1. This is a rather productive way to employ one's biological date rapey tendencies. Might evolutionary biologists learn something about the intersection of masculinity and capitalism from the case of Henry T. Nicholas? Oh probably, but more importantly
2. Dude, 1999: so much money, so many drugs, such terrible dressers. Parachute pants and Prada mini backpacks actually put shoulder pads and perms to shame. Does prosperity just naturally beget awful fashion trends?
3. What is it about geeky billionaires? Why is it always the finance billionaires that turn pervs with underage sex dungeons, while the geeks start underground sales dungeons? You would think that the demographics of the tech world vs. the finance world would make the tech guys more desperate and therefore likely to date rape. But the opposite is true! Is this just another chapter in my "New York Is A Warped And Poisonous Place That Kills All Love" manifesto? Probably!

4. Oh, but he had a thing for hookers. Naturally. Well, who doesn't I guess.

New Sales Tactic: Drugging Customers? [WSJ]
Broadcom Exec Accused Of Spiking Tech CEOs' Drinks; Has More Blow Than Scarface [Gizmodo]
Former Chief Of Broadcom Is Indicte
Drugs Grab Spotlight In Broadcom Case [WSJ]
Sex, Drugs and Microchips: Highlights From Broadcom Complaint [WSJ]

Because America is not part of Europe. You know what would happen if we joined the European Union? Let's "mark to market" our economic figures to Euros for a second. (This is not a particularly meaningful exercise, but when the Gross Domestic Product is passing for the ultimate barometer of economic health I feel entitled to dabble in the absurd.) In the same amount of time that our economy cracked the $14 trillion mark, it would have shrunk 10% to 9 trillion Euros. In other words, no one would be lining up to buy cheap American exports. Of course, not that that much stuff is made in America anymore, which is why our 13% increase in exports of goods only contributed 0.2% in the way of GDP growth. But 0.2% can make all the difference!

Because The Rest Of The World Is Starving Thanks to land and pork barrel politics, agriculture remains a thriving (if small) sector of the American economy, and thanks to those same pork barrel politics we decided to drive food prices higher than oil prices would have already rendered them by paying people to use perfectly good corn to run cars or somesuch. Well, we make corn in America! And soybeans, and lots of other things that will make you fat if you aren't living on $3 a day in Nairobi.

Because The Rest Of The World Is Still Coming Here (And Fewer Than Ever Are Sending Their Money Home) America's growing population helps our GDP numbers sound good even when everything is actually getting harder for the average person! Between 2003 and 2007, for instance, our per-capita GDP grew less than 1.9% a year on average; Japan's per-capita GDP grew 2.1%! But thanks to our swelling immigrant class (and possibly, the celebrity baby boom) we have a growing populace that pumps that number up to nearly 3% annualized growth when we pool our funds together!

Because Everyone Is Sick, And Getting Sicker Health care a very important sector of the American economy — in fact, it's the only sector that's created any jobs since the nineties — and the costs — hey, every cost has a "benefit," hah! — just keep rising! That means lots of profits for all the companies working hard to remind us how bad heartburn can make you feel. And all the accountants and managers and lawyers responsible for figuring out how hospitals can add treatments and procedures to routine hospital stays so the insurance companies actually pay them; they are drivers of economic activity too! In this most recent quarter, medical care might have been the single brightest spot of a very unhappy chart: costs rose 12.1% over the quarter.

Because banks control all the money. The financial sector might seem like it's a mess right now, but they didn't get to represent more than a fifth of the whole GDP by being unclever. After getting the government to set up a special body giving them "immunity" from failure in the wake of that touching Jimmy Stewart movie, bankers quickly set about figuring out how to control all the money in the universe and take a big a cut possible each year in fear someone would figure out what they were up to and shut the whole thing down. Over time, of course, they realized that they controlled too much money for the government to ever shut any of it down, so at that point they just overpaid themselves because that's what they did last year, and because that's what everyone else was doing, and because if they didn't do it they were the greater fool. By 2005 the average finance worker earned 50% more than the comparable worker in any other field — and a lot of them made a lot more than that. But it's hard to blame them — absurdly profitable ideas like $3 ATM fees and selling repurposed mortgages to old people literally on a "fixed income" are all in a day's work for these guys.

