by Matt Siegel

I once drove Bea Arthur to a radio interview in my Honda Civic, and reveled in the fact that I had her (good) ear for forty-five minutes. She didn’t appreciate it when I asked if she had been part of vaudeville; apparently my years were way off.

I opted out of personally driving the celebrity I was interviewing this time, a musician who some would argue is just as gender-confounding as Ms. Arthur. I selected an UberBlack (that’s their “high-end sedan”) to drive me and Mike Hadreas AKA Perfume Genius, to the Chateau Marmont, the most cliché celebrity interview spot in Los Angeles. Something about placing an unassuming homegrown artist like Hadreas in that absurd environment appealed to me. It didn’t fit Hadreas, but it might one day. Last week, he made his first appearance on Letterman, performing his hit single “Queen,” which Slate named the gay anthem of the year. (I also had him make a Grindr profile, above.)

Hadreas asked if we would see Lana Del Rey at the Chateau; she had just played at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery two nights earlier. I mentioned that Del Rey’s music has been referred to as “Hollywood Sadcore,” which one MTV journalist described as “what you get when you cross a woman who looks like a ’60s Playboy bunny with a song that sounds a little bit like Chris Isaak’s ‘Wicked Games’ sung through a PJ Harvey/Lykke Li filter…” How might one describe Hadreas? Perhaps what you get when cross a man who looks like a boy who dresses like a female executive with songs that sound like longing, despair, and, most recently, power. That’s Perfume Genius’s Tacoma Sadcore.

You live in Washington State but you chose to record Too Bright in Bristol, England. You also love British musicians like Kate Bush and PJ Harvey. What is it about Britain?

I don’t know. I haven’t been there long enough to know if there’s some specific vibe. I like it over there because…my music does better over there, so that’s a nice ego boost.

Why do you think that is?

I’m not certain. It could be very simple — just like I got better press or something very non-magical like that. In the states, people go to shows as like a social thing still, or just to drink, and then there’s music next to them; they’ll even do that at my show. I think there are probably better shows to for that than me, like, playing two chords and gently cooing; it’s not very conducive to a casual hang.

The audiences [in Britain] are much more enthusiastic. They’re not as self-conscious about looking interested or seeming interested. In the states, people are still sort of…it’s cool to have a snarky element to everything across the board. So the front row will be like really excited people, and nobody is clapping in the back. I play festivals in Europe, I play bigger venues; I haven’t played a single music festival in the states. But this new album — since it’s louder — people really like louder music, and so now I’m going to play American festivals.

I don’t think it’s as simple as loud/quiet. Before, the subject matter would be strange or twisted but the music underneath is very sweet and pleasant, and American doesn’t seem to like that. I guess it’s not a nice thing to say about all of America, but, whatever, I’ll say it. In America, if it’s a happy movie, it’s just like a happy movie — it’s not multi-tiered at all, and I feel like there are more tiers to things in other countries. Like a movie doesn’t have to tie everything up at the end, or it can have happy moments and sad moments, and people aren’t like, “That was confusing! I don’t know what to do! I’m hungry!” I know it sounds like I’m saying I’m going over America’s head but that’s not what I mean.

What do you see when you look out at the audience?

I don’t really look out that much, just because I get anxious and I want the least amount of things that make me self-conscious. At a good show, people are usually just very sweet. They just smile and are supportive. And I like seeing gamers in dresses…it’s just very sweet to me. You see a lot of couples. This tour’s a lot different, though. People know what to do. They know when the song’s over and to clap and stuff. Before, when I was playing a string of really quiet songs, people would be like, “Should we clap?”

Do you think your audiences would be better off sitting while watching you perform?

Before, yeah. You know, we used to play a lot of churches and stuff, but now we play dive bars and we’re playing some of this louder music and it’s kind of fun. Even when people are loud and drunk and being obnoxious, a lot of the new songs — it kind of helps in a way — like I kind of sing at them and wave my finger at them.

Omigod, I have to ask you what you think of EMA (musician Erika M. Anderson, who is also on the Matador Records label).

I love her. I don’t listen to much music right now but I listen to her. She knows what she’s talking about. And she’s, like, really impassioned. I think that’s really fucking ballsy.

When I saw her perform she had to leave the stage to cry. I love that. That’s the kind of shit I like to witness.

Me too! That’s what I try to do. Fucking go for it and channel something. Like when you lose yourself for a second.

I mean she got on her knees!

Yeah! That’s hard to do, like, it takes a lot of fucking guts to go for it like that because it takes a certain amount of drama, which seems phony at first to open yourself up to something, you know what I mean? It takes a certain amount of ego and drama with yourself to think that you could get it! And I think people are scared…

Well, you could look like a fool.

Yeah, you could look ridiculous. That’s what’s so badass when people go for it anyways. That’s what I try to do. I was watching some videos of me screaming, and I’m just like fuckin’ — it’s not a cute scream, it’s not pretty — but I’m kinda proud of it ’cause I just go fuckin’ nuts. I’m just screaming, and that’s what I wanted to do.

What do you feel when you’re screaming?

