Please just come right out and say it for once.
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Atic12 / Getty Images
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Atic12 / Getty Images
They’ve basically forgotten all about them.
Tails, he won.
Facebook: maryellenmcinnisPCdistrict5
As the National Post reported, P.E.I. is the sole province that uses a coin toss to resolve a tie, but it's by no means the only one with a strange process. In the Yukon, they draw lots to see who gets elected. Nova Scotia puts the candidates names in a box, shakes it, and picks a winner. Ontario and New Brunswick allow the returning officer to vote in order to choose the winner.
The most common way to decide a tie in Canadian elections is by holding a by-election. Everyone votes again and they see who wins.
Coin tosses are used to settle electoral ties in the Unites States, too. The Washington Post reported in 2014 that 35 states in the U.S. use it as a tie breaker.
Other states use similar games of chance to see who fills a seat.
"South Dakota and Arizona have used card games," reported The Atlantic. "In Virginia, the winner has been chosen from a hat."
CBC News / Via cbc.ca
Squad up!
DC / Marvel Studios / Monique Steele / BuzzFeed
The abusive messages were sent out from an account posing as the feminist writer and activist Caitlin Roper, before being deleted. But questions remain over how such promoted tweets are able to be sent.
The Knicks dropped out of the top 3 and all hell broke loose.
“I think we’re moving in a certain direction,” the director said at Cannes. “I don’t think you can really go backwards.”
Phyllis Nagy, Rooney Mara, Todd Haynes, and Cate Blanchett at the Cannes premiere of Carol
Pascal Le Segretain / Getty Images
Todd Haynes is no stranger to controversy. The filmmaker, whose new lesbian romance Carol recently premiered to much critical love at the Cannes Film Festival, got a brush with it right at the beginning of his career. 1991's Poison, his first feature, was targeted by conservative religious groups for its depictions of gay characters and gay sex, with the added political hook that it received some of its funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Poison went on to win prizes, become a milestone of New Queer Cinema, and launch a directorial career that would encompass Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, and I'm Not There. But in 2015, Haynes doesn't expect anything like the attacks he received when starting out, even with a film that united two famous actresses in a heated affair.
"I don't with Carol, I really don't," Haynes said at a Cannes press roundtable, noting how much times have changed. "It was interesting just recently to watch what happened when the religious freedoms were trying to be protected in Arizona — it backfired utterly. I think we're moving in a certain direction, and there are going to be obstacles along the way, but I don't think you can really go backwards."
He added, "I just read a statistic that more Americans would be comfortable with a gay president than a Christian evangelist. Which is bizarre to me, and that marks a radical shift in the last five-to-10 years."
Wilson Webb / Weinstein Company
Carol is a love story, but it's also very much about homophobia and gender expectations. It's set in 1952, where the title character (played by Cate Blanchett) finds her sexuality being used against her in a battle for the custody of her daughter, even as Carol becomes involved with a younger woman, Therese (Rooney Mara). Haynes uses the repression of his characters to show a courtship that takes place entirely in glances and what's left unsaid.
"I always love it when words escape characters and there are things that happen that can't be articulated," Haynes said. "That is really where the visual language of film is given its most necessity." And in a strangely fitting way, the strict social codes of the time enable the love affair between Carol and Therese to unfold.
"Two women deciding to live together in 1952 is way more acceptable than a man and a woman living together in 1952 who aren't married," Haynes pointed out. "I felt this in Far From Heaven — there's actually more liberty, more freedom in hiding or following certain social conventions that give strange permission for closeness."
He continued, "You're watching how these women pursue each other: Carol invites a girl out to lunch. It's more acceptable at the time than it would seem today [where] it probably would seem more like a come-on. Whereas Carol says, 'I wouldn't have asked a man to go to lunch — that would have been something else.'"
According to Zeshan Ali Khan, the company told him they cannot hire him because they only employ “non-Muslims”.
"Initially, I thought it was a joke. Had they wanted to reject my application they could have given other excuses…," he said.
The Hindu also reports that Khan received an email from Mahendra S. Deshmukh, Associate VP & Head-HR of the company, stating, "We would like to clarify that the company does not discriminate against candidates based on gender, caste, religion, etc. Any hurt caused in the matter is deeply regretted. This erroneous email was sent by my colleague Mrs. Dipika Tike who has joined recently and is still on training."
