Don’t google me, bro!
CAFNR / Via flic.kr
The Conservatives, NDP, and Liberals have all lost people running for Parliament over old Twitter and Facebook posts, and the trend is likely to continue, especially among younger candidates.
The most high-profile casualty so far was 21-year-old Ala Buzreba, the Liberal candidate in the Calgary Nose Hill riding who stepped down Aug. 18 after offensive tweets she had sent years earlier were dredged up by conservative activists.
This year marks the 20th anniversary since the release of Empire Records. Save the Empire!
"I swear you get smarter the shorter your skirt gets"
Even if it wasn't understood.
2015 to 1995 R.I.P.
The show, which followed a woman who was transported from 2015 to 1995 to give her twentysomething self another round of '90s fun, is saying goodbye to fans.
VH1
It's just not fair. (No take-backsies, VH1.)
VH1 / Via kristilynn.tumblr.com
VH1
Please welcome to the stage, my mate…
Mat Whitehead / Getty Images / Thinkstock
1. Delta Goodrem.
2. Jess Mauboy.
3. Kylie Minogue.
4. Ruby Rose.
5. The Veronicas.
6. Miranda Kerr.
7. Gabriella Cilmi and Vanessa Amorosi.
8. Rebel Wilson.
9. Bindi Irwin.
10. Olivia Newton John.
11. Dame Edna.
12. Monica Trapaga.
13. Daryl Somers and Ossie Ostrich.
14. Bert Newton and Burgo.
15. Karl Stefanovic and Lee Lin Chin.
16. Mr Clicketty Cane.
17. Plucka Duck.
18. That Hemsworth cousin who was on My Kitchen Rules.
19. Farnsey and Barnsey.
Mat Whitehead / Getty Images
20. B1 and B2.
21. Irene from Home and Away.
22. Alf Stewart's flamin' galahs.
23. Mike Whitney and Tania Zaetta from Who Dares Wins.
24. A pile of snakes.
25. Former Prime Minister Harold Holt.
26. Captain Feathersword's sword.
27. That guy who's just waiting for a mate.
28. The Australian electrical engineer responsible for the creation of WiFi, John O'Sullivan.
29. Axle Whitehead's scrotum.
30. Madison Avenue's glass of water.
31. Guy Sebastian's fro.
32. The reanimated corpse of the Mr Squiggle puppet.
33. The original "Happy Little Vegemite" kids.
34. The Sydney seal.
35. The man who had his hand up Agro's butt.
36. Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.
37. The robot version of Healthy Harold.
38. The Chk Chk Boom girl and Corey Worthington.
What do you mean?!
“It was medium Ben at best.”
BuzzFeed Blue / Via youtu.be
Bear-y sassy.
GoPro / Via youtube.com
GoPro / Via youtube.com
K, Bye.
GoPro / Via youtube.com
We all lead quiet lives of desperation… and thirst.
Happy 22nd birthday to the man of our dreams.
ITV
Did you have a Nokia 3210? Or a Motorola Razr V3?
What goes around comes around.
But they're not exactly a new trend.
We see you, Soulja Boy.
Scott Gries / Via Getty Images
Get your cute fix with a BuzzFeed Animals newsletter!
imgur.com / Via reddit.com
I open at the close.
In some parts of Arkansas, cornfields seem to stretch for years. Over a third of the state’s 539 cities count populations of less than 1,000 residents. Conservative Arkansas, nicknamed “The Natural State,” might not seem like a great place for drag queens — but backstage on a Saturday night at a Little Rock community theater in mid-August, 12 queens are split into two dressing rooms, adjusting their wigs and sucking themselves into corsets before the 44th annual Miss Gay Arkansas pageant in Little Rock.
On a counter, there’s a makeup kit filled with a crayon box of eye shadows, contours, and Elmer’s glue sticks. “Put some Carmex on there to soften that lip up,” someone says to a nearby backup performer. A contestant sits stone still as her “big sister” paints her face, a process that can take about 1.5 hours. There are at least three rolls of duct tape available at a moment’s notice for tucking or cinching waists. “Does anyone have an extra pair of pantyhose?” a dresser asks no one in particular. Laughter pours from backstage as a queen fits into her hand-stitched blue feather gown.
