The worries are exaggerated: Only 7% of young adults with student debt have $50,000 or more. http://t.co/Aavawc8KpC

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) June 24, 2014

Doesn’t that sound like a fact? Well, it’s something that might be a fact.

The Brookings Institute Institution (!!!) is here to tell you that the whole fable of debt-panicked young people in America is a lie! And their study comes complete with a huge announcement in the New York Times, which puts a rather snide slant on the whole thing. It’s all in your head, millennials! “Only 7 percent of young-adult households with education debt have $50,000 or more of it,” summarizes the Times up top. (There’s a quiet and enormous caveat in that sentence, which we’ll get to shortly!)

But then they must backtrack from this tale a bit:

The first thing to acknowledge is that student debt has risen over the last two decades. In 2010, 36 percent of households with people between the ages of 20 and 40 had education debt, up from 14 percent in 1989. The median amount of debt — among those with debt — more than doubled, to $8,500 from $3,517, after adjusting for inflation.

So let’s see: people with college debt saw their debt double, and also the number of those households with debt more than doubled. That is not exactly undermining this supposedly fake narrative of the increase of student debt! What’s more, the Times notes, tuition and fees at public colleges are up 50% in the last ten years.

Then they must come to this graph.

Do you see where that says “based on households with people between 20 to 40 years old with at least some education debt”? That’s actually quite a bit of a fudge!

What’s the deal with these numbers? GLAD YOU ASKED. It’s not what it sounds like!

• Those aren’t households with people between 20 and 40; those are households headed by people between 20 and 40. Which is to say, this data excludes all people living in households headed by, say, their parents, or other adults. The way Brookings put this is: “households led by adults between the ages of 20 and 40.” Just another way to say it excludes all households led by anyone over 40! (Those households might be identical in student debt to “young” households! Or they might not? WHO KNOWS!)

• One effect of this age spread sample is that it includes college graduates from up to almost 20 years ago. This is literally not at all a study of college graduates of the last five years, or even ten years. We’re talking about people up to the age of 40, well into Gen X.

• Also, in this survey, when there are multiple people in the household, the Brookings Institution simply divided the amount of college debt by number of people in the household. So one person’s $20,000 college debt becomes two people’s $10,000 college debt. This works out mathematically, of course, but not structurally.

• And finally: The number of the people making up this data is quite small.

Where does it come from? GLAD YOU ASKED.

All this data comes from the Survey of Consumer Finances, which is conducted by the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and the Department of Treasury. It takes place every three years, since 1983. It samples about 4500 households in the U.S., usually, but recently expanded to 6500 households. And this isn’t new data; this is the data from their 2010 survey. (The 2013 survey will be published in 2015.)

Of all the households in that study, only about 1711 have “household heads” that are younger than 40. That’s what they’re extrapolating from. (And, intriguingly, a small number of those have a head of household younger than 18.) This is not a big sample!

What, obviously, does this data completely omit? Well, one obvious thing is… households who are headed by someone who is not under 40. One thing we know is that, in 2012, 36% of Americans aged 18 to 31 were not their head of household, because they were living with their families.

This survey also clearly combines family and non-family households. (Also, there’s some unknown amount of statistical imbalance from same-sex households; 31% of same-sex households are likely to have two college-degreed people, compared to 24% of opposite-sex married households and just 12% of opposite-sex cohabitating households.)

And finally… this survey is, essentially, of rich people. No, literally!

We apply survey weights throughout the analysis so that the results are representative of the U.S.
population of households. The use of survey weights is particularly important in the SCF because
the sample design oversamples high-income households to properly measure the full distribution of
wealth and assets in the United States. This high-income sample makes up approximately 25 percent of
households in the SCF.

Literally what they are saying there is that the information on which they are basing a sweeping assessment of American student loan debt is based on a sample in which 25% of those surveyed were “high-income households.” This is insane. (Update: I wanted to clarify that I get it that they are weighting this over-representation down to represent the population at large; that’s not my beef, entirely. Mostly I think it shows a further weakness in their non-rich sample at large.)

Here’s a fun footnote in the actual Brookings Institution report:

These statistics are based on households that had education debt, annual wage income of at least $1,000,
and that were making positive monthly payments on student loans. Between 24 and 36 percent of
borrowers with wage income of at least $1,000 were not making positive monthly payments, likely due
to use of deferment and forbearance….

