FitzGibbon Media

Yes, you can be a liberal and a sexual abuser.

Last week’s sudden closing of a prominent progressive public relations firm amidst sexual harassment allegations against its boss has rightfully seized the attention of many journalists on the left. Many of us had professional dealings with employees at FitzGibbon Media. After all, the firm counted a long list of publicly progressive people and organizations as clients, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress, the AFL-CIO, The Intercept, and Chelsea Manning.

Spreading the message of progressivism was the job of the firm’s founder and president, Trevor FitzGibbon. But it didn’t stop him from being a sexist lout who preyed upon women. Per the Huffington Post’s reporting, the allegations of prospective employee Sierra Pedraja inspired many others who had experienced similar harassment and abuse from FitzGibbon, some of them his own employees. And he is hardly alone.

Vox’s Emily Crockett used a perfect phrase to describe workplaces like FitzGibbon Media: “putatively progressive.” Too often, it is assumed that the people who wear progressive labels put those ideals into practice in their personal and professional lives. FitzGibbon is an extreme example disproving that assumption, but this should be an alarm, particularly for men to examine themselves, especially liberals. They need to stop believing that liberalism elevates us over the possibility of being sexist, because that’s a Republican thing. Nor should we assume progressivism based upon a few nice tweets, rah-rah columns, or even actual work for liberal causes. FitzGibbon just showed that such work can be used in service not of ideals, but one’s own ego, power, or dick.

Dec 30, 2015

Museum für Angewandte Kunst

Biblical scholars are arguing about whether Eve was created from Adam’s penis bone.

Chapter two of Genesis describes God creating Eve out of Adam’s rib, but one scholar—Ziony Zevit, a professor of Hebrew Bible at American Jewish University in California—has offered an opposing theory. According to Zevit, the Hebrew word typically translated as “rib,” tsela, is used in the creation story to refer to a very different part of the male anatomy. 

Zevit’s philological theory didn’t get a lot of attention when it was first published in the Biblical Archeology Review’s September/October issue (title: “Was Eve Made from Adam’s Rib—or His Baculum?”), despite a press conference touting the claim. But a Haaretz article published this morning, in which its author argues that Zevit’s hypothesis is most likely wrong, made the story go viral.  

Zevit has actually been pushing this baculum theory for a long time: it’s in his 2014 book on the Garden of Eden, and back in 2001 he and a biologist co-wrote an article in the American Journal of Medical Genetics making the same case. (The crux of his argument is that the Biblical story was an etiological explanation for why human males, unlike most other mammals and primates, don’t have a penis bone.)

According to The Daily Mail, “Christians have reacted with fury” to Zevit’s theory, which is apparently Daily Mail code for three people writing angry internet comments.

Dec 29, 2015

Report: George Pataki, who was running for president, is no longer running for president.

The Boston Globe’s James Pindell says that the former New York governor informed prominent New Hampshire supporters that he would be leaving the race this afternoon. 

If Pindell’s report is accurate, Pataki probably didn’t spend very much time on the phone—according to Real Clear Politics’s aggregate poll, zero percent of New Hampshire voters support his candidacy. That lack of support comes despite the fact that Pataki had put all of his eggs in the New Hampshire basket and wasn’t doing much campaigning anywhere else. In February, The Daily Beast reported that he wouldn’t take calls from the national press—he would only speak to reporters in New Hampshire. 

The world has hit Peak Hoverboard.

Four days after Christmas, and life has become a never-ending supercut of hoverboard fails and an endless scroll of stories about hoverboard bans (and about the intemperate celebrities who whine about said bans). But two items on Tuesday raised hoverboard news to another level.

1. Mike Tyson wiped out so hard it sounded like his knockout punch to Michael Spinks.

#hoverboard #knockout #MikeTysonBreaksBack #imtoooldforthisshit @getcyboard

A video posted by Mike Tyson (@miketyson) on

This has instantly became the hoverboard fail to end all hoverboard fails, if only because Tyson is either the zenith or nadir of everything he touches.

2. A priest in the Philippines reportedly has been suspended after riding a hoverboard during Mass.

It’s one thing to get busted by police for riding a hoverboard on New York City sidewalks (a law, by the way, that politicians there want to change). It’s quite another to be told by a church diocese that you have violated the “highest form of worship” by using it to “capriciously introduce something to get the attention of the people.”

Unless Donald Trump rides a hoverboard onto the debate stage next month, or the hoverboard’s inventor happens to ride off a cliff (which, to be clear, would be a tragedy), hoverboard news will wane from this moment onward—until, that is, the cost of the real hoverboard drops from $20,000 to $200.

Sergei Ilnitsky / Getty Images

Kremlin employees’ end-of-year bonus is this lousy 400-page book of Putin’s best quotes.

It took the book’s young editors, Anton Volodin and Makar Vikhlyantsev, five months to comb through 150 of Putin’s speeches and interviews. They wanted to publish the book, titled Words That Change the World, the Times reports, “so that every senior official or important politician could have Mr. Putin’s most important pronouncements readily at hand.” 