The Miss Gay Arkansas pageant is the oldest continuous state preliminary. This pageant formed in 1972; the first-ever Miss Gay America, crowned in 1973, hailed from Arkansas. In the contest’s earliest days, organizers sent out announcements about an upcoming pageant to gay bars and theaters around the country. From there, it has grown, through promoters and pageant fans, into a large system. Now, these contests are heavily loaded in the East Coast — places like Virginia, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania — but next year, there’ll be a new preliminary in California.
The current crop of Bible Belt queens takes the opportunity to represent their state at nationals very seriously.
“That’s who I’m going to be,” said Jonathan Neighbors — who goes by Blaze Duvall in drag — referring to the coveted title of Miss Gay Arkansas. “The pageant’s the scraps I was built from as a kid.”
Neighbors, contestant 5, started doing drag when he fled his small northeast Arkansas hometown as a teenager. When his twin brother, who was also gay, died at 16, Blaze decided to honor his brother’s life and come out to his father. Their father, a Baptist deacon, responded with: “I’d rather shoot a fag than see one” — and he was true to his word. Neighbors has two bullet wounds from the incident. Because his father’s a police officer, no report was filed and Neighbors left Arkansas for New Orleans.
When Neighbors took on the drag name Blaze Duvall, she met her first drag family in the city. For her, drag offered survival. Her family, comprised of a mother, who helped her get into drag, and her sisters, up-and-coming queens under the same mother, offered her guidance. It’s a tight-knit group she can depend on. She’s been part of two other drag families, from when she moved or if family members decided to take a break from drag, and, she said, each member has played a role in her life.
Neighbors has since moved back to Arkansas and is now a small business owner who runs four consignment shops. He said most of the men in his hometown work at a steel mill or at the prison. He thinks the gay community in Arkansas is growing, but a lot of LGBT folks are still scared to come out. The area, he said, teaches people to keep their sexuality a secret. He thinks discretion and worrying about what people think is “choking the community,” and he sees pageants as a way for people to overcome those worries.
“Pageants help make you into a stronger person,” he said. “It’s the world we made.”
For a queen to compete at Miss Gay America, she has to win two preliminary pageants — a local one such as Miss Hot Springs, Arkansas, and either a state (where she’s a resident) or a regional (not every state has a formalized preliminary). The judges score contestants on a set criteria — not directly against one another — in five categories: male interview (only portion out of drag, 150 points), solo talent (three minutes, limited to handheld props, 150 points), evening gown (100 points), onstage interview portion (50 points), and talent (seven minutes, full production, 300 points). After the competition finishes, contestants receive their score sheets and judges’ notes.
When Neighbors performs as Blaze, she puts on makeup for a pageant by taking pieces from her drag family’s styles — the way they paint or dress — and mixes them to tell their family story. Her drag sisters have shared secrets like different ways to apply makeup and how to dress for her body. She paints a family portrait on her own face. In most cases, drag mothers choose their drag daughters, and this relationship is not only an extension of family but one similar to classical apprenticeship. A daughter learns techniques from a skilled artist as would any fledgling painter. The pageant’s system of critique helps performers work on their craft. It’s kind of like a writers workshop or art school crit. Miss Gay America’s tagline is "Where boys are boys and female impersonation is an art."
“There’s a coaching aspect to it,” said Todd Mauldin, who gives the illusion of Blair Williams, the current Miss Gay America. “The bottom line of this is about getting those critiques to become a better competitor and entertainer.”
Williams, who oversees all the preliminaries, gave the Arkansas queens a pep talk (“Wear hair appropriate for a crown” and “Don’t be so consumed with winning you don’t get the experience”). The night’s winner and first alternate of Miss Gay Arkansas will go on to battle against 52 other title holders at the America pageant in October. Early organizers of the pageant probably never would have imagined this many contestants in the early ’70s when some cities — like Detroit, Miami, and San Diego — deemed it illegal for men and trans women to wear female attire. In 1984, police arrested a former Miss Gay Missouri for cross-dressing before successfully challenging the city of St. Louis on the charge.
“Back then, it was much more daring for men to be in female attire,” said Ron Standridge, a drag historian (or what he calls a “dragologist”) who’s been involved in Miss Gay Arkansas for over 20 years. “These days, drag has become a legitimate form of mainstream entertainment.”