So… they… set aside as much as 1/3rd of people in the survey sample because they weren’t paying off their student debt. That’s an intriguing class of debtors, don’t you think? They claim that dismissing these people from the sample did not “qualitatively alter the pattern of results reported above”; so why dismiss them at all?

It’s shocking that the Times presents this survey in this way. This study does actually tell us things! It’s not actually a pack of lies. It just doesn’t tell us necessarily what people are saying it’s telling us. And no one of course will actually read the whole survey, so its repackaging will now enter the narrative, thanks to bloggers….

Great @dleonhardt piece on research by @chingos and @bethakersed suggesting the sky isn’t falling on student debt http://t.co/R7eOuCQJPY

— Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) June 24, 2014

The new DC parlor game: Find some random economic or social shift. Blame it on student loan debt. Ignore data. Repeat yourself. Meme started

— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) June 24, 2014

… and professional policy wonks alike. And that’s a huge disservice.

UPDATE

I wanted to specifically call attention to this criticism at Quartz, which actually… doesn’t really disagree with anything either here or in the report. It’s full of good points, but what it’s not is any kind of defense of either the Brookings Institution study or of the marketing of that study. Saying that it’s a small-ish percentage of debt-havers that are carrying massive amounts of debt isn’t controversial or unreasonable. It’s actually probable! But presenting a definitive landscape of America’s student debt based on heavily sampled data most recently updated in 2010 and heavily weighted to “reflect” America as a whole is lot less useful. (Have we not been through this on a daily basis with the Huffington Post Science section, after all?)

The New York Times, 1986:

The recently spruced up Union Square area has become fertile ground for a new crop of restaurants. Union Square Cafe, an inviting, low-key newcomer on the site of the former Brownies, a health food restaurant, is one of the most appealing of the lot.

In 1995:

“We’re still in the same area, which is important,” Ms. Hirsch said. “We think that people who come to Barnes & Noble will appreciate having our store nearby because what we have at our store, you can’t get anywhere else.”

…

In the last few years, Revolution Books seemed something of a lonely hanger-on on East 16th, which has turned into a local restaurant row led by the upscale and critically acclaimed Union Square Cafe. The new block also has a restaurant, Uncle Moe’s Burrito and Taco Shop.

And in 2014:

Mr. Ellis, who grew up in the neighborhood and whose father was Mr. Meyer’s original landlord, said the closing of Union Square Cafe would be painful for him, for the area and for Mr. Meyer, but a small, independent fine-dining restaurant could no longer operate in one of New York’s busiest crossroads. Still, he said, he could still envision a partnership with Mr. Meyer’s restaurant group.

“A Shake Shack could do very well in that space,” he said.

Photo by David Bliwas

★★★★★ “Clouds,” the two-year-old said, riding nowhere in particular on adult shoulders. “Sky, sky, sky. Blue sky, blue sky, blue sky.” The water in the fountain had gone from chemical blue-green to algal olive-green, with an accompanying algal odor. Loose-edged clouds covered and uncovered the sun. A lean black pigeon walked by on the bricks, its feet pink and claws black. The two-year-old wanted to go to the playground; the seven-year-old wanted to stay put. The compromise was Lincoln Center. Flatware clinked on dishes in the shade of the restaurant on the north edge, under the grass roof. The surface of the black reflecting pool was only a tiny bit ruffled, the wished-on coins at the bottom still distinct dots. The two-year-old peeled off his shoes and socks and went up the grassy steps, charging back and forth along the tipped and elevated lawn. It was a little bit hot out in the openness of it, and all but empty at midday. The grass had a white shine on it, and a chartreuse glow of new growth. Really the children should have been eating lunch already, but the day could not be ignored. The two-year-old scampered down the steps and went running on the plaza, feet slapping the hard surface. Coaxed back into shoes, he made for the artificial grove across the way, the evenly spaced sycamores and sandy gravel, and went scuffling through the heart of it. The shade was narcotic, stunning. People sat in chairs all around the perimeter, to see the sun without being out in it. Lunch would be late, naptime even later, the whole schedule coming off the spool. When the younger child was finally awake again, it was almost time to start cooking dinner, or to abandon the notion of cooking dinner and to get back out into the late day. Off to the playground, then, both children speeding ahead on scooters, the younger curling his back foot up flamingo-wise in ostentatious self-confidence. Later, he would experimentally let go of a swing at the top of its arc, to wrap up the day with a fat lip. Excessive possibilities. A small tree under the big trees caught its own portion of sunlight. The clouds had abandoned the sky. Even waiting indoors for takeout was too much. Better to take a slow walk around the next two blocks. A cool wind eased its way up the avenue. Everyone’s hair looked fantastic, alive with subtle textures and shadings. The bricks looked good; the stains and grime on the bricks looked good. The bronze-toned facade of the old OTB parlor, now given over to yoga and herbs, gleamed richly. Even the dull red paint, slathered several stories up to further blank out a blank brick wall, was vibrant, each little broken peeling patch a point of interest. Nothing was gilded or honeyed yet, in the long end of daytime, just each thing saturated with the colors all its own.