"It was a blunder and personal mess created by one of our trainees who has no decision making power. We have 61 employees in our office here including one Muslim in the HR team," the company added, according to TOI.
Females are strong as hell.
Netflix / Kennedy Miller Mitchell / Via youtube.com
Always work on your night cheese.
NBC
NBC
NBC
NBC
“To everybody out there who’s her friend, this is going to go on her Facebook page and I want all of you to know she watches Disney channel.”
“You’re havin’ a sunday sesh gettin’ fuckin’ maggot with the boys….”
Choose wisely.
I feel soothed from the harsh realities of life already.
*disintegrates into puddle of feels*
LINK: Follow livesweetphotography for more awwwwwwws.
Using money and ideas gained from building a big e-commerce company and selling it to Amazon, Vinit Bharara is getting into political news.
Cafe.com Editor-in-Chief Blake Zeff, Some Spider CEO Vinit Bharara, Some Spider COO and President Paul Smurl, and Scary Mommy Editor-in-Chief Jill Smokler.
Some Spider
Election seasons bring with them fresh waves of media upstarts, and the newest entrant in this cycle's media-contest-within-a-presidential-contest is Cafe.com, a startup whose funding, and, more intriguingly, business model, comes from the world of e-commerce.
Cafe is the third in a group of sites run by a parent company called Some Spider, which is owned by Vinit Bharara, a co-founder of Diapers.com, which sold to Amazon in 2010. Its editor-in-chief will be former Clinton aide and Salon Political Editor Blake Zeff. In an early hiring coup, they poached two top hands from the New York Times' excellent tech team, Paul Smurl and Rajiv Pant, to build their platform.
The site will aim, Zeff said in an interview along with his three colleagues on Tuesday, to speak to Americans about politics through stories deeply rooted in identity. That will mean talking about politics and policy from certain perspectives — Zeff cited ethnicity, gender, occupation, and age as possible angles Cafe will take. And, he said, it will mean putting tech resources into features that allow readers to figure out what, for instance, a tax proposal would mean for them.
But the most distinctive thing about the nascent site isn't its editorial approach. It's the way in which Bharara's e-commerce roots have shaped his approach to media. Cafe is one of three sites he owns, along with the established Scary Mommy, which he purchased, and The Mid, which is focused on people who — well, you're not supposed to use the term "middle-aged."
Bharara described his approach as a "blend between Vox, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and Amazon."
The business model, he said, is rooted in part in watching Scary Mommy raise six figures' worth of money for charities, using the collective power of an intense, engaged community.
"We're trying to create these big blocs of communities," Bharara said. Rather than simply serve readers display ads, the challenge is to "act as their union rep, go to the brands, and figure out a mutually advantageous way" to sell readers products. In the case of Scary Mommy, that could be diapers; on Cafe, Bharara suggested he might connect readers to advocacy groups. The site's revenue would come from vendors, not readers.
Media companies once dreamed of being the home base for engaged, passionate communities, but that has declined alongside the rise of mobile, and of Facebook and Twitter. Bharara said offering "benefits and services" to readers could help build communities in a way that the social networking giants are overlooking.
Facebook and Twitter are, Smurl argued, missing an opportunity to deepen their relationships with users, and to make money selling them things. "They're so focused on growth that they are to some degree sowing the seeds of their own disruption," he said.
Cafe aims to launch this fall with 10 to 15 editorial staffers and plans to grow. The site, Zeff and Bharara said, will not explicitly identify itself as progressive, though both men are Democrats.
"We're not going to [be] studiously nonpartisan like, 'On the one hand, he said she said,'" Zeff said. "But the brand of the thing is not 'Come here, all ye liberals.' We think that if we have really good product we can reach a whole lot of people who frankly don't have a political affiliation."
Bharara and Zeff also addressed a minor complication of running a political website: Bharara's older brother, Preet, is the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and has transformed the state's politics with a series of aggressive investigations.
Vinit Bharara said he'd told Zeff to give his brother no quarter.
"You'd have to [write it] if there was a story that was negative about Preet," he said. "It isn't even conceivable that we not go there."
“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me!”
