The fascinating new glimpse of the little animals was on the BBC’s new show, Wild At Heart, which is narrated by David Tennant.
BBC / Via youtube.com
This Is What An X-Ray Of A Hamster Looks Like After They Fill Their Cheeks With Tons Of Food
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You Need To See How Creepy The "Friends" Intro Is Without The Music
Never realized that none of them can dance.
The title sequence to Friends is one of the most iconic TV intros of our time.
That couch!
NBC / Via youtube.com
Look at them all dancing in a fountain and splashing water at each other!
NBC / Via youtube.com
They have umbrellas for some reason!
Should have brought them in the fountain.
NBC / Via youtube.com
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33 Of The Creepiest Lines In Literature
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” - John Milton, Paradise Lost
Dan Meth / Via BuzzFeed
1. "Even the dead tell stories."
—Marcus Sedgwick, Revolver
Suggested by Tallulahmac
2. "Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city."
—Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
Suggested by caitlinm18
3. "The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe."
—Ray Bradbury, Kaleidoscope
Suggested by Jonny Lim
4. "With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so: "First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions."
—Bram Stoker, Dracula
Suggested by Amy Wildman on Facebook
5. "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country."
—Kurt Vonnegut
Suggested by kellym4af8fad7c
Dan Meth / Via BuzzFeed
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Which Disney Villain Said It?
You poor unfortunate souls.
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65 Books You Need To Read In Your 20s
The books that will move you, inspire you, make you cry, make you think, make you laugh. Even if you read them in high school or college, you’ll have a different perspective on them now that you’re Out In The World. (Trust me.)
The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud
The best 9/11 novel that's much more than a 9/11 novel. Weirdly relatable, even though the characters are all pretty much upper-class pseudo-intellectuals.
What She Saw..., by Lucinda Rosenfeld
Important twenties life lesson: Dating losers is not a life sentence. (Thank god.)
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What's Your Ikea Spirit Name?
Are you a GODMORGON or a KÖTTBULLAR at heart?
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26 Things That Only Make Sense In The Midwest
Cedar Point > Disney World
Being late to work because you were stuck behind a tractor.
Buying concealer specifically for your mosquito bites.
Cheese being its very own food group.
Puppy Chow serving as a well-balanced meal.
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This Policeman Filmed Dancing To Taylor Swift In His Car Is An Inspiration To Us All
In an emergency, just call 1989-11.
The Dover, Delaware, police department has shared a dashcam video of an officer dancing to Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" in his car.
And while we don't know if the video is fake, or if this officer's a genuine Swiftie, we can't help but be inspired by the way he gets down to Tay Tay.
When this guy gets down, he gets down.
Click the sound icon for full effect.
Dover Police Department / youtube.com / Via vine.co
He shakes it right off.
vine.co / Via Dover Police Department / youtube.com
He shakes it all the way off the steering wheel, at times.
"Hella good hair."
vine.co / Via Dover Police Department / youtube.com
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Here Are The First Images From The Fully Illustrated Edition Of "Harry Potter"
Four beautiful illustrations of Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, and Malfoy from the upcoming full-color edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, due out in October 2015.
Scholastic and Bloomsbury, the publishing houses that put out the Harry Potter books in the United States and the United Kingdom, today released the first four images from the first fully illustrated version of the Harry Potter books.
Jim Kay, an award-winning British artist, is set to do the artwork for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's — erm, Philosopher's — Stone, which is due out in the U.S. and the U.K. on Oct. 6, 2015.
“To be given the opportunity to design the characters, the clothing, the architecture and landscapes to possibly the most expansive fantasy world in children's literature, well let’s just say I'm extremely excited about it,” Kay said in a release from Scholastic.
This new deluxe hardcover edition will feature 110 full-color illustrations, as well as separate cover images done by Kay for the American and British editions. A representative for Scholastic told BuzzFeed there is no release date for the cover images yet.
Kay will also do the art for the fully illustrated editions of the other six Harry Potter books, which Scholastic plans to release once a year for the next six years, with the release of an illustrated Book 7, Deathly Hallows, in 2021.
Jim Kay / Bloomsbury Publishing / Via mediaroom.scholastic.com
There's a sketch of a freckly young Ron, who looks like he might have a bit of an itch on his nose.
Jim Kay / Bloomsbury Publishing / Via mediaroom.scholastic.com
And there's Kay's interpretation of Draco Malfoy, who's looking eerie while getting magically measured for his Hogwarts robes in Madam Malkin's Robes for All Occasions, where he and Harry meet during Harry's first trip to Diagon Alley.
