Drunk Idiot Freaks Out in Miami Beach (Of Course) Movie Theater

"When officers searched the theater, they found several sandals that were left behind by moviegoers who fled the scene."
'"Man paced theater, screamed 'This is it' during movie showing: Police."

Goat Video G.O.A.T.

Perhaps you're partial to the classic "ibex-as-ninja" footage, or the guy who writes great songs but then sings them so gratingly as to make it difficult for anyone to listen to them. Or maybe you like the one with the death-dealing golden eagle or the leopard. They all have their merits. But for true goat-video lovers, I think this is likely the single greatest goat video of all-time.

Why We Hate-Search

This #NoBollocks content was produced in partnership with Newcastle Brown Ale. If you enjoy this article, won't you be a love and watch a TV commercial on the Internet? Go on, it's right there on the right.

In 1956, the great science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov published 'The Dead Past.' In the story, scientists and the government clash over the Chronoscope, a machine that can let a viewer see as deep as the ruins of Carthage, but is restricted for mysterious reasons. (Reader, halt. If you've yet to work your way through Asimov's oeuvre and would like to absorb the climactic twist of this story on your own, skip down.)

Ah, but you are on tenterhooks! Here we go. A scientist pushes to access the Chronoscope. Access denied. He proceeds nonetheless. His act of defiance wins the day, but destroys society as we know it. Why? As a bureaucrat bitterly clues him in, a machine that can see into the very distant past can'idiot'also see into the very recent past: say, one millionth of a second ago. What our scientist has done is set free the ur-security camera, one that will allow us to track each other anywhere, at any time, for all time. "Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone,' our hero of a bureaucrat hisses at the scientist-villains. 'May each of you fry in hell forever.'

Well! As usual, Asimov got the dangers right, but the means and motivation wrong. He rightly predicted that our future would produce an unheard-of level of exposure, but did not predict we would be the means. We do not need an ur-security camera when it's we ourselves who leave a littering of video, blog post, credit-card records and Google search strings for corporations and individuals alike to raid. Our very human desire for contact over isolation, convenience over difficulty, and declaration over circumspection would provide the means for our'

I'm sorry. I briefly forgot that I am not David Starkey. But gigantic digital footprints notwithstanding, we're not yet absorbed into Asimov's great Multivac as a bodiless synaptic web. We're still here in corporeal form, and one can, if one wishes, approach us as human, question us as to our circumstances, then jeer in our face and depart.

So why do we hate-search? That is, why do we trawl the internet for information about people we dislike? I call this activity "smearching," and it often overlaps with hate-reading, which is what happens when your hate search becomes part of your daily routine.

In an effort to answer these questions, I've tried to lay out the main types of smearching, as well as recall what we did before the Internet, though I am a poor fool and remember little of this dark time. I am also but a lone woman and not even on Tumblr so I will rely on you to provide additional means, methods, and motivations for smearching, which is by its very nature a solitary activity, cloaked in shame, called 'stalking' at best, and thus not wholly to be understood by even the most inveterate smearcher.

1. IT IS BY ITS VERY NATURE A SOLITARY ACTIVITY, CLOAKED IN SHAME, CALLED STALKING AT BEST, NOT EVEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD BY THE MOST INVETERATE SMEARCHER

Humans are dumb, and one of the main ways in which we are dumb is we don't like anyone to know that we care about them. In love, we generally get over this fear because a host of 'no thanks' eventually renders our affections but a dry husk of a once-flowering bloom. But in hatred, we never get over the fear that someone will know they got to us'because to declare we are threatened means to declare someone our equal, exactly the opposite of what we wish them to be.

Here's where smearching comes in. Those unable to bear the stink of superiority of that guy tinkling the ice of his bourbon in your face can content themselves with his Amazon ratings (10 1-stars! 10!) or his pudding-faced child. (Facebook.) That these are all, in fact, signs of success'having anyone rate a book on Amazon, having had sex, having the time to use Facebook'mean nothing if they can be quantifiably reduced. This is not jealousy but a kind of back-door pecking, reducing one's enemy to a reasonable size so that you can tinkle your glass back with your sad idea of parity.

What we did in the old days: The best illustration of pre-smearch pecking comes, I believe, from the end of Broadcast News, when Albert Brooks asks his child if he knows who William Hurt is. The child replies, 'The big joke?' Yes. In the old days, we relied on our children to reliably pass, in the playground or elsewhere, information back-and-forth we were not willing to say to someone's face! Take that, Attachment Parenting!

2. WE HAVE FORGOTTEN THERE IS ANOTHER WAY TO LEARN ABOUT PEOPLE

The other night, I attended a party of a bunch of twentysomethings and was immediately struck by the oddity that no one would tell me what they did when I asked them, 'What do you do?' Remembering my youth, I naturally thought this was from shame. But further prodding revealed a well-known videographer, a clerk at the AG's office, and several others more impressively employed than some people I could name.

I asked them if this was modesty. But their bristling refusal to acknowledge how they spent their days did not bespeak modesty. I asked if they hated me. They claimed no. Finally, a young man with his face half-hidden by a tie-dye baseball hat told me it was like asking someone what courses they were taking in college.

This made me feel my mortality more than I enjoy on a Saturday night (COLLEGE!!!) but it answered my question. It was neither secrecy nor modesty on their part, but the idea that this information'what they did'was so freely available on Facebook, Google and Tumblr to ask them about it was doing was akin to asking someone if their hair was usually brown. Intimate information'that they played Catan last night, that the Deerhoof show had been really good, that I needed to make that ex-girlfriend who'd come to the party go away, somehow, just go away'was for in-person. LAWYER. That was like asking what college courses they were taking.

I pondered this new intimacy. Then I took all the good champagne and drank it, because they are in their twenties and can't tell the difference.

What we used to do: We used to ask people what they did. Sometimes, if we responded, 'Poet,' they said we were brave, and what they meant is we were poor but it was nice someone had loaned us a dress so we could leave the house.

3. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO LEARN ABOUT PEOPLE

Try to find out what my brother does. Try to find out what my sister does. TRY TO FIND OUT IF I ACTUALLY HAVE A BROTHER AND SISTER.

YOU CAN'T, because they're not on the internet. (This may or may not be in response to the information dump of their sister, but I can't ask even them, because they're not on the internet.)

I am on the internet, however, and my information dump'as well as yours'has rendered us the point persons for tasks that used to be filled by phone books, encyclopedias, newspaper films, phone operators, and other objects you could throw across the room with a hard thump.

These operators are gone. Now, any dunderkopf is granted a smorgasbord of information, and who in their right-click could not spiral? I have told a friend about an upcoming date and had an astrological chart of the gentleman in question sent to me ten minutes later. I have gone through the wedding photos of complete strangers and found I had enemies I didn't even know, just from their centerpieces. I have judged hairstyles, children, countertops, motorcycles, blog names, avatars, jobs, even email names'simply because the person was not in the position to refute my judgments with their presence. One whois query led me to find an ex's wife makes jewelry for Garnet Hill and I ALMOST BOUGHT SOME.

