Let’s find out.
Are You More Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Or Jennifer Aniston?
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15 Asian-Inspired Dishes That Are Better Than Takeout
No more delivery.
Tofu Kimchi Fried Rice
Recipe Here
Unicorns in the Kitchen / Via unicornsinthekitchen.com
Chicken Chow Mein with Rainbow Vegetables
Recipe Here
I Knead to Eat / Via ikneadtoeat.com
Maple Ginger Beef
Recipe Here
The Recipe Rebel / Via thereciperebel.com
30-minute Sesame Beef Stir Fry
Recipe Here
Yes to Yolks / Via yestoyolks.com
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Just A Reminder That All Of Rory's Boyfriends Were Terrible
In case you forgot.
If you're a Gilmore Girls fan, then you probably know that all three of Rory's boyfriends in the series were 100% trash.
It was a coming-of-age story, after all, and it's basically not possible to come of age without running into some grade-A twats along the way.
Warner Bros. / BuzzFeed
No shade to Rory for her choices: Sometimes a girl's gotta get the D where she can.
But before the next series comes out on 25 November, let's remind ourselves how shitty these boys were, lest we forget, or allow our nostalgia to cloud that fact.
Warner Bros.
It all started with the biggest crydick in all of Stars Hollow, Dean.
Warner Bros.
Dean was the kind of guy who'd whine that Rory didn't want to spend every waking moment with him, cause every now and then she had, I dunno, HOMEWORK TO DO.
She probably also needed a break every now and then from your insufferable pouting, m8.
Warner Bros.
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Teens Are Brutally Roasting Each Other In A New Trend Called The #HuhChallenge
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Samuel L. Jackson Thinks You All Need To Chill The Hell Out About Brangelina
“I don’t know why it’s everybody’s business, or why people care anyway.”
Unless you've been living under a rock this week you'll be aware that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are divorcing.
😢 😢 😢
Valery Hache / AFP / Getty Images
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33 Kitchen Tricks To Save You Time And Hassle
You: 33. Kitchen: 0.
BuzzFeed
You can tell how ripe an avocado is by popping off the stem and checking the color underneath.
If it's yellow or green, you're good to go. If it's brown, the avocado is too ripe. (If it doesn't come off easily, it's not ripe enough.)
babyaribaaruba sterck / Via youtube.com
Chopping herbs? Use a pizza cutter!
melissalonie / Via xenlife.com.au
Impress your guests with crystal-clear ice cubes:
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People Are Pretty Pissed About Their Patronus Results On Pottermore
PatroNUH-UH.
In case you haven't heard, Pottermore released its official Patronus quiz today.
Pottermore
And while many were pretty satisfied with the Patronus they were bestowed, some were definitely NOT feeling it.
Warner Bros.
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What It Felt Like To Be A Woman On The Most Misogynistic Season Of “Big Brother” Ever
Big Brother 18 winner Nicole Franzel.
Sonja Flemmiing / CBS
On Wednesday night, for the first time in the show’s 16-year history, a woman triumphed over a man to win CBS’s Big Brother. When Nicole Franzel beat Paul Abrahamian in a 5–4 vote, taking home the $500,000 grand prize, host Julie Chen couldn’t have been more exhilarated to proclaim the groundbreaking news.
“When people were still clapping coming out of commercial, I was like, ‘No, everybody settle down. You need to hear this! Let me slow down and repeat myself. Did you hear me?’” she told BuzzFeed News in the Big Brother backyard following the finale. “I was so excited.”
Though Franzel wasn’t the first woman to win on the series, she was the first to beat out a male contestant for the prize. “It just makes the whole thing sweeter that I made Big Brother history,” she told BuzzFeed News. “That is a cool feeling.”
Frank Eudy
CBS
It’s poetic justice that a woman emerged victorious on Big Brother 18, considering the fact that male contestants groped women this season, critiqued their bodies in lecherous and condemning ways, and spewed some truly heinous opinions about women in general — like when Paulie Calafiore was heard on the live feed calling women “dumpsters” for male bodily fluids.
“It was hell and it felt like hell,” Da’Vonne Rogers told BuzzFeed News of living inside the Big Brother house for 99 days. While the 24/7 live feeds had revealed Frank Eudy repeatedly placing his hands on Rogers and making unwelcome comments about female players’ bodies (“Oooh, titties sittin’ right,” he told Rogers), Eudy's behavior first came to light on primetime in the July 10 episode when Rogers confronted him after he slapped her behind once again.
“I'm a parent, first and foremost. I have morals and I have self-respect, and I'm not about to let you do whatever you think you want to do to me,” Rogers told BuzzFeed News after the finale. “At some point, I had to tell him to back off.” Eudy had also grabbed the stomachs of several female contestants and informed them that they were getting fat. But the struggle that Rogers and many other female players grappled with when it came to speaking up was that, unlike many other reality competition shows, Big Brother is a game where contestants vote one another off and confrontation is often a quick way to lose half a million dollars.