Dahlia El-Shafei
This new “mainstream” nature of female impersonation, Standridge said, has been largely due to the seven seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race on Logo. (Note for RPDR fans: Season 5’s Alyssa Edwards won Miss Gay America in 2010, but, of course, was infamously dethroned for Coco-knows-why reasons.) Pageant conversations can often turn to RPDR, because in certain seasons of the reality competition show, there’s been an underlying “comedy queen” versus “pageant queen” narrative. On the show, pageants are sometimes written off as outdated by the show’s younger, more “alternative” queens. In Arkansas the general feeling about RPDR is...mixed. As drag platform-inches from the margins, some worry the system might eventually fade in its prominence. More gay bars close every year; LGBT bookstores are all but extinct.
“RuPaul’s Drag Race seems to be a shortcut to gaining fame,” said Standridge, “but being Miss Gay America is still one of the most prestigious achievements in the female illusion world.”
Miss Gay Arkansas packed the house, because pageants have essentially created their own culture of “gay celebrity” status. Miss Gay America is a very big deal in this community. It can take many years for queens to move up its ranks. Audience members ranged from a 13-year-old girl who loves pageants but can’t see the live performances that take place in bars to a gay, bearded man, 78, who keeps a picture of himself in drag on his phone.
“Our system has a future because I see a lot of new blood,” said Williams, who travels across the country to each final preliminary as part of his Miss Gay America duties. “In Missouri there were 19 contestants, and 11 of them were first-time competitors at that state level.”
One of the first-time competitors at Miss Gay Arkansas is Justin Lloyd, who performs as Nakita Sinclaire. She said she actually found her way to pageants because of RPDR.
“I was 15 when the show aired,” said Lloyd, now 22, who on Friday night had performed a 1920s flapper cover of “Fancy.” “I always knew what drag was, but I didn’t really know a lot about it. But when I watched the show I was like, Wow.”
Lloyd grew up in northwest Arkansas, where, he said, he was one of four other black kids in his small town. He continuously got bullied: “I was a black man, skinny, short, very effeminate, high voice, and I didn’t care about sports.” Though he didn’t want to put himself into danger at high school, at 16 Nakita came out to his family, who found his sexuality “hard to handle.” He graduated high school, then went off to college at the University of Arkansas, where he felt able to try drag. He initially kept drag from his parents, but recently he decided to tell his mom.
“Drag kind of helped my family with my gayness,” he said. “My coming out was hard for my parents to handle, but seeing me in drag, they got it.”
As Sinclaire, Lloyd dressed in a catsuit for the night’s talent portion (300 points) and performed a mashup of “Everybody Wants to Be a cat” from the Disney movie Aristocats and “Memory” from the musical Cats. Blaze Duvall sat on a lone chair in a spotlight for her performance; she gripped a wire hanger for an emotional portrayal of Joan Crawford’s Mommie Dearest. Alexis Herrington, contestant 4, sauntered onstage in a buttoned-up blouse dressed as Celie from The Color Purple. Herrington set a long dining table for four other performers, then broke out into Fantasia’s rendition of “I’m Here.” To close out the night’s main talent portion, contestant 12, Eden Alive, busted out a full-on, fast-paced production of Lady Gaga’s “Applause.”
A chorus of yaaass followed each queen as she interpreted drag in her own way (while still mindful of the score sheet parameters). The two nights of competition blurred in the glitz of sparkly gowns. Emcees, former Miss Gay Arkansas winners (or “Forevers”), asked questions for the interview portion like: “What was your biggest obstacle in preparing for competition?” and “If a fellow competitor forgot their jewelry tonight, do you loan them yours?”
As the judges tabulated final scores, 15 Forevers stood backstage. Through a “passing of the crown” ritual, Forevers give their blessing to their newest sister. Missy Klein, 54, won the title back in 1992 and walked onstage to cheers and tears. This year Megan Michaels, Miss Gay Arkansas 2006, looked out into an audience where her mother, 80, watched her perform drag for the very first time. Generations of queens rocked hair so high Dolly Parton would die of jealousy. They stood decked out in floor-length gowns, some of which can cost upwards of $5,000. Pageants can get expensive, and most of the night’s contestants had a long list of sponsors, such as their local bars, salons, and friends.
At around 1 a.m., after six hours of competition, contestant 12, Eden Alive, a former seminary student, visibly shook as the emcee announced she’d been crowned the new Miss Gay Arkansas. The crowd erupted for their new queen. Blaze’s “little sister” Jessie Beard, 25, who gives the illusion Karma Koture, sat in the second row the whole time. Beard was born in a farming community with a graduating class around 25, and he’s been doing drag for four years. He says it makes him feel beautiful. He worked as a nurse for six years, but quit to focus on this art. Now, he works three jobs — at a craft store, a pizzeria, and a bar — to pay his bills.
