“Crumpets and bubbly chocolate bars might fill some people with joy, but scientists claim that most humans have a primordial fear of clusters of holes. Everyday objects with many closely-packed holes can be a trigger for people who report suffering from trypophobia, or the fear of holes, which can lead to intensely unpleasant visceral reactions, psychologists claim. A study suggests the widespread, predominantly latent phobia is associated with ancient threats such as beehives, poisonous flowers and venomous creatures.”

There are some fun things to do today — Kiese Laymon at the New School, Reza Aslan at PowerHouse, Meg Wolitzer at McNally — but really it’s TENNIS NIGHT. And, in other news, we’ve lost an independent New York City publication today but gained a growing local employer, as our neighborly website Capital NY goes to the owner of Politico. It’s like the Daily News goes to grad school? The next two years are gonna be fun.

by Nate Hopper

1.

In 1941, almost exactly five months after Hitler had offered to end the war and a few nights before Christmas, a 2,750-pound German bomb fell into a married London couple’s wooden kitchen, which was already “flimsy.” But the bomb did not explode. Alf Fry and his wife waited four weeks for the bomb to be dug up from the clay, dismantled, and hauled away. But before that, they came to call the bomb “Max.”

Max’s impotence was both normal and odd. As the war progressed, bombs that large — named, quite literally, blockbusters — were more commonly used by the Royal Air Force in night raids on German military centers along its rivers or in Berlin. One killed 200 in Berlin’s fashionable Hotel Bristol. And those R.A.F. bombs, which needed to be craned into the planes’ bomb bays, were notoriously volatile. Sometimes, they would not explode at all when deployed. At other times, they unexpectedly would, even if being dropped in safe zones with their detonation devices disarmed, and fall “to earth like a fiery comet.”

But Max, an early and light edition (the R.A.F. bombs tripled in size over the course of the war, from 4,000 to 12,000 pounds; propaganda would claim the latter could blast an area of ten city blocks), only destroyed a flimsy kitchen and a Sunday morning later that January, when about a thousand neighbors needed to evacuate their homes at 7:30 a.m. for his disposal. It only took an hour and a half.

2.

At 29, John Horne Burns, who the Times recently named “the great (gay) novelist you’ve never heard of,” finished The Gallery on April 23, 1946. He then fell upon his typewriter and, he said, “wept my heart out.”

The Gallery’s narrator travels along much the same path that Burns himself took as a G.I. in the war. And in the novel, he recounts his time at an American cemetery at Saint-Jean de Fedhala, in Morocco. To enter, a visitor or mourner had to bribe its gardener with two cigarettes.

“The graves are plotted in neat rows,” he remembered. He saw “how close and still bodies can be laid together in the earth. Over each rectangle a white cross spreads its rafter arms. Most of the crosses have dogtags affixed to them, giving each its relief from anonymity.” He found some unmarked graves, and imagined that “underneath must be the bodies of those who were blown apart by artillery or drowned while still wading ashore.” Or, maybe, were bombed.

In the beach town’s garden, after dark, “there was also the largest woman in captivity, the French secretary to Fedhala’s doctor,” who also looked after the doctor’s child. “We called her Blockbuster.” She weighed 190 pounds, which she “carried” with “offishness,” and “she insisted on deferential treatment to discriminate her from the Ayrab wenches, who were far more natural and amenable to reason.”

3.

The Brockton Blockbuster was mostly a right arm.

Its power was first seen on the baseball diamond at Brockton High School (hence the locative) in the hometown of its owner, then known as Rocco Francis Marchegiano — later simplified to Rocky Marciano. His family would describe it as “rocket-like.” It was later more frequently called “murderous,” when the Brockton Blockbuster became the six-time undefeated heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

At birth, he was 12 pounds. He grew into a “stocky” boy on his mom’s Italian cooking. Then he was 188 pounds, when he fought Joe Louis on Oct. 26, 1951. By then, his arm had swept floors in a shoe factory and moved into pulling tacks from its shoes, punched Army bags filled with stuffed rags as he waited for a deployment to the Pacific front that never came (Marciano was honorably discharged about a month before John Horne Burns wept on his typewriter), and fought in 35 pro bouts, one of which, said his brother, ended with him “sheering” his opponent’s “front teeth off at the nubs.”