Why You Need To See It: What the remake of this timeless classic fails to realize is that RoboCop is far more than a movie about a police officer who is also a robot. It's about corruption and big business, it raises questions about ethics in science and law enforcement, and it's a masterfully directed sci-fi action film that will set an unreachable bar for every movie you watch after. The bad guys are vile, the good guys are somewhere in the middle, and RoboCop stands alone.
Submitted by Samantha Raczynski, Facebook
Orion Pictures
Why You Need To See It: Now that the Mad Max series has been successfully rebooted, it's time for the originals to get the love they deserve — Road Warrior especially. The Earth has dried up and civilization has fallen. The planet is a wasteland and Mad Max walks it.
Submitted by Rachel Ellett, Facebook
Kennedy Miller Productions
Why You Need To See It: Well directed and beautifully choreographed, Equilibrium is riveting, haunting, and suspenseful from start to finish. Set in a dystopian future where feelings and emotion have been outlawed — a ban facilitated by mandatory daily injections of a drug called "Prozium" — Christian Bale stars as John Preston, a strict and unforgiving enforcer of the law. That is, until he neglects to take his Prozium. For some reason, Equilibrium is seldom talked about. Well, it's time it became a part of the conversation.
Submitted by Rebecca Elson, Facebook
Dimension Films / Blue Tulip Productions
Illustration by Daniel Fishel for BuzzFeed News
“Success in sight: The eyes have it!” Thus the scientific journal Gene Therapy greeted the news, in 2008, that an experimental treatment was restoring vision to 12 people born with a congenital disorder that slowly left them blind. Healthy genes were injected to replace the faulty mutations in the patients’ retinas, allowing an 8-year-old to ride a bike for the first time. A mother finally saw her child play softball. Every patient, the researchers reported, showed “sustained improvement.” Five years in, a book declared this “breakthrough” — a good-gene-for-bad-gene swap long pursued as a silver bullet for genetic conditions — as The Forever Fix.
Earlier this month, two of the three research teams running these trials quietly reported that the therapy’s benefit had peaked after three years and then begun to fade. The third trial says its patients continue to improve. But in the other two, all the patients tracked for five years or more were again losing their sight.
Not all gene therapy ends in Greek-caliber tragedy. But these trials serve as a sadly apt parable for the current state of human genetics. This goes especially for the big-data branch of human genetics called Big Genomics. In five years of talking to geneticists, biologists, and historians, I’ve found that the field is too often distinguished by the arc shown here: alluring hope, celebratory hype, dark disappointment.
We live in an age of hype. But the overselling of the Age of Genomics — the hype about the hope, the silence about the disappointments — gobbles up funding that we might spend better elsewhere, warps the expectations of patients and the incentives of scientists, and has implications even for people who pay genetics scant attention. Many hospitals, for instance, are now collecting genetic information from patients that they may market to “research partners” such as drug companies. Some take more care than others do to secure informed consent. (Had blood drawn lately? Read everything you signed that day?) It’s not just that they’re selling you this stuff. They may well be selling you. And the sale depends on an exaggerated picture of genetic power and destiny.
To be sure, medical genetics has chalked up some sweet victories. Our growing ability to spot rare mutations, for instance, is helping doctors diagnose and sometimes treat nasty rare diseases. Last fall, for instance, doctors in St. Louis sequenced an infant dying of liver failure, saw that he had inherited a rare mutation that both his parents happened to pass to him, devised a way to counter the mutation's disruption of his immune system, and saved his life.
But when it comes to how genes shape the traits and diseases that matter most to us — from intelligence and temperament to cancer and depression — genetic research overpromises and underdelivers on actionable knowledge. After 110 years of genetics, and 15 years after the $3.8 billion Human Genome Project promised fast cures, after more billions spent and endless hype about results just around the corner, we have few cures. And we basically know diddly-squat.
I know — diddly-squat is rough talk. Yet this is hardly a radical claim. Geneticists and doctors outside of Big Genomics — people studying genetics in songbirds, sea urchins, monkeys, microbes, fruit flies, and roundworms, for instance — often voice it privately. Others are eager to tell us what genes can’t do or warn that “precision medicine” will let us down. One of the world’s most respected geneticists, Britain’s Steve Jones, gives quite an entertaining lecture on our humble state of knowledge.“The more we learn, the less we understand,” he says. “We know almost nothing of genetics.”
