[via Kottke]

The publisher of a small weekly newspaper in Georgia was indicted last week for filing an open records request with a local court, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports. The story Mark Thomason was going after with his request is almost as strange as the fact that he was charged with a felony and jailed overnight after filing it.

As of today, you can watch the first trailer for the new Tom Hanks-starring, Clint Eastwood-directed biopic of Sully Sullenberger, the US Airways pilot who dramatically landed a full jet in the Hudson River in 2009. I’m sure the movie will be decent, but it’s impossible for it to be better than the fake Sully biopic created by Norm Macdonald for Conan O’Brien just a month after the incident.

Well-known suit-wearer Gay Talese is scheduled to release a book in two weeks. The book is about a man, Gerald Foos, who says he purchased and maintained a motel in Colorado for several decades specifically for the purpose of spying on his customers as they did such private activities as having sex and using the bathroom. Part of the book was adapted into a long New Yorker article published April 11, which revealed that Talese had, at one point, peeped along with Foos, and potentially concealed the existence of a murder that Foos said had taken place at the motel.

Today a Turkish journalist asked Donald Trump to comment on Turkey, where at least 42 people died in an airport bombing apparently carried out by ISIS operatives. Trump answered the question, but not before asking the man for his papers.

As major Brexit proponent and former mayor of London Boris Johnson left his home in London today, he was greeted by the people he’d so proudly led to victory just last week. Those people proceeded to tell Johnson to ever so politely fuck off.

Last year, author Garth Greenwell suggested that Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life could be the great gay novel that contemporary culture was waiting for. A few months later, Greenwell produced his own contender for that title when his acclaimed What Belongs To Us was released. Around the same time, Alexander Chee’s novel Queen of the Night was released. Thatt’s another beloved book that’s widely regarded to be gay—if not in subject matter, then in sensibility.

Edward Ivari, the high-end hair-restoration guru whose circumstantial connections to restored-hair-haver Donald Trump were explored in a Gawker investigation last month, is now denying ever laying a hand on the presumptive Republican nominee’s mane. The denial—his first comment on the matter after repeated attempts by Gawker reporter Ashley Feinberg to ask him, and after an exchange of contentious legal letters in June—comes in a recent missive to Gawker from the office of Charles J. Harder, the proxy attorney of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who has acknowledged funding a covert legal campaign to destroy Gawker Media. The company is currently in bankruptcy.

After months of bureaucratic wrangling, the Obama administration has disclosed its official count of civilians killed in airstrikes outside of conventional war zones: Somewhere between 64 and 116 since 2009. Strangely enough, the administration chose to release the numbers on the Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend.

This week, British Conservative Party politician and Brexit cheerleader Boris Johnson saw his chances of becoming the UK prime minister torpedoed when his ally Michael Gove announced he would also run for the seat. Boris quickly ducked out of the campaign, possibly ending his political career forever. But what a political career it was.

Watching The Purge: Election Year is like listening to an explanation of American politics from your high-school aged brother who goes to class sometimes. The third entry in James DeMonaco’s cheap and profitable horror franchise centered around an annual 12-hour nighttime period in which Americans are permitted to indulge in “any and all crime” is as wannabe woke as ever. The movie vaguely gestures at Black Lives Matter-style activism responding to the disproportionate effect the Purge has on minorities (it’s hard to determine if the movie is referencing the theory of fundamental cause or just tripping over it), women in office, and conservatives whose hunger for money and power amounts to blood thirst. These things exist, says The Purge: Election Year. These things...are things. This movie is a deep dive into a shallow pool and watching it is slightly less pleasurable than breaking your neck (I’m guessing). Election Year’s social consciousness reads more like a coma.

On Saturday, Australia will hold its federal election. The current conservative government—a center-right coalition led by the Liberal Party—is narrowly slated to win out, despite the fact that the Liberal Party appears to have laundered taxpayer money through a company the party owns.

Management experts speak of every company as having “stakeholders”—all of the different people affected by what a company does. If you can rearrange the hierarchy of stakeholders, you can change the world.

When I think “unfortunate mistake,” I think about getting handed the wrong change at the grocery store. I don’t think about having my nice day spoiled by an ever-loving supersonic missile!

Back in December, Donald Trump’s personal doctor declared to the world that Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” While that particular claim is unfalsifiable (although almost certainly incorrect), according to a source with knowledge of Trump’s current prescriptions, that letter isn’t telling the whole story. Most notably: Donald Trump is allegedly still taking speed-like diet pills.

After promising that the 2016 Republican National Convention wouldn’t be “boring,” Donald Trump has begun lowering expectations for the event, even declining an invitation (from whom is unclear) to speak at all three nights of the convention. “I don’t want people to think I’m grandstanding—which I’m not,” he told the New York Times. “But it would get high ratings,” he added.

Earlier this week, in a Hill article discussing the various former Bush advisors supporting Hillary Clinton, we got the briefest of insights into the Bush family’s current priorities. Priorities that include, George, George, Jr., and absolutely no Jeb.

Forget the lawsuits, the bankruptcies and myriad failed business ventures—this potentially illegal purchase unearthed by the Washington Post is Donald Trump’s most embarrassing executive decision yet.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch will accept whatever recommendation career prosecutors and the FBI director make in the Hillary Clinton email server investigation, a Justice Department official told the Associated Press Friday. The move assuages concerns that Lynch, a political appointee and a Democrat, might have overruled investigators.