Da’Vonne Rogers and Bridgette Dunning.
CBS
Like Rogers, Bridgette Dunning eventually hit a breaking point where the money wasn’t enough of an incentive to let harassment slide. A myriad of body-shaming insults had been hurled at Natalie Negrotti all season long, but when Calafiore unleashed a tirade against her, saying, among other things, that she was “as fake as those things on [her] chest,” referring to her breast implants, Dunning could no longer sit back. She was one of the lone voices who defended Negrotti during a major house meeting that was designed to clear the air between Calafiore and Negrotti, instead doing everything but.
“I know that playing Big Brother, you're supposed to keep your cards in your pocket and not make enemies in any way, but it's a moral issue for me, and I would do it all over again,” Dunning told BuzzFeed News. “You can only take so much when you hear comments being thrown around about women or their bodies. I was livid. That really strikes home for me. I'll always stand up for women, I'll always stand up for myself.”
Natalie Negrotti
CBS
Negrotti told BuzzFeed News she felt "attacked personally — especially about [her] physique.” “It did make me very sad,” she said. “I definitely thought about self-evicting numerous times just to escape all of the bashing towards me. And that was the hard part. I was so excited to be there and I felt like people were attacking me constantly. … This was the hardest and most difficult thing I've done.”
BuzzFeed News talked to the men of Big Brother 18 about using derogatory language, slapping women’s behinds, and criticizing their bodies — and the biggest offenders defended their actions. Runner-up Abrahamian, who called contestant Michelle Meyer a “fucking cunt” during an argument, told BuzzFeed News he stands by what he said. “In real life, I don't take that shit from anybody, and I'm not going to change that in this game,” he said. “I think Michelle was a little bit of a bully; she would poke and prod at everybody this season, and she poked the wrong person in that moment. Don't think you can walk over me because there's money at stake. I don't care what's at stake; nobody talks to me that way.”
Eudy, who told BuzzFeed News he has no regrets about his behavior this season, said that he wasn’t acting maliciously. “I never did it to be mean. I did it out of a sense of camaraderie,” he said. “I think sometimes when you sit there and you’re talking with the guys in the house...it's not necessarily stuff you mean, it's just the way guys talk to each other. I still try to stay as PC as possible, but at the same time, sometimes you forget where you're at. You'll be sitting there having a conversation, you get up, see a camera and think, Oh shit, I'm in the Big Brother house and people heard that.”
Calafiore was mostly unaware of how the press, his family, and the show’s fans — who started using the hashtag #WeHatePaulieCalafiore — have reacted to his behavior, because he was cut off from most forms of communication until the show wrapped on Wednesday.
Paulie Calafiore
CBS
“There's not many things I said or did in the game that I actually feel in real life,” he told BuzzFeed News when discussing the incendiary incidents that occurred during his time on the show. “You go into there, you step into that house, you turn the switch on, you play the game; you step out of that house, you turn the switch off, the game is done. … At the end of the day, there's only one winner, and that's what I was going for. I didn't care how I got there.”
The general consensus among the female contestants was that Calafiore was essentially scared of them. “He seems to be intimidated by strong, independent, thinking women who he can't have under his thumb doing what he wants all the time,” Dunning said. “When we all weren't charmed by him and all his words, I think that scared him a little. I'm glad I scared him, to be honest.” Rogers added: “I hope this got aired, but I made a point of saying to Paulie, ‘I never see you talk to men like this, I only see you talk to women like this,’ and that's when he tried to get in my face. I said, ‘Paulie, I'm not scared of you. I'm not that woman.’ I guess he felt intimidated by that. I think he feels intimidated by strong women period.”
When asked for a response to Dunning and Rogers’ comments, Calafiore said: “Bridgette voted for a man who called a woman a cunt, so I think she's a hypocrite. I think they just don't like powerful people and that's what it is. I have a lot of women friends, I have a sister, I have female family members, and it’s not how it is. If you're going to have an opinion, be ready to defend your opinion, because I'm going to call you out for it, whether you're a man or a woman. We live in a world where there's a lot of equality, so women can have the same kind of opinions as men.”
Big Brother has come under fire in the past for its casting choices, most notably in regards to Aaryn Gries, who used horrifyingly racist language on Season 15. But producers have long maintained that the houseguests are simply a representation of America, a belief seemingly supported by the current climate surrounding this year’s presidential election. It’s a similarity that Julie Chen quickly honed in on when discussing the misogyny in Season 18. “Big Brother is a microcosm of society, and look at the election,” she said. “Unfortunately, this is an example of what is going on in the world outside of the house, every day — in the workforce, with promotions, and with equal pay. The list sadly goes on and on.”
The women of Big Brother 18.
CBS
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Joss Whedon Has Launched A Campaign To Get You To Vote — And Not For Trump
Keegan-Michael Key, Julianne Moore, Don Cheadle, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Leslie Odom Jr., from Save the Day's "Important" PSA.