What we used to do: Once, King Henry VIII would send around his lords to tell everyone who the queen was that year, and you would have to sign that she was the true queen and there was no other. Sometimes, when questioned, if you forgot and said 'Our Lady Catherine, God Bless Her and Keep Her' instead of 'Anne,' you were hanged at the crossroads. But you could luck out with 'Katherine' a lot of the time.

4. THE WEB CAN TELL THE TRUTH IN THE WAY A PERSON CANNOT

When I say the web can tell the truth, I don't mean 'the truth' in the sense of 'I googled your mother's boyfriend and need to tell you that he has three very rich ex-wives, all dead,' or even, 'the subject's pattern of credit-card use indicates the subject is involved in prostitution and money laundering.' (Though Spitzer was hate-searching par excellence.)

What I mean is the web you present contains, like the nervous sweat you sport when you swear you're fine, a truth greater than you intend. Like all presentation, what we do on the web involves a degree of (increasingly crippling) self-consciousness, and it is only through pre-self-deprecation that we can get past the points we missed, the jokes we lost, our flat-footed delivery, our'TOPIC. What I mean is, though it is true you can, in truth, not tell anything about someone's life from her Amazon reviews (One 2!!!) you can tell a great deal from her unconscious clues. Is she maniacally liking and commenting on everything on your page? Has she set the photos of her baby shower private? Does he delete Tweets that are not favorited in good time? Does NO PICTURE OF HIM EXIST ON THE WEB?

We see this unconscious truth sniffed out by no greater force than the commentariat, who, though they know the writer not, correctly pinpoint his or her weakness, hypocrisy, pretension, error, and split infinitives, like holy fools in a court of cowards.

I don't mean you guys are holy fools. Or that I am King. That is just a metaphor.

What we used to do: Those of us known as 'empaths' would know there was something wrong and say so on the way home from the party. Our companion would tell us we were wrong and always overthinking everything. If he or she were a therapist, they would possibly say we were 'catastrophizing' or 'projecting.' Later, we would say, 'I told you so.'

5. TO SEE IF THEY ARE FAT OR THIN

I don't know. I can't explain it. I do this all the time.

What we used to do: Other people used to volunteer this information, first thing.

6. WE LIKE TO TOUCH A HOT STOVE

In the not-too-distant past, I related to my therapist that a nighttime spiral had led me to the following informations: One ex had inherited an apartment in Paris; a friend had married a Hollywood director; another ex was selling felted items on Etsy. She paused'I am not sure she has, as we once called it, 'the internet''and spoke. 'You know, Lizzie, it sounds like torture,' she said.

Yes. Yes, it does. And it's divine.

When one's general experience on the internet involves paging through emails for your boss to prove you did in fact say the meeting was 1 p.m. on Thursday, not 2, though she will have moved on to some new gross negligence by the time you find it anyway, or spending three hours finding the drivers for your LAN that iTunes latest update broke (call me) so you can get back on the internet in the first place, the idea of submitting to an unholy alliance with the subconscious can seem a welcome palate-cleanser. Felted Etsy-ware is pain, yes, but is pain not life? How else to dim the experience of the Excel file than with the terrible news that, three years later, that boss was hit by a bus? (True story.)

And yes, though it is 'torture,' cannot we then argue smearching is a sign we truly have no desire to have, in fact, this horrible person in our lives, and a healthy reminder of the pain they caused is but a self-administered preventative, the wee bit of virus that immunizes? Would we not, were we truly unhealthy, call these people and hang up; drive by their houses; actually send them emails? I would tell my therapist this but she will just ask me why I am being so analytical, like that is not MY JOB TOO.

How we used to do this: We used to drive by their houses. Call them and hang up. Drop in on them in the library. Leave secret mixed tapes.

7. R U THERE?

A friend recently explained my propensity for using Apple TV to play podcasts because my TV is next to the radio with the theory that technology is often ahead of what people actually want. 'They thought we wanted phones with video screens,' he said. 'But then it turned out people actually wanted to tap out tiny messages in Morse-like code.'

Dick Cheney and Dharun Ravi notwithstanding, our smearching is much the same. We do not stalk the symbols of our discontent in their actual habitats, but prefer to piece together a portrait using the web's fragmentary shards, mixing a running roster from 1998 with an abandoned Facebook profile with a Pinterest page of the new love interest as if this were the same as sitting across from them as they ate their eggs.

On the one hand, yes. We acknowledge this means we have lost. There is no them, and no eggs. But on the other hand, we have won. This person is lost to us forever, and our proof is that we are alone, late at night, learning all we can about them, and they cannot see us either.

THE TRUTH IS

Asimov was right. The bureaucrat of his story had nothing to worry about. We all need the danger of chaos, the satisfaction of knowing someone is fatter than us. But we don't, as he feared, need it in real-time. To hate-search is to seek our cave painting, our fractured bit of tile, our ancient Carthaginian. In 'The Dead Past,' the scientist wanted to use the Chronoscope to see if Carthaginians actually sacrificed their children by fire. We, too, want to know if anyone is immolating anyone, self or otherwise. We want to see the fire, but from a healthy distance. We don't want to taste those ashes on the wind.

Lizzie Skurnick writes That Should Be a Word for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Shelf Discovery, a memoir of teen reading. She lives in Jersey City. You can follow her on Twitter. Photo by David Mican.

How Did You Get There, Vegan Fashion Designer Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart?

Leanne Mai-ly Hilgart is an animal lover with an entreprenurial spirit who founded a vegan fashion line. Vaute Couture is finding success'recently opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Williamsburg'but the founder quit her Ford Modeling contract and her MBA program, worked 80-hour weeks, and had to reinvent the female dress coat in order to get to this point. Over iced coffees, Hilgart talked about talked about unusual fashion, unusual work, and business as usual.

How did you end up with a vegan fashion line. Are you a fashion person or an animal person first?

Since I was eight, I've been raising money and awareness for animals. I would coordinate my friends to make arts and crafts that we would sell door-to-door to raise money for the local shelter. My business sense wasn't there yet, I probably spent more on materials than we made, but my parents let me give all that money to the shelter. Then, my high school was dissecting cats, and I waged a campaign to require the right to alternative options for conscientious objectors. It was a really long fight, but I ended up garnering support for a bill that turned into a law requiring alternatives in all K-12 schools in Illinois.

I find that everyone has their own voice with their activism, and I developed mine in college, where I was running groups and focused on spreading awareness for animals and a compassionate lifestyle in a way that was really welcoming and recognized the compassion in everyone. Everyone is compassionate; not everyone knows all the ways we can easily help and not hurt others in our daily lifestyles.

Skipping forward, I can tell you that I searched for the thing that would be my contribution to raising awareness for animals, helping fight for their rights in a way that was productive, would get the most out of what I had to offer, and was something no one else was doing. This was outerwear. No one had made a warm dress coat that was vegan, and it was always there as an excuse as to why we still had to use animals for some things: "Well, we can't completely get rid of animal products, we'd freeze without a wool coat." And thus, this was my mission, to make sure there was no excuse to wear animals ever again.

Okay, going back, what were you studying DePaul?

