This is the most important friendship in history.
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Listeners on Amazon Prime Music are getting an exclusive, all-acoustic playlist with original recordings commissioned by the company.
OAR's Marc Roberge
Amazon
On July 31, Amazon Prime Music subscribers will be treated to a streaming all-acoustic playlist, with exclusive tracks from 30 artists in a mix of covers and original songs. It is only Amazon's second excursion into exclusive streaming, following a holiday release last winter called "All Is Bright." What's really interesting about the playlist, however, is that these tracks aren't just exclusive to Amazon due to licensing agreements, they're exclusive because Amazon commissioned the recordings itself.
The collection, titled simply "Amazon Acoustics," will stream on Amazon Prime Music, Amazon's streaming service that comes free with Amazon Prime. The playlist includes a cover of Outkast's "Hey Ya" by Surfer Blood, a song by Train, and an original solo track from OAR's Marc Roberge.
"When it's Amazon, you jump on it," Roberge explained to BuzzFeed News of his decision to record a track for the Seattle retailer. "This is just a really timely and awesome opportunity. I wrote the song the day I got the call."
Exclusive tracks represent a strong emerging trend for streaming. One of the few ways the Spotifys or Rdios of the world can differentiate from the competition is to offer something unique that the others don't have. Usually that comes in the form of an artist picking one streaming service over another, like Taylor Swift putting her music on Apple Music and not on Spotify, or windowed releases — when an album would, hypothetically, be available on Spotify for a few weeks or months before getting released to Apple Music.
So "Amazon Acoustics" — as a commissioned release — is a new way to look at exclusives. It puts Amazon in similar territory with record labels, and is even more similar to the way Netflix offers exclusive shows it makes itself, taking on something of a studio role.
An all-acoustic playlist is, uh, let's say fairly out of step compared to exclusives on other on-demand music services. This year, hip-hop has been the streaming economy's biggest trend, dominating services like Spotify, YouTube, and Rdio. So, why strum when the rest of the industry thumps?
According to Steve Boom, vice president of Digital Music at Amazon, Prime Music has a different audience than its competitors. "The Amazon Prime demographic is different than the general demographic," Boom told BuzzFeed News. (We translated this to mean that it has more old people.) "[Prime] is getting wide enough to seem like it's the same, but it's not."
Boom went on to explain that Prime listeners are more of the "lean-back" variety — the kind of listener who relies on curation and ease of use for a casual listening experience, instead of a platform geared toward letting the audience find new music for themselves. Pandora, the online radio service, is a purely lean-back service, and is one of the few major platforms to also not count hip-hop as its leading genre among audience members.
Regardless of what this release could be a model for — in terms of lean-back experiences, commissioned releases, or strum-along music for a wider age category — Amazon downplays the importance of exclusivity.
"I think the jury is still out on whether exclusives will be a big deal," said Boom. "We want to provide something cool for our customers — that's the bottom line."
NEW ORLEANS — As Hurricane Katrina barreled toward the coast, small-time drug dealer Jabbar Gibson and a friend decided to hunker down in a motel down the street from his home in the dilapidated Fischer public housing complex. The rain and wind were so fierce that the windows blew out as they huddled inside.
By morning, Gibson returned home to find the Fischer had damage, too. Fallen trees had gouged out large chunks of some of the homes. The winds had shattered windows, destroyed wooden fences, lifted off tile from the roof, and even taken pieces out of some of the bricks.
Things seemed plenty bad even before he and the rest of his neighbors heard reports about the breach in the levees on the other side of the Mississippi River. Slowly but surely, across the river, other neighborhoods — the Ninth Ward, Bywater, Mid-City — were being swallowed by floodwater.
After two days without power, food, or even a merciful Gulf Coast breeze, and no assurances that anyone would come save them, Gibson and a small group of friends started thinking of ways to escape. They hit the streets with a piece of hose pipe and a plastic jug to siphon gas. Within hours, they had found gas, but the truck they wanted to use wasn’t reliable enough or big enough for an escape.
“We were desperate,” said Kerry Lavinette, a longtime resident of Fischer. “It was either that or we were going to drown.”
