A couple years ago, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg did a laughably stupid thing and named Cathie Black, a rich lady-about-town who ran a bunch of magazines and newspapers as president of Hearst, as his new schools chancellor. Since Black had no qualifications for the job aside from being a rich friend of Bloomberg's, some folks objected and Black resigned after 95 humiliating days. Back in 2010, former Gawker intern Sergio Hernandez thought it might be fun to read the email traffic between Black and City Hall prior to Black's appointment, so he filed a request under New York's Freedom of Information Law. Because Bloomberg is a secretive, entitled, arrogant prick, it took more than two years and a court battle to get them.

In this 17-minute video essay from Jonathan Hertzberg, he compiles scenes of the New York City subway in movies mostly from the 1970s and the 1980s. Though this is an account of the subterranean railway's presence in mainly fiction films, it shows a glimpse of a grimy and violent past. As the subway trundles through these two pre-Giuliani decades, it hosts a variety of gangs, purse-snatchers, tough cops, harassers, jaunty graffiti, drug-pushers, and zombie-eyed post partiers. Hertzberg has simply titled his short film Dirty Old New York Subway.

A rivalry between two kindergartens in China took a lethal turn after the principal of one kindergarten allegedly killed two girls who attend the other kindergarten by lacing their yogurt with rat poison.

Remember the other day when you were saying how much you loved the sketch series "Drunk History" but that you wished how instead of history it was a corny joke about tortilla chips that Morgan Patch told her husband Adam while sauced off her ass on a bottle of wine, which he then turned into an animated short?

In a series of rambling, grammatically challenged Facebook and Twitter posts published last night, Internet personality Antoine Dodson appeared to claim that he was "no longer into homosexuality" and was now a devout Hebrew Israelite instead.

A man attacked by a rabid bat in the Mojave National Preserve will probably die if not found and treated by health officials. Eyewitnesses say the bat landed on the mystery man's neck outside the desert park's book store at the Kelso Depot between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. The man wandered off, oblivious, and the bat fell dead from rabies.

The latest victim of fake news source The Daily Currant: Matt Drudge, who (like the idiots at Zero Hedge last night) was taken in by this bafflingly unfunny story about Mike Bloomberg being denied a slice of pizza at a restaurant.

Million-dollar homes in Camarillo, Calif. were reduced to nothing yesterday as a wind-stoked fire in Ventura County spread over 8,000 acres, threatening 2,000 homes and causing hundreds of evacuations.

Good news for sailors, shipping magnates and these women: pirate attacks are way down. In fact, there haven't been any successful hijackings by Somali pirates in nearly a year, according Donna Leigh Hopkins, a US diplomat and the head of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia.

Either a friend (if you trust CNN) of Kris Kross' Chris Kelly or Kelly's mother (if you trust TMZ) told investigators the rapper had used heroin and cocaine the night before he was found dead in his Atlanta home.

This is reassuring: the FDA says that, sometime this year, they'll finally get around to properly investigating triclosan, the germ-killing ingredient used in anti-bacterial soaps, mouthwash, toothpaste and toys. But how long has this potentially-harmful chemical been on the market? Only 40 plus years.

On Thursday evening, Rhode Island officially became the 10th state to allow gay marriage.

Bitcoin, the virtual currency libertarian geeks expect us all to use to pay for pizza in the future, has had a rough few weeks. A series of booms and busts have sent shivers down the spines of Bitcoin enthusiasts. Now, Gawker has learned that a much-hailed partnership between two of the most prominent players in Bitcoin, Mt. Gox and CoinLab, has devolved into a nasty $75 million lawsuit, which appears to be by far the biggest Bitcoin-related lawsuit ever.

Jeff Hanneman, guitarist and founding member of legendary American metal band Slayer, died of liver failure today in California. He was 49.

Just hours after her first post-jail interview aired on Good Morning America, the police video taken during Reese Witherspoon's arrest has emerged. It's even better than you could have expected.

The New York Times is reporting Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told FBI interrogators that he and his brother initially considered carrying out suicide attacks on the Fourth of July. When the two finished building their bombs earlier than planned, they moved the attack up to Patriot's Day, according to a law enforcement official.

The Daily Beast stage, or fraction, of the career of Howie Kurtz ended with a perfectly apt string of Twitter messages from the media reporter/Washington bureau chief:

Welcome to Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

A group of women in Devon, England, thought it would be fun to dress up like pirates for a talk about piracy being given by sea captain Colin Darch. Unfortunately, some of the fun wore off when the realized that, rather than discussing piracy in general, Darch would instead be recounting the time he was held hostage for days by a band of armed Somali pirates.

Ah, Liberty University, where upstanding evangelical students still may not dance on a date, but that boy expelled from his high school for illegally bringing a shotgun onto campus gets a four-year scholarship. Truly, He works in mysterious ways!