I went to school to be a teacher, well, a principal by way of the typical teacher first career path. I wanted to start a school that would encourage others to speak up for what they believed in, for those who were treated by the system like bad kids because they were not cogs, not rule followers. Their voices were quieted and this was a disservice to society. But then, reality hit. During student teaching I realized that I never felt more not myself in my life. I couldn't handle the confines of the system long enough to work on something new. I failed before I had started. I know now it's important to give up early when it's not right, but at the time it felt like a huge failure. I spent the next few years trying to figure out what exactly I was mean to do.

The first question was, what could I not keep myself from doing'when was I giddy, inspired, effortless? It wasn't in my education classes, it wasn't in my classes at all. It was outside my classes, where I was coordinating my animal rights organization, spreading awareness through events and collaborating with other groups to see what we could do together. I realized this was, in the "real" world, something you might call "marketing and events." I swear it was more to me than that. I got an internship with Sittercity.com, which is a company that matchmakes parents with their ideal babysitters.

It was at Sittercity where I saw how a business could really touch a lot of things. I realized that starting a business'creating one to do good in every facet'was a great model for activism. It's kind of like Kant. If the process itself is ethical'a moral end in itself'then you're not just creating a business that gives a little bit of the profit to a nonprofit. You in yourself are creating good with each element of the business. Therefore, each element is a driver for change. On top of that, we can create a new voice for the animals that can reach more people, and connect with them in a new way.

I realized I had to create a business but I needed to figure out what it was going to be. I thought I needed an MBA to balance out my knowledge sets. I started a full-time MBA program at DePaul. I entered all these business plan competitions, and when I got there, nobody would really understand what I was trying to do. I didn't fit a formula, my ideas weren't normal or proven. I was terrible at getting and asking for approval.

Was this the fashion line idea?

No, I was working on other concepts. I felt like I needed to water it down to make it something that people would understand. I wanted to make it eco or something that would reach a market that could sustain it. It was almost too broad, though. I would do my elevator pitch, and the judges wouldn't understand why I wanted to help so many things. They wanted to see the bottom line.

Between the summer of first year and second year, I got a modeling contract in Hong Kong and spent three months there. I was just modeling, and my brain needed something to do. Every night, I would go through a different concept and try to flesh it out. I was looking specifically for one that didn't need too much capital to start up because it was the middle of the recession and there was no bank funding. I had always wanted a coat that was cute, warm, and cruelty-free. I didn't think anyone else would want one, especially at the price it would cost to do that with no compromises. I Googled it, and I found tons of discussion boards with women asking for a coat exactly like that. I talked to girlfriend over Skype, and she said if I didn't do it, no one would. I thought okay, I've got to do this.

I didn't tell anybody except her and my ex. I realized that asking for approval of my ideas was something I never did in my life before business school. I had always just followed that driver inside me that said, "It must be done." I just thought I was going to do it.

And then you did.

I came back, quit my MBA, quit my contract, and started on 80-hour weeks.

Did you have a plan?

One of the smartest things I did was that I didn't write a business plan. That's not the case for everybody, but I had spent so much time writing business plans the previous year that I had it in my head. When I started this, I just did it. The advantage was that I could constantly re-strategize. I could look at the situation and figure out what would be best. Every night, I had a piece of paper out and I was re-strategizing everything. It was exhausting, but it was the only way to survive. I found that whenever something conventional didn't work, I would be forced to come up with something unconventional. Inevitably, it would work better.

Was funding the line with pre-orders from individual customers one of those ideas?

Typically for new lines, you get pre-orders from boutiques. They give you 50 percent up front and 50 percent on delivery. That's how you fund the line. But I started in 2008, in the depths of the recession with a brand new product and an entirely new concept. No one has ever tried to make a winter dress coat with high-tech materials. It's a high price point and a new brand. It was not going to happen.

We were using custom fabric, which meant we needed to make a lot of coats and pay for the materials upfront. I needed to figure out a way to fund it. Chloe Jo-Davis, who runs the Girlie Girl Army, heard that I was developing vegan dress coats and she knew that wasn't something that existed. She wrote a blog post with some photographs. Someone asked her if she could pre-order. Chloe asked me. I told her they could, and my web guys and I spent three days building a pre-order system.

And that worked?

I was shocked. Happily thrillingly shocked. I had hundreds of people in the middle of the summer spend hundreds of dollars pre-ordering coats that they had never seen from someone they had never met. I felt so lucky and thankful, because without them we would not have been able to produce the first line' and it also told me that yes, I am working on something that isn't out there, that people want. I'm not here to create fashion. I'm here to push the industry forward, and to say, "Listen, we don't need to wear animals, period." It used to be that warmth was an excuse. You needed wool to be warm, especially for a dress coat. No, you don't, actually. My coats are warmer than wool.

You crowdsourced the first designs.

When I first started, I didn't believe in myself. I didn't think I was a designer. At the same time, I wanted to know that if I was going to put so much time, effort, and money into something, people would want it. Humbly, I did not believe that I could design something that people wanted. Two of the first four basic designs were a pea-dress coat hybrid, which is the coat I always wanted, and the longer Vintage-inspired coat. I put a call out to illustrators, not designers, all over the world to come up with a visual representation of these styles. Then, we asked the world what they wanted us to make. In six days, we had 8,000 votes.

That's a nice proof of concept.

Totally. We saw which ones won. I took the drawings, which were not flat sketches, and did the real designing process: taking it to a point of construction, ensuring a great fit, making it something that was wearable, and giving it a price point that worked. We did that for two of the designs. For the other two'the pea coat and the Bomono, which is a bomber/kimono hybrid'are the ones I designed from scratch for the first season.

I still work with a couple designers that I like here and there if I needed something different, but I found that I really enjoy designing, so I just do it.

Why did you decide to open a store?

Because I was self-funded and working so much just to keep things going, I've always been squashing ideas. Last Thanksgiving weekend was an extra insane weekend, and I was going crazy trying to keep things together. I wondered what I could do for five minutes that would cheer me up but still feel productive. I went on Craigslist for a spot that I could daydream about. Surprisingly, I found a few options. One girl had an amazing spot, but she needed to tell her landlord what was going on by Thursday. It was Tuesday. I hadn't even thought seriously about opening up a store, but my heart is always right about things. It felt like I should go see it. I stopped by and it was amazing. I was able to afford the entire space, which meant I could use the back for shipping instead of outsourcing it. It made budget sense, and it made sense for the customers because it streamlined everything. Anything I can do to make people happier, I'm really excited about. We closed on the space two weeks later. And I started building the store from salvaged materials.

The vegan aspect is a huge part of appeal line, but how does the non-vegan community respond?

A very small percentage of the country and the world is vegan, but that doesn't mean that people aren't what they call "Vegan at Heart." I have two markets. One is "Vegan at Heart," which is people who want to live more compassionately, and they do in little ways. That's amazing, and they add up. That's my crowd in college who would come hang out with the dogs. They love dogs, and they would understand more and more. They would want to make as much of a change as they can, and that's incredible.

On top of that, I started the label because I wanted to show people that they didn't have to wear animals and that there is a better way. If you create a sub-par version, it's a negative thing for veganism and for everyone. I can't put that out there in the world. I wouldn't have put that out there in the world. That's why my fabric research took so long. My parents are science people, and I focus on problem solving. I consider what I do to be more from an invention standpoint, not a fashion/design standpoint. The look of it is an important but small part of what I do.