As the crown changed heads, Beard teared up. He thinks Arkansas’s bigger cities, such as Little Rock and Hot Springs, are becoming friendlier places for the LGBT community, but he’s still terrified to return to his small town.
“As a queen I’d never, ever go back to my hometown, because I’d probably be strung up,” he said. “When I come to a pageant it boosts my confidence, because one day that could be me.”
♪ I can show you the wooooorld ♪
The three-judge panel, each writing a separate opinion, all agree that the 2013 trial court decision finding the post-9/11 program likely to be unconstitutional went too far.
Christof Stache / AFP / Getty Images
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Friday reversed a trial court decision that would have barred the government from continuing its post-9/11 bulk data collection program implemented by the National Security Agency.
The decision means that, for now, the NSA program implemented under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act can continue unimpeded.
All three judges from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hearing the appeal agreed that the 2013 trial court decision finding the program likely violated the Constitution went too far.
The case will now go back to the trial court, as agreed upon by two of the judges hearing the appeal, Judge Janice Rogers Brown and Stephen Williams. Judge David Sentelle, the court announced, "would order the case dismissed."
A key question at the appeals court was whether the plaintiffs, Verizon customers, had shown that the NSA collected their data — evidence that would show they had standing to bring the case, which is a requirement to bring a case in federal court. The government, however, has only acknowledged collection of data from Verizon Business accounts, the court noted.
Brown was the most sympathetic to the claims brought by the plaintiffs challenging the program. Although she disagreed that the plaintiffs had, as U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon decided in 2013, shown a "substantial likelihood" that they would succeed in their case, Brown wrote that "one could reasonably infer from the evidence presented the government collected plaintiffs' own metadata."
Brown noted that, back at the trial court, Leon will need to determine what exchange of evidence is appropriate so that the plaintiffs can show whether the NSA actually collected their data.
In noting that, however, she added, "It is entirely possible that, even if plaintiffs are granted discovery, the government may refuse to provide information (if any exists) that would further plaintiffs' case. Plaintiffs' claims may well founder in that event. But such is the nature of the government's privileged control over certain classes of information."
Williams, while allowing the matter to return to the trial court, was less sympathetic to the plaintiffs' claims, stating outright, "[P]laintiffs lack direct evidence that records involving their calls have actually been collected." Nonetheless, she supported sending the case back to the trial court because of "the possibility that plaintiffs' efforts" to show that their data was collected "may be fruitful."
Finally, Sentelle, the least sympathetic to the plaintiffs' claims, declared that, since the plaintiffs cannot show that they have standing, "we do not have jurisdiction to make any determination in the cause." As such, he wrote, the case should be dismissed.
Sentelle and Williams were appointed to the court by President Reagan, and Brown was appointed by President George W. Bush.
It turns out the man behind the most socially anxious, self-medicating loner on television is kind of a people person.
Wandering through Chinatown — the neighborhood in which Mr. Robot’s Elliot Alderson lives — the actor who plays him, Rami Malek, has taken it upon himself to defy the unspoken no-eye-contact rule of the New York City sidewalk on this sweltering August afternoon. Mid–photo shoot, he’s decided to approach various passersby and extend his hand.
Some people recognize him and light up — teenagers who stop for a photo, a man who yells his love for USA’s surprise summer hit across the park — while others are bemusedly charmed by this lanky, enthusiastic man with a camera in tow who just wants to say hi.
It’s a nod, Malek says, to his nickname on set, "The Mayor” — which, if you’ve surrendered to the addictively bleak Mr. Robot, is an indicator of all sorts of extroversion that takes a beat to reconcile with the isolated character he plays on the show. Malek may be everyone’s new favorite introvert on TV, but in person, he’s a lot more at home in his own skin.
