Anna Merlan's posts - Turkish uPOST

This month, California has been gripped by three devastating wildfires: Northern California’s Camp Fire, which recently became the deadliest in the state’s history, and, in Southern California, the Woolsey and Hill Fires. An emerging, deeply weird conspiracy theory holds that those fires aren’t caused by wind…

In the days since the midterms, the migrant caravan traveling from Central America towards the U.S.-Mexico border has largely dropped out of the headlines and the president’s tweets, as discussing the caravan’s progress has momentarily ceased to be an effective fear-mongering and vote-grabbing tactic. But thousands of…

In mid-August, Jezebel wrote about the murky sexual abuse allegations surrounding Noah Levine, an influential Buddhist teacher based in Los Angeles. In the time since our story was published, the meditation society that Levine founded has dissolved under the weight of those allegations and the community he was at the…

Last week, writer, filmmaker and accused shitty media man Stephen Elliott filed suit against Moira Donegan, the self-identified creator of the Shitty Media Men list. In that time, a legal defense fund for Donegan has raised over $100,000 and she’s retained the counsel of Robbie Kaplan, co-founder of the Time’s Up…

It’s 11 a.m. deep in the Mojave Desert, the sun already laser-boring into everything it touches, and Bob is driving the stagecoach a hair too fast, speeding down Fury Road while tidily dispatching his not-first Bud Light of the morning. The whiskey still fixed to the stagecoach’s roof rattles as the scenery whips by:…

For the past few years, veteran cosmetics company Avon has been trying very, very hard to re-brand, faced with an army of newer competitors who are also trying to get regular women to sell clothes, makeup, hair wraps, and diet products to their friends and family. In a rather ironic wrinkle, a new lawsuit against the…

Bill O’Reilly has been thoroughly nationally disgraced for more than a year now, such an acknowledged menace to women that even Fox News will no longer employ him. There’s almost no reason to even write about him anymore. Except for one last, lingering mystery: Why, precisely, is he suing his ex-wife and her divorce…

ORLANDO, FLORIDA — Orlando is dotted with lakes and splashy roadside attractions—Disney World, Gatorland, the intensely strange evangelical theme park Holy Land Experience—but on a recent weekday morning, the weirdest sideshow in town was just east of downtown, at an upscale biker bar. Upstairs, next to a huddle of…

In the upcoming midterm elections, voters in Illinois’ 3rd Congressional District will have the choice of Dan Lipinski, the Democratic incumbent, or Republican candidate Art Jones, a white supremacist Holocaust denier who, by way of self-endorsement, claims he hasn’t been a card-carrying member of any Nazi groups…

It was inevitable, and then it happened: Louis CK made an unannounced appearance at the Comedy Cellar on Sunday night, his first performance since he admitted in November 2017 that he masturbated in front of non-consenting women. CK, who didn’t address his sexual misconduct in his brief set, is clearly testing whether…

On July 16, in the middle of a dharma talk in Venice, California—the kind of talk he’s been giving for decades, first across the country and then the world—Buddhist teacher Noah Levine’s mind was on revenge.

In January, Lucien Greaves of the Satanic Temple announced that he was considering a lawsuit against Twitter on religious discrimination grounds. In the intervening months, the decision to sue Twitter has grown into part of a controversy that’s engulfed the organization and recently led one of the Temple’s major…

On Monday, the Daily Mail blared in one of its signature oddly capitalized headlines that model-actress Elle Macpherson was spotted kissing a “mystery man” over some root vegetables at a Miami farmers market. By Tuesday, in news that caused some of us to make an undignified gibbering noise of shock, Mystery Man was…

On Thursday morning, the world learned that Bryan Goldberg has won the bidding for Gawker.com, the now-defunct sister site of our sister sites, which was sold as part of the bankruptcy process around Gawker Media, their now-defunct parent company. (It’s been an eventful couple of years.) Goldberg, who won the bidding…

Friends: it’s been a real shit week. Our house-on-fire of a parent company, Univision, tried to lay off a huge chunk of Gizmodo Media, part of their latest, totally coherent business strategy. Through months of negotiation, our union turned those attempted layoffs into generous buyout offers. Still, everything sucks,…

Rod Dreher is a conservative Christian columnist and a hot take-writer in a unique and very strange class of his own. His latest attempt was a column about Anthony Bourdain’s death (oh no), which tried to tie sin, suicide, transgender identity and witchcraft together (oh nooo), all stuffed into a piece of writing so…

Last November, Vox published a story by politics editor Laura McGann about New York Times politics reporter Glenn Thrush and what she called his “history of bad judgment” around young women journalists. The story detailed four women’s assertions that Thrush came onto or harassed them, usually in situations involving…

In a real drag bit of news for fans of top-shelf eyeliner and science, tattoo artist and makeup genius Kat Von D revealed that she’s against vaccines in an Instagram post Thursday night. Von D, who recently announced her pregnancy with new husband Leafar Seyer of the band Prayers, wrote about feeling judged for the…

It’s finally spring on the East Coast, and Jesus Christ, have we earned it. After a horrifying winter in which everyone’s toenails fell off and all our facial skin was wind-battered into ruin, it’s finally time to be outdoors. I hope to spend every free second either at the beach with a book about medical oddities or…

It’s been three months since Jeffrey Tambor was officially fired from the set of Transparent, following accusations by two staffers that he sexually harassed them. In a curious yet increasingly familiar move for the publication, with men accused of #MeToo-style misconduct, the Hollywood Reporter has given Tambor a…