I had been in business for a month or two when I was asked to be in this event on Michigan Avenue. Before, I had been in all eco-events. This was just a shopping event, so I wasn't sure how it was going to go. I get there, and we put one of the coats at the entrance of the event. Everyone was talking about it and asking where they could get it. I would tell them about the veganism or the eco-consciousness, and they liked that but it certainly was not what sold them. What sold them was that they found a very warm, lightweight coat that was adorable. When I was building a winter dress coat, I was shocked to find out that no one had tried to reinvent the materials of a winter dress coat. It had always been wool or a wool-blend. If it wasn't, then it was not warm. If it was a cheap poly-blend, it might look warm but it wasn't. When I realized that, I realized I could go another way with high-tech fabrics made from recycled fabrics and materials. I could create something that had the warmth and protection of a Patagonia or North Face coat with the look of a dress coat. That combination was something that women all over the world, no matter what they cared about, were happy to buy.

How do you spread the word?

I haven't done any paid advertising, so everything is word of mouth or editorial. Oprah's covered us. Marie Claire. Teen Vogue. But we are mostly niche. We have a very strong following of people who really believe in the brand. This year, we are planning to get a lot more mainstream so women can realize not only that they don't need to wear animals but, more importantly, they can be very warm and dress the way they want.

How many employees do you have?

I have three people on staff and two interns. And it's been incredible. I can focus on developing things and higher-level things like partnerships. I loved doing stuff like writing the customer services emails, but it didn't leave time for other stuff.

We are looking at potentially bringing in investors. I'm not sure. We might go another way, but we need to figure out something so we don't miss out on opportunities to make vegan fashion more mainstream. That's the next step. I have some investors interested, so I think that we will probably do that. Once we do, we would hire a full staff and probably move into an office space. Our storefront could be entirely the store.

In the next few years, I'd like to open other flagship stores. One on the West Coast, either Portland or San Francisco, and some internationally. We have a lot of customers in Japan, and then maybe in London or maybe Australia. Those three are our major international markets. I'd also like to get a tour going. I would tour myself before. I would go to different cities and meet everybody, which was so amazingly fun. I would like to do a pop-up shop tour to bring it to everyone in person. Not everybody can guess their size. We might do a full tour with staff to create a really fun experience for everyone.

At this point, we're going from the stage of me having to do everything myself and creating a very tight, efficient business model with no funding to the next stage where we have a staff. We can take what I've built and bring it to the mainstream.

That's a good place to be.

It is. It's really fun. It's really exciting. There's a lot of stress that comes with it, but yeah. [Laughs]

Who should I talk to next?

Jessica Marquez, who I found because her beautiful needlework art was in In Style Magazine and I Facebook-stalked her to realize we had two friends in common and she was veg-is launching her first book, Stitched Gifts. Her company name is Miniature Rhino.

Previously: Kate Wolff, Standup Comic

Noah Davis is frequently lost. Top photo by Bridget Laudien; second photo by Thomas Smith III.

Chris Marker, 1921-2012

"The great French director and writer, Chris Marker, died in Paris on Sunday at the age of 91. He is often credited as the godfather of the essay film, a blend of documentary and personal reflection. Many well-known directors such as, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub and Michael Moore have based their work on Marker's innovation." Marker is perhaps best known for his short film La Jetée, which provided inspiration for both 12 Monkeys and The Terminator.

How Are You Going to Celebrate the Return of Digg?

Digg relaunches on Wednesday. Are you ready?

The Best Earbuds Under $100

If you're looking for new earbuds under $100, Velodyne's vPulse In-Ear Headphones, at $89, are the ones I'd recommend. 

To say that the headphone and earphone category is crowded would be an understatement. There are hundreds upon hundreds of models, all with their own sound and style, some of which cost as little as a hamburger and fries, others as much as a used car.

But why earbuds? And why the best earbuds under $100? The answer to the first question is portability. Just like we all celebrated the downsizing of the discman into the MP3 player, having a pair of earbuds that you can ball up and toss in your pocket, purse, or backpack is tremendously convenient. Big, over-ear headphones'even ones that cleverly fold up into a smaller package'just can't fit in all the same places. The answer to the second question is quality. For under $100, you can get a pair of durable, portable earbuds that sound really, really good. There are more expensive pairs out there that offer superior sound quality to the models we'll discuss, but frankly, casual listeners aren't likely to see a big enough jump in sound quality to justify that higher price tag. And you have to ask yourself if you'd want to spend several hundred dollars on a product that gets sat on, rained on, and yanked around as much as earbuds typically do.

But first thing's first. Your ears are not identical to my ears. And make no mistake: these things are really going in your ears. So it's just a fundamental earbud reality that no single pair will satisfy everyone in terms of comfort or sound.

That being said, I think the Velodyne vPulse buds are the best for the price when evaluated by those two central earbud criteria: how comfortable they are to wear and how they sound in the real world compared to other headphone in this price range. Let me explain why.

Up until this year, Velodyne was known for making really good subwoofers. The vPulse is the company's first stab at headphones. But nearly everyone agrees that the company was successful in putting their bass-master pedigree to work on a smaller scale. In his Audiophiliac column on CNET, high-end audio enthusiast Steve Guttenberg called them a "bass lover's delight." An early review on headphone enthusiast forum Head-Fi was subtitled "Bass lovers rejoice!!!"

The thing is, whether you realize it or not, you're probably a bass lover. Today's radio pop is fairly bass-heavy across the board, and popular headphones like Monster's Beats by Dre and Bose's Quiet Comfort cans are generous with the bass, even though they don't expressly advertise it. It's a very bassy world we're living in.

Now, sets like the Beats by Dre have been routinely dismissed by serious headphone types for being too bassy. They're bassy at the expense of the overall balance of sound; bassy to the point that it obscures detail at the mid- and high-range. And when you're listening at home, that balance is something you'll want. At their best, a good set of home headphones, like our favorite, the Audio Technica ATH-M50, will reveal new richness in your favorite music. They'll give you an accurate picture of how that music was supposed to be heard.

But earbuds are a slightly different beast. Their use is typically not confined to the sonic vacuum of your own home. They have to compete with the rumble of the subway, the roar of a jet engine, or just your own huffing and puffing on the treadmill. In general, when you're using earbuds, it's more a matter of entertainment and diversion than rigorous sonic analysis. Of course, accuracy is still a primary concern when talking about earbuds. But it's also important to consider how they'll sound when you're out and about.

Yet another factor to consider is what you're listening to. When it comes to most contemporary pop music, if you're cranking up compressed digital files on unforgivingly accurate headphones, things won't sound very pretty. Guttenberg, in a different piece, explains as much. "Trust me on this: you wouldn't want a superaccurate speaker or headphone if you mostly listen to contemporary, heavily compressed music; there's simply too much distortion and aggressive treble on today's music, so you'd probably be happier with speakers or headphones with boosted bass and softened treble to take the edge off."

The vPulse don't sacrifice bass quantity for bass quality

So, back to the Velodyne vPulse buds. I don't want to give the impression that they don't have great sound quality. They do. But every earbud has a slightly different sonic personality, and the vPulse's is certainly a bit more bass-heavy than that of some of its competition. What I'm saying is that's a good thing.