Jim Kay / Bloomsbury Publishing / Via mediaroom.scholastic.com
There's also an illustration of Hermione, who appears to be conjuring Bluebell Flames, which she used to set fire to Snape's robes during a Quidditch match, and also to save Harry and Ron from the Devil's Snare at the end of Sorcerer's Stone.
Jim Kay / Bloomsbury Publishing / Via mediaroom.scholastic.com
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Here's How To See What College Admissions Officers Wrote About You
A group of Stanford students have found a way to crack open the secretive world of elite college admissions.
Beck Diefenbach / Reuters
A group of Stanford students have discovered a way to access their own confidential admissions files — including comments by admissions officers, criticisms of their applications, and information about how their status as minorities, athletes, or legacies affected their applications.
The staff of an anonymous Stanford publication called The Fountain Hopper is encouraging thousands of students at Stanford and other universities nationwide to request their own files, potentially cracking open the secretive and controversial world of elite colleges admissions.
College admissions is a topic that has been hotly contested lately — a recent lawsuit filed against Harvard University alleges that the school discriminates against Asian applicants. The details of how, exactly, private schools like Harvard consider race have long been shrouded in secrecy — but could be laid bare if Harvard students follow the methods of the Stanford students at the Fountain Hopper, gaining access to everything admissions officers have written about them.
The Stanford students' method is shockingly simple: requesting access under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, which mandates that schools provide students access to their own educational records.
Almost nobody knows, however, that FERPA can provide students with access to their own highly secretive admissions files. The Fountain Hopper staffers sent out an email to Stanford students last night encouraging them to request their own admissions documents; they estimate that as many as 700 students have already filed their own requests, creating what could be a trove of data about how the country's most selective university selects its students.
Documents viewed by BuzzFeed News show that Stanford students were able to view the evaluative essays written about them by admissions officers and numerical valuations assigned to their personal qualities, as well as descriptions of interviews and recommendation letters. The documents are labeled "confidential." But under FERPA, they legally belong to students. While most applicants waive their rights to view their recommendation letters, the same does not apply to what is written about them by their school's admissions office.
"It caused such a stir on campus," said Tristan Navarro, a freshman at Stanford.
Navarro said sent in a FERPA request for his admissions records after he received the Fountain Hopper's email Thursday night. The next morning, he said, a confused representative from Stanford's IT Services department told Navarro they had been flooded with FERPA requests overnight. An admissions representative, Navarro said, told him that the office planned to honor the requests within the 45 days required by law.
The Fountain Hopper's staffers said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that they hope the documents shed light on Stanford's process. "We think that admission to a University such as Stanford is a process that is biased towards those that are in the know," they wrote in an email. "Everyone has a right to know what goes on in the black box."
Just 5% of almost 40,000 students were admitted to Stanford in 2014, the lowest admissions rate of any university in the country. Stanford declined to comment.
Just contact the admissions office at your university and request access under FERPA to any documents they have, which they are legally obligated to provide within 45 days. This is the language suggested by Stanford's Fountain Hopper:
Pursuant to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (20 U.S.C. Sec. 1232g), I write to request access to and a copy of all documents held by the Stanford University Office of Undergraduate Admission, including without limitation a complete copy of any admissions records kept in my name in any and all university offices, including the Undergraduate Admission Workcard and all associated content (including without limitation the qualitative and quantitative assessments of any 'readers', demographics data, interview records) ; any e-mails, notes, memoranda, video, audio, or other documentary material maintained by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
FERPA prohibits the imposition of a fee to review documents (per 34 CFR Sec. 99.11(b)).
If you choose to redact any portion of any documents responsive to this request, please provide a written explanation for the redaction including a reference to the specific statutory exemption(s) upon which you rely. Also, please provide all segregable portions of otherwise exempt material. I understand that I may have previously waived FERPA rights pertaining to recommendations provided through the Common Application. Be advised that, if selected, this waiver pertains solely to recommendations provided through the Common Application system.
As per 34 CFR Sec. 99.10(b), these records must be made available for my inspection within 45 days of this request.
I look forward to receiving a full response within 45 calendar days.
Most schools only consider FERPA requests for admissions records from admitted students, however. You will likely be out of luck at schools from which you were rejected.
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In Teen Court, Kids Have A Right To A Jury Of Their Peers
One day after school last December, 15-year-old Michael took the stand in a Brooklyn courtroom. His crime: jumping a subway turnstile instead of paying for the $2.50 ride, classified as the most serious level of misdemeanor in New York.