When Putin’s deputy chief of staff received a copy, he bought up the entire first print run of 1500 copies to give out as presents for the holidays. Here are some highlights:

On terrorists
“We will waste them in the outhouse.”

On drinking
“I drink kefir.”

On foreign policy
“No one feels safe!”

Courtesy of ©Nick Briggs/Carnival Films 2014 for MASTERPIECE

Hillary Clinton has won a coveted Downton Abbey endorsement.

Julian Fellowes, creator of the Emmy Award-winning series, told CNN that, despite his conservative views, “Hillary Clinton seems a more convincing world politician” than her Republican opponents. Fellowes, a monarchist who has sat in the House of Lords since 2011, remarked, “Some of the others, without naming any names, seem rather insular in their approach.” (The names he doesn’t want to name probably include Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and all the other candidates who have promoted xenophobic immigration policies this year.)

Fellowes’s endorsement begs the question: If you had to cast Downton Abbey with only the current Democratic presidential candidates, who would be who? 

Hillary’s tenacious ambition makes her an obvious Mary, and Bernie Sanders’s socialist ideals are perfectly aligned with Sybil’s. Sad Martin O’Malley has forever been—and will always be—the Edith. 

Fred Dufour / Getty Images

ACLU files a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital for refusing to perform a tubal ligation.

Get pumped for our next huge religious liberty battle! This time, rather than businesses covering contraception or bakeries making cakes for gay weddings, the contest is between a patient who asked for a tubal ligation during a scheduled C-section procedure, and the Catholic hospital that rejected her request for religious reasons.

According to an article posted to the ACLU’s blog today, the ACLU’s Northern California chapter has filed a lawsuit against Dignity Health’s Mercy Medical Center on behalf of patient Rebecca Chamorro and Physicians for Reproductive Health. The suit alleges that refusing “pregnancy-related care” for non-medical reasons is illegal in California.

Chamorro is due to deliver her baby by C-section in January, at which time she has requested to have her tubes tied. While her doctor was willing to run the request by the hospital, Dignity Health refused, citing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ position that voluntary sterilization is intrinsically evil. Now, Chamorro and the ACLU have filed an emergency motion seeking to prevent the hospital from refusing the ligation on religious grounds so that the procedure can go ahead as requested in January. 

A hearing is scheduled for January 5th. 

Courtesy of Senor Frog's

The New York Times’s restaurant critic loves Señor Frog’s.

If you’re still looking for New Year’s Eve plans, you might want to go to the new Times Square outpost of the infamous chain better known as the place where college kids go to get sloshed on spring break in Cancun. It just got a rave review from New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells. 

“I had more fun at Señor Frog’s than at almost any other restaurant that has opened in the last few years,” Wells wrote, after downing his fair share of Frogasms, apparently in an attempt to make up for the fact that he spent his own spring break years ago reading The Sorrows of Young Werther in German.

Somewhere, Guy Fieri’s head is exploding.

MICHELE LIMINA/AFP/Getty Images

We may finally find out what FIFA officials actually talk about.

Ahead of the much-anticipated FIFA presidential election, ESPN has invited the five candidates vying to replace Sepp Blatter to a televised debate in January. It’d be a significant move towards transparency for an organization that has always conducted its business behind closed doors. 

Things we could find out should all the candidates agree to participate: What kinds of things do FIFA officials actually talk about? Will anyone want to take World Cup 2022 away from Qatar? Are they going to throw Blatter under the bus?

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How do we get invited to these cool pill bowl parties John Kasich knows about?

While campaigning in New Hampshire today, the Republican presidential candidate revealed he knows all about the underground deep-dish drug scene.

I’m imagining it’s like Russian Roulette, but with a bowl of jelly bellies. Kids these days! They’re so wild and crazy, what with their lower rates of sexual activity, teen pregnancy, and alcohol and tobacco use. Only the surefooted moral leadership of party person John Kasich will set our nation back on a true and righteous path.

Billion Back Records / Giphy

For the ultra wealthy, the tax code is a choose-your-own-adventure that saves them hundreds of millions.

A new report from the New York Times today reveals that although the top one percent of earners have seen a slight increase in taxes over the last four years, the top one thousandth percent have given themselves a sizable tax break. This group has gone from paying on 20.9 percent in taxes to 17.6 percent, on average: a cut of over three percent. When compared to the tax rates wage-earners pay, the discrepancy is much larger:

Each of the top 400 earners took home, on average, about $336 million in 2012, the latest year for which data is available. If the bulk of that money had been paid out as salary or wages, as it is for the typical American, the tax obligations of those wealthy taxpayers could have more than doubled.

The wealthy are able to navigate complex tax laws by employing family offices that convert one kind of income into another. Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego told the Times, “We do have two different tax systems, one for normal wage-earners and another for those who can afford sophisticated tax advice.”