Reviewers agree.

David Carnoy at CNET gave them an "Excellent" 4/5 star rating. He says they "offer excellent sound, highlighted by impressive bass response." But unlike many of the headphones that pump bass to a fault, vPulse do it right. "The sonic emphasis here is on bass," Carnoy explains, "but the key is that the vPulse delivers quality in addition to quantity ' the low-end is deep, full, and tight, motivating you to seek out tracks in your library with potent bass lines that lesser headphones can't handle with as much aplomb'In the final analysis," he concludes, "the vPulse manage to do something many headphones that accentuate bass fail to do: sound pleasing."

Over at Head-Fi, user ljokerl, who has been maintaing a staggeringly comprehensive mega-review of earphones for over 2 years (comprising over 200 models), gave them an overall value score of 9/10. "The vPulse does a good job of combining user-friendliness and functionality in a single package," he writes. "The sound combines solid bass rumble and depth with slightly subdued ' but still clean and detailed ' mids and highs. The bass can be a touch overpowering on some tracks but normally remains well-behaved for such a bassy earphone, making the vPulse highly suitable for anyone in search of a reasonably-priced headset with plentiful rumble and power."

But don't be mistaken: just because they bring the bass does not mean that these are only suited for Skrillex. Guttenberg, in his aforementioned review, noted that "Listening to a great live recording of Jeff Tweedy singing 'Jesus, Etc,' I heard the vPulse projecting a big, wide-open soundstage, bigger than most in-ear headphones'other in-ears sound puny by comparison," though he found the bass "much too ripe in [his] quiet apartment." Still, he says, the vPulse sounded "gorgeous" when listening to a song built around finger-picked guitar and offered a "lush balance" when playing an orchestral film score.

Though in that initial review he had reservations about the bass in quiet settings, Guttenberg returned to the vPulse in a subsequent column that set out to identify the best earphones under $100. In it, he succinctly weighs the matter of "accuracy" against real world experience'and rules in favor of the vPulse: "Back to the Velodyne vPulse; it's not the least bit accurate, but it sounds great. Amazon sells it for $89, and there's nothing remotely close to that price that sounds better with a wide range of music, to my ears."

Ken Rockwell, a well-known photography guru who also has also reviewed a respectable share of audio gear, admits that he's usually not an earbud guy but says that the vPulse are "the very best I've heard. I enjoy listening to these for hours and hours on end. Don't use them for mastering," he advises, "but use them for enjoying music, especially if you demand to hear the deepest fundamentals, and I'm sure you'll enjoy them as I do."

The vPulse are one of only two sub-$100 pairs of buds listed in Head-Fi's Summer 2012 Buying Guide, and while the accompanying blurb does point out that they don't lead the pack in detail and soundstaging, the reviewer says that "the vPulse's bass is emphasized'without adulterating the mids. In fact, the vPulse's mids and treble seem to breathe freely, and the overall balance is just what I'd want when I feel like listening to a bass-emphasized in-ear."

A reviewer at Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity said "they sound like Velodyne all the way . . . a.k.a. very, very good," and a writer at Tech-Kings.net concluded, "After having played with the vPulse earphones for several weeks, scrutinizing and enjoying, if we were in the $75-125 price range, the vPulse would be a finalist without question."

After a long weekend of testing the vPulse (alongside some of the competitors I'll discuss below), I have to agree with the professional reviewers.

Though for the last few years I've been content to rotate through a stable of crappy $30 and  $40 buds (the rate at which I lose and/or destroy the things prohibiting a more serious investment), the vPulse served as a reminder that earbuds could sound as great and feel as comfortable as full-size over-ear headphones. Listening to R. Kelly's new album, I was able to pick out basslines that had eluded me in my first dozen or so listens. Old Stevie Nicks favorites sounded warm, full, and familiar. And the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds Sessions, a four-disc collection of scraps and outtakes of the band recording their seminal album, sounded huge and intimate at the same time. When I was listening to the disc that contains the album's vocal tracks sans instrumentation and first heard the Brothers Wilson and co sing the titular line of "You Still Believe in Me" in exquisite five-part harmony directly into my ear, I was forever a "good" earbud convert.

One quibble I have with the vPulse is that it is, relative to other models I was testing, a quiet pair of earbuds.

Getting a nice, powerful sound required listening at roughly half-volume on my MacBook, and if I really wanted to rock out at levels undoubtedly detrimental to my long-term aural health, I'd have to crank my MacBook or iPhone up to 75% or so volume. When I was using the vPulse to play a podcast on a flight, I ended up listening at my iPhone's full volume. If you get a good seal, the vPulse do a pretty damn good job at blocking out external sound'when I was listening at my customary 50% volume, I could see my friend talking to me from a few feet away, but couldn't register a single sound he was making'and at no point did the buds fail to get loud enough for me to listen at the level I wanted to. But if you're someone who really likes to crank their tunes, and I mean really crank them, the vPulse might not be up to the task.

Anyway, aside from having a sound profile that makes sense for how we use earbuds these days, the vPulse get the other half of the earphone equation right, too. That would be comfort and usability.

Unlike our former pick in this category, the Shure SE215, which use an over-the-ear cord configuration that requires some patience and practice to get right, the vPulse's design is pretty standard earbud fare (we'll compare the SE215 and vPulse at greater length later in this piece). The vPulse's cable is a typical, straight-down deal, which means you can pop the earbuds in and out easily, like you're probably accustomed to with other pairs you've used in the past.

The vPulse's flat cable helps prevent those rage-inducing tangles

The vPulse comes with 10 silicone ear tips in four different sizes, so you'll likely find one to fit your hearing holes. Guttenberg found them "extremely comfortable to wear for long periods of time." His colleague Carnoy notes that the vPulse are a bit larger than your average earbud, but they sit "comfortably nicely in your ear thanks to an angled stem (or post), and the aluminum housing doesn't pinch up against the inner ear lobe." In his mega-review, Head-Fi's ljokerl noted the lightness of the housings and gave them a 4/5 for comfort overall. I found much the same. The second-to-largest pair of tips offered a good seal (and subsequently a nice, full sound), though they didn't feel like they were filling my ear quite as oppressively as the Shures. I've left them in for a few several-hour sessions without any fatigue.

The cable on the vPulse is flat, like a piece of linguine, which is a little strange and makes these a bit more conspicuous than other earbuds. But that flat design significantly reduces the dreaded cable-tangle, one of the most consistently frustrating scourges of the earbud era. Again, seems like a small thing, but once you spend a little bit of time with a pair of earbuds that unfurl almost magically, you'll grow to loathe the unknotting ritual that's required by other pairs. One thing about the cable: it's shorter than most. 3.7 feet. That's actually perfect for walking-around, phone-in-pocket listening (I'm 6 feet tall and the cord was pretty much the perfect length, though there were a few inches to spare), but it doesn't give you a lot of latitude for leaning back in your chair when you're working at a desk, and if you like to keep your music-playing device in a cargo pocket or a low-slung purse, it could be problematic. Velodyne, give us a longer option next time, please!