Soon they spotted a school bus rumbling down L.B. Landry Avenue, a major street that runs from the Mississippi River Bridge through the Fischer Projects and into Algiers, a neighborhood sometimes called the 15th Ward. Gibson and his friends flagged down the driver to ask where he got the bus. “Algiers Point,” he told them.
There they found about a dozen yellow school buses parked in a barn. Inside an unlocked office, Gibson and his friends found keys hanging on a door. They checked the numbers on the keys and matched them to the buses. It took about a half hour to find a bus that would start. Orleans Parish school bus No. 0232 had been left behind with a full tank of gas.
“I learned how to [drive the bus] right then and there,” Gibson said, a smile creasing his face. “I was driving all right for the first time.”
A handful of other friends and neighbors managed to get buses running too. They all headed back to the Fischer for those who’d been stranded.
“He pulled up with the bus,” said Roger Robinson, a friend of Gibson’s, “and was like, ‘Let’s go.’”
In this corner of the old Fischer Projects, they will never forget the swollen drainage ditches, the mounds of tree branches and debris, the relentless mosquitoes, and the heat and darkness of cramped old apartments that no longer had electricity.
They will never forget the mounting desperation as their neighborhood ran out of food and water. The toilets wouldn’t flush. There was nowhere to refill prescriptions. The only breaks in the silence were the occasional echoes of gunfire and shattering glass. Hurricane Katrina had turned them into prisoners of a drowning city.
“We all thought we were going to die,” Lavinette said.
While the memories of their misery are vivid, so are their memories of the lanky young man who saved them: Jabbar Gibson.
These days, he’s better known as Inmate No. 29770-034 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Pollock, Louisiana. Gibson has been there since 2010 for gun and drug possession, locked away from his people and the Fischer, which has since been razed and rebuilt into a sprawling development of small, pastel-colored homes built on the same sun-baked dirt of the West Bank of the Mississippi.
Tucked deep in the piney woods of central Louisiana, the prison is a medium-security facility of about 1,600 inmates. Among them are the brother of notorious New York crime boss John Gotti and one of the co-founders of the Black Mafia Family drug trafficking organization.
Gibson relished the idea that anyone on the outside still remembers him as something more than a low-level drug pusher from New Orleans. “Being called a hero was cool,” Gibson told BuzzFeed News during a May interview at the prison. “I’ve missed out on a lot being up in here.”
Like a lot of the men serving time in Pollock, Gibson almost seemed destined to end up behind bars.
Built in the shadow of the Mississippi River Bridge, and isolated from most other West Bank communities by the bridge, a canal, and a railroad line, the William J. Fischer Housing Development — better known as the Fischer Projects — was home to three generations of Gibsons.
Almost from its opening in 1965, the Fischer was beset by crime, drugs, and all the other ills that come with crushing poverty. Bernice Gibson was raised there as a child, raised her own children there, and today, her daughter Tranice is raising her own child in one of the newer homes on the isolated 50-acre property.
“It wasn’t really no place for nobody to grow up,” Bernice Gibson said. “You always had to fight all the time.”
Gibson recalls having little choice but to protect himself and his three younger siblings. “I grew up fighting,” he said. “I learned it from my father.” He paused. “Before he got into drugs.”
His late grandmother dubbed him “Peter Jackrabbit” as a toddler because of his almond-shaped eyes and restlessness, a boundless enthusiasm that could barely be contained by the project’s brick walls and bleak prospects.
“He looked like a little bunny. He was always smiling,” said Marie Gibson, his eldest aunt and the woman who raised him when his mother struggled with drugs and petty crime. “And every time you saw him, he was hopping somewhere.”
At school, Jabbar played basketball, ran track, and developed a reputation as a class clown. His calm demeanor and playfulness caught the attention of one classmate, Shareena Hills, the summer before they entered L.B. Landry High School.
“He was funny, goofy, and always wanting to joke around and play,” said Hills, his longtime girlfriend and mother to his oldest daughter. “He was never was about trying to do no harm to anybody.”