In the eighth round of the Louis fight, the Blockbuster’s left swiped across Louis’ jaw, causing Louis to stumble to the mat. After a beat, Louis made it up first to his right knee, grasping onto the lower rope, and then all the way up. The Blockbuster bounced around, his head sometimes burrowing into Louis’ chest, and threw uppercuts and pushed Louis back to the outside. Within minutes, he threw a left, and then the right uppercut, which cued him up for a final blow. Louis collapsed through the ropes, done. That right ended his comeback. It made the Blockbuster famous.

About a year later, in the Brockton Blockbuster’s first attempt at the heavyweight title, the right collapsed then-champion Jersey Joe Walcott into an unconscious heap on the lower rope. While he sat there, still nearly upright, the Blockbuster threw a gratuitous left. As the count finished, Walcott fell into a crumpled fetal position, the crown of his head touching the mat.

The Brockton Blockbuster did not lose once in his 49 professional bouts, 43 of which were knockouts, though reporters did call one victory on points dubious and “a miscarriage of justice.” That fight was against a boxer named Roland LaStarza; the Blockbuster’s manager, Al Weill — who also was said to have masterfully, patiently timed the Louis fight till Louis was weak enough — was the fight promoter for the Madison Square Garden, where the match took place. In a rematch three years later, the Blockbuster’s right sent LaStarza through the ropes; LaStarza endured a few more punches before the fight was stopped. Later, it was revealed that the Blockbuster’s punches had broken blood vessels in LaStarza’s arm.

Though he also once nearly killed a man in the ring, the Brockton Blockbuster was generally considered a warm, gentle man when he wasn’t fighting. In 1956, he had promised his wife he would retire before the month of May arrived. And on April 27, having retained his title the previous September with a knockout, he announced his retirement. His left eye looking swollen and bruised, Marciano said that he felt “perfect physically.” His brother would say that he retired because he’d come to hate the smell of the gym.

4.

In the July 14, 1962 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, the magazine published an unapologetic confessional by a white man known pseudonymously as “Norris Vitcheck.” He said that he was a real-estate speculator who worked often in primarily white neighborhoods in Chicago. But, as he initially introduced himself, he preferred the “perhaps slightly” more “odious name” of his work: block-buster.

He summed up his business:

“My function, which might be called a service industry, is to drive the whites from a block whether or not they want to go, then move in Negroes.”

This is how he did it: He targeted “old, middle-class blocks” where “whites already… have been conditioned to insecurity by the inexorable march of the color line in their direction.” He would then buy one of the homes on the block, with a promise to the owners and their neighbors: “Relax. I’m selling this through a white real-estate man. I won’t even talk to a Negro.” Then, he sold the home to “a Negro.” One by one, the white owners would sell — “whether or not they can afford to move.” Within months, non-whites occupied the entire block, as “Vitcheck” and the “more than 100 in Chicago” who devoted themselves to this work made a profit three times over:

“You may believe your home is worth $15,000, for example. If I bust your block, I will expect to buy it for $12,000 cash… The myth that “Negroes lower property values” persists — so whites run, and we block-busters clean up. Within a few days comes profit No. 2: I advertise and sell it to a Negro not for $15,000, but for $18,000… [Then] the easy-payment plan, I believe it is called — that is, $150 to $200 a month until the contract is fulfilled. When is that? This is profit No. 3, the big one. The contract is fulfilled when I have been paid principal and interest totaling $36,000.”

Other block-busters — “If I operated so crudely, frankly I wouldn’t have consented to write this report,” said “Vitcheck” — sped up the process by having “Negroes with noisy cars” drive through the neighborhoods or a poor “Negro mother” walk through with their children or have people make phone calls to local houses asking for people like “Johnnie Mae” — or simply whispering and warning: “They’re coming!”

For his work, whites called “Vitcheck” a “nigger lover,” “vulture,” “panic peddler,” and “Communist and un-American.” One man said he “sold out” his “own race!” But at the end of his story, “Vitcheck” defended himself in a series of questions directed at his naysayers: “Am I really the basic cause of whites’ fleeing?” And: “Would you help remove the pressure on ‘busted’ areas by welcoming a Negro family into your own block?” And: “Whatever the faults and whatever the social stigma I endure, I don’t believe I am hypocritical about all this. Can you honestly say the same?”