So an American Soccer Fan Walks Into a Bar

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and says, “I get excited about soccer. I like how soccer is growing in the United States.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “USA spirit, why else? This is great. This is great.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “I’ve been playing since I was 5.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and notes, “It’s so rare to have a bar filled with Americans cheering for soccer”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and says, “I think a lot of this is reciprocal appreciation of each other.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. He declares the trend “cyclical.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “Brazil is like the Yankees of the World Cup.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “If you took the Real Housewives, the best Real Housewives on all the stations, and you put ’em on one show for a month with eliminations, that’s the World Cup!”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and “[i]t was even more intense in person than it looks in the video.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and says, “I love getting together to party to celebrate us.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and says, “It’s cool to get someone from Europe who says, ‘Oh, you’re doing this well.’ It’s good to get that pat on the back”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and tells a reporter, “We are a bunch of like-minded people getting together to support the team. We are passionate about something we love — that is the beautiful game and this beautiful country.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “The camaraderie and everyone coming together, it’s just a good time.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and says soccer is “a competition to watch, but at the same time it’s fun.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “It’s just basically a beautiful game that unites people and really entertains the world, I think.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “I think you’re absolutely crazy if you come in here, you leave, and you’re still not a soccer fan.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and hugs in front of the television.

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and says, “It’s awesome. You can’t describe the energy level. The comradery, the patriotism.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. “The glass is half-full.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar, “motivated by the Landon Donovan goal videos that showed everyone at watching parties cheering and going nuts.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar because “it’s more fun to be around enthusiastic fans that it is to be at home.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and explains, “I was just trying to find someplace to come out with a lot of people. I got a tip from somebody that this place was trying to tout themselves as a soccer bar.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar. He tells a man with the dictaphone, “I think that’s pretty cool, because a lot of times in the US it’s not necessarily about what the biggest event is, but it’s what the market is willing to pay for in terms of advertising. In the US it shows that if they have to do what their sponsors demand, it shows that their sponsors have done research and that people are watching this.”

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and then falls out of the bar.

An American soccer fan walks into a bar and says, “I’m never coming here again.”

Image by Matt Hurst

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, VanityFair.com critic and columnist Richard Lawson tells us more about the horrors of accidentally sending the wrong text message to your mom.

Cool beans. Sent my mom a text about Fire Island plans that was meant for a friend. So I’m committing seppuku now

— Richard Lawson (@rilaws) June 17, 2014

Richard! So what happened here?

I was coming home from a staff drinks kind of a thing and was juggling several text message conversations, one with my mom who just visited me and my sister in New York, and another with my editor, who had snapped a picture of me at the drinks thing. I was joking with my editor that I looked fat in the picture and texted “I need to lose 30 pounds before Fire Island,” because we’d been talking about my going there with some friends for the first time this August. I am nervous about going because it seems like a very scary place where I will feel gross and old and ugly, and that had been a topic of conversation at this work thing.

So I guess I wasn’t really discussing plans, as my tweet said, so much as I was joking about fears. Anyway, it got sent to my mom by accident because I was ordering a slice of pizza on my way home (so much for losing 30 pounds) and was distracted. I quickly wrote back “Hah, that was meant for a friend, sorry.” She wrote back “30 pounds is too much!” and I replied “Just a joke.” My mom and I don’t have the kind of relationship where we talk about things in that kind of jokey tone, so it was strange and embarrassing, there in the pizza parlor.

So what was the fallout?