It just feels very wild. That kind of screaming is when it’s very easy for me to get lost ’cause I can’t hear anything else while I’m doing it, and it’s gone full circle. It’s like there’s no way that this looks or sounds hot or, like, cool. I just immediately kind of lose it. But it’s fun. I just try to basically have moments like the ones that I look for in every show that I go to. There’s different ways to do it. You know sometimes people sing soul music with their hand up, and you can tell — their eyes roll back in their head for a second. And there’s EMA where there’s a lot more body, a lot more guts in it. It’s spiritual in a different way. That’s like my favorite thing, and that’s why I changed a lot of what I was writing, too, because I wanted that and the more feverish, less kind of patient way that I had been doing it — something with more vibrations and stuff in it.

You have a song on the new album called “Grid.” And the word comes up in another song on that album.

I’m sort of obsessed with “grid” as like a writing word. A lot of times I have really circular behaviors, like things I do over and over even though they’re not working, and I don’t change them. Sometimes I can see what I’m doing; I can see the grid I’m on. I can see how much bigger it is than the little part I’m circling, so I kind of think of the grid as like what is really happening.

The circular behavior, is that that kind of Alcoholics Anonymous definition of insanity? Repeating the same patterns and expecting different results?

You know, I’ve cut out drinking and drugs but I still do a lot of food…and it’s not just vices like that, either. It’s also just, like, thinking. I get in my own way a lot. I feel a lot more confident than I…am. (laughs) Like inside I have this version of myself that I think is really me that I rarely ever match up to. In music, I do a lot more. Sometimes on stage, too.

A lot of journalists have been focused on your despair and longing and now the anger —

Yeah, the anger. “You’re so angry. Where did that come from? When did that start for you?”

Right? “What happened in your life? Oh you’re gay.”

*Both laugh*

Then it’s like, “Why are you so sad and gay?” It’s usually a two-pronged thing.

Is it possible for humor to translate into music like yours? Is there even a place for it?

I think so. To me, when something’s really funny there’s like a wildness to it, and it’s very close to the wildness of something potentially tragic or gross. It’s all very close to each other when you have that extreme level of feeling. I think there’s a sense of humor to a lot of the songs on the album. Like, in My Body, I essentially say that I’m a tramp-stamp at the end of it (laughs).

.~’* just a little reminder to never, ever fuck with me *’~.

— Perfume Genius (@perfumegenius) October 6, 2014

This tweet from the other day. Who upset you? What happened?

Well, I’m not sure exactly…a lot of times…people fuck with me, and I’m telling them “don’t.”

I see that! Do people fuck with you?
Yeah. On the street, ya know, people hollerin’ at me, and I just don’t wanna be bothered with it. I’m just trying to walk. I’m just trying to sit and have a cigarette, and people are trying to mess with me. I don’t feel like it.

I feel you on that. Even eyes, being gawked at.

Yeah, it’s tiny little things that will do it. The reason why it’s so frustrating to me is because I cannot imagine being on the other side. I cannot imagine being in a spot where I felt like I could say something rude to somebody just walking across the street. Or, like, yelling at someone. It pisses me off that they even have the audacity to even say something out loud. I mean, everybody thinks shitty thoughts; it’s just weird to say it. It pisses me off. I’m not gonna not paint my nails, and I’m not gonna not wear crazy fucking shit. I can do whatever the fuck I want, you know what I mean?

So, we moved to Tacoma, which is not a city anymore. I like having my nails painted; I think it looks pretty; I like the way it looks. But they’re, like, the hardest thing to hide if I was gonna, like, dress down to go to Subway, you know what I mean? So even if I’m, like, wearing a hoodie at Subway, I still have to sign everything (laughs). And it’s sad to me. After the last tour I took my nails off and it was kind of relieving walking around my neighborhood. I felt like a spy —

More anonymous?

Yeah, but it’s sort of frustrating to me, and at the same time it’s sad.

What do you think about masc/femme among gay men?

I think it’s ridiculous. Usually, like, anyone that would adopt, like, “masc,” period, to describe them — it’s a very phony, stereotypical masculinity. It’s essentially just them except with, like, a backwards hat, right? And compression socks or something?

Compression socks? Aren’t those what old people wear on airplanes?

*Both laugh*

Well, I’m thinking of socks that are, like, workout socks. And, like, tennis shoes. Isn’t that what you do? Or, like, basketball shorts. You dress like the people who beat you up in high school, right? That’s okay. I mean, as much as I rag on that, it’s kinda hot. Like, that’s what’s embarrassing is I still think, like, strong, straight-acting guys are hot, unfortunately…some of them.

I know. I feel like I’m betraying myself —

Yeah, by thinking that’s hot?

Yes!

It feels like a secret! I really don’t like that. I wish I didn’t…but that’s how it got shaped in me, you know what I mean? I can try to think about it and heal it and stuff, but that’s just…that’s just what I learned is hot very young. It’s hard to shake that.

I do feel guilty about it. Then I think to myself, “If I only like butch guys — ”

“…where do I fit in that?”

Right! Exactly!

I don’t ever necessarily feel masculine or feminine. I just feel…I don’t know. Like when I’m wearing women’s clothes, it’s not like I’m dressing like a lady, a woman; it’s just like I’m doing whatever I want. To be honest, it’s still really confusing to me when I think about it. If I was at the height of power, I think I’d like to be a powerful woman; I wouldn’t want to be a powerful man. Do you know what I mean? Like, I feel fucking badass when I’m walking around and I feel like a fucking female CEO, you know what I mean?

Hell yes I do. Do you think of, like, Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl?

Sure. And I think of Ripley, too. Like alien-boss. Empty-ship boss. Boss-of-the-empty-ship. I think my feminine qualities are badass and strong and I really value them — or the ones people would call feminine, I suppose.