The press, of course, too often falls hard for ludicrous memes such as “the slut gene.” But much of the time, the media is simply amplifying the signal sent by Big Genomics. Big Genomics outfits like the National Institutes of Health and the Broad Institute regularly assure us that their careful reading of the genome’s text will find crucial misspellings that generate disease — and let us revise, delete, or write around those errors.
The genomic age’s signature finding is a yawning gap.
In doing so, they continue a tradition as old as genetics itself. Historian Nathaniel Comfort, in The Science of Human Perfection, calls the history of genetics “a history of promises.” Cambridge geneticist William Bateson coined the term genetics in 1905; by 1927, biologists made the first of many assertions that genetics would cure cancer. In 1940, Canadian physician and embryologist Madge Macklin promised “a world in which doctors come to their patients and tell them what diseases they are about to have, and then begin treatments before the patient feels even the first symptoms.” In 1967, Stanford geneticist Joshua Lederberg predicted gene replacement therapy — the kind that is now failing in the blindness trial — “within a few years.”
In 2000 the leaders of the Human Genome Project doubled down. Standing next to President Bill Clinton, they announced that the project had sequenced the human genome, exposing the full genetic code to view. “Personalized genetic medicine,” an accompanying White House Statement said, would soon “cure diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes and cancer by attacking their genetic roots.” Francis Collins, the project’s director (now head of the National Institutes of Health), said the genomic revolution could reduce cancer to zero and would make gene-tailored personalized medicine common by 2010.
A century of hype is a lot, but this is particularly inspirational ground. The gene, especially after Franklin, Watson, and Crick gave us a peek at DNA in 1953, looked promising as hell. For decades, the gene was seen as the key to all of biology — or as President Clinton would eventually put it, “the language in which God created life.” In its code we would read the story of life, evolution, disease, and death.
But when the Genome Project finally revealed the links in Franklin, Watson, and Crick’s deceptively simple structure, it found few of the strong gene-to-trait connections one might have hoped for. Instead, it found a mess. Our DNA held far fewer genes than expected, almost 20,000, which was confusing. Few held obvious function. Some seemed to do nothing. Some seemed to work fine one day but not the next, or to do one thing in one situation and another in another. And these genes were surrounded by vast stretches of DNA material that aren’t really genes, and which some geneticists called junk, starting a big fight.
To clarify this mess — to figure out what did what, and to identify medically relevant genes — researchers started using sequencing machines to scan the genomes of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people for gene variants that appear more often in people with some condition, disease, or trait. These overrepresented genes are then presumed to contribute to the condition or trait in question.
Unfortunately, GWAs seldom revealed the sort of the neat or consistent gene-to-trait relationships that allow decisive treatment. Instead, they usually found “many genes of small effect”: handfuls and sometimes hundreds of gene variants carried by most (but not all) people with the condition in question, whose effects were seldom clear, and whose presence in a given person did little to predict risk.
It is as if they cracked a safe and found almost nothing.
“Many genes of small effect” became a sort of tepid curse. I myself prefer the stronger, more memorable phrase “Many Assorted Genes of Tiny Significance,” or MAGOTS — a mass of barely significant genes explaining little.
MAGOTS infest most GWA studies for a simple, brutal reason: If a gene variant reliably plays a large role in causing disease, both the variant and the disease it causes tend to be rare, because its carriers tend to die without leaving offspring. This is why the genetic contributions for common diseases and conditions usually come from MAGOTS — the effects of which, it bears repeating, are usually maddeningly obscure and unpredictable. This applies even to diseases and traits that run in families. Take height: Hundreds of genes of small effect, few clues to how they contribute, and no real target to tweak if, say, you want to make someone tall. The best way to engineer a tall person? Tell two tall people to tango.
Similarly, deep digs at cancer, schizophrenia, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, intelligence, bipolar disorder, and height have found mostly MAGOTS. The biggest schizophrenia study so far, for instance, published last July to great fanfare, found 128 gene variants that appeared to account for perhaps 7% of a given person’s actual risk.
The genomic age’s signature finding is not any great discovery. It is the yawning gap between the genetic contributions that geneticists assume exist and the genetic contributions they can spot. It is as if they cracked a safe they knew was packed with cash and found almost nothing. The money’s got to be somewhere. But where?