Because "information processing equipment and software" sales increased 10.3%. And they haven't even released the new iPhone!

Because They Hate Us. These are serious times, Americans! We have a beautiful country to defend, and defense spending was perhaps the brightest spot on the latest GDP report of all. The Pentagon spent nearly $700 billion defending our freedoms last year, a 7.5% increase from last. And we haven't even started bombing Iran!

Image grabbed from Refacing Government Tender via Metafilter

BEA Press Release: Gross Domestic Product [Bureau of Economic Analysis]
Economists React: Recession "Still Likely" [WSJ]
Food Firms Profit As Demand Soars [WSJ]
Grossly Distorted Picture [Economist]
FDIC Seeks Hires, Braces For Trouble [WSJ]
Gross Domestic Product By Industry, Winners & Losers [Visualizing Economics]
What's Really Propping Up The Economy [BusinessWeek]
One Guy Who's Seen It All Doesn't Like What He Sees [WSJ]

In the heady era of dotcom fanaticism, Dov Charney founded the quintessential Old Economy company.

American Apparel is a mass manufacturer. The dawn of mass manufacturing is what enabled the rise of the working class, but by the 1980s America had decided manufacturing, what with its unions and their irksome habit of reminding the market that they are human too, was something less idealistic countries should deal with, and most factories in America had closed. This would not have been of concern to Dov Charney, a Tufts dropout reared in Montreal, had he not been reared North America's Protestant talent for investing in inanimate objects an extraordinary degree of esteem, as in, the T-shirt: Rebellion.

By the 1990s that talent, the knack for Want Creation, for appealing to the desire of people to buy things they don't need in some hope of proving they Are Someone, had begun to eclipse all other talents/knacks involved in propelling the modern American economy. The result was that no one was paying attention to how their T-shirts were made anymore. No one was paying attention because T-shirts were all being made, for pennies on the benjamin, 12,000 miles away. Llike Americans themselves the shirts had become bigger, thicker, rougher, coarser. Dov hated the T-shirts presently on the market. He did not find them sexy. After wading through a few different layers of detachment from labor, Dov found a factory in China to manufacture T-shirts to his liking, but nothing they sent approached his liking, in part because the factory sewing the T-shirts often don't communicate with the factories weaving the bolts of knit cotton. Perhaps the Chinese could simply not intuitively understand the nuances of How Dov Charney Felt A T-shirt Ought to Look; perhaps they simply did not care to, either way Dov decided something radical needed to be done.

Dov Charney found his efforts lionized in a positive, and weirdly prescient New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell. It was the first of many more media stories that would make mention of Dov's "boner."

He opened a factory in the Los Angeles garment district. He decided his factory would weave its own textiles in addition to the more common business of sewing shirts. Dov's command over the intricacies of needle-spacing and fabric finishing and the various manufacturing quirks that represent his "artisan's sensibility" was well-documented in a 2000 Malcolm Gladwell piece in the New Yorker.

2000 was the era of the "New Economy," Gladwell chose to profile American Apparel because, like Dov and most Candians, he likes to think of himself as a rebellious thinker. Don't we all? Dov had started an "Old Economy" company.