But school didn’t stick. Jabbar’s penchant for fighting got him kicked out in the 10th grade. By that time, he had already started gravitating toward the streets and a group of older boys who had their run of the projects.
Raised in a home without much money, Jabbar wanted the things his parents couldn’t give him. Working odd jobs, dealing, and playing dice, he got them. “Every time the Jordans came out, I got them,” he said.
He was also generous — almost to a fault — with siblings and close friends. He made sure his brothers and sisters had Christmas gifts. He’d bring home some cash and extra snacks, and even take them out for dinner.
“He just used to pop up with stuff,” said Tranice, his 27-year-old sister. “Whatever mama say I couldn’t have, he’d come up with it.”
When his younger brother Troy started playing on a traveling youth basketball team, Gibson did his best to attend all of the games. And before more than a dozen games, Troy recalled, Gibson left a brand-new pair of shoes on the bench for him and a close friend.
“I didn’t have no father,” said Troy, who is now 28 and works at the New Orleans Convention Center. “Jabbar was my father, even though he was only two years older. He showed me how to be a father.”
Gibson worked at a local flea market, but the rest of the money came from supplying drugs to the junkies around the neighborhood. His mother didn’t ask questions. “I never paid no attention to him. That’s all on him. What I gotta do with it?” she said.
Around the Fischer Projects and the West Bank, Gibson seemed much older than his age. Even as a teenager, he had no problem taking care of himself or his people. In fact, he seemed drawn to it.
“It feels like he’s a mastermind,” his sister said. “Everybody listens to him.”
Water spills over a levee along the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Aug. 30, 2005.
Pool / Getty Images
In the early morning hours of Aug. 29, 2005, Katrina came ashore and leveled New Orleans and much of the surrounding area.
Thousands of local residents followed Mayor Ray Nagin’s orders to evacuate hours earlier. But at the Fischer, populated by several generations of residents who’d survived hurricanes Betsy and Camille, there wasn’t a rush to leave. High winds and surging waters had never done much damage to those bricks.
They also had no means to leave. Many Fischer residents, including Bernice Gibson, didn’t have driver’s licenses, let alone vehicles. They relied on the city bus and taxi cabs when they had to venture beyond their neighborhood.
As things grew more desperate, Gibson was willing to take a risk. To escape, they’d have to think big. He’d seen that bus coming down Landry Avenue. He knew the bus lot wasn’t too far away. He’d stolen a vehicle before. Why not now, with their lives on the line?
“He was like, ‘I’m about to go get a bus and I’m coming back,’” Tranice Gibson said.
There wasn’t much time to waste — they figured they’d have to beat the rising waters or the police, who might try to stop residents from using stolen buses to escape — to get to safety. Word had already filtered through the gossipy webs of Fischer, and people were lining up to get onto the buses, their meager belongings in tow.
About 60 people had climbed aboard Gibson’s bus when the police arrived at the scene. The officers made everyone get off the bus. Gibson handed over the keys and fled the scene. Only his mother remained.
“I stayed on the bus to protect Jabbar,” she said. “He ran because he [saw] the police.”
He had a reason for running. Nearly two weeks earlier, Gibson had been apprehended after leading New Orleans police on a high-speed chase that ended with a car wreck and four officers suffering minor injuries, according to local media reports. Gibson, who told the Times-Picayune in a 2005 interview that he was known as the “kingpin” of Fischer, also faced a pending charge of possession of crack cocaine stemming from an arrest in June of that year.
Nonetheless, Bernice Gibson said she managed to convince the officers that giving Jabbar the keys and letting him take control of the bus was necessary to evacuate people who were in dire need of help.
“It ain’t the police who was helping us” get out of there, she said. The officers relented and handed the keys back to Gibson when he returned.
“Get on the bus,” Gibson recalled one of the officers telling him, “and don’t stop.”
People streamed out of the Fischer again, yelling and running in all directions. They crowded onto the bus again. Gibson had no fewer than a dozen family members and nearly as many friends coming along for the ride. Three to four people were crammed onto each seat. Some stood in the middle aisle, while those lucky enough to sit had someone on their laps.