5.

In 1974 and 1975, the two Milstein brothers played the New York City Planning Commission against its own city-agency brother in the Board of Standards and Appeals. They’d dreamed up a 43-story tower for the Broadway stretch between West 62nd and 63rd Streets, right across from Lincoln Center, despite it being far more “dense” than what the area’s special zoning district permitted. Other contractors were in the midst of building similar structures within the set guidelines; Paul and Seymour wanted bigger, while lawmakers feared that if the two prevailed, city zoning would be rendered pointless. One Times editorial, beneath the headline “Lincoln Blockbuster,” expanded the threat’s purview: “It is also quite clear that the whole city loses if the Milsteins win.”

Which they did. The brothers maneuvered between the two city agencies, like boys traversing climbing rings on a playground: letting go of one right before its momentum turned against theirs and then latching to the other. They skipped the standard practice of submitting plans first to the Planning Commission, instead jumping straight to the Board of Standards — only to withdraw their application right before the board ruled and rerouted the process back to the commission, where, eventually, a 5–2 vote favored their special permit. (One commission chairman in favor was John Zuccotti, who later became their zoning lawyer.) The vote was not for a 43-, but instead a 34-story building — with 609 units, still much larger than its surrounding competitors and 50-percent more dense than any other building constructed in the city since 1961. They named the resulting building 30 Lincoln Plaza.

This was what the brothers imagined and executed over frequent lunches together at the Rainbow Room. By the time the 30 Lincoln Plaza attempt began, the Bronxite and “frog”-voiced Paul, who wore pinstripes and jewels around his pinkies, had already won a similar gambit with the two agencies less than a decade earlier for his 42-story Dorchester Towers, which consumed the trapezoid between Amsterdam Avenue, West 68th and 69th Streets, and the slant of Broadway. Afterward, the chairman of the commission sued the board to attempt to overturn its variance; he later remembered that the brothers “beat us bloody in court.”

Among the brothers’ other properties — among them the Biltmore, Roosevelt, and Milford Plaza Hotels — they came to own 1,964 units in the Lincoln Center Special Zoning District. They raised prices. By 1979, residents lamented the area was becoming a “carbon copy” of “the Upper East Side.”

In 2010, nine years after the quieter, elder Seymour died, residents attempted to stop 30 Lincoln Plaza from transitioning into condo units. Their argument hinged on the tower’s original construction, alleging that the Milsteins forwent city permits and added an extra floor, making the building seven feet too tall and five feet and six inches too wide. Because of this lie (and that zoning violations face no statute of limitations), the approximately 20 tenants contended, the transition must not go forth.

The building now consists of condos.

6.

In early December, 2011 — a year after the renters of 30 Lincoln Plaza protested and just shy of 70 years after a dud bomb fell into a welcoming London kitchen — approximately 45,000 residents of the German city of Koblenz were evacuated, including seven nursing homes, two hospitals, and a local prison. A live British blockbuster had been discovered in the bisecting Rhine River when its water levels shrank back that November. The fuse was corroded.

The defusers craned in 350 sandbags to surround the submerged bomb. And then, with the city emptied, as the lead defusing expert later explained, “I did my job, that was all.”

People returned to their homes. They were safe. The bomb was gone. It did not have a name.

Nate Hopper was an Awl summer reporter in 2011. He now is an assistant editor for Esquire’s website and weekly tablet magazine. At time of publication, he has not seen Jaws. GIF by Mathew Lucas via Giphy.

Rochus Misch, the last living person save for a couple hundred Argentinians to see Adolf Hitler alive, has died.

by Brendan O’Connor and Choire Sicha

In late July, we ran a piece looking at a website called Elite Daily. Around the office, we’d been calling the story “Who Is Eddie Cuffin?” That’s because one thing that had captivated our attention was the bylines of Elite Daily’s writers, which, the more we looked, turned out not to be real people. So Eddie Cuffin is not “the most interesting man in the office,” as per his Elite Daily bio, because he does not exist.