“How are you feeling today?” the jury foreman asked him.
“Nervous,” Michael said. (His name has been changed since he is a minor.) He had walked in with a scowl, but now looked like he was about to cry.
The New York Police Department takes turnstile jumping very seriously. More than 37,000 people received incarceration time for fare evasion from 2008 to the first half of 2014, according to state data; 1,802 of them were minors.
If Michael didn’t take care of his ticket before his next birthday, he could have even become one of the nearly 50,000 16- and 17-year-olds who end up in the state’s criminal courts every year, most of whom are charged with nonviolent crimes — New York is one of only two states where the age of adult criminal responsibility is 16. The overwhelming majority of youths sentenced to incarceration, 80%, are black and Latino.
But adults wouldn’t decide Michael’s fate that afternoon. Instead of giving him a ticket, the police officer who caught Michael trying to sneak into the subway sent him to teen court, which is run for and by teenagers.
The judge Michael faced was a teen. The jury members were teens. His “youth advocate” defender, as well as the “community advocate” who played a vaguely prosecutorial role, were teens as well.
“We are here to help you, not to judge you,” the 17-year-old foreperson reassured Michael before the questioning began.
Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed
Teen court, also called youth or peer court, may sound like the premise of a sitcom, but there are more than 1,000 youth court programs in 49 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Association of Youth Courts, and some states have even passed teen court-related legislation.
Teen courts are a diversion program, not a court of law, and the majority don’t adjudicate guilt or innocence the way real courts do. Instead, the goal is to determine a fair sentence for first offenders who have admitted guilt for low-level offenses rather than throwing them to the mercy of the criminal justice system. Advocates also believe teens can get through to other teens in a way out-of-touch adults can not. Some jury members are former "respondents" who went through the teen court system themselves.
“Here we treat respondents as people who have stories to tell that go beyond the mistake they made,” said Jah-Neyce, a 17-year-old member of the Red Hook Youth Court. “In a regular court, the judge doesn’t really care who you are.”
Teen court hasn't been around very long — 20 years ago, there were only 78 in operation, according to the National Youth Court Database — although some say its roots stem back to the late 19th century, when social welfare leader William Reuben George founded the George Junior Republic in Freeville, New York, which promoted youthful self-government. His son-in-law may have founded the first youth court in the 1960s.
Police, probation officers, schools, district attorney’s offices, or family and criminal courts may refer minors to teen court who have already confessed to low-level crimes ranging from marijuana possession to shoplifting to assault. The jury attempts to target the root cause of an offender’s actions, after which they might be referred to social services, face community service, attend mandated motivational group counseling, or write a personal essay or public apology.
Advocates say positive peer pressure is more cost-effective than scaring nonviolent offenders straight. It costs about $500 to send a kid to teen court compared to the roughly $5,500 cost per child of appearing in juvenile court, said Jack Levine, program director of the National Association of Youth Courts.
But not everyone is so convinced that it’s a great idea.
Some critics are horrified at the prospect of going so easy on crime. “This scheme combines the worst of soft sentencing and silly gimmicks,” Centre for Crime Prevention’s Peter Cuthbertson told the Daily Mail last summer after a peer court opened in West Yorkshire, England. Those on the other side of the spectrum are concerned by a study and anecdotal evidence that suggested police might refer some kids to teen court who would have otherwise simply been sent home with a stern lecture.
Others are just skeptical that the program actually prevents reoffending. Every teen court is different — some employ adults judges, while peers preside over others, and there’s a vast variation in referral sources — so it’s difficult to evaluate their effectiveness. Teen court participation also typically requires a formal or informal admission of guilt, which means it’s hard to compare it to the traditional court system. And, since teen court is designed for first-time offenders with low-level offenses, recidivism rates are low to begin with.
The lack of concrete data may be the reason why few people know teen courts exist — municipalities strapped for cash aren’t typically excited to invest in something that isn’t proven to work.
Though teen courts seem popular with some legal experts — the former New York State chief judge launched a fund to provide financial support and has unsuccessfully lobbied for legislation — funding is scarce. Most courts in New York are funded by local government, although they can also receive money from the state and federal government, private donors, and local school districts and foundations. Although the majority of youth courts in New York state have an annual operating budget of $50,000 or less, New York’s youth courts are barely scraping by, their employees say.
“People love the idea of youth court,” said Beth Broderick, project director of the Staten Island Youth Justice Center, which hosts the borough’s youth court, “but they don’t seem to want to pay for it.”