Researchers in the field are quick to point to one of the handful of effective drugs to come from genomic insight, such as Gleevec, a leukemia drug developed in 2001. But Gleevec, however potent, falls far short of the medical miracles forecast 15 years ago. As science writer Ed Yong pointed out in a recent Twitter conversation about this, “Treasure was promised. Gleevec’s a coin.”
At this point, the problem is not so much that genetics fell short of its early promises. The problem is that big genomics players keep making similar promises.
Take, for instance, that schizophrenia study rife with MAGOTS. When the study came out last July, John Williams, head of neuroscience and mental health at the Wellcome Trust, Britain’s biggest biomedical funder, saw it as cause for humility. “What this research screams to me,” he wrote, “is how little we know about schizophrenia, and how far we are from biological tests and treatments for mental health disorders compared to other major diseases.”
Had blood drawn lately? Read everything you signed that day?
Yet last July, the Broad Institute, a genomics powerhouse that played a big role in that schizophrenia study, triumphantly unveiled it as part of an announcement that a donor had given Broad $650 million to expand research at its Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genomics. Broad’s director called the study part of “a revolution in psychiatric disease.” Francis Collins, apparently deaf to how closely his promises echoed those he’d made 15 years before, when the Human Genome Project was unveiled, said psychiatric genomics now stood “poised for rapid advances.” The promises were a decade old, the rhetoric a century. The only things new were the event’s over-the-top staging and production — it views like an awards ceremony — and how boldly, even after 15 years of the “genomic age” with little to show, the Broad conjured big money from thin results.
Big Genomics is converting hype to cash at unsettling speed. After the FDA told consumer genomics company 23andMe it could no longer sell people health data, the company began selling that data to drug and biotech companies. An entire industry, potentially fed by almost anyone who draws blood, spit, or biopsies from you, is emerging to do likewise. Its growth, along with the increasingly routine collection of genetic data by hospitals, will feed the genomics bubble while putting private genetic and health information at increased risk.
Meanwhile, it’s becoming routine for researchers and research centers to leverage genomic findings into industry jobs or startups. This happened, for instance, with the research team that ran one of the sight restoration gene therapy trials whose effects faded after three years.
At the peak of the trials’ promise and publicity, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which ran one of the studies, provided seed money and office space to Spark Therapeutics, a new startup that aims to develop genetic therapies. Spark’s ticker symbol, $ONCE, reportedly referred to the company’s intention to make treatments that would correct genetic faults with a single application.
Bolstered by a partnership with pharma giant Pfizer, Spark went public this January. It promptly became the first quarter’s hottest IPO, returning 256% on first-day investments and reaching a value over $1.5 billion by March. The vision trial had gotten great press — and its president, co-founder, and chief scientific officer, Katherine High, was one of the scientists leading the CHOP trial. High’s integrity may be bombproof. But this sort of bench-to-boardroom practice hardly encourages the critical interrogation of one’s own work that good science depends on.
None of this is to say we should pull the plug on Big Genomics. Some suggest — and I agree — that we’d do well to take some of the billions spent chasing genes for conditions like Type II diabetes, heart disease, or stroke and spend it instead on finding ways to change risk-elevating behaviors like smoking, overeating, overdrinking, and avoiding exercise.
It would be responsible, however, for researchers to temper their hype — though this seems unlikely, because hype pays.
So let me offer a hype filter. This one comes courtesy of the oceanographer Henry Bryant Bigelow, who helped found Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. A century ago, Bigelow opened a letter his brother had written him from Cuba. His brother reported that while weathering a hurricane there, he had seen, flying by, what he was almost sure was a donkey.
With three words, Bigelow gently told his brother he didn’t quite believe him — and stated a maxim for maintaining the ever-curious but ever-skeptical stance that marks the good scientist.
“Interesting if true,” he wrote.
Send this to your significant other to avoid in-person embarrassment.
The collaboration was originally intended for the rapper’s 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city.
Graham Denholm / Getty Images
Angelo Merendino / Getty Images
Can you move down the carriage please?
How about I just meet you in hell?
Matthew Lloyd / Getty / Alex Finnis / BuzzFeed
I'm sure it isn't, but do I look like I care?
Thinkstock / Alex Finnis / BuzzFeed
I mean, I could come, but you know what I could also do? Not.
TfL / Alex Finnis / BuzzFeed
Probably because you're talking to me.
Thinkstock / Alex Finnis / BuzzFeed
