So, Steve Jobs is dead. A tech genius has passed on. Sad. Certainly a devastating loss to Steve Jobs' close friends and family members, as well as to Apple executives and shareholders. The rest of you? Calm down.
Break out your reading glasses and racial animosity: it's time for a very special alumni edition of Gawker Book Club! Patrice Evans is a current staff writer for Grantland and a generally accomplished writer online and off—you may know him by his alter ego, The Assimilated Negro. You may know him by his many pieces published on this very site!
Santa came early this year and dumped this video clip onto the internet. It is Justin Bieber, smooth-cheeked troubadour of your niece's (or nephew's!) dreams, singing a song called "Mistletoe" from his soon-to-drop (like other things) Christmas album.
There have been plenty of absurd tributes to Steve Jobs. But the most tone-deaf has got to be the one by Wikileaks, which last night tweeted a link to a faked copy of the former Apple CEO's positive "H.I.V. report." RIP, Steve!
Straight up horror, that delightful combination of gross-out thrills and sexual chills, is usually something best enjoyed in short bursts, which is why it works wonderfully at the movies. But on TV? FX is giving it at shot with American Horror Story and, boy, is it something!
Naked hot tub ladies describe their tryst with Ashton Kutcher. Willow Smith collaborates with Nicki Minaj. Jennifer Aniston says there is "no desperation" in her life. Michelle Pfeiffer thinks plastic surgery is "sad." Thursday gossip kisses and tells.
While American society has traditionally eschewed the practice of setting elderly people adrift on floating chunks of ice, we have embraced the next best thing: sequestering old people in their own buildings, communities, or suburbs, and ignoring them completely. Who knows, or cares, what they are up to? We prefer to focus on the youthful and ostensibly sexually available people pictured on the teevee.
This pop star likes to watch naked girls pop their booties on stage at strip clubs. This singer behaved like a jerk at the mall. And this formerly fat comedian is packing on the pounds again. But does he also feed on strippers?
Here's a trailer for the "true life" movie My Week With Marilyn, a sexy drama about Marilyn Monroe visiting London for the first time and having a brief dalliance with a cow-eyed young man. Looks good?
Derrick Bell, a leading racial thinker and law school professor, has died at the age of 80. Besides being an accomplished author, founder of critical race theory, and the first tenured black law professor at Harvard, Bell was famous for quitting jobs on principle: as a young man, he quit a job at the Justice Department rather than resign from the NAACP; and later, he gave up a teaching job at Harvard in order to protest their minority hiring record. From the NYT:
Tipster Amanda sent us this picture of dirty, unemployed patchouli monster Penn Badgley participating in yesterday's Occupy Wall Street march by holding a sign (handcrafted by a Tea Partier, it seems) and demanding the return of the Glass-Steagall Act. For some reason he (or the original signmaker) filled in all the holes in the letters—maybe to represent how he/the protesters have "had their fill" of corporate greed? What does it mean.
Herbert Chavez, a 35-year-old man from the Philippines, really, really loves Superman. So much so, that since 1995 he's undergone a variety of plastic surgeries in order to look just like his favorite comic book hero—including a nose job, chin augmentation, lip injections, and thigh implants. And he's still not done: As he told ABC CBN News, he plans on getting even more surgeries—the most ambitious being an operation that would make him taller. Superman doesn't transform in a phone booth, but in a doctor's office.
To apply for a photo ID—now required of voters under a new Tennessee law—96-year-old Dorothy Cooper gathered up a bunch of documents and took them all to her local photo ID office in Chattanooga. But a clerk said her docs didn't prove that her last name was really Cooper, and denied her application. Score one for the purity of the ballot box!
God Hates Steve Jobs about as much as God Hates Fags, but God loves Apple products—therefore, it's totally not hypocritical at all that Westboro Baptist Church member @MargieJPhelps used an iPhone to declare her congregation's next publicity stunt demonstration on God's behalf. Even God has an iPhone.
Conan O'Brien returned to NBC, and the studio he occupied for 16 years as host of Late Night, on Wednesday when he paid Jimmy Fallon an on-air visit. But as you'll see in this clip, O'Brien wasn't there for nostalgia's sake. He'd come to take back Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, even though his settlement with NBC prevents him from using the character anywhere else.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which some refer to as "the Gay Super Bowl of Chemistry," has been awarded to 70-year-old Israeli scientist Daniel Schechtman for his discovery of "quasicrystals." It sounds like something you might buy on QVC, but they are actually metal atoms arranged in such a way as to resemble Islamic mosaics, and they have significantly altered how chemists view solid matter.