It is so hard to reprocess male femininity as qualities and not hindrances.

Well, I’ve felt like that forever. I’m trying to flip it. Flip it completely. Almost like — threatening people with it. Make it into something to be scared of. When I began wearing whatever I wanted, I went nuts. I was wearing tons of costume jewelry. Basically, it was like advanced style for like two years, you know what I mean? When I used to go out, people were like, “Why is nobody hitting on me?” but the secret to getting laid is to dress like someone you would want to have sex with, and when I’m wearing all this costume jewelry, I wish that was someone that I would find sexually attractive.

Sigh.

I’m almost embarrassed to be that honest, but it sucks, and I’m so pissed off, because intellectually that maddens me.

Does it mean that we think we’re unattractive?

Well, of course I think I’m unattractive. Even beyond the feminine/masculine, I’ve never been able to just, like, hook somebody, I always have to charm them or, like, trick them into liking me. You know what I mean? I can’t just like show them my —

Face.

Face, and be like, “Hey.” I’ve never really felt like that; I’ve felt like I need to be jokey or charm them.

Like you physically is not enough.

Uh huh. I feel like if I took really good care of myself and ate really well, and, like, quit smoking, I think I would feel better about myself…and I would think I’m more attractive, even if I wasn’t. Just ’cause I would be doing all I could. I think that’s part of the reason I don’t feel attractive, though, because I don’t treat myself well inside. I don’t think nicely of myself a lot of the time.

I saw a quotation where you said something about Liz Phair’s influence on you at age twelve, that she would, like, go there, talking about sucking dick.

Exactly. Specific. (laughs) What happened was, like, I was listening to like Ace of Base and Janet and stuff, and then, I think I shoplifted a Spin Magazine from the grocery store, and they were talking about her stage fright and some of her subject-matter and stuff, and so I bought Whip-Smart (Phair’s 1994 album) with my allowance and that completely changed the way I listened to music forever. I mean, I still like Ace of Base a lot, but I didn’t know music could be like that. It kind of really changed me, that album, and it was right when I was sort of allowing myself to stop pushing the fact that that I’m gay back, you know what I mean? Admitting to myself. Stop trying to run from it. But I did come out to my mother when I was fifteen, and I just started ordering Out and The Advocate to the house and leaving them out for my dad to see — didn’t really officially ever come out to him. I mean they all knew. Nobody was surprised when I told them. Of course I came out as bisexual.

Of course.

It didn’t change anything with any of my close friends or my brother, even. It felt like a big deal to me.

How long have you been with your boyfriend Alan?

Five years about. I met him shortly before I was about to do my first show ever. And he made music and we met because we were both sober, and it was right when I had first started getting sober for real. So if I was gonna go on tour and play shows I thought it’d be nice to have someone with me who doesn’t party, so I asked him to play music with me.

Did you ever do the 12-step thing?
That’s how we met. It was very helpful. I’m sure it’d still be helpful now if I went but I haven’t gone in a few years, but in the beginning I was really hitting it, going to coffee with all kinds of people. It was cool. It was very healing. I went to gay meetings. It was a lot of older gay men who were very kind to each other and talking very openly and were supportive, and I have never really seen that.

What had you seen?

Skeeziness.

Sexually?
Yeah, but that probably had a lot to do with the drinking and going out and doing drugs and going to weird places and stuff. I guess I hadn’t seen contented, happy, older gay men who were talking openly about things that happened and were still going on that were not great but were sweet to each other, and that was really powerful for me. And beyond that when I went to non-gay meetings, being able to relate to people who were really different from me. I went to rehab north of Seattle, a lot of military guys, and they were sweet and I became friends with them and I’d hear them talking about feelings that I had. The last time I used I was in a hotel room and I had this feeling, if I smoke anymore or do any more I’m gonna die, and I had that thought in my head, and I just did it anyway, you know what I mean? That’s essentially what it was in the end: a really long drawn-out suicide attempt. I just did not care anymore.

So you wanted to live?

Or I guess I wanted to not die.

When you have to explain what your music is like to an elderly relative, for instance, what do you say?

I’m not very good at it; I usually say sad. Sad, like, singer/songwriter — I feel like they’ll know what that is. Weird. I say weird a lot.

When you think of singer/songwriter, whom do you think of?

James Taylor is the first person I think of. (laughs)

Do you feel any connection or relation to him?

No. (laughs) Well, my mom loved him, and I heard him a lot. He’s a little too — I don’t know much about his backstory — he sounds very nice, and I don’t feel like I’m as nice as him.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In late 2013, McDonald’s briefly lost control of its reputation. A photo, accompanied with the caption “My buddy works at McDonald’s and sent me this photo of raw McRib meat,” was posted on Reddit. The site’s commenters voted it onto the site’s front page, where many thousands of people saw it, but it wasn’t quite a sensation. They mostly made jokes and complained about hard it is to get McRibs. One wrote: “Oh, no. It’s raw, frozen meat that is perfectly edible. Run for your lives.”