But some research is promising. An Urban Institute study of four courts found that those who attended teen court had less than half the one-year recidivism rate of those who passed through the juvenile justice system. Advocates compare that to extensive research that shows that imprisoning young offenders actually increases their odds of committing more serious crimes and returning to prison while also making them less likely to graduate from high school.
“Teens take risks without understanding the long-term consequences,” said Dory Hack, director of Youth Justice Capacity Building at the Center for Court Innovation, a nonprofit that works closely with the New York State Unified Court System. “We strongly feel that youth court is a better way to respond to many minor offenses than the criminal system. We want them to have a positive experience and feel heard.”
In New York City’s youth courts, where teen members are paid a small monthly stipend after undergoing intensive training and hear cases twice a week, annual compliance rates average 93%, Hack said.
A flowchart detailing how some youth courts operate, via the Center for Court Innovation
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed / Via courtinnovation.org
There are more than 80 youth courts in New York State (called "youth" because some respondents are as young as 10 years old, although members are 14-18). The Center for Court Innovation operates five youth courts in New York City and one in Newark, New Jersey. In 2013, the Red Hook Youth Court heard 146 cases, most for larceny, truancy, and assault. The Staten Island Youth Court heard 170, many for shoplifting, thanks to the borough’s most popular teen hangout: the mall.
For New Yorkers 16 and older, the alternative to youth court isn’t necessarily jail time, but the “escalation of a case through the system,” Hack said. In other words, if a kid like Michael doesn’t show up to court, or is later charged with another offense, he might face increasingly serious consequences. By housing the courts in community centers, the Center for Court Innovation hopes to connect at-risk kids who come to youth court with other services they might need close to home. Some sessions take place in real-life courtrooms, like the youth court at Youth and Community Programs at the Red Hook Community Justice Center, which was founded as the nation's first multi-jurisdictional community court in 2000, while others, like Staten Island’s, are conducted in repurposed office rooms.
“There’s an air of legitimacy because of what the kids bring to it,” said Broderick, adding that many respondents and their families are “really stressed” by a traditional courtroom setting.
During youth court sessions in Staten Island and Red Hook, teen respondents walked in looking nervous or defensive — most said they had never heard of youth court before, and had no idea what to expect — but quickly opened up once they realized the jury was on their side.
After everyone in the room cited a crucial confidentiality oath — every so often, a jury member and a respondent run into each other in their high school cafeteria — the cases began. One 11th-grader, clad in sequined Uggs, said that her friend had convinced her to shoplift a bag from H&M and that she struggled with peer pressure. The court assigned her an essay on that topic, along with three hours of community service and a behavior workshop. A pair of sisters who were reported truant explained in separate sessions that their mother had taken them to McDonald’s for breakfast because they had a half-day at school. In many states, truancy charges can carry serious offenses for both kids and their parents, but the court decided that the sisters hadn’t done anything wrong and let them go without any sanctions.
Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed
Michael, the turnstile jumper, was questioned more relentlessly.
First, the community advocate assigned to his case (the kids switch positions regularly) argued that the city loses out on funding thanks to fare evasion, and that younger kids might copy Michael’s actions and get a ticket or face actual jail time. Michael’s advocate, who had met with Michael before the hearing to get to know him better, said he possessed “a multiple of positive attributes,” had a good relationship with his family and friends, and had never dealt with the police before. Plus, Michael “liked to play handball after school.”
The jury then peppered Michael with questions, speaking as quickly as only teens can.
Did Michael have money with him? (No.) Did he ask anyone, say, in his school office, to borrow some before deciding to jump the turnstile? (No.) Had he ever been suspended? (Yes, twice; once for hitting a teacher, but that was in fifth grade.) Did he feel like anyone deserved an apology? (Yes: the MTA.) Who was his role model? (Biggie Smalls, which elicited some hidden grins from the otherwise professional jury). What were his future goals? (College, although he only said so after some encouragement from the jury.) How would his experience in youth court get in the way of them?
In a closing statement, the community advocate said Michael “lacked motivation and spoke too quickly.”
But his advocate defended him.
“He stated if given the chance he would apologize to the MTA, he does not skip school anymore, and he has learned not to jump the turnstile,” he said before thanking Michael for participating.
“We know how hard it is to admit to one’s fault in front of his peers.”
Jon Premosch / BuzzFeed
The jury left the room to deliberate. Some members felt that Michael had learned his lesson, but others thought he was just saying what they wanted to hear.