Cait Oppermann / BuzzFeed News
Mr. Robot is, like fellow summer standout Unreal on Lifetime, a dark blossom of a show on a cable network known for lighter fare. While it’s a drama set in the present day, it has a sci-fi spirit. Its creator, Sam Esmail, is a newcomer with only an indie romance, 2014’s Comet, under his belt. Its most famous cast member is Christian Slater, who plays the title character, but most of the story is carried by less familiar but no less interesting talents, including Portia Doubleday, Suburgatory’s Carly Chaikin, Swedish actor Martin Wallström, and, of course, Malek. It's been a critical hit and a change of pace for USA, a channel known for successful comfort-food dramedies like Suits and Royal Pains and for the perky slogan "Characters Welcome."
But there's nothing cutesy or quirky about Elliot, a cybersecurity technician who has a taste for morphine and hacking everyone in his life, from his childhood friend to his court-mandated therapist, peeking into their private accounts for all the secrets they don't care to share. He likes to play vigilante in his spare time, a tendency that’s escalated as he’s gotten drawn into fsociety, an Anonymous-style hacktivist group that aims to erase the credit record and isn’t afraid of getting rough. He's intensely lonely. He’s not affecting awkwardness, he says the wrong thing often, and more often than that, he doesn’t say anything at all.
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
Except to us. Elliot unleashes his alienation on the audience in a fourth-wall-breaking voiceover that turns the viewer into his imaginary friend and closest confidant. And while the iron grip he’s had on the story has started to loosen, he’s been an all-consuming but unreliable narrator, the full extent of which we're only starting to understand as Mr. Robot’s first season comes to a close. Things are largely funneled through his point of view, i.e., every time someone mentions the conglomerate Elliot blames for his father’s death, we hear his nickname for it instead — Evil Corp.
The instability of Mr. Robot’s subjective universe has only increased (spoilers ahead, for anyone not caught up) as the season has gone on, until, in the penultimate episode, it was revealed what many of us suspected all along: That mysterious, erratic head of fsociety, played by Slater? He doesn’t exist. He’s never existed, not in the form in which we’ve known him. He’s a delusion who looks like Elliot’s dad and who dwells only in Elliot’s head.
Elliot has been Mr. Robot all along.
Malek isn’t in on every detail of the show’s plan — USA renewed Mr. Robot for a second season before the series premiered — but this is an unveiling he’s known would be coming from the start. He’s aware that it’s the sort of development that requires a leap of faith, even in a series that, from the beginning, established Elliot as paranoid, unstable, and uncertain about the truth. He’s maybe even been a little nervous about it.
“I have to remind myself always that it's a tightrope with him. One episode, you probably want to kill him. And the next episode, I'm sure you feel for this guy,” Malek says later, sitting in the gratifyingly air-conditioned Silk Road Cafe on Mott Street. Elliot may sometimes traipse into the morally questionable territory of a Walter White or Don Draper, but he’s considerably less sure of himself and of his world, to the point of being someone who seems in need of help rather than some grand act of white-hat corporate terrorism.
“My hope is that the audience comes together with Elliot to try to get him back to reality in some way,” Malek says. “I understand that it is hard to watch someone's perspective that is, at certain moments, not real. Or a figment of his imagination. But that's the ride you're on with him — so I guess you gotta take it or leave it.”
He pauses, then leans forward and asks, “You wanna take it with him?”
Well, yeah.
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
Mr. Robot is Malek’s first starring role, but it’s hardly the Los Angeles–born 34-year-old actor’s debut. He’s been working for over a decade, as supporting characters that register more than they normally might because of his charisma and because he’s got the kind of face you notice. He stripped down at the office in Need for Speed, played the new hire at the group home in Short Term 12, and was one of Tom Hanks’s community college classmates in Larry Crowne. He’s been a bit of a “hey, it's that guy!”
Speaking about himself and Mr. Robot, he has the careful patience of someone who hasn’t yet gotten ground down by doing press, but who likes to play at some fourth-wall-breaking of his own from time to time. “Does that work?” he asks, after struggling to arrive at just the right term, “empirical” for the opposite of “intuitive.” He also turns to his sister, an emergency room physician visiting from D.C., who accompanied him to the interview, for help with Taylor Swift’s nickname. And after an anecdote involving his eyebrows almost getting sacrificed for a part, he jokes to his publicist, “Am I getting too campy?”
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
If the gap between the real Malek and the fictional Elliot can feel startling at first (though, the actor admits, Elliot’s paranoia has bled into his life a bit: “I microwave all my electronics now,” he deadpans. “I've had to buy three new computers since this show started”), that just speaks to how thorough a character Malek has brought to screen. Elliot doesn’t feel like a creation, he feels like someone who exists, which is why, as with any performance this absorbing, there’s this instinct to ascribe the character’s qualities to the person playing him.