Save the Day
After slaying vampires, corralling superheroes, and vanquishing genocidal robots, filmmaker Joss Whedon is tackling perhaps the most formidable project of his career: convincing Americans to vote. And he's essentially conscripted half of Hollywood to help him.
Today, Whedon is launching Save the Day, a super PAC designed to get as many people to the ballot box as possible on Nov. 8 — and he's made a series of short-form videos to accompany the campaign. The first, titled "Important," features 27 actors — including Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, Keegan-Michael Key, Don Cheadle, James Franco, Jesse Williams, Cobie Smulders, Martin Sheen, and Neil Patrick Harris — earnestly imploring people to vote, while also making fun of political ads featuring a parade of celebrities.
"It's about targeting people who either aren't going to vote or have been anesthetized out of voting — fighting the sort of apathy and cynicism that says, 'It doesn't matter if I vote,'" Whedon told BuzzFeed News. Voting, he said, "matters more than any single thing you're going to do in the next two years. It's the exact definition of democracy. It is a heroic and necessary act."
To make “Important” possible, Whedon and Save the Day’s head of production Jennifer Cochis flew from Los Angeles, to New York, to Los Angeles, to New York, and back to Los Angeles over the course of a single week in early September. “Three red-eyes in a row,” Whedon said. “It was a personal best.”
And he was not shy about asking his famous friends to pitch in, something he admitted he's usually terrible at. "There is almost nobody that I wouldn't approach to say, ‘If you can pitch in, do it now,’” he said. “It was pretty much the same spiel to everybody: 'Doing a voting PSA to help get out the vote and stop orange Muppet Hitler.'"
While the video never mentions Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton or Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump by name, in it, Cheadle stresses the importance of keeping "a racist, abusive coward who could permanently damage the fabric of our society" out of office. And Hamilton's Leslie Odom Jr. wonders aloud why we'd want to "give nuclear weapons to a man whose signature move is firing things." In short, Whedon's super PAC makes no secret that they would prefer people vote for Clinton.
Mark Ruffalo and Joss Whedon on the set of the "Important" PSA shoot.
Jennifer Cochis / Save the Day
"At least one person was like, 'I didn't expect this to be quite so partisan. I don't want to alienate half my fan base.' But nobody backed out," Whedon said. "In general, everyone was very comfortable with what we were doing." (Everyone, that is, save for Ruffalo. “He was the first person who had a name in the script,” said Whedon. “He was like, ‘Joss, I don't think anybody wants to see me naked.’ And I'm like, ‘Uh, will you still be my whipping boy?’ And bless him, he did.”)
The video’s loose, irreverent tone won’t be a feature of the entire Save the Day campaign, but Whedon does appreciate the freedom the super PAC allows him. "We heard from some of the Clinton people, and they have a specific thing that they have to do to stay on message," he said. "We can go kind of anywhere, we can be a little more anarchic, have a little more fun with it. I think there's a lot of people who are going to be inured to whatever any candidate says. … It's very much, like, Let's save democracy! We can use the old barn!"
Whedon also waded into the 2012 presidential campaign with a tongue-in-cheek YouTube video a week before the election, warning that a vote for GOP nominee Mitt Romney would bring about the zombie apocalypse. The prospect of a Trump presidency, however, strikes Whedon as genuinely catastrophic. His interview with BuzzFeed News took place the day after Trump said that "Second Amendment people" could stop a Hillary Clinton presidency, and he was clearly still upset by the news. "I thought the lowest low is when he and his people started indicating that there would be rioting if he didn't win," said Whedon. "It was like, Oh, this smacks of beer hall putsch. This is very '30s Berlin. And then yesterday comes, and for all the backtracking in the world, there is no mistaking exactly what he said."
Whedon knew for certain he wanted to make an impact on the election after Bernie Sanders supporters began threatening to disrupt the first day of the Democratic National Convention in July, implying that Sanders' young base of voters might not vote for Clinton.
Julianne Moore and Joss Whedon.
Jennifer Cochis / Save the Day
"I just went into giant terror sweats. I was like, Oh, we're in so much trouble," he said. "This is before Michelle Obama came out and sang a beautiful lullaby to America that made us all feel like we might actually live through the day. But it went from, Hey! We should all kick around some ideas, to I'm going to put up a million dollars, create a mini studio, and get every idea that I think has any merit out there."
Whedon has recruited an eight-person team to work on Save the Day, led by executive director Ben Sheehan of Funny or Die. They've already shot seven videos, mostly written and directed by Whedon, and plan to make at least five more, rolling out one to three a week via the Save the Day website and elsewhere online until election day.
The team is not just focusing on the presidential campaign, either; the videos will also stress the importance of voting for down-ticket candidates for the Senate, House, and state and local officials and ballot measures. "Getting the Senate back, so we don't have an obstructionist Senate that will literally not do its job, is just as important," said Whedon. "There are a lot of propositions of gun laws and stuff that are just as important. Everybody needs to get in that booth."