“He has future goals!” one teenager said in Michael’s defense.
“Well, only after you told him what they should be,” said another. “You had to prompt him.”
Ultimately, the jury assigned Michael a group counseling course, since they felt he needed a group for motivation’s sake, and a letter of apology to the MTA.
Michael and his mother then met with a youth court staffer so she could explain how the center would help him finish his sanctions in time — and that if he didn’t show up, it could stay on his permanent record, at least until he turned 18. (Most jurisdictions send kids who don’t complete their sanctions in time back to the traditional juvenile justice system.) Michael’s mother said she didn’t speak English or have an email account; the staffer told her not to worry.
“The goal isn’t to punish,” a 15-year-old jury member named Marcos said. “But if we see a pattern, we want to help kids fix it up. We all want what’s best for them.”
Asana, 17, who judged Michael’s case, used to think that “every man behind bars is a criminal,” she said. Then, she listened to an elementary schooler explain why he stole an iPhone. He told the court that he only did it because an older group of boys had threatened his family. The experience made Asana cry.
“It made me think of my brothers and sisters,” she said. “Now I’m not so biased.”
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This Couple’s Bookstore Proposal Is Every Book Lover's Dream
“Any proposal had to involve books, and books in New York entail The Strand.”
Britt Burgeson, 26, met Daniel O’Duffy, 25, when they were both students at the University of Notre Dame.
“It took a long time to win over Britt,” O’Duffy told BuzzFeed. “We met speed dating at Notre Dame, and she absolutely mauled me in a contest of wit and literary references.”
Krystie Yandoli / BuzzFeed
“I knew that I loved her soon after starting at a different college and feeling a void in my life where we weren't talking every day, weren't sharing experiences,” O’Duffy said.
Krystie Yandoli / BuzzFeed
After dating for years, O’Duffy wanted to make things official by proposing to Burgeson last September at one of her favorite places in New York City: The Strand bookstore.
“I made sure that the day was the pinnacle of a normal Sunday," O'Duffy said. "We went to our favorite bar, our favorite summer day outing at Governor's Island, which coincidentally fell on the last day it was open in 2014. We were surrounded by our friends at our favorite bar, then we wandered through the best bookstore.”
Krystie Yandoli / BuzzFeed
“Growing up an only child, I spent a lot of time reading. Books provided adventure, friendship, and a lens into another’s reality,” Burgeson told BuzzFeed. “New to New York, The Strand was my oasis in the city.”
“In case of even the most bleak global apocalypse in the style of The Road, Britt would keep going because there are books left unread and unloved out there,” O’Duffy said.
Krystie Yandoli / BuzzFeed
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Can You Guess If These Craigslist Ads Are Real Or Fake?
Will you get a bargain or get scammed?
Comedy Central
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The Whitney Houston Biopic Is Surprisingly Sympathetic To Ex Bobby Brown
Lifetime’s Whitney could upset Houston’s diehard fans with its unsparing portrait of their relationship.
Angela Bassett directing YaYa DaCosta in Whitney.
Lifetime
For a long time, among Whitney Houston's fans and sympathizers, the accepted narrative of her relationship with R&B singer Bobby Brown was that Brown was the miscreant who led a formerly angelic singer down a dark, drug-fueled path.
Eventually, a different version of their relationship that's more sympathetic to Brown emerged — which is the interpretation in actor and first-time director Angela Bassett's Lifetime movie Whitney, which premieres Jan. 17. Viewers will see Houston abusing drugs before Brown even comes into the picture; in this retelling of their relationship, Houston is the one who leads Brown into harder drugs.
But for Bassett, this portrayal of their relationship simply serves to more accurately set up the beginning of the central, complicated narrative of Houston's life — and the one she and producers chose to focus on in this biopic, which stars former reality TV show model YaYa DaCosta as Houston.
"When I came aboard, the story was a five-year period through the wonder years of their careers, where they both were very successful, and popular, magnetic, charismatic, entertaining. It's all beautiful — that first blush of love," Bassett said in an interview with BuzzFeed News, speaking of the beginning of Houston and Brown's courtship in the late '80s.
That's perhaps an optimistic view of a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship that was fueled by drug abuse, 911 calls, uncomfortable TV interviews, and tabloid covers. By the '90s, Houston and Brown were the frequent butt of jokes on Saturday Night Live and MadTV, and the 2005 Bravo reality series Being Bobby Brown showed a couple whose relationship was on its last legs.
