half a million Americans dead. The messages, along with other revelations in Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, shed light on how the Sacklers saw themselves not as beneficiaries of a company that invented, aggressively marketed, and profited from a dangerous drug, but as victims of a smear campaign. They also lay bare the […]
As mid-March approached, colleges and coastal cities braced for the inevitable: swarms of students fresh out of Zoom school looking to do keg stands in a global pandemic. In Florida, Palm Beach extended its 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. curfew to deter would-be Spring Breakers. In Texas, a county judge reminded residents of last year, when beer-chugging kids caused several superspreader events. The University of California Davis even offered to pay students to stay home, though not much—their “Spring Break Grants,” which students had to apply for, maxed out at $75 gift cards to local businesses. But the warnings haven’t kept […]
The frenzy over celebrity-endorsed investment vehicles known as SPACs has prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission to warn amateur investors not to turn fandom into a financial disaster. High-profile sponsors from NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal to tennis star Serena Williams to ex-Trump adviser Gary Cohn have loaned their star power to “special purpose acquisition companies”—which has regulators worried. “Celebrities, like anyone else, can be lured into participating in a risky investment or may be better able to sustain the risk of loss,” the SEC wrote in a statement. “It is never a good idea to invest in a SPAC just because […]
American billionaire Stan Kroenke—the real estate and sports mogul who owns more than 2 million acres of ranching land across North America— has just won a decade-long legal battle in Canada to keep the public from two lakes that can only be reached through his property. Kroenke, who is married to Walmart heiress Anne Walton, owns the largest ranch in Canada—a hulking mass larger than the metro Vancouver area, which fully surrounds two bodies of water: Stoney and Minnie lakes. The lakes, each more than a half-mile long, are both publicly owned in Canada and filled with fish. But the orientation […]
Last year, the vast majority of online child exploitation reports were found on Facebook, according to new data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline. The study identified over 20.3 million reported incidents related to child pornography or trafficking (classified as “child sexual abuse material”) on the social media site. By contrast, Google cited 546,704 incidents, Twitter had 65,062, Snapchat reported 144,095, and TikTok found 22,692. Facebook accounted for nearly 95 percent of the 21.7 million reports across all platforms. Notably, MindGeek—the Canada-based parent company of porn websites like Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn—reported far fewer than Facebook: […]
The documentary 17 Blocks, from director and FOUND Magazine creator Davy Rothbart, was filmed over the course of two decades, beginning at the turn of the millennium. The movie follows the Sanford-Durants, a family by whom Rothbart was “adopted,” as the mother puts it, living in a southeast D.C. neighborhood situated just 17 blocks from the White House. The timescale of the movie recalls Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, the 2014 film featuring the same actors (including the director’s own daughter), shot over the course of 12 years. But where Boyhood followed an upper-middle-class white boy in Texas, Rothbart’s documentary centers on a […]
In what seemed to be the first dystopian shots of the annual Super Bowl ad arms race, Dolly Parton announced last week that she had rewritten her working-class anthem “9 to 5” as “5 to 9” for a Squarespace commercial about, as Variety put it, “office workers getting their entrepreneurial side hustles going after hours.” (Sleeping is out; the gig economy is in!) To this, Coors said—and I apologize in advance for this—hold my beer. The next day, the Molson Coors Beverage Company announced an ad they’re calling the “Coors Big Game Dream” that uses something called “Targeted Dream Incubation” to […]
At around 6:30 a.m. on Christmas Day, country singer JP Harris woke up to an explosion. A 63-year-old man had parked an RV next to an AT&T network hub in downtown Nashville and blown the vehicle up, killing himself, injuring eight others, and flattening several buildings. Cell service was knocked out for days. When federal investigators looked into the Nashville bomber, they found letters he’d written promoting 9/11 conspiracies, suggesting the moon landing was fabricated, and claiming that reptilians had taken control of the Earth. (Needless to say, there is no evidence for any of these claims). “Everything is an illusion,” […]