To that end, along with founding and funding Save the Day, Whedon has rejoined Twitter after famously deleting his account in May 2015 so he could focus on his follow-up project after Avengers: Age of Ultron. (He had to take a new handle, @Joss, because his old one, @JossWhedon, is now apparently owned by someone in Russia. "I guess because he's not pretending to be me, [Twitter was] like, Well, we can't really do anything about it," he said with a shrug.)
Joss Whedon watching actor Clark Gregg shoot his segment in the "Important" PSA for Save the Day.
Jennifer Cochis / Save the Day
At the time he left Twitter, Whedon told BuzzFeed News that the service’s constant torrent of angry trolls was crowding out his ability to be creative, noting, "I don't really think I need to visit You Suck Land anymore." But now, Whedon's ready to take them on.
"I have a pathological fear of conflict, but I think this is more important than the fact that I'm a fraidy-cat," he said. "You cannot be afraid that people will not like you. The people with extreme beliefs are willing to yell until the people with more complex belief systems just want to go away. And if you can't stand up for the thing that you know in your heart and your brain is true at a time when it means a difference to the entire world, then you have no right to stand up at all. If you cannot talk back to these people, then you get what they think you deserve.
"We're going to anger a lot of people, I'm sure," he continued, referring to Save the Day. "And we'll miss the mark, you know? The point is to throw up as much against the wall as possible, so that we can reach some people, so we can see if something sticks — an image, a phrase, a humorous short, or a not-at-all humorous short, whatever it is that just gets some people to reconsider the idea they're busy on Nov. 8."
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16 Photos That Show What It Means To Be A Colombian Rebel Today
FARC rebels use scarves to protect their faces from dust as they ride in the back of a truck on the edge of the jungle in southern Colombia.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
For more than a half century, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — better known as the FARC — has been in a brutal civil war with the government. But now the two sides are on the verge of signing a peace treaty.
This summer, I spent a total of five weeks with an elite FARC unit at different times and at different camps in the jungles of the southern state of Caquetá. The rebels came from fronts all over Colombia for a year’s education program to prepare them for leadership roles as the FARC prepares to transform itself from an armed rebel group into a leftist political party. Many of the rebels I met were unable to read or write when they joined the FARC but now were studying history, current affairs, and Marxist-Leninist political theory. More than a third were women, with many occupying command positions. The FARC has strict rules against sexual discrimination, although they have not always been observed.
Watched by her boyfriend, this FARC rebel checks her appearance in a hand mirror in her makeshift shelter at a guerrilla camp in Colombia’s southern jungle.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
For many city-dwellers in Colombia, the country’s left-wing rebels are bogeymen — kidnappers, drug traffickers, and assassins. But people who live in the vast areas of Colombian countryside controlled by the FARC tend to have a different view of the rebels. For them, the FARC replaced governments that always favored Colombia’s rich elite: The rebels have kept order, administered justice, built roads, and raised taxes. As part of the peace process the FARC has renounced kidnapping and has made commitments to abandon its involvement in the cocaine trade, historically two of its main sources of revenue.
FARC rebels load a truck at night to move their camp closer to the village of El Diamante, on the edge of the jungle. The rebels took around an hour to pack up their camp, where close to 100 had lived for several months.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
During the long and violent civil war FARC units have carried out massacres of civilians and selective assassinations, such as the 2009 killing of 27 members of the indigenous Awá people, including women and young children. Still, the bogeymen view of the FARC owes much to the country’s mainstream media, following the government’s lead. Colombia’s biggest newspaper, El Tiempo, is owned and run by the family of President Juan Manuel Santos, who was also defense minister in the previous administration. Foreign governments and media have frequently taken the same line. The United States declared the FARC a terrorist organization in 1997 and has still not lifted that classification.
Many FARC members fear that after they disarm they will be vulnerable to assassination by pro-government paramilitary groups in a repeat of the movement's last attempt to enter civilian politics in the mid-1980s. Then, around 3,000 members of the FARC’s Patriotic Union party were murdered by right-wing death squads.
This FARC rebel raises a banner across the road outside the village of El Diamante.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
After four years of slow peace negotiations in Havana, Cuba, the FARC and the Colombian government are in an unprecedented honeymoon period. They have signed a bilateral ceasefire and provisional accords, and they are due to sign a final agreement on September 26. Combat commanders from both sides have met up, without guns, to talk about how they may work together in the future.
The Colombian people will vote for or against the agreement in a plebiscite on October 2. FARC delegates are holding a conference September 17–23 in the southern state of Caquetá to discuss the treaty, and they will almost certainly approve it.
Carlos Antonio Lozada, one of the FARC’s top commanders, talks to rebel fighters about peace negotiations with the government while visiting a jungle camp near the village of El Diamante.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
I first reported on the FARC when I lived in Colombia in 1985–86, traveling several days on horseback to their mountain headquarters. Peace negotiations with the FARC began in 2012 in Havana. I flew there early this year and asked permission to visit their camps in Colombia. The FARC allowed me to photograph and interview whomever I wanted. The rebels I met were friendly, disciplined, thoughtful, and, apparently, idealistic.
