No one mourns a troll. This is the thing about Shashank Tripathi, the anonymous Twitter user outed by Buzzfeed's Jack Stuef on Tuesday morning after a night creating and spreading false rumors on Twitter. I tend to agree with Heidi Moore: the responsibility for the dissemination of those rumors lies with the journalists who retweeted or reported them, not with Tripathi, who has no personal or professional obligation to tell the truth on Twitter, no matter how influential his followers are. A lot of journalists and outlets reported false things on Monday, including CNN and Reuters* and Andrew Kaczynski, the Buzzfeed writer who initially called Tripathi out. Tripathi never claimed to be a journalist or a credible source; in fact, he was always clear that he was the opposite: a troll.

Fat asshole and Fox News president Roger Ailes just re-upped to run his network through the 2016 election, and he continues to maintain the grotesque fiction that he operates an independent news outlet and not a vital constituency in the Republican coalition. In case there was any doubt left, though-there isn't, really-here's a handwritten note he sent to George W. Bush's secretary of state in 2005 offering "help off the record" any time.

I'm eating oatmeal. Are you? If your power is not on, I doubt it buddy, unless you have built a fire, which sounds nice. What can you eat during these primitive powerless days until life returns to normal?

After Gov Cuomo declared a transportation emergency, the MTA is waiving all fares this Thursday & Friday. [twitter.com]

Alas, post-Sandy New York is not all feel-good tales of entrepreneurial ingenuity and upscale Halal carts; there's also been some looting. Police arrested 15 people in the Far Rockaway section of Queens and nine others in Coney Island, including one woman who was charged with possession of a firearm after police found a gun in the safe she was in the process of stealing.

A woman in Hawaii was swimming off the coast of Maui when a 12-foot-tiger shark attacked her. Despite finding herself in literally the most terrifying situation imaginable, the woman, who has a black belt in tae kwon do, kept cool and preemptively attacked the hellish sea beast with a punch to its nose.

ATTENTION, ATTENTION: THE GAME HAS COMPLETELY CHANGED NOW THAT PHILLY HAS JUST UNVEILED THE WORLD’S LARGEST T-SHIRT CANNON.

When it actually happened- it being, when I was punched in the face by a black man for wearing what I was wearing for Halloween- is a bit of blur. The before part anyway. The after came into focus so sharply and so quickly, it took a while to process. That is until the blood came gushing out. The exchange before the guy punched me in the face was simple: he screamed something to the effect of my costume being racist, and I responded with the kind of shitty teen explanation that makes you wonder why doctors don't devote all of science to discovering a cure for teenager. Here's how it went down.

An unlikely star was born at some of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's post-hurricane press conferences: sign language interpreter Lydia Callis. Everyone from NPR to New York magazine to Gawker's own Max Read has been singing Callis' praises since she stepped up and, with her boisterous American Sign Language routine, served as a spot of sunshine in an otherwise horribly dim time.

Nana Gouvêa is a modelactress-ish entity originally from Brazil who now resides with her husband in Manhattan. After Sandy devastated the city, Gouvêa and her husband ventured outdoors to document the destruction and to prove that there's one thing killer storm surges can never wash away: raw sex appeal.

According to an email sent out by Maxfield & Oberton, their Buckyballs and Buckycubes “desk toy” magnet sets are being discontinued “due to baseless and relentless legal badgering by a certain four letter government agency.” Said agency is the CPSC, which sued the company in July, alleging that the small, strong magnets “contain a defect in the design, packaging, warnings, and instructions, which pose a substantial risk of injury to the public.” The CPSC’s statement went on:

In 1993, Jennifer Toth horrified the world with her book The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City. The work detailed the lives of the homeless citizens who’d established communities in the subway and railroad tunnels beneath the streets of New York. Though criticism of the validity of some of Toth’s claims ran rampant following her book’s release, over the years various other sources have indeed found many people—one documentary estimated as many as 6,000—living illegally and dangerously in the subway tunnels.

A reader who went through Hurricane Katrina sent us nine helpful tips to make your post-Hurricane life a bit easier. If Sandy has left you blacked out, flooded out, or stressed out, you may find these useful:

Limited Subway Service Returns Tomorrow: Here's the Schedule [observer.com]

Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan this morning, on the footpath with all the bikers and walkers forced to trudge into the city, was a very fat man riding a very tiny electric scooter. The smallest size of scooter an adult man or grown child could sit on outside of circus setting. Near the midpoint of the crossing, he stopped and dismounted. His right pedal had fallen off. He was standing on the left side of his tiny scooter, straining to reach across and pick up his broken pedal, being thwarted by his sizable belly. Eventually, he succeeded in picking it up and reattaching it. He rolled by me very slowly ten minutes later on the way down. 


The cave featured in Scott O’dell’s 1960 classic YA novel Island of the Blue Dolphins has been discovered on San Nicolas island, just off the coast of Santa Barbara. According Navy archaeologist Steve Schwartz, it is likely to have sheltered the real-life Lone Woman - the mystical, mythical dolphin charmer with probably very tangly hair that smells like fire - that the book is based on.

That's not Nicki Minaj on the right, it's Miley Cyrus, and she just won Halloween.

Deadspin presents “Eli Manning Looking At Things.” Original inspiration here.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie earned rave reviews from moms sending their kids to sleepaway camp, when he sported a fleece embroidered with his identifying information while leading press conferences Tuesday.

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