news

All the Girls Standing in the Line For the Rap Show: Iggy Azalea's Sudden Rise

Emma Carmichael · 06/14/12 03:25PM

Iggy Azalea almost wasn't Internet-famous. Last summer, the native Australian was living in Los Angeles, and after what was supposed to be two weeks in Miami at age 16 had turned into five years spent in four cities throughout the states, she was down to the last of her savings. She had one shot left, and so she used that money to film the music video for "PU$$Y," a song off her first mixtape.

Fake Worlds Collide: Woman Posed As a Boy to Seduce a Minor, Then Helped Solve an Online Cancer Hoax

Adrian Chen · 06/14/12 12:49PM

Last week we brought you the story of how a group of online detectives uncovered an elaborate internet cancer hoax that lasted for 11 years. But as they worked to get to the bottom of one hoax, an even more twisted one was right in their midst: now it's been revealed that one of the people involved in the investigation was a woman posing as a teenage boy to prey on an underaged girl.

What's 50 Grand to a Revolutionary Like Me?: Watch the Throne and the New Black Power

cord jefferson · 06/12/12 05:05PM

When Jay-Z and Kanye West released Watch the Throne last year, they did so, at least in part, to glorify things. Thing-glorification is a pursuit with a rich and not wholly invalid history in mainstream rap music. And from its opulent golden cover to its braggadocio about cars, clothes, jewelry, and women, Watch the Throne makes sense in the way that Paula Deen using whole tubs of butter makes sense—Jay-Z and Kanye West are rich men who like to revel in rich things.

For Lindsay Lohan's Next Trick, We Will Watch Her Vagina Get Banged With Reckless Abandon, Maybe

A.J. Daulerio · 06/12/12 01:40PM

Even though Lindsay Lohan is currently shooting both Liz and Dick and Lady In A Porsche Smushed Against An 18-Wheeler simultaneously, novelist Bret Easton Ellis announced last night that she has also won a part in the forthcoming film he wrote The Canyons, which is not a about large chasms in the earth created by running water. Lohan will star with America's current male porn person of note, James Deen, and be required to do things and have things done to her simulating real live humping, like this, says the The Daily Mail:

I'm a Gay Mormon Who's Been Happily Married for 10 Years

josh weed · 06/08/12 05:30PM

Yesterday, blogger and family therapist Josh Weed published a 6,000-word post on his personal site that he'd co-written with his wife of 10 years. In the post, Weed came out publicly for the first time. Still, he explained, he is a "devout and believing Mormon" who has been "very happily married to a woman" for a decade, and he and his wife plan to remain together. Here is a condensed and edited excerpt from his post. Weed will also be joining us in the discussion to answer your questions.

So You've Decided To Whack A Raghead.

Mobutu Sese Seko · 06/06/12 02:16PM

Last week, the New York Times ran a 5,000-word article on the Obama administration's "secret" drone assassination program that might as well have been accompanied by the cheery clip art that comes with brochures on STDs from the free clinic.

John Carter is a Movie About a Man Named John Carter, According to John Carter

Rich Juzwiak · 06/06/12 11:00AM

John Carter, the instantly infamous Disney bomb and possible co-assassin of Taylor Kitsch's career, sees its home-video release this week. It's kind of worth checking out just for the disastrous spectacle of it all, but if you're busy and don't want to watch two-plus hours of a multi-pronged civil war on Mars (aka Barsoom), which a white man crashes and then out-indigenouses the indigenous people, I've distilled everything you need to know about it. The video above is every instance of people saying the titular character's name throughout the film. They say it a lot. It's branding gone bad.

The Full Report on Author Ray Bradbury's Death

Emma Carmichael · 06/06/12 10:41AM

Ray Bradbury, the celebrated science fiction author who wrote Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, is dead at 91. io9's Meredith Woerner broke the news this morning after speaking to members of his family and has the full report. [io9]

The Long, Fake Life of J.S. Dirr: A Decade-Long Internet Cancer Hoax Unravels

Adrian Chen · 06/06/12 10:06AM

On the evening of May 13, Mother's Day, a Canadian woman named Dana Dirr was hit head-on while driving to the Saskatchewan hospital where she worked as a trauma surgeon. She was 35 weeks pregnant, but determined to work until the moment she gave birth. The morning after the crash, her husband John ("J.S.") Dirr posted a note on Warrior Eli, a Facebook page the Dirrs had created to document their 5-year-old son Eli's battle with cancer: "Last night at 12:02am I lost the love of my life," J.S. wrote. "I lost my wife, the mother of my children, and my best friend." Miraculously, Dana had held on in the hospital just long enough to have her baby—a daughter, and the Dirr's eleventh child.

This Is How You Make Something Go Viral: An Impractical Guide

Neetzan Zimmerman · 06/04/12 12:55PM

In effort to free up the longtime staff writers from a daily content quota and give them more breathing room, we instilled the whole traffic-whore model for about a month with varying results. The ultimate goal of this exercise was to show how, often times, the stories thought to be guaranteed traffic-drivers never materialized and how some of the longer stories outperformed them. The message: good is good, and you don't have to anchor your success to the oftentimes flukey nature of internet readers' tastes.