Flee, the animated documentary that premiered at Sundance last week, opens with Amin Nawabi, an Afghan refugee in Denmark, lying on a patterned cloth, talking to someone off-screen. It sounds something like therapy. He’s speaking to Jonas Poher Rasmussen, the director of the film and Nawabi’s old friend, who encourages him to recall his earliest memories. Two and a half decades prior, Nawabi had appeared at Rasmussen’s school with no family, minimal Danish, and no backstory. Charismatic and well-dressed, Nawabi made friends easily, but shared little. The class rumor was that he’d walked from Kabul. Now full-grown, Nawabi has since come […]
On New Year’s Eve of 2015, the government of Adjara, an administrative region in the southwest corner of Georgia, issued a decree granting a company called Zimo Ltd. permission to unearth two swamp cypresses and a 650-ton, 135-year-old tulip tree from the Black Sea coast. For a fee of 6,200 Lari (about $1,875), the company could haul the trees onto boats and ship them 25 miles north, to be replanted in an elaborate park owned by businessman and former Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. The decree was not well-received. On the day of the move, the diggers were flanked by 40 […]
As vaccine rollouts ramp up—or in some cases, stumble ahead—in countries across the world, the SARS-CoV-2 strain has rolled out some new features of its own, primarily in the form of rapid genetic mutations. Some evidence indicates variants of recent months have made the virus more infectious, or in one case, possibly more deadly. Virus variants are inevitable and often benign. The new coronavirus has likely mutated countless times without attracting the attention of epidemiologists. But new strains identified in the U.K., South Africa, Brazil, and California have given some infectious disease experts pause. Several studies indicate that the strain known […]
In the final days of 2020, very few people can look back and say they’ve had a good time. (Dua Lipa, maybe… or soap wholesalers). One member of that fairly selective club is Nathan Apodaca, the TikToker known as @420doggface208 or just doggface208, who shot to viral fame over a video of him skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and listening to to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Through TikTok’s mercurial algorithm, Apodaca became a celebrity overnight, transforming from indie-vibe hero to brand sponsor in record time. When fans found an old tweet of his, from a time when Apodaca was living in a Walmart […]
Forty women identified only as “Jane Doe” have sued MindGeek, alleging the Montreal-based internet porn company knowingly profited from the sex-trafficking operation GirlsDoPorn. The suit, which was filed Tuesday afternoon in the Southern District of California, seeks punitive and compensatory damages of more than $80 million. “Plaintiffs have suffered damages including, but not limited to, severe emotional distress, significant trauma, attempted suicide, and social and familial ostracization,” the complaint alleges. “Further, MindGeek has received ill-gotten gains by selling, marketing and exploiting videos featuring the Plaintiffs’ likenesses.” (MindGeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) The case builds off of […]
The avant-pop artist FKA Twigs has sued actor Shia LaBeouf for what she described as “relentless” abuse during their nearly one-year relationship in 2018. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and first reported by The New York Times, accuses the Transformers actor of sexual battery, assault, infliction of emotional distress, and knowingly infecting the singer with a sexually transmitted disease. At the center of the lawsuit is an incident that occurred on Valentine’s Day in early 2019, when Twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, claims LaBeouf threatened to crash a car if she did not say she loved him. The […]
Four days before Thanksgiving, as the U.S. braced for a second wave of the illness that has killed over 270,000 people and forced most of the world into isolation, CEO Nicholas Duro launched his app for upscale live events and group travel. He called it “Private Island.” To celebrate the debut, Duro flew 19 people—including 12 TikTok influencers and a Nickelodeon star—to Hawaii for a nine-day “Friendsgiving” of “luxury hotel accommodations, fine foods, and loads of activities meant to get the blood pumping.” The guest list included Colie Nuanez, India Good, Carson Paw, Mishka Silva, Fuller House actor Isaak Presley, and […]
The guy on the phone is trying to buy a piano. He’s a 55-year-old Staten Island man calling about an ad for a vintage grand. On the call, he’s energetic, gregarious, and prone to laughter–which is good, because the salesman, prank-caller Johnny Brennan of the Jerky Boys, has veered off-topic, away from thousand-dollar instruments and onto what he calls his “Terminal Groove” class: a hybrid of bikram and goat yoga, that involves stretching at 110-degree temperatures surrounded by hot goats in total silence. Raised voices or screaming, he explains, can cause the animals to collapse and go into cardiac arrest. “I’m […]