We live in the age of the entrepreneur, who responds rationally to global pressures and customer demands in order to maximize profit. To the extent that we still talk of Gloversville—and the glove-making business there has long since faded away—we talk of it as a place that people need to leave behind. There was Lucius N. Littauer, for example, who, having made his fortune with Littauer Brothers Glove Co., in downtown Gloversville, went on to Congress, became a confidant of Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and then put up the money for what is now the Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard University. There was Samuel Goldwyn, the motion-picture magnate, who began his career as a cutter with Gloversville's Elite Glove Co. In 1912, he jumped into the movie business. He went to Hollywood. He rode horses and learned to play tennis and croquet. Like so many immigrant Jews in the movie industry, he enacted through his films a very public process of assimilation. This is the oldest of American stories: the heroic young man who leaves the small town to play on the big stage—who wants to be an entrepreneur, not an artisan. But the truth is that we always get the story wrong. It isn't that Littauer and Goldwyn left Gloversville to find the real culture, because the real culture comes from Gloversville, too; places like Washington and Hollywood persist and renew themselves only because Littauers and Goldwyns arrive from time to time, bringing with them a little piece of the real thing.

Within a few years American Apparel was the largest apparel factory in the country. The biggest surprise was probably that he didn't have to price the T-shirts any differently. Americans were so used to paying way too much money for T-shirts — because of logos or brand names or symbolism or sheer price insensitivity — the ones made by $12-an-hour tailors working under strict California labor laws did not have to cost bulk customers more than $3 or $4, and all the rock bands and small fashion labels could attach their symbolism to Dov Charney's softer, better-fitting T-shirts with a comfortable markup.

The founding innovator got bored with producing supply and fascinated by producing demand.
Somewhere along the line I think Dov got greedy and/or envious of his customers and friends in the industry, the rock bands and indie fashion labels. He wanted to be a brand as well, to create demand and desire and iconic symbolism. He wanted his iconoclasm and rebelliousness to be noticed. So he began opening retail across the country, manufacturing trendier items and masturbated in front of a magazine reporter. He staffed his new retail business with the cutest youngest coolest kids, kids immersed as he had been in the nuances of the ephemera and nothingness — the drape of a shirt, the taper of a pair of jeans, the razor-cut arrangement of the tendrils — that had come to represent the "rebellious" school of American coolness. To expedite his staffing choices he even retained the services of a friendly coke dealer in the Lower East Side. If there is a Cliff's notes guide to Dov Charney's interpretation of that which was truly cool, it was doing coke on the Lower East Side.

Dov also made his own lifestyle and practice of taking employee concubines a centerpiece of his marketing strategies, keeping apartments throughout the country for the wild parties that doubled as photo shoots for company ads, and to house the employees who best represented the company image. The possibility of getting evicted from one of the apartments at any time kept favored employees' standards in line — not that anyone knew what the standards were. There was no handbook. It was all visceral.

The company grew way too fast, driven by momentum and the geometric growth prospects of the demand business.

Charney opened 187 stores in the space of four years. The process was almost comically hurried, sloppy, and exacerbated by the presence of all the cokeheads and the employee turnover that resulted from coke, low wages and a severe detachment from anything that felt like labor resulting from the fact that work was intended to serve as an extension of a "lifestyle," which left hours upon hours open for pointless alliances and rivalries to form. He got sued for sexual harrassment a few times, a consequence of having sex in the office and, in the absence of rigorous quantifiable achievement standards, often favoring employees he had fucked, was fucking, had some complex about fucking.

At the height of the real estate bubble Dov picked his real estate in the riskiest, most foolhardy fashion, spending millions to refurbish high-profile urban locations that were neither outfitted to handle retail stores nor generally owned by landlords that might give him a good deal on a leases elsewhere.

For driving desire and demand to the company's wares the cool kids who staffed the stores and starred in Dov's gigantic billboards were just as important to the company's sales as the factory workers themselves, but they were not remunerated as such, generally because businesses find it easier to deal with young unskilled recreational drug using hipsters as a consumer than as a human resource. The low wages translated to high rates of shoplifting and employee theft. The first fellow employee I ever liked got fired for stealing from the till.

After trying to make up for its sloppiness with momentum, the company encountered its cash flow problems with a combination of sloppy accounting standards and the perception of momentum. It was tough on the poor Chief Financial Officer!