The story didn’t truly blow up until it was covered as a story. ABC’s “McDonald’s Frozen McRib Photo Stirs Web, Not Appetites” (28k Facebook shares) is an example of the duplicative national coverage; WJLA’s “Frozen McRib photo shows McDonald’s sandwich before cooking” (18.6k Twitter posts) represents one of countless local news takes. Among the people who reposted WJLA’s story was Wes Bellamy, a teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia. He posted it twice, once in November and again about a month later:

Wooooooww RT @ABC7News This is what a McRib looks like before it’s cooked, for the record. http://t.co/exFr2Js5Jr pic.twitter.com/xGNBGuo3Dh

— Wes Bellamy, M.Ed (@WesBellamy) November 15, 2013

Wooooooww RT @ABC7News This is what a McRib looks like before it’s cooked, for the record. http://t.co/exFr2Js5Jr pic.twitter.com/xGNBGuo3Dh

— Wes Bellamy, M.Ed (@WesBellamy) December 22, 2013

Tweets like this led McDonalds to release a non-denial denial:

There are few things more legendary at McDonald’s than the McRib. It is a boneless, seasoned pork patty on a bun with slivered onions, two dill pickle slices and plenty of our sweet, smoky, barbecue style sauce. One reason our customers love the McRib is its fun and wonderful shape. Just like a burger patty is formed to be round and flat, we form the iconic McRib in the shape of traditional ribs. We then flash freeze the patty to seal in flavor and freshness, just like you freeze meat in your own freezer, before going to our restaurants. The McRib is also known for its iconic taste, which is why we use a quality cut of pork — pork shoulder — to give our McRib lovers a thicker, meatier McRib experience.

This was not so much a correction as a restatement. Customers saw a picture of a flash-frozen reconstituted meat patty and thought, “gross.” What they actually should have thought, says McDonald’s, is “wow!”

This week, Bellamy is starring in a new McDonald’s video designed to repair the McRib’s reputation. Standing outside a McDonald’s production facility operated by Lopez Foods in Oklahoma City, he recounts his side of the story. “McDonald’s brought me here because of a tweet they saw. Someone sent me a picture of what I thought was a McRib,” he says. “So I think you all want to bring me here so that I can actually see how the McRib is made, and see if my mind can be changed a little bit. I don’t know, though. I’m a skeptic.” He then suits up in full protective gear as Grant Imahara, the likable Mythbusters star, announces that he will be chaperoning the visit. (Bellamy later claimed on Twitter that he had not been paid for his participation; Imahara, a recurring figure in McDonald’s videos, presumably was.)

This video is part of an advertising campaign called “Our food. Your questions.” McDonald’s tested versions of this campaign in Canada (1,400 stores) and Australia (900 stores) before rolling it out in the United States (over 14,000 stores), often using American talent — one strange and memorable video from the Canadian campaign showed the executive chef for the entire company making a Big Mac from scratch in his home kitchen. Whether these earlier campaigns were a straightforward advertising success is difficult to know, and probably beside the point: Neither campaign backfired, which is a better outcome than the pink slime McNugget scares that inspired them in the first place.

In the video, the first person our hosts meet is a VP with a science PhD. He shows the men to an enormous vat of meat, then to the machine where that meat is ground. They watch as preservatives are poured into the meat, which is then pressed into the rib-like shape. This new object is sprayed with water before it is flash-frozen; holding one of the completed patties in his hand, Bellamy talks viewers through a revelation. Imahara asks him if “this is what you saw” online. “Yeah, I think it is. But you know what, it’s kind of crazy, because it’s different, now that I actually know what goes inside of it.” They crack jokes and laugh. Below them, spotless machines grind and whir, monitored by a smattering of workers in hard hats.

What’s remarkable about this video is that it doesn’t correct any particular misconceptions: It portrays exactly what the company’s previous statements claimed, and ends with an image that is essentially indistinguishable from the one that went viral. No fears are assuaged, and no surprising secrets are revealed. The first image was shocking because the frozen meat-slab did not align with most humans’ idea of what food looks like; the same meat-slab in Bellamy’s hand, in the context of a production facility, is a triumph of precision and science. Our distaste for the products of industrial food production can be muted, in other words, by instilling a reverence for its immaculate process.

This depends on a little bit of misdirection, of course — the first time we see the meat it is dead and clean and does nothing to evoke the animals and facilities from which it came — but the video is generally honest. The part of the process it shows us is sterile and largely mechanized. It distracts from the fundamental strangeness of mass-conveyed ground pork by reminding us of tight tolerances and speed and efficiency. It’s food created with the same level of technical mastery as your iPhone or your car or your pills.

Believe it or not, the McRib is 100% Pork meat and real. I saw how it was made with my own eyes. It’s actually pretty good. I liked it.

— Wes Bellamy, M.Ed (@WesBellamy) November 3, 2014

This is a bold response to Americans’ recent (and maybe overstated!) interest in where their food comes from, and a step further than Chipotle’s attempt to appropriate the language of “locally sourced” food and “farm-to-table” dining to market its international burrito chain. It represents food as a product and its manufacture as a fact of modern life; it represents critics as luddites and concerned customers as naive people who don’t quite understand the world we now live in. Those customers are not misinformed, however! Their disgust is just wrongheaded — their obsession with where their food comes from is driven by misguided desires or category errors. It’s an ideological correction, not a fact-check. The difference between farm-to-table and factory-to-table is, in this view, semantic.