A FARC rebel waits for transportation at the roadside on the edge of the jungle in southern Colombia.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
Guerrillas break from class at the Isaías Pardo School, where they have spent months studying.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
Guerrillas study together.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
Guerrillas study in a small group.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
Colombian FARC rebels repair a road near a camp in the country’s southern jungle.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
FARC rebels Patricia and Jefferson (their noms de guerre) share breakfast. They have been a couple for the last 14 years and have been allowed to move to different postings together.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
FARC rebels David and Jaisuri (their noms de guerre) dance at the roadside while waiting for transport.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
One of Colombia’s FARC rebels gets a haircut in camp. Most of the guerrilla men favor a backless mohawk cut.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
Two of Colombia’s FARC rebels get their hair braided.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
A FARC rebel drinks coffee before getting out of bed in the early morning at a camp in the country’s southern jungle.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
FARC rebels walk back to their camp. Even with a ceasefire in effect, many of the guerrillas keep their weapons with them at all times — but the pistol in this picture is actually a radio playing popular songs.
Malcolm Linton / Polaris
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21 Photos Proving Summer Was The Fucking Worst
*unsticks leg from chair for the last time this year*
First off, the unbearable heat and mosquitoes are just the TIP of the iceberg.
You're basically guaranteed a sunburn if you spend more than .2 seconds outside...
...which meant you got to spend the rest of summer peeling off your skin.
Even if you managed to tan, it never turned out quite how you expected.
reddit.com / Via imgur.com
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After Her Engagement Ended, This Woman Decided To Do Her Disney Engagement Pics Solo
“When I look back on those photos, I see a princess choosing to have a perfect day amidst an imperfect situation.”
A woman is proving you don't need a prince to feel like a princess by forging ahead with her Disney-themed engagement shoot after ending her relationship with her fiancé.
DPark Photography / Via dparkphotography.com
Brooke Lowry told BuzzFeed News she had dreamed of a "vintage 1950s" engagement shoot at Disneyland, and booked the shoot last fall after she got engaged.
DPark Photography / Via dparkphotography.com
She said she had also planned on doing a shoot during a trip to London, but knew she wouldn't feel complete without incorporating Disney as well.
"London is my absolute favorite place in the world, but Disneyland, like a fairy tale, is almost like my favorite place outside of this world, and I knew this milestone in my life wouldn’t be complete without incorporating such a magical place," she said.
After her engagement ended, Lowry said she was "incredibly disappointed, heartbroken, alone, scared, embarrassed, and rejected." She considered canceling the photo shoot, but then remembered why she loved Disney princesses.
DPark Photography / Via dparkphotography.com
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Kendall Jenner Did A Ballet Shoot For Vogue And People Are Pissed
“Ballet dancers don’t train 7+ hours a day, 7 days a week, to be represented by Kendall Jenner and her dodgy feet.”
Kendall Jenner is the cover star of Vogue España this month and appears in a ballet-themed shoot.
Kendall posted the video on her Instagram, which shows her dancing around a ballet studio wearing pointe shoes – and people did not like it.
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21 Pictures That Will Bother You Way More Than They Should
Warning: This may drive you insane.
Why would you ever eat cereal like this?
Or a donut like this?
No pizza should be eaten crust first:
It's all just plain wrong.
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Why America Will Never Stop Trying To Solve JonBenét Ramsey’s Murder
BuzzFeed News; Alamy
The photo that accompanies People magazine’s recent cover story on JonBenét Ramsey shows a corona of soft blond curls, a row of glistening baby teeth visible behind just-parted pink lips, and a pair of wide eyes gazing out from behind thick, dark lashes. At 6 years old, she has not just been given a woman’s hairstyle or clothes or makeup, but she’s been taught a woman’s stillness. She is not caught in motion, as children so often are in photographs. She seems conscious of no desire, no distraction, that will keep her from sitting still as her image is captured. She is letting us look at her.
For the past 20 years, the American public has never stopped looking at JonBenét Ramsey, and has never stopped looking for justice in her name: in primetime specials and TV movies, in best-selling true crime accounts and self-published screeds, in online communities that formed in the early days of dial-up and still thrive today, and in magazine and tabloid spreads that prompt readers to mourn, year after year, as if it were always a fresh assault on America, a CHILLING DISCOVERY, an UNTOLD STORY, the MURDER OF A LITTLE BEAUTY.
In 1996, Americans were still reeling from the trial of Susan Smith, a South Carolina woman who had been convicted, in July 1995, of drowning her toddler sons. Also still fresh was the O.J. Simpson trial, whose unprecedented gavel-to-gavel TV coverage had been a ratings bonanza the previous year, and which had seemed like it would go on forever until it ended in Simpson’s acquittal. The Internet, still in its infancy, gave viewers little opportunity to talk back to a media that both terrified and informed them. But the Simpson trial had helped to usher in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and proved that viewers would seemingly watch anything, no matter how dull or inconclusive, so long as it related to a crime that fascinated them.