In early 2005, chief financial officer Mark Schlein died unexpectedly of heart failure, and Mr. Charney and others say a replacement wasn't found for a year. An interim CFO was later hired, though Mr. Charney only remembers that "he had gray hair and quit after a week." Mr. Charney delegated bookkeeping to a few younger staff members and continued to open stores.

Problems developed. According to a chronology of the company's financial history provided by American Apparel executives to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. Bank, a Minneapolis-based bank that was backing American Apparel's growth, urged Mr. Charney to secure additional financing amid the company's rapid store openings.

Which is when the real financial wizardry came in.
Adrian found a guy named Jonathan Ledecky who had just pulled off something interesting: he'd gotten a bunch of investors to pretty much write him a $200 million blank check he then took public on the American Stock Exchange, so speculators could trade his shares on its shares before he even did anything with the money. Luckily for Dov, Ledecky decided to buy American Apparel, thinking it might be a good fit for the types of big financial funds that need to buy into nebulous concepts like "Corporate Social Responsibility," which American Apparel, by treating its predominantly Mexican base of factory workers so well, still, despite everything, very much espoused. Thus American Apparel became a publicly traded company using the unaudited 30%-inflated earnings statements someone had been pulling out of their asses.

And Ledecky saved the day!
Dov Charney was now worth more than $580 million! He had to hire a new CFO, however. The new CFO found that American Apparel had "no sense of American accounting standards." Join the club right?

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dov referred to the CFO as a "loser."

Earlier: American Apparel Is All It's Coked Up To Be
Why Retail Breeds Sexual Harrassment
Related: Living On The Edge At American Apparel [Business Week]

Another of the friends in the picture is a high-powered producer for a top television network who owns a Brooklyn condominium, another is in law school, and the last is independently wealthy. And where is Maureen Tkacik? Why, living in a tiny fifth floor rental apartment with the selfsame roommate — and, we hear, the selfsame Judas Priest photo —with whom she lived in the picture, which was taken ten years ago; a cautionary tale in downward mobility if there ever was one. She doesn't so much as recall meeting the future billionaire, and why would she? Her most salient memory from the house in which Ms. Southworth was photographed is being rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning.

Ms. Southworth is not alone; Ms. Tkacik crossed paths in school with numerous other individuals who proceeded to achieve things in life: Donald Trump Jr., one half of the screenwriting/production duo behind the Harold & Kumar films, New York Observer reporter Doree Shafrir. In fact, her entire life might be considered a case study in how not to climb the social ladder, and, the photo below, wherein she sits next to Kretchmar and her present roommate, goes much of the way to revealing why: that ensemble.

The email:

You all know that I love you. I try to help you out where I can and I jerk off to your successes but when I saw a Disney Ad next to the Kristin Davis Blowjob pictures on Egotastic, I had no choice but to do a post. Reality is that I have no issue with his site, sure he's a virgin, but I love virgins, just ask my stepdaughter's friends.

I thought it was funny and newsworthy and hope you can link it because I am in the mood to get someone at Disney fired....I want to see this story on CNN so help.

And part of his post:

The most wholesome family corporation fucks up again. First, Walt Disney was caught molesting kids after taking them to his magic kingdom and showing them special cartoons he drew for them on his penis, true story my grandmother told me he did it to her. Then they made Nazi propaganda videos for Hitler to help kill the jews who were stepping on Disney's Waspy toes in Hollywoo. Then they were accused of subliminal messages in they movies trying to program kids to hate black people and gays and now they advertise next to porn.

I was scoping out some celebrity smut site that pretty much only posts celebrity nudity, sex tapes, nipple slips and upskirts next to some seriously desperate, virginal commentary and I was pretty shocked to see Goofy staring back at me.

Today the Federal Reserve, hot on the heels of saving Wall Street, elected to cut interest rates once again, by 75 basis points. And while the stock market had a screaming orgasm over this, I did not personally think it was such a great move. Herewith, a dissenting opinion.

And by "us," I mean Bear Stearns, because I personally have weighed the odds and I'm pretty sure I personally have nothing at stake here, no matter what you do, Ben Bernanke. My balance sheet, while admittedly lacking much in the way of assets, is also blissfully insensitive to short-term market and/or interest rate fluctuations.