McDonald’s wants to eventually bring its regular customers around to weary, know-it-all Reddit user’s point of view that almost stopped the image from going viral in the first place:

Even at age 14, I’m not sure if I’d find this to be WTF worthy…

I bet if we showed op a picture of a cow and told him that’s where steaks come from he would shit his pants…

Yup, just like the “pink goo” of processed chicken. What would people like them to do, just waste all of the non-choice bits of meat? It seems much more practical and ethical to at least use all of the meat…

This is not wtf at all. First time OP seeing frozen fastfood?…

Cultivating these attitudes — the chain is also getting a new slogan, “Lovin’ > Hatin’” — is important for the next stage of the new industrial food revolution: the stage where the last humans leave the factory floor, and the first machines join the service ranks.

The Time I Sexted My Mom

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer Beejoli Shah tells us more about what it’s like to send a sext to your mom by mistake.

Today will forever be the terrifying day I accidentally sexted my mom

— Beejoli Shah (@beejoli) October 18, 2014

Beejoli! So what happened here?

So, before I get fully into this, it’s important to know two things about me:

1. My mom and I text. A lot. To the point that I once deleted two years worth of text chains on my iPhone, except the one with her, to free up storage space, and I didn’t gain a single ounce of space on my phone. That’s how many texts we’ve sent each other. It’s perhaps a bit excessive.

2. I rarely pay close attention to the non-important things I’m doing. Like, say, watching where I walk so as not to trip on the loose step in my stairwell nearly every day. Or, you know, making sure I pick the right person to text. Or sext. You get the idea.

So! It was a Saturday like any other, and I was lounging around in bed doing my second favorite in-bed activity: watching Gilmore Girls. (First favorite is sleeping, third favorite is blogging — get your minds outta the gutter.) I was texting up a storm with my mom about my favorite topic: gossiping about my older sister, while also juggling a few scattered texts from friends about that evening’s plans. One of said scattered texts was to a guy I’d been hanging out with, trying to convince him to come out that night. After all the traditional arm-twisting (“It’ll be fun!” “Just don’t drink that much?” and a healthy dose of passive-aggressiveness) had failed, I knew I had to up the ante: sext time. Unfortunately, I am a pretty terrible sexter, and while I can assure you that no one on the Internet or elsewhere wants to see my boobs, I also don’t want to make it any easier for someone unintended to find them…so I sent a fairly tame partially-clothed picture insofar as the annals of millennial sexting go, but definitely not the type of thing you’d want landing in the hands of someone who doesn’t see you in various states of undress regularly.

But somewhere between perfecting a tweet in my head about just how annoying Lorelai Gilmore actually is when you watch Gilmore Girls as an adult, toggling between texts about dinner plans, and planning my hostile takeover from prodigal daughter to most favorite Shah child, I didn’t notice that I had toggled over one text too far and texted my mom. The realization dawned on me pretty instantly, and while I debated going with a “Oh, I just bought this new bra, what do you think?” I knew that my mom was too smart for that to work. (After all, this is a woman who I’ve written about multiple times on the Internet for giving the best dating and sex advice of all time.) I instead went for a combo of “OH MY GOD THAT WASN’T FOR YOU G2G BYEEEEE” and threw my phone across the room into my laundry basket, hoping that it had somehow morphed into a time machine since the last time I washed and folded. To her credit, my mom glossed right past it with a casual “Okay bye,” because I suppose as much as she wanted to scold me about the perils of sexting, she only has herself to blame: She did remind me recently that I’m twenty-seven and still single. She very well may have brought this lame attempt at seduction upon herself.

Just how awkward have things been between you and your mom since? And, also, did you ever end up going back in and sending the message to the right person?

Surprisingly, not that awkward! My mom and I have a pretty great relationship, especially when it comes to issues surrounding my love life. We’re no Rory and Lorelai, but this is a woman who once walked in on me hooking up with my high school boyfriend (at the time, my SECRET high school boyfriend) on the living room couch, and these days it’s become a punch line for her about how dumb I was to not have the foresight to send him home earlier, when I knew she’d be home by five. I get the sense she’s probably not that thrilled about it, and is biting her tongue on trying to over-parent me about “Look what happened to poor Jennifer Lawrence,” but let’s be honest: Who wants to be the person who goes, “Hey, so about that sext…”

I never did go back to resending that sext, not just because I had learned my lesson, but, well, it took me so long to think of the first one, I didn’t have a better second sexy text in my arsenal. And you can’t sext someone with the sext you sent your mom. We’re not Hapsburgs, after all.

Lesson learned (if any)?

Really, really pay attention to who you’re texting. If anyone, I blame iOS 8 for this. That little top nav toggle bar that shows the last eight people you texted by their initials might be useful in theory, but given that everyone I text somehow pulls from the same 6–8 letters for their initials, things can get dicey real fast. Also, never sext. Sexting is terrible.

Just one more thing.

As if I hadn’t already learned my lesson, I accidentally sexted my mom again a week later. On the day of Diwali, the Indian new year. In response to her “Happy Diwali!!” text. It was much, much worse. I don’t think my parents will keep paying my phone bill much longer.

Join the Tell Us More Street Team today! Have you spotted a tweet or some other web thing that you think would make for a perfect Tell Us More column? Get in touch through the Tell Us More tip line.

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor who was in New York but is now in Berkeley.

The Times notes that, thanks to Uber and other ride-sharing apps (but mostly Uber), life in Los Angeles has been radically transformed.

These days, [Ryan O’Connell] uses Uber, the smartphone-enabled car service app, as much as three times a day, Mr. O’Connell said the other day, sitting with friends by the rooftop bar at the Ace Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, a popular Uber destination. He takes it from his home in West Hollywood, Calif., to his job, as a writer for the MTV series “Awkward” in Hollywood, and out for drinks after work. His roommate and best friend has a car, and yet they rely on Uber to get around on weekends.