The vPulse was designed specifically for Apple products, and in-line volume and playback controls let you turn up or skip through tracks on iPhones, iPads, and iPods. It's got a built-in mic, too, though it's made to work with the iPhone and CNET's Carnoy says he had trouble hearing callers while using them with his Android-powered Samsung Galaxy G3. They come in black and blue.

I think the vPulse are an excellent pair of earbuds for most people. But as I said, there are hundreds of models out there, some of which are very good, so we should take a look at a few of those, too.

Our old pick in this category, the Shure SE215, is still a worthy competitor. Shure's a big name in audio, so the SE215 are likely the only pair we'll discuss here that you might be able to find in a brick and mortar store nearby, and they deliver a great, detailed sound all around. In Lifehacker's 2011 headphone round-up, head Head-Fi'er Jude Mansilla named them his budget pick and said they offer "a level of performance well above [their] price," though that round-up was conducted before the vPulse was released. In my tests, the Shure SE215 was definitely on par with the vPulse in terms of sound quality, though I'd characterize their overall tone as a bit brighter and more aggressive. Vocals were somewhat crisper than I found with the vPuse, and the bass, while not as pronounced as it was in Velodyne's buds, was strong and well-defined. For comparison, in his Head-Fi thread, joker gave the vPulse a score of 7.4 out of 10 in sound quality and the SE215 a 7.8. Frankly, I thought both sounded really, really good. The SE215, however, was certainly louder than the vPulse: where Velodyne's in-ears generally took a 50% volume, Shure's were plenty loud at 25%.

The two models weren't as even when considering comfort and fit. The SE215 has an angled earbud design, chunky plastic housings, and a cord that is intended to be worn over the top of your ears. Once you get them fitted in just right, they are snug'it's like they're hardwired into your dome, for better or worse'but getting that fit takes a little bit of trial and error. Even when you know what you're doing, the process takes more effort than one would like. It's essentially a two-handed operation. You have to kind of stretch your ear open with one hand, fit the earbud in, and guide the cable around the back of your ear with your free fingers. Taking them off requires the same effort, just in reverse.

This putting-them-in-and-taking-them-out factor might not seem like a huge deal on paper, but when it comes to the overall experience, I found the ease of use to be a significant advantage for the vPulse. Especially when you consider that many earbud listening sessions are brief affairs: you throw 'em in for a few subway stops, tug on the cable to pull one out when someone's talking at you, etc. It's like the difference between a pair of well-worn loafers you can slip in and out of with ease and a pair of combat boots you have to cram your feet into and then lace up for good measure.

There are definitely be some, I'm sure, who will prefer the slightly brighter, more balanced sound of the SE215 over the laid-back, low end-focussed vPulse, but I can't imagine anyone finding the SE215 more comfortable to wear or easier to use. Still, I'm confident that both of these earbuds would be nothing short of revelatory for those who have endured Apple's stock buds, or others of their tinny, ill-fitting ilk, for any period of time.

To be explicit, we prefer the Velodyne VPulses ove the Shure 215s.

The Shure SE215, our former pick, sound great but aren't the most straightforward to wear

These aren't the only good sub-$100 buds out there, though. If you're looking for a more neutral earbud with a standard, cable-down design, another good bet is the $99 HiFiMAN RE-ZERO in-ear. They're a Head-Fi user favorite, and in his super review ljokerl gave them a sterling 10/10 for value. Basically, they're the most accurate earphones you can buy for $100, though as Guttenberg explained, accuracy is not always the be-all and end-all when evaluating earphones. Joker agrees, noting that their scrupulously neutral sound profile is "not for everyone." But if you know you're bass-averse, these are definitely noteworthy. They also might be kind of tough to get your hands on, as they come from a smaller outfit.

The Klipsch IMAGE S4, at $79, are another long-standing consumer favorite'they have a solid 4/5 stars on Amazon after a whopping 1,400 user reviews'though many users have reported that the S4's flimsy cable can fray and split in a matter of months, something you don't have to worry about as much with the vPulse's tough, flat cable. In my testing, these were a distant third to the vPulse and SE215.

You may be wondering if you can get away with spending less. You can. Here's what you'll lose.

Our favorite cheap buds, the Monoprice 8320, which you can get for a baffling $9, weren't totally blown out of the water by the more expensive brethren, but its limitations were clear in back-to-back listening. Compared to the vPulse, the Monoprice offered significantly less-disciplined bass and a good deal less detail in the highs and mids. If the vPulse made me feel like I was inside the music; the Monoprice made me feel like I was listening to the music from a decent boombox at very close range. It also seems like the thin cable of the Monoprice buds would quickly succumb to general earphone abuse in some way or another. Still, for the price, I was impressed.

Finding the right pair of earbuds can be daunting'just take a peek at Head-Fi threads like ljokerl's seemingly never-ending earbud mega-review or ClieOS's "concise" listing of over 100 earbuds catalogued meticulously by sound-profile. But the Velodyne vPulse, at $89, seems to me to be a nearly perfect modern earbud. It's got enough bass to stand up to planes, trains, and the other noises that make up the dull roar of city life, but it's still got enough detail in the mid- and high-range to keep audiophiles coming back. It's a highly comfortable pair of buds, even during marathon listening sessions, and it's easy to slip in and out of your ears on the go. Plus, think of all the time you'll save not having to untangle its cable.

What Olympic Athletes And Grimace Have In Common

"You're going to pee purple, you're going to poo purple."

The Best Of The New York Times' Pug Journalism

Meet the best fodder for New York Times style pieces for a hundred years plus: the pug.

10. "Cyrano the Pug Has Gout: It is the Result of High Living, as in the Human Family, Says the Doctor' Canine Tooth Filling" (June 18, 1899)

9. Story From Romney's Past Prompts Protest at Dog Show" (Feb. 14, 2012)

8. "Raw Food for Dogs: A Risk or a Cure-All?" (Feb. 15, 2012)

7. "Mr. Morgan's Pug Found" (Oct. 26, 1884)

6. "Pug-ness, Tiger-ness, Whatever" (Oct. 10, 2003)

5. "Joint Replacements Keep Dogs in the Running" (Jan. 16, 2011)

4. "On This Walk, the Pug Is Top Dog" (Nov. 13, 2005)

3. "From Royalty's Best Friend to Collectors' Favorite" (Feb, 8, 1998)

2. "Banned by Many Airlines, These Bulldogs Fly Private" (Oct. 6, 2011)

1. "While the Pugs Eat the Caviar, Owners Bond" (June 1, 1997)

Ali Pechman lives in Manhattan and is on the editorial staff at ARTnews. She writes about art here and tweets here. Photo by Jon Clegg.

Mickey Hates Santa

For me, the most depressing religious philosophy concerning the condition of existence is the concept of samsara, where you are continually reincarnated until you get it right. For those of us who feel as if the brutal burden of being alive is perhaps the cruelest joke, the idea that, when you've finally discharged your obligations in that regard, you get sent back to the start, as if you were playing some sadistic game of Chutes and Ladders, is almost too painful to consider. Once around will be more than enough, thanks. Still, every time you are tempted to wallow in the mire of despair over the sheer strain of subsistence'and the chance, however remote, that it's going to happen all over again'try to remind yourself that things like this incident out of Orlando occur in the world all the time, if only to allow the absurdity to alleviate your agony in some small way. It doesn't usually work, but how much worse would it be if you didn't even try?

