After a very expensive four-year run, Fashion's Night Out is over (in the U.S.). Tastefully launched during the peak of the 2009 recession, FNO was initiated to encourage spending by setting up a DJ booth in a Victoria's Secret, giving you a glass of bad champagne, and steering you towards some designer-y clothes. By last year, FNO had spread to over 500 cities in the U.S. and 30 internationally.
Legislators and gun rights advocates get really angry whenever nosy reporters try to use public records laws to find out who's packing heat. When the Westchester Journal News published an online map of local residents with handgun licenses last year, the paper was excoriated by the NRA and its allies; it eventually took the map down. When Gawker published a similar list—without addresses—of New York City handgun permit-holders last month, we were attacked by Fox News and received multiple death threats. And when the editor of the North Carolina Cherokee Scout dared to request—not publish, but merely request—similar data from his local sheriff, he was forced to apologize and resign; he plans to leave the state entirely.
A 2009 survey showed that the median white family in American had twenty times more wealth than the median black family. How can this be, so many years after the civil rights movement? The answer, according to a new study: black people have been systematically screwed by home ownership.
Two weeks ago, we had yet to understand how two minutes of goats yelling like humans would inextricably shake the foundations of our very being. And now we have an absolutely perfect 25-second remix of Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble," interjected with those very same goats. (There's another remix floating around too, but this remix is far better.)
Wal-Mart is widely despised by left wingers for reasons both philosophical and aesthetic. The company, in turn—though sometimes pushing for "green" improvements and other traditionally liberal notions that will help the Wal-Mart bottom line—is a heavy Republican donor and notorious union-buster, and generally behaves in the corporatist, center-right way that one would expect of one of America's largest corporations.
The world scratched its head yesterday when it learned that former Chicago Bulls star Dennis Rodman is in North Korea, spreading a message of world peace via extreme facial piercings and basketball just days after North Korea's latest nuclear test. (And also filming an HBO documentary with the Harlem Globetrotters and VICE.) But the choice of Rodman actually seems inspired if you consider this photo of a young Kim Jong Un Kim Jong-Chul, Kim Jong Un's younger brother, glowering at the camera in Rodman's number 91 Bulls jersey from his days at a Swiss boarding school. The Kim clan are noted basketball fanatics, and all apparently a fondness for the Rodman-era Bulls, reportedly.
A California high school student who hid in a locker to catch a thief who's been stealing stuff from her classmates' backpacks during Phys Ed was shocked to discover the perp was none other than her own teacher.
Authorities in Tasmania didn't see anything wrong with emblazoning an anti-drink-drive message across the side of their breath-testing vans.
"Why do people hate Anne Hathaway?" asked Yahoo! Shine. "Why do women hate Anne Hathaway (but Love Jennifer Lawrence)?" posed the Cut. "Why is everyone hating on Anne Hathaway at 2013 Oscars? (TWEETS, GIF)," wondered the Huffington Post. "Is it a gender double-standard - or is it her face?" quizzed Salon.