On Nov. 2, police received a call from a local jewelry salesman, Jay Brett Rind, reporting an accidental shooting at his apartment in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. According to an affidavit filed in court on Nov. 5, Rind told dispatchers that he’d met an old friend, 21-year fire department veteran James Gilliard, for dinner to offer him the “deal of a lifetime.” Rind planned to move to Mexico, and suggested he give his old pal, whom he’d met years prior when Gilliard owned a local pawn shop, two guns. The friends met for dinner at a local grill, according to the […]
A Los Angeles judge granted a restraining order against Diplo Wednesday afternoon, filed by a woman who alleged the EDM DJ had leaked “revenge porn” of her on Twitter. “We are pleased to announce that by an order dated November 16, 2020, the Court ordered our requests ‘all granted’ and the restraining order issued,” attorney Lisa Bloom who represents the petitioner, wrote in a statement about the decision. The filing, which The Daily Beast reported on Monday, came after the woman tweeted a thread alleging that she’d had a long-term intimate relationship with Diplo, beginning from when she was in her […]
A Los Angeles woman has filed a restraining order against Diplo, or Thomas Wesley Pentz, county court records show. Attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents the plaintiff, said she sought “to block Diplo from distributing revenge porn” allegedly “designed to humiliate her and to scare other women out of coming forward.” “I am representing [redacted] regarding her claims against Diplo,” Bloom said. (The Daily Beast is withholding the woman’s name to protect her privacy). “I’m very proud to represent her. As with all clients, we put her through an elaborate vetting process which she cleared. I find her to be very credible […]
Two years ago, filmmaker Raquel Cepeda started looking for tapes. Specifically, she was searching for leftover footage from 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s, a 1979 documentary about two gangs in the South Bronx: the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls. Cepeda was researching the life of the Skulls’ former “First Lady” Lorine Padilla. But the movie had long been MIA—never released commercially, it wasn’t available on DVD until 2010—and the footage was even more so. The production company, a subsidiary of Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video, figured the tapes were lost. So did the film’s director, Gary Weis. “I don’t know what happened […]
Carl Lentz, the pastor credited with bringing the Instagram-friendly Australian megachurch Hillsong to the U.S. and baptizing Justin Bieber, was fired this week from the New York franchise he helped found. Hillsong founder Brian Houston announced the news in an email to Hillsong East Coast members on Nov. 5. “God will use Carl in another way outside of Hillsong Church,” Houston wrote. “This action has been taken following ongoing discussions in retaliation to leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures.” Houston didn’t elaborate on the “moral failures,” but Lentz hinted at them the following day […]
At first glance, the small group assembled outside Pornhub’s L.A. office might have looked like employees. They surrounded the building in black T-shirts with white script, framed by the adult site’s signature orange box. Instead of the standard logo, however, the tees read “Traffickinghub.” The sparse and socially distant protest, which happens every week, had been organized by the West Coast arm of Knock Out Abuse, the domestic violence nonprofit whose annual gala, once called a “designer bachelorette party” by the Washington Post, attracts a roster of D.C. insiders and corporate executives—including Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kristen Gillibrand, and Wolf Blitzer. The […]
President Trump was being treated in the hospital for COVID-19 on Saturday, and at least nine of his party’s top officials had contracted the virus—but it made no difference to many GOP officials and campaign aides who continued to flout social distancing guidelines and host maskless, indoor events. On Saturday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who tested positive for COVID-19 late Friday night, doubled down on his criticism of mask mandates. While they may help mitigate infection risk, he claimed, they are “certainly not a cure-all.” Instead, Johnson pointed to “individual responsibility.” After his test on Friday night, Johnson said he didn’t […]