There wasn’t really any fallout. It actually turned into an interesting conversation with my mom, over text. My uncle, the brother she was closest to, was gay, and he and his partner had a house on Fire Island in the ’70s and ’80s, before he and basically everyone he knew died of AIDS, and so my mom has a certain nostalgia for the place. She reminded me that I went there as a baby and that my sister, a toddler at the time, was fascinated by the drag queens she met. At one point my mom texted, “There used to be a tea dance, but I don’t know if they still do that,” and I thought about everything I’ve heard about the “teas” at the Pines, and it was strange that my mom was at least dimly aware of what goes on at them. I said, “From what I’ve heard, they very much do exist,” and my mom said she would try to find out where exactly my uncle’s house was, and then the conversation just sort of petered out. I’m not completely, technically “out” to my mom, so this felt like an interesting, accidental inch forward. Scary and weird and definitely a little embarrassing, but also good? It’s good to act like a human being with your parents, I guess. Because we are all human beings.

Lesson learned (if any)?

The practical lesson is don’t text while a little tipsy and ordering pizza. The more abstract lesson might be that my mom is more aware of the world than I give her credit for.

Just one more thing

I’m wondering as I do this if my mom will somehow see it. My aunt somehow found and read a Tumblr post I wrote recently about a trip I took, and she told my mom about it, and that’s terrifying because in the post I talked about boys and cigarettes and wine, and that is not stuff we talk about at all. (Unless she’s accusing me of smoking, which I always deny.) So what if she sees this? What would happen? I hope she wouldn’t feel made fun of. Mum, if you’re reading this, I am not making fun of you. It was just funny and embarrassing that I accidentally text messaged you about feeling insecure about going to an island full of gay men, on a Monday night in June, when you’d taken the train home to Boston that morning, having spent all weekend with me as I tried to present a tidy version of my life to you. That’s all.

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

by Noah Kulwin

I was on vacation last week (while apparently you all fell for some app that just sent the word “yo” to each other, and also all suddenly became soccer fans? Great work!) and I took the opportunity to handle all those little annoying tasks that you never get to. For instance: iPhone autocorrect is the most horrible thing in the world. For years, my phone has been typing “ducxking” for me when clearly I intend to type… not that. It’s easy to fix!

Go to Settings.

Go to General.

Scroll down for Keyboard.

Hit Shortcuts.

There you can add a “shortcut” but that is actually a dictionary of sorts. If you just add the word or phrase you want, and don’t add an actual shortcut, it will stop autocorrecting the word you mean to type. NO MORE DUCXKING.

This exercise of adding my commonly used swearwords was, as always, an excellent reminder about the horrors of our gendered and sexphobic and certainly slutphobic swear economy. I mean: TRIGGER WARNING for “the existence of humanity.” (Ya fudgepackers.)

by Brendan O’Connor

Braco is a middle-aged Croatian man with long, graying hair and a face permanently molded into a close-lipped smile. His eyes are dark, soft and gooey, like slightly melted Tootsie Rolls, and tens of thousands of people have traveled enormous distances to be caught, if only for a moment, in their field of view.

“Braco does not teach, talk or diagnose to give treatments — he simply gazes in silence and offers his gift to visitors — independent from religion, ideology, race, color and culture,” his website states. “Amazing transformations happen, and many find new power, vitality and a zest for life resulting from their experience.” His verified Facebook adds, “many report about improvements on different levels of their lives.” Braco’s followers claim that His Gaze has lifted depression, cured illness (including cancer!), and restored brain function.

Braco was in New York this weekend for the summer solstice, holding hourly sessions in which he shared his Gaze from ten in the morning until six in the evening. Neither children nor women pregnant past their first trimester were allowed to receive his gaze. I am neither a child nor a pregnant woman, and so I bravely ventured to Midtown Manhattan on Sunday morning, where Braco was in residence at the Wyndham New Yorker hotel.

11:51

The crowd inside, especially on the second floor, is much the same as they are immediately outside — mostly white, mostly middle-aged. Nobody looks particularly healthy, but everyone is smiling. I walk past a long table with lots and lots and lots of Braco-branded DVDs; his face is everywhere — DVDs, books, posters. It’s like being in a hall of mirrors, but with Vigo, the kind of lame villain from Ghostbusters II.

11:52

The next session is due to take place at noon in the Grand Ballroom. Someone asks me for a ticket. I don’t have one. A woman (smiling, always smiling) directs me back out the door to where tickets are being sold for eight dollars. Most of Braco’s volunteers — wearing badges that say “Volunteer” and “Braco Gazing Event” — are women. The volunteer selling tickets looks up at me with wide eyes and asks, “Cash or credit?” I begin to pull my wallet out of my pocket before I find myself saying, “Um, actually, I need to go to an ATM? I’ll be right back.” This is a lie, because something is telling me to leave. As I turn, she reaches out and tells me to wait just a minute. She bends down underneath the table between us, rummaging for something, popping back up occasionally to check that I am still there before coming back up with a ticket that has “complimentary” printed across it in purple block letters.