“We were bunched up all kinds of ways,” Robinson said. But they were thrilled, relieved, almost delirious. “We all were clowning,” recalled Byronisha Crockett, still a Fischer resident today.
Few people seemed concerned about Gibson's ability to navigate a lengthy road trip in a wobbly school bus, which, as it turned out later, had been in need of serious repairs, according to the Times-Picayune. They had little choice but to place their fates, if not their very lives, in the hands of this drug-dealing 10th-grade dropout.
Except his mother. “I couldn’t convince her to come,” Gibson said, the resignation in his voice even today. “She didn’t trust me.”
“Jabbar didn’t know how to drive no bus,” she said.
With his mother in the rearview mirror, Gibson pulled the bus onto Landry Avenue, merged onto the West Bank Expressway service road, and headed west out of town.
Someone on the bus had mentioned going to Texas. He figured he could come up with a plan and get directions somewhere along the way.
Only a few minutes into the journey, Gibson and two other buses came upon a police barricade to state Highway 90 — the only route off the West Bank. The officers were standing outside with several people who’d reportedly tried to get away in a pair of mail trucks.
With the officers preoccupied, Gibson managed to gently guide the bus by the barricade and onto the highway. The officers never took off behind them; they were free to go.
Even with little space to spare on the bus, Gibson stopped several times along Highway 90 and picked up people who needed a ride. “I just couldn’t leave them behind,” he said.
“Some of these people were barely making it,” said Sherrell Gibson, one of his cousins who still lives in the Fischer.
Many passengers were in emotional and mental distress from the previous few days. Others were sick or disabled and in need of immediate medical attention. At least a couple were pregnant.
There was a lot of need for such a tight space, and Gibson’s largesse continued as they made it down the road. He bought gas, snacks, and even diapers.
Some of this was practical: Gibson didn’t want people to rush off the bus and draw attention to law enforcement in the remote towns that dotted Highway 90. Some of this was borne out of necessity: He was one of the few people who had money. He figures that he spent about $1,200 during the trip.
“He treated us real nice,” Robinson said. “Because of him, we were all straight.”
At one of their final stops along the way, near Lake Charles, Louisiana, a cashier gave the passengers two full ice chests and two cases of water. He also told them something they didn’t know: The Astrodome in Houston was being opened as a shelter for Katrina evacuees.
The bus arrived at the Astrodome just after nightfall, about 12 hours — a trip that normally takes about five hours — after pulling out of the Fischer parking lot. It would be the first to arrive at the stadium. Gibson and his bus had beat a caravan of other buses — those being run by FEMA — to the Astrodome by several hours. As for the other two buses from the Fischer, they didn’t make it; one ran out of gas, and the other got a flat tire.
Gibson and the people on his bus were initially refused entrance. They were told the Astrodome was reserved only for those who were being evacuated from the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans.
“This is not the bus that we were expecting,” Tranice Gibson remembered the Red Cross workers telling them. Then Gibson explained their situation.
"Now, we don't have nowhere to go," Gibson told the Houston Chronicle that night. "We heard the Astrodome was open for people from New Orleans. We ain't ate right, we ain't slept right. They don't want to give us no help. They don't want to let us in."
Red Cross officials eventually worked it out, and Gibson and all of the passengers from Orleans Parish bus No. 0232 were allowed to stay in the Astrodome.
Hurricane Katrina evacuees on the floor of the Astrodome in Houston.
Stan Honda / Getty Images
It didn’t take long before reporters and TV cameras found the bus and its disheveled-looking passengers as they trudged into the stadium. They were drawn to the baby-faced Gibson, driver of what law enforcement and Red Cross workers had taken to calling the “renegade” bus.
Gibson remembered that one of the police officers there couldn’t believe his age. “‘You drove that bus all by yourself?’” he said the officer asked him. “‘How old are you?’ I told him and he said, ‘You don’t look that old.’ I was looking like I was 12.”
Gibson was among the early heroes of Katrina, a man barely out of his teens who did what the government had failed to do: rescue dozens of poor people from an impending disaster. He was the perfect man for that moment — someone willing to ignore media reports of looting in New Orleans and hijack public property for the public good.