Thanks to my industry, indeed, my own financial situation has been governed by a recessionary state of constant layoffs and downsizing for years and years — and I'm lucky enough to have one of those jobs they haven't figured out how to do better in Hyberabad. And I'll let you in on something, Ben Bernanke; my finances have zero correlation with those of the stock market. I'm not alone in this; most Americans are actually earning less than they were in real terms than they were in 1999. They can handle a few quarters of recession because they've been handling it.

Some of my morning commenters would have me believe bailing out JP Morgan is the only way to minimize "collateral damage on Wall Street and thus the economy," but really, whose economy are we talking about here? The buying power of the minimum wage employee is at a 51-year-low.

So fuck the Street, Ben Bernanke; just this once, just for, like, a quarter or something. You don't have to play rough; I'm not asking you to nationalize any industries or institute land reform or anything, just give them a little scare. They chose this path, you know. They chose to worship Ayn Rand and wear those Paul Smith shirts and pay zero money down on their Hamptons summer homes and obnoxiously, whenever confronted by someone like myself at a bar, claim that the Market Solves Everything. Let the market solve this one for them. People are eating dirt for dinner in Haiti, Ben Bernanke; you can let Bear Stearns go to bankruptcy court.

Sure, some financial institutions might get pissed for a minute. They didn't lend Bear Stearns all that money to leverage the shit out of their delusional bets that the housing market would keep going up up up only to spend years in bankruptcy court for the sake of reaping fifty or sixty cents on the dollar. But you know what? They probably also lent money to Goldman Sachs and Jeff Greene and John Paulson to leverage the shit out of the lucky hedge funds that bet it would all end in failure. They lent money to all those short-sellers who bet the price of Bear Stearns stock from $67 all the way down to $2. Sure, that's what makes our economy so "dynamic", Ben, but does that make it any more virtuous than a legalized Ponzi scheme?

What if there were some sort of cascading ripple effect? everyone wants to know. What of all that IRRATIONAL FEAR? But you just tell them, Ben Bernanke, that they should maybe sit quietly in their illiquid asses and reflect on what the fuck made them think it was rational to buy into all this fancy housing market bullshit in the first place. Just ask them, Ben Bernanke, what they thought was rational about people in Southern California taking out mortgages with monthly payments equivalent to five months' rent?

Because the housing market never made much sense to me, Ben Bernanke. I mean, there we were a couple years ago, with a war on, a slowing economy, oil roaring up toward $100 a gallon or whatever, skyrocketing energy prices sending other commodity prices through the roof... just where were the buyers who were supposed to keep bidding up those houses so everyone could continue pumping the economy with home equity loans? I'll tell you where a lot of them are now: sitting at home, watching network TV and avoiding opening their mail. Sort of like Bear Stearns with that portfolio of mortgages, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities no one wants to put a value on just yet.

But you know? Eventually they'll open the envelopes, see what they've got, realize it's probably not the end of the world and start moving money around again. Assets are only "illiquid" till someone — the market? — figures out how to make them liquid again!

And if it is the end of the world, there's always the hope of an early death a la Ken Lay. Right?

Working for a man is probably the only thing less fun than working for The Man. Both are probably going to end badly. But look: You're still trying, penning inflammatory columns to try and ramp up the Google Analytics score so you can get back into the career columnist game that just months ago left you abandoned and alone. Glad to see you've still got all that audacious hope! But here's the reality: look around. How many people do you really expect to die fully satisfied with their lives? One? Three? Now, what about the ones who are freezing their eggs. Do they probably have the worst odds of all of them? Yeah, like we discussed last week, a recession is coming. Everyone just needs to lower their standards. Life is pain! XOM

Want To Have A Baby? Now's The Time [Boston Globe]
Earlier: Want A Better Job? Stop Working Right Now And Get Your Nails Did

"If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women," Gates said.