But Bassett said she wasn't particularly interested in what came later. "You get an indication of what is to come," she said of her film. "We all know how the story ends. We didn't need to visit that here."
DaCosta
Lifetime
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These Airport Nap Pods Are Every Tired Traveler's Dream
Each one is stocked with a bed, desk, and alarm clock. Sure beats sleeping on the baggage claim.
Ah, yes. The ever-so-satisfying airport nap:
We'll take one just about anywhere: on seats...
Armrests be damned.
On people:
On the baggage claim:
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Which Dr. Seuss Character Are You?
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” ― Dr. Seuss
Random House
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Romney: The World Is A Mess
As rumors ramp up that Mitt’s considering another run, he emphasizes the failures of “Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama” foreign policy, economic opportunity, and addressing poverty.
Shannon Stapleton / Reuters
SAN DIEGO — Mitt Romney didn't directly answer speculation he would run for president again on Friday night in San Diego, but he did lay out a short version of a stump speech, repeatedly attacking Hillary Clinton's foreign policy and emphasizing broad economic opportunity — and poverty.
Speaking from the USS Midway, a former aircraft carrier turned museum, at the RNC winter meetings, Romney argued the 2016 election will be about the post-Obama era. But then he said three things would be most important: an aggressive foreign policy (making the world a "safer place"), economic opportunity, and addressing poverty in the United States.
Romney listed off a litany of trouble spots in the world, taking pains to include Clinton's name in his description of the foreign policy approach, and other general nods toward her work as secretary of state under President Obama (such as, "if we press the reset button," a reference to the relationship with Russia).
While Romney did not explicitly say he is running for president again in 2016, his three principles could be seen as a vision of a different campaign. Romney, who many believe showed a softer, more personal side only after losing in 2012, spoke about how his wife Ann knows his heart and has seen him work with people who are very poor when he was a pastor. He also called it a "human tragedy" that the middle class in America doesn't believe their children's future will be better than their own.
Last week Romney told a group of 30 Republicans donors that he was seriously considering running for president for a third term and began making calls to former aides and supporters, according to reports.
"She believes people get better with experience," Romney said of his wife on Friday night, before vowing that they would both support whoever the nominee ends up being in 2016. His only small hint was that he was giving "serious consideration" to the future.
He also touched on what many would expect to be Democratic territory, saying that under Obama the rich got richer and income equality got worse.
Romney's timeline was likely influenced by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's announcement that he will run in 2016 as well, suddenly crowding an already large and varied field, that seems likely to include New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, among others.
Rumbles that Romney will seek the Republican nomination yet again have been met tepid support, though, in some conservative and media circles and among other candidates.
Paul recently said that Romney "had his chance," Cruz and other Republican senators didn't have many words of encouragement.
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Chris Hemsworth Is Not At His Best In The New Movie "Blackhat"
Director Michael Mann’s cybercrime thriller is a lot of beautiful sequences that add up to an alarmingly dull whole.
Chris Hemsworth, Wei Tang, and Holt McCallany in Blackhat
Frank Connor/Universal Pictures
Director Michael Mann was making hyper-stylish globalized blockbusters back when the Transformers franchise was but a robot-alien twinkle in Michael Bay's expensive-sunglass-covered eye.
Mann's new film, the hacker thriller Blackhat, feels like a spiritual sequel to his 2006 adaptation of Miami Vice, which, love it or loathe it, often embodied the kind of thrilling, larger-than-life lushness that Mann can do better than anyone else. And Blackhat manages to be even more unmoored and beautiful and remote and empty. It involves a continent-hopping terrorist plot that brings together the FBI, Chinese officials, and a convict released from prison for the occasion. And it is, for the most part, amazingly dull.
Blackhat stars Chris Hemsworth as Nicholas Hathaway (who's referred to by his last name like it's some notorious handle), a man in the middle of serving a decade-plus sentence for his past hacking misdeed when he's furloughed from prison at the insistence of his old MIT roommate, Chen Dawai (Wang Leehom), now a security analyst with the Chinese government. A malicious hacker has caused a meltdown on a Chinese nuclear plant using a remote administration tool Hathaway and Chen wrote back in college. Joined by Dawai's network engineer sister Lien (Tang Wei) and — in the spirit of international cooperation — FBI agents Barrett (Viola Davis) and Jessup (Holt McCallany), the team tracks the hacker from the U.S. to Hong Kong and Indonesia.
Frank Connor/Universal Pictures
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The True Tragedy Of "American Sniper"
Warner Bros.