Gibson’s resourcefulness had finally earned him praise and media attention instead of a rap sheet. He said he got to meet Will Smith, Oprah Winfrey, and Spike Lee, among others. His bravery earned him the kind of admiration that eluded even public officials and police officers.
“To some he is a thug,” read the headline of his hometown newspaper, the Times-Picayune, on Oct. 16, 2005, “but to the 60 people on the school bus he commandeered as Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters rose, Jabar [sic] Gibson is nothing short of a hero.”
He recounted the story of stealing the bus for all of the major cable networks. He got to meet Oprah and claims that she promised him a home and some money for his family. (“She gave me a big hug,” Gibson said.) Dozens of people around the country pledged their support to him.
“When they blew it up on the news, I took it for a joke,” he said. “Before you knew it, I was at a CNN table.”
Gibson said he doesn’t remember the name of the man who offered to make a movie about his life and flew him out to L.A. for negotiations. Many of his claims can’t be corroborated or verified by anyone other than himself; none of the media reports from that time ever cite the alleged moviemaker by name. But it’s a story Gibson’s told and retold: the first-class flight to L.A., the fancy hotel, the wining and dining.
“I felt like he was going to take this story and run with it,” Tranice Gibson said.
“Thanks for letting me eat all your fries without ever asking if I can.”
BuzzFeed India
BuzzFeed India
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BuzzFeed India
These clever signs help teenagers to find books without revealing private information.
"I would notice how popular teen books on these topics were, but how rare actual questions about them from teen library patrons were," Azevedo said. "Most of the topics would be embarrassing to ask about, but some of them could threaten their privacy or even safety if asked in front of people or discovered by parents in a search engine history."
Harry Potter and the Fault in Our Scars. Thanks to #NewHarryPotterBooks on Twitter.
I’m out of excuses.
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No excuses.
Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
When you combine chocolate and water in ~just the right way~, you get a beautifully rich mousse that you can slather on baked goods or use as a dip on its own. How-to video and recipe here.
cafefernando.com / via cupofjo.com
If you haven't made soft serve in a food processor yet, now's the time. It's easy, fast, and takes just a few ingredients. (Eat it right away for a soft serve consistency, or pop it in the freezer for a few hours for a texture closer to ice cream.) Get the recipe.
Because life's too short to pre-heat the oven. Get the recipe.
Blake Deadly.
Blame an extremely high flood, bad luck, and a failure to heed warnings that New Orleans faced an existential threat.
NOAA / Via en.wikipedia.org
Ten years on, the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina still haunt the Gulf Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. More than 1,200 people died. Property damage was estimated at $108 billion, making Katrina by far the costliest Atlantic storm to hit the United States.
BuzzFeed News has pulled together the facts, figures, and maps that place this epic disaster in context.
Peter Aldhous for BuzzFeed News / Via aoml.noaa.gov
The annual Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1, and is usually over by the end of November. During that period, cyclones form over warm waters in the tropics. Water evaporating from the sea surface, combined with the Earth's rotation, forms storm systems that slowly spin in anticlockwise direction, with a zone of low pressure at their center.
As these storms grow in intensity, they typically shift north and west, threatening the Caribbean and the U.S. Gulf and Atlantic coasts with high winds, heavy rain, and surging seas before veering off to the northeast. They can grow to an enormous size — Katrina measured about 400 miles across when it made landfall in Louisiana.
Once the maximum sustained wind speed in an Atlantic cyclone exceeds 39 mph, it is classed as a tropical storm. When winds top 74 mph, it is called a hurricane.
The chart above shows every hurricane season since 1980. But even if you go all the way to 1851, when current records began, there is no season that matches 2005. It boasted 28 tropical storms, 15 of which attained hurricane strength.
There were so many storms in 2005, in fact, that the planned alphabetical roster of men's and women's names was exhausted, and hurricane watchers started naming them after letters of the Greek alphabet. The final storm of the season, Zeta, raged on into January 2006.