For 32 years, Glynndana Shevlin worked at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, and through 29 of them, her spot was a concierge club called the E-Ticket Lounge. From 2 p.m. to 10:30 at night, Shevlin hosted guests on the 11th floor of a wing known as the Adventure Tower, serving continental breakfasts, chips and salsa, appetizers, and drinks. As a sommelier, she specialized in wine. “I have long-term guests that have been calling me asking me, ‘How’s it going during the pandemic?’” Shevlin said. “My phone’s been off the hook.” The calls picked up on Tuesday, after Disney announced they […]
Aracely Diaz was at home with her husband and kids when the email arrived, announcing that Disney would lay off 28,000 workers. Diaz has worked as a housekeeper at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California for 19 years. So had her husband, Micael Diaz. The next morning, the couple woke up at 6:30 in the morning, got in their car, and sped north on the I-5 to Sacramento. “It was a shock—we weren’t expecting this,” the 48-year-old said in Spanish. “But we told our kids, ‘Hey, we’re going to go out there. We’re doing this because we want to fight for […]
In early July, the Walt Disney Company reopened parts of two amusement parks: Disney World near Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The former reopened to house the tightly controlled 13-week experiment known as the NBA Bubble, in which staff, players, coaches, and personnel adhered to strict social distancing guidelines and isolation requirements, paired with regular on-site testing. The latter welcomed back its workers with less grandeur, opening up a sprawling outdoor shopping district called Downtown Disney, with a select staff of several hundred. Though they reopened within days of each other, the two parks worked with wildly different resources. […]
On Saturday morning, protesters showed up to the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles, carrying signs. To passing drivers, the scene looked pretty typical. There have been protests in Los Angeles nearly every day since the civil uprising in June over police brutality, and the signs’ language resembled slogans popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement. One woman scrawled “CARE NOW” on her cardboard. Another sign read: “DEFUND HOLLYWOOD.” Among the crowd was a 28-year-old resident of Phoenix, Arizona, named Tara Nicole, one of the event’s organizers. She passed out water bottles, fliers, and signs labeled “Freedom […]
Thursday afternoon, Marla Maples, the television personality best known as Donald Trump’s second wife, shared an Instagram photo from notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates cracking up like a cartoon villain. “We get rid of cash and coins,” the overlaid text reads. “We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we turn off the chip and you starve!” “Education is key…Ask questions…Dig deeper…,” Maples wrote over the Instagram Story, which bore the vague header: “The digitalized economy?” If users dug deeper, clicking through to the original […]
For more than nine months, five of them during a global pandemic, a 26-year-old woman named Chelsea Becker has been sitting in Kings County Jail, under a $2 million bail, for giving birth to a stillborn baby. Becker has been there since November, when police arrested her and prosecutors charged her with murder. The District Attorney argued that Becker’s methamphetamine addiction had caused the stillbirth, citing a 50-year-old law that civil rights advocates say was never supposed to apply to pregnant women. It has put Becker at the heart of a national debate over criminalizing fetal death. On Friday, however, California’s […]
The Chainsmokers’ drive-in concert in tony Southampton, New York, an allegedly distant charity festival held on Saturday night, violated the terms of their permit and will likely face citations and fines from multiple city departments, according to Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman. Over 3,000 residents paid up to $25,000 to hear the EDM duo, featuring the subprime sounds of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon’s DJ alter ego “DJ D-Sol.” The event, which had a permit from the town of Southampton, boasted a long list of precautionary measures: temperature checks upon entry, bathroom cleanings every 10 minutes, obligatory masks, ample sanitizer stations, […]
On Saturday, two days into the MLB’s skeletal 2020 season, Fox Sports debuted a feature few asked for: virtual fans. Facing a schedule that dropped from 162 games to just 60, held in stadiums without crowds to boo, applaud, or smooch on the jumbotron, Fox announced via tweet that they had just the fix: a partnership with SportsMEDIA Technology and Silver Spoon Animation to insert the grainy, Sim-like visages of shrieking baseball lovers onto home screens everywhere, further blurring the line between reality and dystopian role-playing game. As one Reddit pundit put it: “Why.” As sports negotiate their return to televisions, […]