The more we looked, the more we disliked the site. We talked about this in the piece, and that whole fake writer thing, and that the site itself glamorized a grotesque version of “eliteness,” and that the content was often disgusting and rude, engineered to incite or troll to encourage sharing. The story was harsh!

Another thing that initially got us turned on to Elite Daily was that in June, the site had “re-launched,” and it got a nice simple by-the-numbers write-up on TechCrunch.

This week, TechCrunch deleted that story entirely — and then published a new story, “Elite Daily, Content Farm Or Groundbreaking Site For Upwardly Mobile Youngsters? You Decide.” This was weird. There was nothing wrong with Jordan Crook’s original story on TechCrunch. It was a drive-by press release, essentially, but there were no obvious errors of fact.

In the new TechCrunch story, Elite Daily founder or co-founder David Arabov, who would not speak with us, did speak with TechCrunch. And he provided an opportunity for both to now introduce errors of fact and, honestly, errors of opinion.

TechCrunch wrote that their takeaway about our story was this:

That Elite Daily was called out to such an extreme degree by The Awl smacks of someone’s sour grapes and little else. We are, because of our legacy, pro-entrepreneur — but not at the expense of the truth. My initial post glossed over Elite Daily at best.

This is bullshit, and cagey bullshit. “Someone’s sour grapes and little else” is a school-yard slam rendered weaker because it refuses to name names. Is it The Awl’s sour grapes? The writer’s sour grapes? Why are the grapes sour? (And “little else”? Oh my.) It’s also defensive bullshit. TechCrunch’s writer called us, before writing this piece, though not for interviewing purposes. Crook wanted to express that we made TechCrunch look stupid. We had no such interest, and don’t think we even did. We hadn’t even criticized the TechCrunch story!

In any event, TechCrunch couldn’t even stand by this hostile and crazy dig at a fellow editorial startup; that paragraph was subject to a revision post-publication. This is how it read originally.

Apparently TechCrunch did not like the way that sounded — that their mission is to “support the startup.” And as for all the rest… well, let’s do this in order. There’s lots.

TechCrunch helpfully provides audio of their interview with Arabov, who has many complaints.

• David Arabov: [1:19] “He wouldn’t say which publication he was reporting from… [1:44] We kept asking what publication he was from and he finally answered The Awl.”

Not true. Here is a screenshot of our correspondence. “David Scott” is David Arabo’s name on Facebook. (Why?)

• David: [ 4:00 ] “He used all assumptions, there’s no fact in there that’s true.” David: [ 4:49 ] “He reached out to everybody here personally, like, for a statement, while he was writing this article… He was kinda harassing people… He started emailing our partners, like, without telling us or anything like that.”

At no time has Elite Daily asked us for any corrections, odd given that there is “no fact” in the article “that’s true.” We also don’t find it remarkable that a reporter would reach out to people for a story. We wanted people to talk to us, so we asked them, openly, to talk to us. This is an incredibly silly complaint to be carried by an editorial publication coming from the founder of an editorial publication.

• David: [ 5:17 ] “He comes out with this article, 5000-word article”

It is 3,300 words.

• Jordan: [ 5:39 ] “I do want to understand why he was coming after you, especially if none of this is true, what was going on there, I can look into that as a story.”

This is a hot technique. “Oh, this entire article is false? Let me help you.” But the implications of a reporter “coming after” the subject of the reporting are bizarre and betrays a misunderstanding of what reporting is.

• Jordan: [ 6:00 ] “What is your father’s name?” David: “My father’s name? Jacob Arabo, who is also Jacob the Jeweler.”

Great, this is a question we wanted to ask. We were forced, in the absence of interviews, to write that “although there is almost no mention of it anywhere, he is surely the son of Jacob ‘the Jeweler’ Arabo.” We wanted to be very careful with matters of fact. Apart from one lone picture caption on the Internet, there was almost nothing conclusively linking David and his father online. We were also cognizant that this period was likely a difficult experience for the family and didn’t want to harp on it.

• David: [ 6:08 ] “Here’s the part that’s not true: he said that this company is financed by drug money… If you look at the article it says that Jacob the Jeweler is involved in this whole drug dealing scheme… then it uses that assumption to say that the money is used to fund this thing.”