The August 22, 2016 cover of People magazine
Time Inc.
Though little more is known today than in 1996 about how the 6-year-old beauty pageant star died, a new wave of JonBenét-related media has nonetheless begun to crest in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of her murder. Earlier this month, Dr. Phil broadcast an interview with JonBenét’s brother, Burke Ramsey, who was 9 years old at the time of her death, and whose family once took pains to shield him from tabloid allegations that he was his sister’s killer. Though the Dr. Phil interview itself was newsworthy, it simply rehashed information that has long been public. The same week also saw the premiere of A&E’s The Killing of JonBenét: The Truth Uncovered and Dateline’s Who Killed JonBenét, though these specials were only a prelude to CBS’s two-part series The Case Of: JonBenét Ramsey,which aired Sept. 18–19. Yet so far, though investigative panels have been assembled and viewers continue to hold out for a break in the case, none of our return visits to the story have yielded the kind of information that would make it any less of a paradox.
Revisiting crimes and tabloid sensations has long been a staple of American media, and at its best can provide the public with a new sense of understanding, or even closure. Horror can even inspire nostalgia, if the source is understandable. And the more innocent the victim — the younger, the fairer, the richer, the whiter — the more horrendous the monster, and the stronger the forces of law and order prove themselves to be.
But even when it was first in the news, JonBenét Ramsey’s murder was never presented to the public in a single, coherent narrative. The clues the public clung to came from rumors and tabloids; what was a fact one day could be proved false the next, and often was. The case’s suspects frequently suffered far less from police pressure than from public attention. JonBenét’s mother, Patsy Ramsey, was never officially indicted or brought to trial, but for many viewers her guilt was never in question. Compounding the tabloid furor was JonBenét’s preternatural femininity, and the pervasive sense that her murder was somehow inexorably linked to her partial citizenship into the land of womanhood — and the mother who some argued pushed her there. Such a story combined the lurid with the pure in a way that forced Americans to imagine the unimaginable.
The ransom note.
The Washington Post / Getty Images
JonBenét Ramsey was 6 years old when she was murdered in her home in Boulder, Colorado, on Christmas night in 1996. JonBenét’s mother, Patsy Ramsey, told investigators she first noticed something was wrong when she woke up early the following morning to find a ransom note on the stairs.
Listen carefully! it instructed her. We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction… At this time we have your daughter in our possession. She is safe and unharmed and if you want her to see 1997, you must follow our instructions to the letter.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter.
Patsy Ramsey and her husband, John, claimed to have slept straight through the night. Patsy woke first, and told the police she hadn’t yet looked in on her daughter’s room when she found the ransom note. “And then,” as true crime writer Carlton Smith later put it in his book Death of a Little Princess, “in one of those moments when time seems to stop, the heart of Patsy Paugh Ramsey, former Miss West Virginia, about to be forty, the happy wife of a successful businessman, was shattered by a bolt of terrifying, unthinkable fear, the first step down the road that would alter her life forever.”
The ransom note found in the Ramsey home was shocking not just for its terms, but for their specificity. It demanded $118,000 in exchange for JonBenét’s life — the same amount as the salary bonus John Ramsey had recently received as president and CEO of Access Graphics, the billion-dollar subsidiary of Lockheed Martin. The note was also addressed only to John.
Any deviation of my instructions will result in the immediate execution of your daughter, the ransom note continued. You will also be denied her remains for a proper burial. … You stand a 99% chance of killing your daughter if you try to out smart us. Follow our instructions and you stand a 100% chance of getting her back. You and your family are under constant scrutiny as well as the authorities. Don’t try to grow a brain John. … Don’t underestimate us John. … It’s up to you now John!
Victory!
S.B.T.C.
Patsy called 911, and the police searched the Ramsey house but found nothing. By afternoon, they were certain enough that the scene would yield no further evidence that they told John to take one last look around, to see if he noticed anything unusual. Along with his friend Fleet White, John went into the basement, past the area where household odds and ends were kept, and into a small, windowless room the Ramseys called the wine cellar. It was there that John Ramsey found JonBenét’s body. She had suffered a skull fracture. She had been strangled. Her hands were bound. Her mouth had been covered with duct tape. And she had been wrapped in a white blanket.
John Ramsey pulled the duct tape from his daughter’s mouth and carried her body upstairs. The police told John to inform his wife of their daughter’s death, and he laid her body beside the family’s Christmas tree.
JonBenét Ramsey’s image was emblazoned on dozens of police investigation binders.
Ray Ng / Getty Images
After news of the murder broke, police and press theories about the ransom note’s author proliferated dizzyingly: Patsy Ramsey woke up to find the note, or wrote one, or sat by as her husband wrote one, or woke to find a ransom note written by her husband, or maybe by her 9-year-old son Burke. “Some acquaintances wonder if all the attention lavished on JonBenét, however innocent and well meaning, hadn’t left brother Burke feeling slightly left out,” Bill Hewitt wrote in People magazine. Yet reporting that implicated other members of the family also returned to Patsy’s relationship with her daughter: Hewitt also quoted a photographer who worked with JonBenét, and who recalled Patsy saying, “This is not just my daughter, this is my best friend.” Even Boulder police Detective Steve Thomas would argue it was possible Patsy had punished JonBenét for a bed-wetting incident and lost control of her temper.