I love war movies: not for the explosions or the patriotism, but because they gave me a window into the world that structured the days of my onetime boyfriend and best friend Luke, who left our small town in Idaho at 18 to attend military school, enlist in the Army, become a Ranger, and, in 2003, leave for the North Korean DMZ and Iraq.
In the beginning, I consumed whatever Luke approved as a true approximation of military life. Blackhawk Down, especially the book, was one of his favorites, and I devoured it, sending him AIM messages with each chapter, asking questions about acronyms, and begging him never to get “Blackhawk Down-ed.” I wanted to know everything about what his life in combat might look like — the way that soldiers spoke to each other, how their beds were arranged, how dirty their faces got in the sand, the patterns of sweat on their backs, the look of their walks, and straightness of their posture. I wanted to feel something of that reality, but I was terrified of how that reality might play out.
That’s what draws so many of us to military movies: the fetishization of what the military does to men (turns them into honorable, beautifully built brothers of man) and the terror of what happens to those men once placed in battle.
It’s certainly what drew me and so many others to American Sniper, which is shattering all records for a January release, bringing in an estimated $105 million over the long weekend. The success of Sniper comes as a surprise in part because for much of the last 10 years, you couldn’t tell a story about contemporary U.S. conflicts that brought audiences to the theater. Stop Loss, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, Lions for Lambs, Redacted, The Messenger, Green Zone, and Brothers were all disappointments; even Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker famously grossed just $17 million domestically.
When the war is happening — when the coffins draped in flags are coming home every week — the horror of men in battle is too great. No one wants to pay $10 to be faced with the ongoing and uncomfortable reality of an ambiguous war still without resolution.
But after the battle is ostensibly done — not won, per se, but, at least in American eyes, over — that’s when Hollywood’s mythology machine kicks in. The success of Zero Dark Thirty ($95 million domestic) was a testament to audiences’ willingness to see a movie that narrativized the most disturbing parts of the war (torture) and pointed to their end result (the capture of Osama bin Laden). A similar phenomenon happened with Vietnam: the canonical movies (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill) we associate with that conflict all arrived several years after its end.
It’s difficult, after all, to tell a good story when you don’t know how it ends. But the brilliance of so many of those failed war films is that very inability to conclude, the particular purgatory and perdition of these wars without end. It hurt to watch them; to leave the theater blinking in dismay, wondering how to get that deep feeling of unsolvable sorrow out of your heart.
Most Americans avoided these films because they didn’t want to feel that intimately connected to these unsettling and unwinnable wars. As many have pointed out, the make-up of the contemporary armed forces (which, absent conscription, draw heavily on lower-income populations) has facilitated an alienation from the realities of war: Since so few know anyone in the war, it’s remarkably easy to remain financially, emotionally, psychologically unaffected. A movie like The Hurt Locker or the stunning documentary Restrepo bridge that gap, rendering the vast psychological wreckage in a manner that simply cannot be ignored.
Some believe that American Sniper is serving a similar function. The film humanizes its protagonist, Chris Kyle, and in so doing, ostensibly humanizes the war. By watching Kyle, as a child, an aimless adult, and a principled Navy SEAL trainee, we’re encouraged to think of him not as a soldier, but a man: a father, a husband, a person of worth. Because the screenplay is based on Kyle’s own autobiography, we’re also invited to take its depiction at face value: This isn’t some screenwriter’s rendering of the war, but the way it really was. The visceral shots of Kyle during SEALs training (close-ups on his face as superiors spray him with a firehose, shivering in the mud strapped to his fellow trainees) invite the audience to empathize with his growth, as both a man and soldier. When he lies on his stomach, sighting his rifle, POV shots make his gaze our own. In the theater where I saw it, the Dolby Atmos sound made me feel the rumble of the tanks vibrating through my entire body; every time Kyle made a shot, I felt the kickback in my spine.
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Kyle is as winning and American as they come: unwavering in his commitment to both America and his men, he’s a throwback to the type of soldier we associate with the cleaner wars of the past, when ideas of “good” and “bad” were so comfortingly legible. Unlike the soldiers from other films dealing with recent wars, he doesn’t listen to rap music, stash porn, or play video games; he drinks three beers at a bar and calls it good, and despite a lower lip that looks permanently filled with tobacco, we never see him dip. The closest he comes to manifesting something like PTSD is bum-rushing a dog he fears is attacking his son; that anger and psychological trauma is quickly resolved when his psychiatrist gets him talking to other veterans at the VA hospital.