(It’s not clear how many Special Complimentary Tickets are given out. The box from which the woman removed the ticket was quite full, so potentially there could be quite a few folks who are as special as I apparently am, but the box hadn’t been readily available and seemed buried under lots of other things, so I think it’s fair to infer that I must be pretty special.)

“Oh!” I say. “Oh! Uh. Wow. Um. Thanks!”

11:55

I walk back down the hallway toward the Grand Ballroom and hand over my complimentary ticket. Three women usher me in. The ballroom is large and ornate and I feel like I’ve been transported to the Overlook Hotel.

Three broad-shouldered, middle-aged white men stand against the wall, studying the crowd. I find a seat next to a woman who proceeds to pick at her teeth with her Metrocard. The ballroom is about half-full; I estimate there are somewhere between a hundred and a hundred-fifty people here. At eight bucks a head, that’s somewhere between $800 and $1200 in revenue.

12:00

A tall, blonde woman named Angelika Whitecliff, the author of 21 Days With Braco, comes out. She introduces the musician David Young, a Braco devotee who claims to channel the ghost of George Harrison. Young plays two flutes at the same time.

12:07

Young finishes his performance and Whitecliff returns to the stage. She speak at length about the books and DVDs Braco has written and produced, as well as the thirteen books that his mentor, Ivica Prokic, wrote to help us (“us”) face our problems and difficulties. One of them is newly available in translation.

“The good and evil are not far apart,” Ivica wrote. “They are side by side. It goes in a circle. It goes and goes. After every day comes the night, but fortunately after every night comes the day.”

Ivica believed that a piece of the sun resided within him.

12:15

“We have a choice to focus on the good,” Whitecliff says. “I’ve seen people with just the worst depression come to The Gaze, and that depression is lifted.” People around me are nodding. Presumably they too have experienced, or witnessed, this phenomenon. “Braco shares this gift equally. All we have to do is be open to receive it.”

Whitecliff tells us about all of the people she’s heard about who, when they come to share Braco’s Gaze and watch his DVDs and read his books and buy his merchandise, they can face their problems. “They say that when they meet the same types of challenges [as they had before they came to know Braco] they gracefully sail through them. It’s the same situation but they’re not the same,” Whitecliff tells us. “That’s a remarkable gift that Braco is helping so many people to realize.”

12:21

Whitecliff asks how many people are here for the first time. I see four raised hands.

Whitecliff introduces a clip in which a Vietnam veteran talks about his experience with Braco. The vet suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for decades after the war; after his fourth time sharing Braco’s gaze, his PTSD was lifted. “It was real,” he tells the camera, tears in his eyes. Then he was diagnosed with stomach cancer — but falsely, it turns out. “That man saved my life,” he says. “And I’ve got the paperwork to prove it.”

12:25

The video is over. Whitecliff asks us to turn off our cellphones. “Now is your time to meet Braco’s Gaze,” she says, asking us to place any photographs we may have of loved ones over our hearts. We all stand, and breathe deeply.

12:26

Braco emerges, trailed by a (very attractive) younger woman. He is wearing a white, flowing shirt and tight jeans. Like, really tight. They are stone washed and, if I am not mistaken, flared.

Braco stands on the stage and Gazes out at the audience, turning his whole body slowly from one side of the room to the other. His posture is weirdly stiff, his legs pressed tightly together and his arms held slightly out from his sides.

12:30

Braco leaves.

12:31

“I hope you feel better!” Whitecliff says. A microphone is handed to Theresa, from Colorado, who shares her Braco story: her son was in the movie theater in Aurora; he was not hurt. (His friend was killed.) She attributes this to having received Braco’s Gaze via live-stream some weeks before.

12:36

We are dismissed.

12:42

I examine the merchandise. There is something called “Sun Jewelry.” The most budget-friendly item the cuff ring, encrusted with white diamonds, is selling for $2700; the most expensive item is the one carat sun pendant for $7200. I didn’t see anyone buy any.

There are about twenty DVDs for $20 each; Braco’s book After the Great Tragedy is $16, while Whitecliff’s book 21 Days with Braco is $21. An album called Thank You Braco is $15. A volunteer whose name tag says her name is “Vanaja” explains that there are two DVDs which include “The Voice” — in which Braco speaks. (A note on Braco’s site reads: “Please know that Braco never personally contacts people or communicates with people directly. He does not give any interviews and he does not speak in public.”)