Why would someone with a car in a town like Los Angeles rely on Uber to get around on weekends?

“It became very clear to me that I could use Uber and have the kind of life I wanted,” he said. “I feel like I found a way to take the best parts of my New York lifestyle, and incorporate them in L.A.”

That makes sense. So, what are the best parts of that lifestyle?

Mr. Heitzler, 42, uses the ride-sharing app at least weekly, gladly leaving his car behind when he socializes. “In Los Angeles, you have the ubiquitous D.U.I. checkpoints everywhere,” he said. “If you’re going to go to a party, you either don’t drink or you Uber there and Uber back, and problem solved.”

Oh.

At the Mandrake, a bar he co-owns near Culver City, customers may be more likely to order a third cocktail when they know they can be whisked home safely; he certainly is. At the end of the night, “I see people reach for the phone and call the Uber,” Mr. Heitzler said.

Oh.

“I find myself going down there a lot and taking friends that are coming to visit, because there’s so much cool stuff to do,” said Lara Marie Schoenhals, 30, a writer and Mr. O’Connell’s roommate. On a recent night, she bounced from drinks at the Ace to dinner at a Roy Choi hot spot in nearby Koreatown then more drinks at a new bar in West Hollywood. “I can just, like, YOLO with Uber,” she said.

Well.

Photo by Adam Fagen

Legacy Assessed Realistically

“I do think that the general sense of [The Daily Show] as somehow being more authentic or having integrity is based almost purely on a dissatisfaction with traditional journalism. We are, in some ways, the cheap protest vote. I remember people said I was voted the fourth most trusted. But my name being in there was a fuck-you to everybody else. A dildo rolled in glitter would serve the same purpose as my name in that conversation.”

★★★★ Orderly, clean-looking cumulus drifted by. The breeze was chilly but worth letting in the window. All but one of the honeylocusts on the block had gone completely yellow. Here was fall in its belated fullness. Strobe flashes came from the glass of a turning car or a balcony door swinging. Knots of teens in their hoodies filled the wide sidewalk. An NYPD van watched them from near the crosswalk, windows open, the passenger-side cop smoking a cigarette.

by Emmet Stackelberg

In April of 1788, a mob of workers and freed slaves broke into a temporary shelter on the site of the still-under-construction New York City Hospital on Broadway and discovered a collection of preserved dead bodies and body parts. They believed that the bodies, in various states of dissection, had been stolen from cemeteries. They were right, for the most part.

By the late eighteenth century, the creation of a wholly American medical system, one not reliant on British doctors and facilities, necessitated an education apparatus fed by a regular supply of cadavers. In 1788, only five years after the war, this apparatus was still being erected. Columbia College opened its medical school in 1792, ten years after Harvard’s began. As the facilities were getting built and the doctors began taking pupils, the problem of obtaining bodies to dissect found its solution in the grave sites of the city’s poor — especially the Negro Burial Ground, which was created after Trinity Church banned black graves in its yard. It took up about six acres of land just outside the city limits, abutting the muddy northeastern shore of the Collect Pond, an early reservoir for the city. It had been in use for decades, and would continue to be used until a little before New York provided for legal manumission of slaves. (Most slaves continued to serve their former masters as indentured servants, no longer property but still bound to a household.)

The graveyard was convenient for nighttime corpse-hauling runs, just a few steps from the Old Hospital. In the hush of the city’s outskirts, medical students as young as fifteen years old could swiftly reach the burial ground and identify the most recent gravemarkers, which were carved wood, etched with the dates and ages. The bodies had to be fresh; what good was a body whose insides had begun to decay? In winter, the ground was harder, but the bodies stayed fresher for longer. The students dug and struggled and eventually hoisted the corpses out. Then a panting, short walk through the vapors coming off the pond and into the temporary shack at the Old Hospital. This process came to be called Resurrection.

The secret theft of bodies by doctors was made an open one in February of 1788, when an anonymous notice appeared in the New York Daily Advertiser relating that “a number of young men” had recently visited a private gravesite and taken “the corpse of a child out of the grave, and attempted that of an aged person.” It ends with a warning to young, grave robbing men that “perhaps their lives may be the forfeit of their temerity, should they dare to persist in their robberies.” But the robberies continued. The Daily Advertiser noted that “the interments not only of strangers, and the blacks, had been disturbed, but the corps of some respectable persons were removed.” Finally something snapped. The paper reported what happened next this way:

On Sunday the 13th inst. a number of boys, we are informed, who were playing in the rear of the Hospital, perceived a limb which was imprudently hung out of a window to dry; they immediately informed some persons — a multitude soon collected — entered the Hospital; and in their fury destroyed a number of anatomical preparations: some of which, we are told, were imported from foreign countries — one or two fresh subjects were also found — all of which were interred the same evening.

The hospital then was only a wooden shack, a temporary structure until the original building, damaged during the war, could be reconstructed. When the mob finally broke through into the wooden rooms, they acted with swift and blunting rage. The mob was only quelled by the intervention of Mayor James Duane, who placed the students and doctors in the town jail, which sat across from the Commons — now City Hall Park. A crowd which had gathered to search the doctors’ homes were soothed for a few hours by Governor George Clinton and the Mayor, but by the afternoon, had gathered again in a more vicious spirit, this time outside the jail; they wanted the doctors and students. A small militia was called, then another. The members of the second militia had their guns taken right out of their arms by the crowd.