Because it’s impossible to wrap up the film, as so many World War II dramas do, with an American victory, the contemporary war film has to create another winnable conflict. In American Sniper, that conflict manifests between Kyle and his sniper nemesis, a doppelganger about whom we know nothing other than 1) he won a gold medal for Syria in the Olympics; 2) he, too, has a young daughter; and 3) he likes spinning a single bullet around on the table like a Bond villain (with no lines of dialogue) while staring into nothingness, waiting for informants to call him with Kyle’s current location. His life’s work seems to be hunting one man in a war of hundreds of thousands, which effectively makes Kyle seem all the more important, skilled, and valuable in our eyes.
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When Kyle at last vanquishes his nemesis, it offers the sort of unquestionable victory that so many of these wartime films, with the pointed exception of Zero Dark Thirty, simply cannot conjure. That’s why the coda of the film — in which Kyle is gunned down by a troubled veteran he took to go shooting — goes unseen and unexplored. To see Kyle dead and gasping on the ground, the victim of a broken system that fails to care for its vets, would undercut the message of personal (and, by extension, national) triumph the film aims to convey.
Some might counter that this sort of neat narrative is what actually happened to Chris Kyle. And while I have no doubt that Kyle was the sort of man who inspired tremendous loyalty amongst men, or that his skill as a sniper was unrivaled, it’s crucial to remember that all of us are constantly narrativizing our lives. Working with co-authors Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice, he turned his memories into a story with a beginning and an end, a genesis and a payoff. That story was tightened as it made its way from Kyle’s mouth onto the page, and tightened further still as it made its way from a 480-page book into a 133-minute movie.
As James Fallows argued in his recent tour de force on the “tragedy of the American military,” the rhetoric of “supporting our troops,” and the resultant imperative not to criticize the failings of the military on a systemic level, is, in truth, a cop-out: a way of not actually taking the military seriously. I’d argue that American Sniper, for all of its patriotism, is the filmic extension of that rhetoric: By buying the ticket, by fostering a feeling of intimacy with Kyle, you’ve expressed your devotion to a certain ideal of the American military and the values of honor, brotherhood, and self-sacrifice, but one which, after leaving the theater, you can once again ignore.
In Eastwood’s hands, that ideal is evacuated of politics: There’s no messy discussion of what got us into the war, or what’s preventing us from winning it, just a story of a man and his individual triumph. Which, of course, is part of the reason American Sniper is dominating the box office: Absent commentary on the war, it can attract viewers of all political persuasions. The narrative makes it virtually impossible to question Kyle or the war he’s fighting; in the one scene in which one of his kills is questioned, Kyle simply yells his defense, effectively ending the scene and any interrogation thereof.
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Watching American Sniper in the theater is an immersive, ultimately cathartic experience — but it shouldn’t be. Every war movie should make you feel like shit. Indeed, every war movie I’ve seen over the last decade, with the exception of Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper, has made me feel like shit, in part because the man for whom I began watching those films was killed in Fallujah in 2004.
I sought out those broken, ambiguous war movies that failed to fill theaters because they manifested the ambiguity and sorrow I felt about Luke’s death. I watched them because in making me feel something deeply, something that troubled me and sat thick in my stomach, they also kept the loss of Luke alive. It’s not that I wanted to wallow in sadness; it’s that they allowed me to continue to grieve him, while simultaneously giving voice to the ways in which an honorable man can fall victim to a cause that might ultimately not be.
I didn’t cry during American Sniper. I felt anxiety and fear, the way that narrative wanted me to, and elation when Kyle made his way into that truck and, ultimately, home. I felt desire for the build of Bradley Cooper, the thickness of it, the way he tucked his polo shirt into his pants, and the sullied baseball cap, because it reminded me of how Luke was built and dressed the same. But Sniper was, at end, a superhero movie. Any frustration I might have felt after the coda was immediately dissipated by a hard cut to actual footage of Kyle’s Cowboy Stadium memorial, set to a melodramatic score, flags billowing mighty and high.
That’s an excellent way to tidy the story of messy war. And while American Sniper shows due glory to its protagonist, I fear it’s ultimately a disservice: not to the thousands of soldiers who gave their lives, but to any future actual and accountable connection between the people who fight these wars and those who watch movies about them.
Warner Bros.
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19 Stages Of Awkwardness That Happen When Your Sarcasm Is Too Subtle
Not a struggle AT ALL. Inspired by this post.
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Immediately, you think of a super sarcastic, zinger of a retort.
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