But Malek actually got his start on a multicamera sitcom, laugh track and all. His first steady gig was in The War at Home, a half-forgotten Fox show starring Michael Rapaport. Malek played Kenny Al-Bahir, a family friend whose coming-out storyline earned accolades from GLAAD. “I think people have a hard time thinking that I could've done a sitcom,” Malek admits of his current fame. But “people used to think of me as a comedy actor.”
Or a character actor. Except that he’s so compulsively watchable in Mr. Robot as an ungainly antihero trying to become a hero (or vice versa) that he’s a reminder that “character actor” is what we tend to label people who are too interesting for the confines of the typical lead role. The pleasure of watching him in the series is not one of discovery but of the knowledge that he should have been given a bigger platform earlier.
Malek seems to have more sclera than the average human — as Elliot, he can seem like he’s all eyes underneath the tech kid hoodie he wears like chain mail. He’s an unconventional heartthrob, a geek pinup, and, as Elliot, a testament to how entrancing a little good ol’ elusive, brooding intellect can be. (“I think they love him because he shuns them,” Malek says with a laugh of the several women — it’s complicated — in Elliot’s orbit.)
Malek is also Egyptian-American (mostly — “An eighth Greek,” he adds, “Mediterranean”). He’s played a pharaoh in the Night at the Museum movies, a suicide bomber on 24, and an Egyptian vampire in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2, but has otherwise managed to elude Hollywood’s perniciously narrow ideas about the sort of roles that go to actors of Middle Eastern backgrounds.
“I'm just trying to play against ethnicity,” Malek says. “I got to play a guy from Louisiana in The Pacific named Merriell Shelton, and now I'm playing Elliot Alderman.”
If Elliot’s racial ambiguousness has been, for some, frustrating — a character with no apparent ethnicity isn’t a stand-in for one of color — Malek’s casting has nevertheless made him the most visible actor of Middle Eastern descent on television, and that’s something he’s proud of. “I'm pretty thrilled that I get to say that it's me,” he says. “I like how receptive people are to that. I don't know if that would have happened 10 years ago.”
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
The success of Mr. Robot, which counts Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and directors Paul Greengrass and Rupert Wyatt among its fans, means that more people have been calling — Malek says he’s in talks for a bigger movie and a smaller one that he hopes to squeeze in before the show goes back into production in March.
He already has a decent record of attracting the attention of high-profile directors, even if his parts have a tendency to end up on the cutting room floor. That’s what happened with Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, in which he played Clark, the sycophantic son-in-law of Cause leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). “It's so funny to see how everybody works, and they're different,” Malek says of the film, adding, “The experience was everything to me.”
He also bonded with Spike Lee while filming the remake of Oldboy. “He let me run amok,” Malek said. “I brought him ideas of what I wanted to wear, which kind of had a dominatrix look to it.” When the part ended up getting snipped down to a death scene, the director, in typical Spike Lee fashion, shrugged to Malek, “Tough business” — but ended up casting him in his next film, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.
It’s a tough business indeed, though one that’s granted Malek the opportunity to have a hit like Mr. Robot in his mid-thirties. And it’s the scene-stealers who sidled onto the scene from the sidelines that he looks up to — actors like Michael Shannon, John Hawkes, and Chris Cooper. “I admire people who have gone a long period of time and are having their moment in the sun as they get older,” he says. “People who have just persevered through it. It can be tough to battle when you know you have something to share and people don't recognize it.”
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
Mr. Robot is making up for any lost screen time — Elliot’s not in every scene, but he’s in most of them, his interior monologue a steady presence. Malek performs with an earwig microphone in his ear so that a production assistant can read the scene’s voiceover, which he records later. “She's really soothing when I listen to her,” he says. “It feels like we have this little secret we get to tell each other every day.”
Elliot’s sardonic narration (“Am I crazy not to like this guy? Among some of his Facebook likes are George W. Bush's Decision Points, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, and the music of Josh Groban. Must I really justify myself any further?”), like the revelation about Mr. Robot’s identity and fsociety’s plan, is a hat tip to Fight Club. It’s a relationship the show finally made explicit by using a cover of the song that played at the end of the 1999 David Fincher film, the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind?”