There are still websites and forums actively dedicated to discussing the minutiae of JonBenét Ramsey’s murder. Commenters debate and revisit everything from the significance of the movie posters in the Ramseys’ basement (“I think An Officer and a Gentleman would appeal more to Patsy”) to the size and brand of underwear JonBenét was wearing when she was murdered. But amateur detectives soon have to move beyond the physical evidence, which suggested much but ultimately said little: It was impossible for experts to state, conclusively, whether the handwriting on the ransom note matched Patsy Ramsey's, or whether JonBenét had been sexually assaulted in the past or on the night of the murder, or even whether the murder had been committed by an intruder or by those who lived in the house. Much was possible but little was known, and as a result, nearly every theory of the murder eventually had to make the leap into pure speculation. Often, for those who continue to debate the case, this means looking at the usual suspects, means analyzing photographs and video of the Ramsey family, means asking: Were they really grieving? Were they really monsters? And shouldn’t I be able to tell just by looking at them?
The JonBenét Ramsey Case Encyclopedia, an exhaustively sourced website that provides both a database of evidence and testimony and forums where visitors can discuss their own hunches, has an entire page reserved for theories about to how and why Patsy Ramsey killed her daughter. There’s the Boulder police–endorsed “Bed-Wetting Rage Theory,” but also the “Marital Rage Theory,” “John Caught in Act,” “Sexual Abuse by Patsy,” “Munchausen-by-proxy Syndrome,” “Child Pornography Ring,” and “Ritual Sacrifice.”
Taken in the aggregate, this speculation seems, finally, less about Patsy Ramsey herself than about people’s need to create a list of every scenario, no matter how outlandish, that could lead a mother to kill her own child in so brutal a fashion. A story where the most innocent victim imaginable is preyed upon by the darkest of forces is still better than no story at all: Grim as it is, it points the finger at a real villain. The worse JonBenét Ramsey’s death was, the greater the contrast between her innocence and the gruesomeness of her death, the greater the payoff when her killer can be caught, when justice can be served, at the long-awaited end of the story.
John and Patsy Ramsey on CNN on Jan. 1, 1997.
Helen Davis / AP
In the days following her daughter’s murder, Patsy Ramsey was often heavily sedated, sometimes to the point of delirium. In interviews from that period, she speaks weakly, haltingly, and the simple act of ordering a sentence seems to take every ounce of her will. She appears, simply, broken.
Questioned by the reporters who soon flocked to the town, Boulder residents remembered a very different woman. They described Patsy Ramsey as a glamorous and energetic mother who volunteered at her son’s elementary school even as she was undergoing chemotherapy, and who seemed determined to make her daughter as decorated a pageant queen as she had once been herself.
“Patsy was dynamic,” Robert Elmore, a parishioner at the Ramseys’ church, told author Lawrence Schiller. “She was a take-charge person with very definite ideas. And she had this living angel. JonBenét was an actual angel. I don’t remember ever seeing any child more beautiful.”
“Why couldn’t she have grown up?” Patsy asked Kristine Griffin, a high school senior who competed on the pageantry circuit and coached JonBenét, the day after the murder. “All Jonnie B ever wanted,” Patsy told her, “was to win a crown like yours.”
Yet there were some who wondered how interested JonBenét really was in the pursuit her mother loved so dearly. Even Griffin had noticed that JonBenét frequently gave her prizes away to participants who finished a pageant empty-handed. If she wasn’t forced into pageantry, she also didn’t seem to see it as anything more than a way to have fun, despite the titles she quickly amassed: Little Miss Sunburst, Little Miss Merry Christmas, Little Miss Colorado, National Tiny Miss Beauty.
For Patsy, who was crowned Miss West Virginia in 1977 and went on to compete at Miss America, JonBenét’s pageantry may have been a way to return to a world she knew better than any other — or at least thought she did. In The Death of Innocence, the memoir she co0wrote with her husband, Patsy fondly recalled how, as JonBenét prepared for the Little Miss Sunburst pageant in August 1996 — the month she turned 6 years old — Patsy asked her mother and sister to help her with a costume. They found, Patsy wrote, “a white satin cape and collar that could be made into a Ziegfeld Follies costume, reminiscent of the one I had worn in the Miss West Virginia Pageant some twenty years earlier. Like mother, like daughter.”
Days after JonBenét’s death, pageant organizers began selling videos of her performances to network affiliates. In particular, footage of JonBenét in what Patsy called the Ziegfeld Follies outfit captivated viewers: It showed her wearing a costume and performing a flirtatious routine that may have suited a young woman, but was jarring from a little girl. It also created an even more sensationalized narrative around JonBenét’s murder.