Racism Seems Like A Lot Of Work

Man, I thought bigotry was as easy as "ready, set, hate," but apparently you've got to figure out a whole system of codes and stuff. It hardly seems worth the effort. I mean, yeah, when you think about it, there's not a whole lot in life that does seem worth the effort, but it especially feels like a waste of time to put in all that toil just to be prejudiced.

When Lenny Bruce And Steve Allen Talked Free Speech

The Paley Center for Media, which has locations in both New York and LA, dedicates itself to the preservation of television and radio history. Inside their vast archives of more than 120,000 television shows, commercials, and radio programs, there are thousands of important and funny programs waiting to be rediscovered by comedy nerds like you and me. Each week, this column will highlight a new gem waiting for you at the Paley Library to quietly laugh at. (Seriously, it's a library, so keep it down.)

Not too long ago, a fella by the name of Daniel Tosh stirred up a debate on the Internet about what is okay to joke about and what isn't. Do we have the freedom to joke about anything or are some topics too offensive and off limits? Well, guess what? This is not a new debate. In the late-50s and 60s there was no comic that brought this question to the forefront more frequently than Lenny Bruce.

On March 4th, 1964, Lenny Bruce was invited by Steve Allen to make his third appearance on his show, his first in several years. As Lenny jokes, he had been on television quite a bit in the intervening time, in the form of newsreels. However, to give you an idea of the type of reputation Lenny had during that time, before he is even introduced Steve Allen gives the comic a four minute introduction, warning viewers about what they're going to see tonight. Allen insists that Bruce is not a comedian who tells dirty jokes. Instead, "he deals with subject matter which many people consider off limits. Religion. Sex from the philosophical viewpoint. Things that will shock you." He goes on to suggest that if his viewers don't want to be shocked, they should turn the show off for the next ten minutes. "Go watch Johnny Carson. Or the late night movie. (Although ten minutes of it won't do you much good.) Go out in the backyard and have a beer, if that's what you do. Go in and kiss the kids if they're asleep. Go do something constructive. But don't sit there and then send me a stupid postcard."

The reason for these four minutes of disclaimers? Allen tells his audience that on the show tonight, Lenny Bruce is going to do a routine that involves a four-letter word that WILL shock them. And it might shock you, too.

Lenny Bruce was brought into show business by his mother, a stage performer, and broke in by working as an usher at the Roxy Theatre in New York. It was here that he was greatly influenced by the work of Sid Caesar. Caesar's "double-talk" routines, in which he would expertly mimic the cadences of foreign languages, are firmly routed in Lenny's material as he quickly switches accents and characters as if he were flipping a switch. After a brief stint with the Marines and a tour of the jazz clubs and burlesque houses of America, Lenny developed his act. As Steve Allen said, Lenny was not a dirty comedian, but his statements about modern society branded him as a controversial figure, and as he traveled from town to town, the local law-enforcement began to notice. Bruce was arrested many times, usually for violating whatever-town-he-was-in's standards of decency, but also, as Steve Allen mentions later, for narcotics possession. The Glaser Foundation, which supplied this clip to The Paley Center, quotes Lenny's autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, where the caption beneath a photo of the comedian being frisked by a police officer reads, "Here I am living up to my public image. A true professional never disappoints his public."

After Steve Allen's lengthy preamble, it's time for Lenny to take the stage. Now, admittedly, I am writing this as someone who is not an expert on Bruce's material, but it's clear that on this television appearance he was given the freedom to perform in the freeform style that he most commonly used. He begins with a little bit of talk about his reputation and the First Amendment. He states that America was founded on the basis of freedom of speech and his problems occur when someone who "isn't hip to the law" watches his show and gets offended on behalf of the people who get offended. He explains that the present litigation he's involved in surrounds a four-letter word that starts with an "s" and ends in a "t." (Get ready for it.)

"The word is 'snot.'" The routine continues and Bruce describes the difficulties of getting snot out of a suede jacket. If you try and throw a jacket with snot on the sleeve into the cleaners, they'll bust you. One important thing to recognize about television at this time is that this isn't Lenny playing the old switcharoo with the words "shit" and "snot." (Well, he is a little bit with that misdirect') This really is the offensive word that Steve Allen was alluding to earlier. Later in the episode when Bruce and Allen are talking at the desk, Allen discusses the idea of how one person's most offensive word may not be all that offensive to someone else and uses the examples of "armpit" and "belly button." When I write these articles I try not to do a lot of "look how different things were back then!"-style observations, but I think it's important to realize that Bruce isn't being cutesy here; he's actually inching towards the line of what was allowed on TV.

From here, Lenny does a chunk on religion. "The Jewish god doesn't have a face. The Christian god has a family. A mother, a father, and he's been in three films." His god is different. He doesn't believe the selflessness exists in a real life, so he looks instead to the Lone Ranger, who does good and doesn't accept anything in payment. He then moves into a character piece in which he plays a member of a town the Lone Ranger has saved, confronting the masked man for not accepting a gift. He jumps back and forth from the townsperson to the noble Lone Ranger as the hero explains that he doesn't accept gifts because all of the "thank you masked mans" that he gets would distract him from saving others. The Lone Ranger agrees to take one present, for the kids, and decides that he wants Tonto the Indian, so he can "perform an unnatural act."

Lenny ends his monologue here and concludes by saying that all of the words that he's said this evening, "lie closely with the ear of the beholder. What those words meant to you." Lenny then sits down with Steve Allen to discuss this point of constitutional freedom. According to Bruce, the law prescribes true freedom of speech, and what is considered "dirty" to one may not be "dirty" to another. Allen points out that even in the Bible there are stories, words, and references to acts that you could not say on television, at which Bruce warns that someone tuning in right now would think that this was a religious program and then turn it right back off.

When asked if when he started working if he did more conventional jokes ("about the freeway and your wife's cooking") Bruce responds that he still does. The main problem he has now is his public persona. "You get arrested in Town A, Town B has to follow suit. And then Town C is already ready for you." It's clear that Bruce believes he is right to say the things that he does, and doesn't just do it for the headlines, but he also understands why his words offend some. He doesn't blame the police as a whole. Instead, "Certain individuals'think a certain way and they interject their personal point of view." While he's careful to never directly say this, with a few references to the Communist party he alludes to the idea of the censoring of words being a slippery slope in which all civil liberties are threatened. Towards the end of the interview, Steve Allen sums it up thusly: "This is not a problem that can be viewed in black and white. Unbridled freedom would result in pure anarchy, and yet when you begin inching in, you find that you are moving into inhibitions of freedom' There is no way to solve the problem. What may be too much freedom may be not enough to someone else."

Ultimately, this segment of The Steve Allen Show was never shown on television. The sponsor of the show, Westinghouse, demanded that Bruce's performance not be broadcast, even after Allen offered to record an additional disclaimer. Reflecting on the experience in his book Funny People, Allen wrote, "It was a nightmarish experience for all involved, and most of all ' I assume ' for Lenny."