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
“Look, we all love Fincher, especially Sam,” Malek says of the homage. “But it works for Elliot — that's his story as well. So he can't shy away from it.” While Fight Club was centered on a Gen X crisis of masculinity, Malek sees Mr. Robot as more idealistic in its personal catastrophes — more a story about a new generation’s sometimes floundering but sincere aspiration to do good even when effecting change seems impossible.
“For all of Elliot's foolishness and mistakes, he does have this desire to have an effect on society and to help others,” Malek says. “He may go about it in the worst ways at times, but at least he's giving it a shot — and I think that's something people can respect.”
Themes like that, for him, are what the show is about as much as the technology in which it’s centered. “It is about how people deal with intimacy,” Malek says, pointing out the amount of time we spend with screens these days. “That's the world we live in. And I'm not chastising it in any way. That's what society has become, and it's cool that our show gets to talk about that.”
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
Mr. Robot already has an endgame in mind — Esmail first conceived of it as a movie and has said he sees the story as lasting four or five seasons. At one point, the showrunner talked Malek through where things were headed, but he claims that, like Elliot, he’s managed to block out a lot of essential details.
“He asked me, ‘Are you the type of actor that wants to know everything or would you want to be surprised?’ And I thought I wanted to know, but now I've really enjoyed being surprised by certain things,” Malek says, calling out what happened to Frankie Shaw’s character Shayla as a shock that “made [his] heart skip a beat for a second.”
That said, Malek has also clearly enjoyed keeping mum about what he does know, especially with his family, who’ve been watching along with him. His sister flees the café the moment it looks like we’re getting into spoiler territory. And he watched the episode with the Mr. Robot twist with his identical twin brother Sami, a teacher. “He looked at me like, You're such an asshole. He was like, 'I didn't know you could keep a secret that well,'” Malek recalls with a laugh.
If being able to talk about the show without letting any of its secrets slip is becoming just as momentous a task as being its lead, Malek’s wearing his new stardom lightly and well. He offers the most unhelpful of teasers for the season finale, which airs Sept. 2, regarding Elliot’s relationship with Tyrell Wellick (Wallström): “You learn even more after the next episode!” If you’ve come this far with Mr. Robot, nothing needs to be said to get you to show up for the big finish.
And in the meantime, with a second season already set and potential new projects bubbling this fall, the future’s looking pretty good for Malek. But like any good mayor, he’s open for feedback about what he should take on next.
“I'm up for anything,” he says into the recorder as the interview comes to an end. “Let me hear your thoughts.”
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
Cait Oppermann for BuzzFeed News
“The best science today says it is going to happen and that we’re not ready for it,” a climate scientist told BuzzFeed News. “That, unfortunately, is bad news.”
An iceberg floats in Disko Bay, near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 24, 2015.
NASA / Saskia Madlener
Steve Nerem, a geophysicist at NASA and the University of Colorado, Boulder, said the world is all but certain to see a three foot sea level rise due to the concentration of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
Nerem told BuzzFeed News Thursday even if global emissions stopped immediately, the effects of CO2 already in the atmosphere would lead to rising sea levels, in a sort of "inertia" effect. The ocean rise could hit three feet by 2100 or later, Nerem said.
"Eventually we're going to get to 3 feet," he added. "Is that going to happen in 2100 or 2200, or somewhere in between? It really depends on what we do with our CO2."
Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and president of the Pacific Institute, was not a member of NASA's research team but praised the conclusions.
"The best science today says it is going to happen and that we're not ready for it," Gleick said. "That, unfortunately, is bad news."
Venice, Italy, sits just above the water, making it particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels.
Andreas Solaro / AFP / Getty Images
Since 1900, global sea levels have risen about 7 inches, Nerem said, and the rate of rising has increased over the last two decades, with NASA documenting a nearly 3 inch change since 1992. The geophysicist said multiple factors contributed to the rising, but the largest one was human impact on the environment.
"There can be short term variations due to, for example, El Niños," Nerem said. "But over long time scales, like the last 100 years, almost all the rise we see is due to our influence, in my opinion."
But that rise hasn't been experienced equally; some parts of the world have seen as much as a 9-inch rise, while other areas, such as California, have actually seen sea levels fall in recent years. However, in California's case NASA anticipates accelerated sea level rising over the next decade.
The NASA video below visualizes worldwide changes in sea level since 1992, with warm colors indicating higher waters and cool colors indicating the opposite.