The story wasn’t a solid-gold ratings draw until it was no longer about a murdered child, but about a murdered child-woman.
“When it emerged that the child had been a beauty pageant queen,” CNN’s Brian Cabell said at the time, “the story became sexier.”
It was around the same time that newspaper articles began to wonder whether JonBenét Ramsey could have been a victim of sexual assault on the night of the murder, and perhaps of ongoing sexual abuse in the months or even years prior to her death. The tabloids didn’t wonder so much as proclaim. A January 1997 issue of the National Enquirer promised to tell “The Untold Story” of “How Daddy's Little Girl Really Died,” the headline paired with a grainy photograph of JonBenét gazing up at some unseen figure, as if in fear. “We are learning more about the innocent lamb who was slaughtered,” a Hard Copy special promised viewers, before playing an exclusive clip of JonBenét’s appearance in the Little Miss Charlevoix County pageant.
The story wasn’t a solid-gold ratings draw until it was no longer about a murdered child, but about a murdered child-woman. Only then did tabloid reporters converge on Boulder in what one journalist described as a “gang bang”; only then did the story turn from a senseless tragedy to a morality play.
Rooted in the public’s enduring fascination with JonBenét’s pageantry was the idea that her murder was unavoidably connected to her apparent womanliness: that a woman was, inherently, even more vulnerable than a child. News stories that focused on JonBenét’s pageant involvement — what a Newsweek cover story called "The Strange World of JonBenét" — were taut with the suggestion that Patsy Ramsey had pushed her daughter into a dangerous world. And that she should have known better.
In the missing white woman cases the public knows so well (Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway, and Brooke Wilberger, to name a very few), and whose hold on the American imagination remains undiminished, it is impossible to escape the symbolism of light versus dark. It is in the tabloid headline, in the detective’s remarks to the press, in the nightly news. The girl walked into the night, into the darkness, and then she was gone. She grew up just enough to leave her well-protected home, and as soon as she stepped into the hungry world, she was consumed. These are terrifying stories, but in these tellings they at least have rules: Stay where you belong and you won’t be hurt. But JonBenét Ramsey, too young to step into the dark world beyond her front door, was still consumed by darkness. As video of her pageant performances played on every channel, it was hard for viewers not to wonder if Patsy Ramsey, by making her little girl into a little woman, had invited that darkness home.
The Ramseys' home in Boulder.
Karl Gehring / Liaison / Getty
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22 Low-Key Living Legends Who Deserve Our Admiration
Heroes.
This teacher who pulled the ultimate slip up:
imgur.com / Via reddit.com
This kid who doesn't want his leftovers touched:
imgur.com / Via reddit.com
Whoever designed these tights:
i.reddituploads.com / Via reddit.com
The people who made this roll of duct tape large enough to fix literally anything:
imgur.com / Via reddit.com
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Can You Guess If It's Real Makeup Or A Snapchat Filter?
Get at least 10 correct, or you’ve gotta quit Snapchat in disgrace.
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23 Life-Giving Breakfasts To Help You Survive The Week
Treat yourself.
Charlotte Gomez / BuzzFeed
Jam and Cheese Toast
"Sliced bread, guava jam, and cheese toast."
Recipe: Raspberry Brie Grilled Cheese Sandwich
Poached Egg on Toast
"Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day tbh (although some mornings I have no desire to eat). Lately, I've been preparing frittatas so I have something I can just heat up in the morning as a time saver. Another simple favorite is poached eggs on toast; if I'm feeling extra fancy, I use goat cheese on the toast instead of butter."
—Joe Purcell, Facebook
Recipe: Poached Eggs With Gouda on Toast
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The Best Places To Go On A First Date In NYC
Recommended personally by locals.
New York is home to thousands of restaurants and bars. It also has a notoriously fast-paced, full-on dating culture.
Bravo TV / Via giphy.com
Choosing the perfect place to go can be pretty overwhelming.
There are so many essential things to factor in. Like drinks that are strong but not too strong, and exits that are easy to slip out of if your date ain't going great.
HBO / Via giphy.com
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How Presidential Candidates Practice For Debates
Win Mcnamee / Getty Images
Debate prep takes many forms: studying, rehearsing, testing applause lines in front of an audience of your closest advisors.
On this episode of the BuzzFeed politics podcast, we talk with Democratic consultant Lis Smith about how that process works. She worked on Governor O'Malley's debate prep team this year and on the rapid response team during President Obama's 2012 campaign.
And we talk with Jim Lehrer, the "dean of moderators," about the particular challenges moderators are facing this year.
He says it shouldn't be up to moderators to fact check candidates, even in Donald Trump's case. "The voters aren't stupid," he says, "and the moderator's job is to make sure it is all revealed for the people to see and make their own judgments about all of this. It isn't playing God."
Listen to the full episode here, or subscribe on iTunes
Update: This article previously misstated Lis Smith's role on President Obama's 2012 campaign.
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