The rioters did what they could to destroy the jail. Provost Prison was four stories of imposing stone, with a small Georgian-style cupola on top. The rioters destroyed the windows and took down part of the jail’s fence. The governor and mayor called in a larger militia, which stood at attention as rocks and bricks flew at them until the commander gave an order to fire. This, finally, scattered the crowd. It also left a handful of dead rioters and a great deal of wounded ones. Doctors peering through shattered windows four stories up would have seen bodies dotting the street, either in agony or in silence.

With the riot now over, and new bodies now in need of resting places, advertisements began to appear in the papers. Charles McKnight, a prominent surgeon, posted notice that “he hath not been concerned, privy to, or promoted the removal of any dead bodies from any church-yard within the city.” His students swore the same in a separate ad. Readers may have spotted a technicality: the Negro Burial Ground was neither a churchyard nor within the city. The city soon assembled a Grand Jury to investigate how the riot, the first since the Revolution, had started. In his address opening the jury, Chief Justice of New York Lewis Morris spoke of the riot’s cause as being “some very indecent and unpious plunder of dead bodies from their graves.” He went on: “If this report is founded in truth, which undoubtedly it is, you will readily account for the resentment that has seized the minds of the remaining relatives of such deceased persons.”

The Grand Jury’s decision, whatever it was, does not seem to have survived, but a resolution was eventually sought through policy. A new act was passed in the state, making grave robbing illegal and the issue faded from memory. Doctors, their reputations bruised and their supply of corpses choked off, turned to a new set of professionalized grave diggers, who came to be known in the nineteenth century as Resurrectionists, or “Sack-’em-up Boys.” Charles McKnight died three years after the riot, at age 41, and was buried just outside of Trinity Churchyard. Presumably, his body was not disturbed.

The Doctors’ Riot of 1788 was, at its core, a violent rejection of medical science’s view of the value of the bodies of the poor. Doctors regarded them as necessary specimens, essential for the training that would spread their science and the research that would advance it; the rioters viewed them as remains of friends and family that deserved an undisturbed resting place. The doctors’ position conspicuously applied almost entirely to the remains of slaves, freedpeople, and the poor — perhaps in their minds the closest thing to criminals’ remains. In death, as in life, bodies delineate difference.

In 1991, construction workers digging through layers of Manhattan infill rediscovered the Negro Burial Ground, and intact graves within it. An exhaustive excavation effort followed. Bodies that were no longer bodies — now only remains — were recovered painstakingly, their names forever lost on the long-decayed wooden gravemarkers. Where they lay, a National Monument now stands, the result of protests and public battles over how such a valuable piece of Manhattan would be used. The visitor’s center on Duane Street, another exhibit, called “Reclaiming Our History” regards the dead not as specimens but as stories. Next door in the Ted Weiss Federal Building, a bronze sculpture by Frank Bender looks out with three faces forensically reconstructed from actual remains. One, a young woman, had been buried with a musket ball stuck deep in her ribcage, but we don’t see this. The sculpture leaves their bodies unseen, except for the hands.

“It Was a Riot” is an occasional series about riots in American history.

Emmet von Stackelberg is a writer living in Cambridge.

by Awl Sponsors

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For a start-up like Mr. Butterfield’s, reaching that valuation in such a short time is unheard of. Slack, which offers a chat-room-like product for businesses to use as an internal communication tool, was introduced publicly only eight months ago. It is focused on the enterprise, which means it sells its products primarily to businesses, rather than individual consumers.

But with a new $120 million round of financing, announced on Friday, venture capitalists believe that Mr. Butterfield is building an enterprise company that will lead the next 100 years of online collaboration.

Slack is nice. It might even be well worth a billion dollars. But no one believes this. No one believes that we will all be making projects in Slackland in a hundred years; no one believes that Slack will be around in a hundred years; no one even believes that the internet itself will continue to exist as we know it in a hundred years. That’s a level of delusion too rich even for Silicon Valley these days. The beautiful thing is that it doesn’t matter.

Each week, the ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ industry observes a sacred ritual: Together, but not quite in sync, dozens of websites embed and then post the longest segment from John Oliver’s HBO show, Last Week Tonight. This video is made available by HBO shortly after the show airs — this week’s, about the sugar industry, is timestamped October 26th.

That John Oliver’s weekly video(s) will go viral is, at this time, a given. Whether or not the posts that embed those videos will go viral is another matter altogether. Each time around there are winners, losers, and mere participants. Here’s what happened this week.