This is not even remotely a thing that our article says. It is not remotely a thing that we have implied.

• David: [ 6:56 ] “He [Jacob] did not go to jail for money laundering.”

Correct. We did not say he went to jail for money laundering. We wrote that he “served two-and-a-half years in prison as part of his plea deal to get out from under accusations of conspiracy to launder $270 million in drug money for the early-90s Detroit-based “Black Mafia Family.”

• David: [ 7:11 ] “He proved himself against that.”

That is not actually what a plea deal means either.

• David: [ 8:22 ] “My brother” [Benjamin, who works at Elite SEM, a “search engine marketing” firm] “works in the building next door.”

Yes, Elite SEM is now in the building next door. Elite Daily and Elite SEM formerly occupied the same building. Before they moved into their current location next door, Elite Daily operated out of Black Ocean’s offices, which at the time were two floors above Elite SEM’s.

• David: [ 9:58 ] “I actually have the breakdown of how much they [Black Ocean] invested in us… so, if you look right here Black Ocean comes in with $31,000 and Gerard Adams comes in with $31,000.”

TechCrunch was forced to issue a post-publication revision on this actually. It sounds like David was pointing to some documents breaking down the finances of the early days of Elite Daily. Apparently some of those documents are wrong. Investor Gerard Adams was kind enough to inform Jordan of the mistake; there were another $20K in “operating expenses” (that could be rent paid or value given, etc.).

• David: [ 10:20 ] “We had $62,000.”

It sounds like you had approximately $81,000. No bigs.

• This:

Jordan: [ 11:23 ] Is it true that the people who work for Elite Daily, the writers, um, have worn Jacob and Co jewelry before, and watches?

David: Jacob jewelry and watches?

Jordan: Yeah.

David: I mean…

Jordan: Were they given those as gifts?

David: No, they were not given those as gifts.

Jordan: Some of them do or do not wear them?

David: They wear them if I give it off my wrist, like, to go hang out, like but they don’t wear them as gifts. I mean, I don’t give anybody gifts that expensive.

Jordan: [ 11:49 ] So do some of them buy them on their own, maybe, and own them?

David: Nobody has them.

Jordan: Nobody has them?

David: I mean, two girls have them. I gave them a little necklace for Christmas, a little [inaudible] necklace for Christmas. It’s literally nothing. Silver necklace.

Jordan: [ 12:03 ] Which girls?

David: [ 12:04 ] They no longer work here.

Jordan: They no longer work here, OK.

Reproducing this just because it’s enjoyable, and good reporting!

• David: [18:05]: Lots of sites have misogynist content, but “nobody says anything to them, why is that something that they call us out on?”

We are absolutely certain that Elite Daily is not the only site on the Internet being called out for sexism. But then, also, Elite Daily is the only site on the Internet publishing The 21 Signs She’s Expired. (“17. She has a box of condoms at her apartment.” “15. 3 fingers can fit.”)

• David: [ 13:27 ] “There’s 40 Jacob and Co articles out of 4,792 in our Luxury section… He’s my father, I’m going to put articles in there when there’s something good going on, why not?” [ 14:37 ] “That’s bullshit. That’s bullshit… There’s only 40 articles of Jacob and Co that live on the site. There’s more than 40,000… between 40 and 50 thousand articles that live on the site.”

Okay.

• David: [ 25:53 ] “None of our writers are fake people. They’re real people. They’re just aliases… We’ve done a great job at building up the character. People actually know them pretty well… They’re real people, but they’re aliases.”

Crook takes up this banner as well, regarding the large number of bylines on Elite Daily that aren’t real people: “Other writers, like Kaitlyn Cawley, simply don’t want the excessive profanity from their 20-something Elite Daily years to haunt them in their later years. (Or disappoint their parents.)” What’s to even say about this? “This Website Is Staffed By People Without The Courage Of Their Convictions”?

• David: [ 34:45 ] “They say our content’s misogynistic, it’s very materialistic and everything? And here you have an article, 20 Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make In Your 20s that has 201,000 shares on it. Then you go down the list: Why Men Aren’t Really Men Anymore. This is actually against men. And it has 141,000 shares on it.”