Anyway, there is an abiding school of thought — and I am for once going to admit that I have not read nearly enough to know how true this is — that it's all the influence of his wonderful wife Melinda, who rejected him on grounds of lack of spontaneity the first time he asked her out for "two weeks from Friday." From a recent Fortune profile, Melinda sounds kind of like Michelle Obama, in the sense that she sounds AWESOME, and also in the sense that she not only made her husband a better person but that in that process, she became a better person herself. (Isn't that sweet? Don't you wish that happened more often?) There are all sorts of things we learn, such as the fact that Bono thinks she's the coolheaded rational counterpart to Bill, and that it was her idea to eradicate malaria. But this is the part you'll find really poignant if you're that type. It's from her high school valedictory speech, given in 1982:

If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped.

Bill Gates' New Project: Farming [CNN]

Melinda Gates Goes Public [Fortune]

We've seen the perils of tech-obsession firsthand: Earlier this month a reader emailed to complain about a business dinner she attended, where "there was music, champagne, the food was amazing, the setting lavish. But did the men at my table pay any attention? No. They were all playing with their iPhones." And she's not the only one to forfeit male attention to Steve Jobs. Our very own guest columnist, Heather declared herself an iPhone widow last year. "Wherein we used to actually interact with one another during cab rides or walks or, you know, dinner," Heather lamented, "Now I sit there and watch him make love to that damn phone, his unblinking eyes glazed over with rapt-geek puppy love."

But guys aren't the only ones with geek love to go around. My own boyfriend tried to ban laptops after work hours in our household. The first day he made me go cold turkey and I was relegated to answering emails on my BlackBerry in the bathroom. Since then I've maybe gone one night without perusing the internet for at least ten minutes. But I'm not addicted at all! Though if someone destroyed my wireless network I would cut them in a hot second.

"Technology Overload" Can Ruin Relationships: Expert [Reuters]

Earlier: The iPhone is Cool and All, But Can You Stick Your Dick in It?

And while I'm reluctant to accept the Daily Mail's theories about the character or motivations of pretty much anyone with a vagina, it seems disturbingly clear that the problem here is not so much the "glorification of suicide" — which, let's face it, is old as time or at least def. Shakespeare — but the fact that, for the younger generation, the fanatical posing and uploading and friend-collecting and pixelated mirror-staring enabled by Internet "networking" can stunt a kids' development at the age and maturity level at which they first discovered started logging on. As one of the dead kids' moms pointed out:

I think the problem is they do not know how to speak like adults about serious issues like this. They can speak to each other on the computer but do not know how to express their emotions in other ways.

Yeah, I know, I'm fucking old. Which is why I'm going to just say it: can't we fucking BAN MYSPACE, and all its bastard social networking stepchildren, already? What redeeming social value do these sites have?
Pastimes like this make Halo look like the fucking Model U.N.

A Wild Child Surfed Her Way To Suicide And "Virtual Immorality" [Daily Mail]
How Friends Paid Online Tribute To Dead Youngsters [Guardian]

While we sort of like the idea of dispelling stereotypes — such as the assumption that techies are all ugly trolls — we're also annoyed that even girls who clearly have it going on upstairs are made to feel like they don't measure up if they don't have it going on in every other physical aspect. Particularly because real tech girls (some of whom are actually on the site, like Megan McCarthy, party correspondent for our brother site Valleywag) work in jobs that don't put them in the public eye, offering up their imperfections for scrutiny. Also, anyone can nominate a girl for this site without her approval. But if you really wanna barf, check out the brother site Dig a Tech Guy, where the same emphasis of good looks is not at play.

Dig a Tech Girl
We Don't Dig "Dig A Tech Girl" [Boinkology]

What about you, Mormons? (Ha ha ha "multiple multiple" ignorant polygamy joke should go here but too lazy.) And what's with Austin, Texas being the capital of Ann Coulter fuck-or-hatefuck fantacizing? Okay, also assfucking= Tampa. Angelina=Toronto, followed closely by Turkey again! And, oh god someone stop us before we do this all day but here's something that may shed light on Dov Charney: masturbation = Montreal.