Each DVD, however — with or without The Voice — has been “energized,” which means that if you have a stomach ache or a headache you can place the whole DVD or the case on your body, where you feel the pain, or under your pillow overnight, and it will be lifted. “Like, fifteen, twenty minutes,” Vanaja says.

12:45

I leave, but I am still not feeling any of the purported effects of the gaze, perhaps because Braco and I never made actual eye contact. I’m a little anxious, even.

Outside the hotel, no one is smiling, because it is Midtown, so why would you? That makes me feel a lot better.

Brendan O’Connor is a reporter in New York.

Photos from Braco.net

Everything’s coming up ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ:

Vinit Bharara made his fortune selling Pampers and Huggies. Now he wants to capitalize on a business fast becoming as commodified as diapers: digital content.

His new site, Cafe, will be “a mass publication that explores everything and anything,” Bharara tells the Times, the most venerable content prospecting operation east of the Mississippi. “If I need to be practical, I’ll be practical.” But for now? Diap up, it’s time to hit publish.

Vice is continuing its interminable will-they-won’t-they media sales tour, conjuring a $2.5 billion valuation in the pages of the Times business section (“Vice would also arrive [at Time Warner, Disney or Fox] with a devoted following, though the size of its audience is hard to verify independently.” Good grief, this is an inferential game people have been playing for half a decade now: Vice is worth a lot, therefore Vice has a very large audience. So large that its size must never be spoken aloud!) A source at BuzzFeed “Snorts At Report Of $200 Million Raise” in a headline on Business Insider, brought to you by Jeff Bezos. Vox loves brands! Every company with a recognizable name and and a few business reporters is cashing in on some kind of conference; Vanity Fair’s $5000 party pass will buy you a rough and powerful high resulting from watching Keith Alexander hand off a mic to Jonathan Ive. The profoundly cynical Distractify, one of the first pure viral mills, can’t help but raise $7 million from one of the most powerful VC firms in the world.

And times — traffic numbers — are basically good, is the thing. VC-free Gawker Media is on a hiring spree; even the austere FT, with its big tall barbed wire paywall, is flush. The weird new internet is configured in such a way that well situated news and entertainment sites can build enormous audiences fairly quickly — part of the reason so many people are scrambling for the next great metric is that the old ones can barely contain what’s happening. There are about a 100 million people reading Gawker Media sites. If you count YouTube videos, BuzzFeed is probably quite a bit more than twice as large. These are astonishingly large groups of humans!

But these are all different stories, too: The money raining down on Vice, for example, represents the beginning of a looming panic among media conglomerates, which are still doing spectacularly well but which know, deep down, that the internet is about to do something horrible and vulgar to the business of television. Vice, at least the Vice Shane Smith pitches, is the perfect conservative hedge. (Not unrelated:”Fusion will integrate Whisper posts into its TV broadcasts.” It all comes back to TV in the end.)

The common thread is confidence. It’s a faith bubble: Inside it we can all grow, forever. We can make that money back! We love Facebook and Facebook loves us, and our love is a true love. Our audience? Our audience is like no other audience — our audience is cool, their whole lives are in front of them, and we will grow old together. Or maybe we already have grown old together, and we kept things clean and we kept things happy and we kept that flame alive for decades, and now we have all this spending power to convert into capital. Either way, it’s time to make a move. Where is this all going? Surely there will be losers among all these winners, right? Maybe someday, but not now. So do it! Monetize! Get it! Turn that diaper cash into a general interest web portal for the new generation, the savviest generation, the generation that can never quite remember how it got to this page in the first place.

Photo by cc511

Good question! Glad you asked, given that the reason is at least partly because he “had allowed an employee to post naked photographs of a former female employee who had sued him.”

On Wednesday, just after the company’s annual meeting, Mr. Charney sat in a conference room at the Times Square offices of the company’s outside counsel, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and was fired by the board. Under the terms of his contract, Mr. Charney will be suspended immediately and formally terminated after 30 days. The directors also voted to remove him as chairman. Mr. Charney still owns 27 percent of the company’s stock.

A person with direct knowledge of the meeting said that Mr. Charney was shocked and that the meeting lasted more than nine hours.

So, approximately thirty days and nine hours.

Photo by Juan José Richards Echeverría