“I’m in Eastern Ontario. Thousand Islands. Great Lakes. Doing what everyone else is doing in North America—trying to stay inside as much as possible,” Dan Aykroyd said on a phone call in April. Technically, he was outside at that moment. Aykroyd was walking around his family’s farm in Canada, which has the luxury of space and the drawbacks of weak cell service and several unfortunate incidents involving Aykroyd’s mouth and some wayward gnats. This summer marks the 40th anniversary of one of Aykroyd’s most famous and famously chaotic movies, The Blues Brothers. An outgrowth of the blues band Aykroyd and his […]
Early Saturday morning, two people were shot—one fatally—inside the section of Seattle known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest Area (CHOP), a police-free zone that sprung up in the wake of anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. The gunshots that rang out between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., killing a 19-year-old man and leaving another in critical condition, marked the first report of serious violence inside CHOP, where a largely festival-like atmosphere has prevailed. The protest area’s internal medical team, referred to as Medic One, transported two victims to the nearby Harborview Medical Center. “We had two […]
For the past decade, Chris D’Elia, one of the country’s top club comedians who packs theatres hundreds of times a year, has enjoyed the special status afforded to a few middle-aged comics who grasp and expertly deploy devices of the Gen-Z internet. The 40-year-old stand-up, who has three Netflix specials and a Comedy Central special called White Male. Black Comic, has maintained massive followings across social media—on Twitter, where he has 1.1 million followers; on Instagram, where he has 2.4 million followers; on TikTok, where he has 158,300 followers, despite posting just nine videos; and, when it was around, on Vine, […]
Wednesday morning, a Change.org petition circled the internet calling to “Have TikTok remove any content involving the ‘George Floyd challenge!!’” The page featured a disturbing layout collage, cropped to reveal only the bottom two photos. In each, two white guys mugged for the camera, as one knelt on the other’s neck—both mocking the murder of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his windpipe for eight minutes and 46 seconds. By that evening, the petition passed its goal of 5,000 signatures. The new goal is now 7,500. “There is a challenge currently ‘popular’ on the app TikTok,” the […]
Monday afternoon, America’s most manic snitch sat down in a stairwell at his new undisclosed address to upload an Instagram video about the music industry’s supposed latest mega-scam. “So listen, I want the world to know that Billboard is a lie,” said Tekashi 6ix9ine, or Daniel Hernandez, who was recently released from federal custody, where he was serving out a sentence for nine charges including conspiracy to murder and armed robbery. “You can buy No. 1s on Billboard. I want that to register in your head: You can buy No. 1s on Billboard.” The conspiracy he was talking about involved the […]
One of the peculiarities of online dream analysis, at least for those of us without advanced psychiatry degrees, is its tendency to get specific. On a dream interpreter like Dream-Meaning.net, where users can search imagery for its precise meaning, ambiguity is an afterthought. The image of a diaper, for example, broadly symbolizes “childish or dependent attitudes.” But the entry also breaks down into 14 subgenres, such as “Wearing Diaper” (feeling ashamed about needing help), “Getting and Receiving Diaper” (mommy issues), “Holding a Diaper With Leaks” (problems or conflicts with children), and “Soiled Poopy Diaper” (a “positive sign” that pet projects will […]
On Thursday, the Professional Beauty Federation of California published a press release to the “Hot Topics” section of their website. It was titled: “Time to Sue Governor Newsom.” The release came in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that the following morning, California would officially enter “Phase Two” of the “Safer at Home” order. Select businesses, from florists to clothing retailers to toy stores, would be able to resume operations in a limited capacity. But absent from the list of acceptable businesses: beauty salons. Newsom placed businesses like nail salons and barbershops in “Phase Three”—a stage he believes to be “months, […]
On October 10, 2019, federal investigators [******]unsealed an indictment charging the owners and two employees of the websites Girls Do Porn and Girls Do Toys with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. They arrested three of the four defendants. They named the fourth, a New Zealander named Michael Pratt who had already fled the country, a fugitive. The indictment coincided with a sprawling class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 22 unnamed women who claimed the company had operated an extensive fraud scheme to coerce women into filming illicit videos, while squirreling profits away in […]