Site / Likes

1. YouTube: 25,151

2. Time: 21,598

3. The Huffington Post: 15,525

4. Upworthy — 12,729

5. The Washington Post: 4,531

6. Mother Jones: 4,263

7. Grist: 3,353

8. Vox: 2,700

9. Raw Story: 2,199

10. Slate: 2,025

11. AddictingInfo: 1,580

12. Attn: 1160

13. Salon: 784

14. Uproxx: 548

15. The Daily Dot: 545

16. TruthDig: 429

17. CNET: 359

18. Popsugar: 313

19. Esquire: 258

20. Business Insider: 254

21. Hollywood Reporter: 199

22. Deadline: 188

23. Laughing Squid: 186

24. Mashable: 176

25. Medical Daily: 153

26. 9Gag: 146

27. Alternet: 143

28. Gawker: 114

29. Gothamist: 111

30. Men’s Journal: 107

31. The Week: 106

32. The Wrap: 79

33. Boy Genius Report: 76

34. SF Weekly: 71

35. Groundswell: 65

36. HitFix: 59

37. The Wall Street Journal: 48

38. AskMen: 44

39. Entertainment Weekly: 40

40. Splitsider: 34

41. Pajiba: 29

42. E! Online: 25

43. Pixable: 22

44. Philly.com: 14

45. ViralViral Videos: 12

46. Yahoo! (Syndicated from The Wrap): 10

47. Elite Daily: 9

48. Laughspin: 7

49. University Primetime: 7

50. Candy Industry Blog 7

51. America Blog: 6

52. Zap2It: 6

53. Tastfully Offensive: 6

54. Substance: 6

55. United Press International (UPI): 5

56. Daily Picks and Flicks: 4

57. Complex: 4

58. Higher Perspective: 3

59. BroBible: 3

60. Business2Community: 2

61. SocialNewsDaily: 1

62. RYOT: 1

63. Videosift: 0

64. WhatsTrending: 0

65. UIInternview: 0

66. Yahoo! (Syndicated from Business Insider): 0

(For links to each of these posts, the raw spreadsheet data is available here. You can try some of the links yourself with these free tools)

This data was collected on Thursday evening, October 30th. The video and its many instantiations are still not done collecting traffic, but the rankings are now unlikely to change in any meaningful way. We may update this list next week to reflect Facebook shares gathered by The Awl as the result of this post, which is ultimately an elaborate excuse to embed a John Oliver video on our website.

At the time of measurement, this video had produced at least 102,638 Facebook interactions. 25,151 of those interactions were claimed by links to the YouTube video itself (which was also by far the most Tweeted instance of the video — its competitors were not tweeted much at all).

This left 77,487 surplus Facebook interactions to be claimed by a pool of 65 sites. If these shares were rationed equally, that would work out to about 1,200 free shares apiece. But that is not the world we live in! So congratulations are in order to our top three video posters, as determined by Facebook shares, as measured by SharedCount: Upworthy, The Huffington Post, and, in first place, Time, which harvested 21598 Facebook interactions.

Some notes:

— This is not a full picture of John Oliver video sharing, but it’s close. We undoubtedly missed a few sites; others posted the video directly to their Facebook brand pages, without an external embed. The video was also tweeted and pinned and plussed and all that, but the numbers were comparatively small; the resultant traffic likely even smaller. Facebook also tells publishers about a thing called “reach,” which is not represented here, but which is widely suspected to be a modern variant of an ancient calming spell popular among village healers and hedge witches.

— This ritual’s practitioners have given it a name:

I won the Oliver-off! Give me my Pulitzer! RT @HayesBrown: Congrats, @bendreyfuss! pic.twitter.com/ZozsmZvv5B

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) September 22, 2014

The tool you’re seeing there is a piece of software called “Spike,” which allows social media manager types to see the spread of viral news stories in real time. (Dreyfuss performed respectably this week: 4263 shares.)

— This was, in the grand scheme of John Oliver video embedding, an off week. The video is hovering between two and three million views right now. Here are the top videos from the show:

What a bummer! When John Oliver destroyed/vaporized/murdered/owned/surprise-smooched/ripped/KILLED the FCC, Upworthy, with a post titled “John Oliver Goes Off On An Epic, Fact-Checked, Mic-Dropping Rant For 13 Minutes That You Need To See,” gathered 356,369 Facebook interactions.

Upworthy also posts transcripts of videos like this, which is a nice service. And an interesting critique, by accident, of comedy explainerism:

Sugar activates our brains like cocaine. I’ve got to say, Scarface would have been a very different movie if it ended with Al Pacino sitting in a chair, sugared out of his mind on baked goods, saying, “Say hello to my Little Debbie. Say hello.” With sugar being so viscerally appealing to us, it’s frankly no wonder that food manufacturers put it in everything, and I do mean everything.

Delivery counts.

— The distribution, even this week, was fairly brutal:

What makes the difference between a viral post and a literal zero? Not clear. Good headlining, big Facebook audiences. Timing, probably, but lots of sites don’t put timestamps on their stories anymore, because I guess metadata is just another world for liability (Monday afternoon seems to be way too late, for what it’s worth). Do “brands” matter? Haha, sure, why not, but I can’t tell you how.

Overall, it’s tough out there: You either catch the wave or you don’t, and a lot of people don’t. Some notable entries: AddictingInfo, a homespun viral site that nearly broke through; Yahoo, which had two failed submissions that were both syndications of posts from other sites; Boy Genius Report and CNET, which are tech and gadget sites; and the Candy Industry Blog, which was actually more of a writeup than a video aggregation, and which offered the… other side of the story? Sort of? “So the good news about the John Oliver segment on sugar is that it doesn’t really focus on candy.” There are also quite a few notable abstainers. Overall, this is just a really weird list of websites, connected by a Youtube embed and nothing else (except a general sense of disquiet about the future).

Anyway: Losers, stay strong. Winners, don’t get too complacent. Who will win? Who will lose? Who will rise? Who will fall? UNTIL NEXT WEEK.

The ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ ᴡᴀʀs is an occasional column intended to keep a majority of ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ coverage in one easily avoidable place.