Number 6 on that 20 Mistakes list is “Spending your money on women who aren’t escorts.” Number 3 is “Mistaking safe sex for anything besides anal.” Number 2 is “Dating unstable women with mommy and daddy issues.”

• David claims at [ 41:52 ] that a former employee source who spoke to us left “a long time ago, pretty sure it was last summer.”

It was not that employee, and we don’t know who he is thinking of.

• David Arabov also calls The Awl “third tier.”

That is incorrect. We are second tier.

• TechCrunch writes: “O’Connor also implied that David’s brother Benjamin may be involved with Elite Daily.”

No, we wrote that Benjamin works at Elite SEM, which is now next door, and that he has contributed to Elite Daily in the past, which he has.

• TechCrunch writes: “Arabov believes that for every misogynist article, there is a feminist counter article.”

We believe that some day free kittens will fall from the sky and the earth will be a paradise.

• David: [36:37] “The numbers speak for themselves.”

TechCrunch has a long section discussing Elite Daily’s traffic. In our piece, we presented Elite Daily’s comScore numbers with Elite Daily’s internal numbers. All sites, particularly smaller sites, show a great discrepancy between these sorts of numbers. comScore undercounts The Awl’s numbers by a factor of 3 or 4 at times. The comScore numbers for Elite Daily differ by a factor of 8 or 9.

• In an interview with Elite Daily Editor-in-Chief Kaitlyn Cawley, Cawley refers to Elite Daily as a “platform.” Kaitlyn: [51:48] “It’s mean to be sort of a platform for people to speak, whether or not you agree with that is your own choice… The idea is that not a single writer, or, a single writer isn’t representative of Elite Daily. It’s the massive amounts of contributors and the massive amounts of writers we have here, the different voices and different understandings and different things.”

It’s reasonable for a publication to have authors who disagree and conflict. We do! But “platform” is a buzzword now for publications. Medium, for instance, really is a platform: it has no dedicated writing staff, though it has assigning editors. BuzzFeed is sometimes a platform, such as when it throws up its hands at its inability to keep contributing “authors” such as The Heritage Foundation from publishing lies on its website. These publications have open publication technology. Elite Daily does not. It is a traditional publication where writers send stories which are published by an editor. Using the descriptor of “platform” is common now because it makes media companies sound more valuable and more like a technology startup. The phrase has the useful byproduct of distancing both the owners and the editorial staff from its most objectionable content, which remains, in the end, objectionable.

• TechCrunch writes: “From Arabov’s perspective, he has the right to push stories about his father’s company without mentioning his relationship to it. This isn’t necessarily above-board. But we, the media, creep ever closer to that grey line between promoted, paid-for content and unbiased journalism.”

“We, the media” is an incredible thing to write. But also: no, we don’t creep ever closer to that “grey line.”

• TechCrunch wrote this: “Like all start-ups Elite Daily is a mix of hustle, fibbing (or outright lying), and mismanagement.”

Both in the specific — even we, in our condemnation of Elite Daily, never called them liars — but in the general, this is distressing. We reject the notion, as all should, that all startups are mismanaged by hustling liars.

“The percentage of households with a microwave climbed from 82 percent in 1992 to 97 percent in 2011. Similarly, the percentage with a computer jumped from 21 percent to 78 percent over the period. Landline phones followed the opposite trend; the share of households with landlines fell from 96 percent in 1998 to 71 percent in 2011.”

I would say that, after asking for a ten-word-or-less explanation of the current conditions in Syria, the number one question that people want me to settle for them — usually when I am on the street or dining in a fancy restaurant, but always when I am otherwise engaged, which makes answering a burden that I somehow manage to bear with an admirable degree of grace — is about the best New Order song. I will save you the awkwardness of having to screw up your courage to approach me: It’s this one. [Via]

Do you think if the Obama administration knew how much more racist it would make the Drudge Report they still would have had Andrew Breitbart killed?

Remember all those people who raised money to build a Robocop statue for Detroit? I hope they bitch and moan so hard about how this remake ruins all their precious childhood memories that random people on the street point at them and laugh.

Unfortunately, you can’t catch skinny.