On second thought, maybe not. After thinking to myself: "where are the Toyotas? The Googles? The Goldmans?" I realized the list of really awesome companies out there was pretty short; same goes for dudes; the end. Sure glad I didn't waste my nonexistent future money on an MBA!

Top Powerful Women Stock Holdings [Stockpickr]

And the one who asked, when you won an award for a presentation, if you were wearing "those" heels during the presentation — fair question. (The ones who asked to see your "jungle nipples" might have crossed the line.)

But the thing is, while good parents and goals and and a strong sense of self blah blah can go far to protect against the abuses doled out by idiot, power-hungry dudes in bed, the office is another story. For one thing, for all y'all who are lacking in the rich husband department, it's your livelihood. More importantly, it's probably a critical component of your identity. So when we read shit like this:

When she was 15 she got her very first job working nights and weekends at a mom and pop deli store. The kids in the family, who were her age, worked there too so she got to know the whole family. One late night she was sweeping up and the 40+ dad of the family came up and grabbed her from behind. When she freaked out he patiently explained that this was the whole purpose for hiring her and that she shouldn't be so naive. Completely traumatuzed she started crying and he gave her a big hug, consoled her and said it was best to never speak of this to anyone, as to not jeopardize their "friendship". She didn't quit the job, and didn't tell anyone until years later because he had talked her into thinking she had brought it on herself. She confided in me MUCH later that she actually felt grateful at the time that he was so understanding.

...a stripper was hired to come to the hotel where a company meeting was being held to celebrate the promotion of two managers. Ms. Nelson left the room and waited in the hallway, her lawsuit said. While waiting there, she heard male salesmen who left the room saying that her "boss licked whipped-cream off the strippers' breasts," her complaint said.

I once had a boss who'd chew out his (silent) wife in front of me; another liked to walk around shirtless, "tackle" female employees in the hallways and give his female assistants pet names synonymous with "Retard." Naturally, the environment came straight from the top; I just ran into a girl who told me that old boss's boss had recently instructed her to take off her coat so he could inspect her outfit, only to instruct her to wear something tighter, with higher heels. This girl was an editor, for fuck's sake. But none of this shit is even so bad; it's the notion that women can't be smart - or that women who are smart are thereby "crazy" "divas" - that usually accompanies it that is the worst. A policy wonk friend of ours had a graduate school internship wherein she was required to trim the edges off newspaper clippings for one of the policy analysts; her current job isn't much better. A certain Jezebel intern used to work for a publisher who asked her to "remove splinters from his hand and share his distaste for the plain looking fat-ish girls at the magazine." He also made her fetch him cappuccino every hour and "slapped his secretary's ass once in awhile," while he kept all real business from the female editors and assigned "the random man who was like the office manager" to do all the editorial work. Another (Jewish) friend had a boss who told the charming joke "How do you get a Jewish girl to stop fucking?" (Answer: Marry her. Ha!) And a friend of ours who was lucky enough to get her own ass slapped waiting tables at the poker room at the Golden Eagle Country Club in Tallahassee, Florida actually complained about it — after which only male servers were allowed to work the poker room. Anyway, in case you didn't get it — don't feel bad, the thickest girls have the nicest racks! wink — this is your repository for sexist boss stories. As long as you're still at work, you might as well give them up.

A Data Storage Titan Confronts Bias Claims [WSJ]

Photos containing an exposed breast do violate our Terms and are removed.

Now, we're not really hippies, and we're certainly not mothers (other than to our dogs and cats), but Christ, just let these people up their mother-child bonding shots if it's so important to them! Where the lines of obscenity are drawn here are just so completely arbitrary and retarded. And so are the Lactivists, actually. They're encouraging people to join their new Facebook group "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!", which currently has over 7000 members.

Breast Isn't Best On Facebook [TechCrunch]