When the pursuit of Cara Delevingne brows goes bad.
A day after the procedure, she says she could barely open her eyes. Doctors said she had a severe allergic reaction to the dye used in the HD brow treatment,
Smth said her eyebrows have begun falling out now. "I had the treatment to get nice pretty eyebrows and now they are patchier than ever," she told the Daily Mail.
The number of graduates from Chechen schools that teach the Qur’an is on the rise in the formerly war-torn region of Russia.
Maxim Babenko
Maxim Babenko
Maxim Babenko
Maxim Babenko
Gogo lets us send email while hurtling through the sky. If only opting out from its monthly charges were as simple.
PR Newswire
There's an undeniable magic to browsing the web in the sky: sending emails among the clouds, keeping up with happenings on the ground while 35,000 feet in the air.
For the majority of fliers, this service is provided by Gogo, a Nasdaq-listed company that has built up a $1.6 billion valuation by making the once-fantastical prospect of in-flight Wi-Fi a reality on the bulk of U.S. domestic flights. But despite its great technical achievements, there's one thing not included in Gogo's slick infrastructure for signing up and paying for its service: a cancel button.
Due to the high price of a single session, Gogo makes its monthly access option highly lucrative for consumers — on a trip to San Francisco last month, I knew I needed the internet both ways, making a $50 monthly pass cheaper than purchasing two single-day passes for $30 each. There was no middle option.
But then comes the catch: You keep paying that $50 every month, even if you aren't using the service. Gogo doesn't send receipts for monthly charges, and doesn't offer an option for consumers to request receipts. While you can now cancel two days before the next billing date to avoid a charge, it used to be seven days. And to get that cancellation, you need to either call customer service, chat with a representative, or email Gogo. Apparently a "cancel" option on its website just isn't something the company wants to offer.
"It all just feels to me that they intentionally built this system to bill people who aren't using it," said Ken Rutsky, who heads a marketing consultancy in Mountain View, California, and was charged for a month of service he didn't want. "You're just not thinking about Gogo if you're not in the air. I think they know that."
More baller, less mess.
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
AND IT’S REALLY DAMN GOOD.
AND WE WERE NOT SPIRITUALLY READY FOR WHAT WAS ABOUT TO COME.
Columbia Records
Four eyes. A million struggles.
The app is designed with a number of “Islamic features” for Muslims searching for partners — but it’s not for hookups.
Shahzad Younas / Facebook
"Some of them had tried to go down the traditional routes – meeting people through relatives and family friends, but they found their choices for prospective [partners] were very limited," Younas told BuzzFeed News.
"And some of them went to Islamic marriage websites too, and didn't have much luck there either. Many of them would complain about how bad the websites were. They would complain they were slow and unproductive- especially given how expensive they were."
Younas said that marriage websites among young, professional Muslims were becoming less popular, with some having a "bad reputation" and attracting people who were "not seriously interested" in getting married.
Marriage is an important element of Islam, and many Muslims believe that getting married is a mandatory part of their faith.
Younas said the app, which is available for iPhone and Android devices, was modelled after Tinder to make it "easy to set up and use." And like Tinder, Muzmatch allows users to customise their preferences, search for prospective partners based on their locations, and includes the "swipe right" feature to show interest.
However, he says that MuzMatch isn't a hookup app, and that he has designed a number of "Islamic features" for Muslims searching for partners.
"MuzMatch uses features you'll see at any matchmaking website or event at a Mosque," Younas said. "For example, you can specify whether you're looking for a partner who is very devout in their faith, such as someone who wears a hijab, or who says they are a practicing Muslim.
The app also includes features for women who are concerned about modesty. "Some women who aren't comfortable showing their profile pictures can blur them out," he said, "or not add one."
If a match is made, users also have the choice to include a relative to act as a "wali", or guardian. Traditionally, walis are used to act as a custodian for women looking to get married.
Have you seen this dog? Because he is awesome.
The author of the book Paper Towns has written a blog post in the wake of Cara’s intensely awkward interview about the film adaptation.
Good Day Sacramento
Good Day Sacramento
Good Morning Sacramento
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