Things have changed quite a bit in the almost 50 years since this episode was recorded. Today, with the advent of cable, there really isn't much that you can't say on television. However, the process of dealing with freedom of speech has become more self-policing; rather than criminal charges being levied, if there is a disagreement about something that is said there is a debate on the Internet. Sure, these debates can get nasty and carried away, but that's just the way the Internet works. But sometimes actual opinions change and viewpoints are broadened as a result of these conversations. And I think that's something Lenny Bruce would've been all for.

Ramsey Ess is a freelance writer for television, the head writer of his website, a podcaster and a guy on Twitter.

Maureen Dowd, Cub Reporter

It's easy to look at our media industrial complex and forget that its members were once young and hungry, that they had to hustle, grease sources and report stories within an inch of life. One can imagine these scrappers delirious just to see a byline buried on B4 or, God forbid, a sidebar. They sammy glicked their way through the newsroom. No one exited the womb a star.

Even so, these people seem to exist only in the ever-present. We see Juan Williams as Hannity's graying foil'who sold out for the change in Roger Ailes' pocket'but not the guy who, in 1987, churned out a gorgeous profile of a lawyer on Reagan's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission named Clarence Thomas. We know Tucker Carlson as the proprietor of "a one-stop shop for Trayvon Trutherism," not as the precocious striver who marshaled his significant gifts to chronicle a Liberian road trip and the abortion of Down syndrome babies. And Brit Hume'grave, phlegmatic Brit Hume' Can you see Brit as Jack Anderson's "leg man"? You can't, but he was.

Which brings us to The New York Times, whose stable of op-ed writers occupy, it is often said, the most valuable editorial real estate in America. As a bunch, they seem tactically devoid of the rough edges that made their salad days work such an energetic pleasure. Nicholas Kristof, long before he epitomized The White Savior Industrial Complex, would lead off a story on Japanese war atrocities with this kick to the gut: "He is a cheerful old farmer who jokes as he serves rice cakes made by his wife, and then he switches easily to explaining what it is like to cut open a 30-year-old man who is tied naked to a bed and dissect him alive, without anesthetic." And Thomas Friedman, back when Matt Taibbi was still in junior high, could deliver a Beirut massacre tick-tock in which he observed buildings "bulldozed atop the bodies inside them. Some bodies were bulldozed into huge sandpiles, with arms and legs poking out in spots. In some areas the militiamen made neat piles of rubble and corrugated iron sheets to hide the corpses." To borrow James Wood's keen phrase, this work hummed with "the riot of life."

That quality liberally imbues the early work of another veteran Timesman, Maureen Dowd. From her current in-house glamour shot, you would not necessarily guess that this was a reporter who, starting out at the Times, happily dove neck-deep in the muck. It was not long after Anna Quindlen picked her up from Time, where she'd worked for two years as a reporter'a few weeks shy of Christmas 1983, after less than a year at the paper'that Dowd, then 29, wrote a story that decades later has lost none of its oomph. "FOR VICTIMS OF AIDS, SUPPORT IN A LONELY SIEGE" is unrelentingly brutal. It didn't win any awards, hasn't been anthologized. And it almost, just maybe, cost Dowd her job.

At the time, Gay Men's Health Crisis, a social-services organization focused on people with AIDS, was founded in Larry Kramer's living room. Now, with a paid staff of 12, a board of directors and hundreds of volunteers, GMHC was for afflicted gay men the only game in town. The day Dowd's story hit the streets there had been 2,803 cases nationwide and 1,261 in New York alone. While the mayor, Ed Koch, was willing to serve on Dianne Feinstein's AIDS Task Force of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and supported federal research, he wouldn't authorize hospice care for the afflicted homeless; he demanded that GMHC pay $2 million to repurpose an abandoned high school as an "AIDS service center"; and, two years into the epidemic, the city wouldn't allocate funds for education or services.

***

"Dowd's clique," that circle of friends all working at The Times'described by Ariel Levy in 2005 as "think Heathers, but nice"'hadn't yet quite formed. Dowd's pal, Michiko Kakutani, had been destroying authors in the Times' Books pages for a couple of years. But Alessandra Stanley, a sometime collaborator to whom she'd been close since their Time days, wouldn't show up until 1990, and friend Frank Bruni arrived in 1995.

Six weeks before the AIDS story was published, Dowd had gotten her first byline as a general assignment reporter on the Metro desk. Fairly unremarkable, it's about Columbia University's just-completed Computer Science Building, on which $5.6 million was spent. It's notable mostly for the prediction of Arno Penzias, a vice president of research for Bell Laboratories and a Nobel Laureate in physics. "By 1986, there will be more microprocessors being produced than McDonald's hamburgers," he told Dowd. "The Dick Tracy wrist radio is not that far away."

Raised in Washington D.C., Dowd had been working there before she moved to New York for the New York Times gig. As a new reporter, she told me, "I thought maybe I should look kind of preppy, so I went and brought a duck sweater'you know, a sweater with a duck on it'from Talbot's." On her way to Columbia she missed her subway stop and ended up in Harlem. "And they were like, You do not belong here with that stupid duck sweater on. So then I got rid of the duck sweater."

Back then, Dowd filed every couple of days: on a new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, Marcus Garvey, Philip Roth ("ROTH'S REAL FATHER LIKES HIS BOOKS"), landmarks ("THE CHELSEA HOTEL, 'KOOKY BUY NICE,' TURNS 100"). Fourteen "silly features," is how she puts it.

The profile of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, edited by James Gleick, was conceived as a story about the organization's "buddies system," volunteers tasked to comfort dying men. Dowd was not expected to spend much time on it, maybe two days. She ended up taking three weeks. "You could have done a two-day feature on it," she allowed. But, she said, "When you cover a news story like that, at a moment like that, that turns out to be this horrible, you know, plague for one segment of society, it's just a very gut-wrenching experience."

The story begins with Mr. Lamb, a patient at New York University Medical Center. He would die three weeks before publication:

Cold in a warm hospital room, Stephen Lamb pulled his yellow blanket tighter around his emaciated body.

Dowd observes, "nurses and orderlies in hospitals who are so loath to enter the rooms of AIDS patients that they let the food trays pile up outside the door, leave trash baskets overflowing, or neglect patients lying in their own urine or excrement."

She observes the yearnings of a man who, like Mr. Lamb, would die before the story got to print:

Allan Kendric, 46, a landscape architect from Queens, used to worry that he had little to say to his patient, a 30-year-old horticulturist from Brooklyn. "My life is so full," Mr. Kendric said. "His whole experience is sitting in his bed in his lonely hospital room."

On one recent visit, as the two sat silently, the young man asked Mr. Kendric softly: "Can you hold me for a minute? Nobody ever holds me anymore."

Dowd's story didn't make A1, though it did jump off the front of the Metro section. I told her I was pleasantly surprised the story was allotted so much space, almost 3,000 words, given executive editor Abraham 'Abe' Rosenthal's well-known homophobia. As Charles Kaiser once said, "Everyone below Rosenthal spent all of their time trying to figure out what to do to cater to his prejudices. One of these widely perceived prejudices was Abe's homophobia. So editors throughout the paper would keep stories concerning gays out of the paper."

Dowd says she wasn't aware of the homophobia. She doesn't dispute Kaiser's account, and others, but "I just had no knowledge of it at the time. I've read about it since and don't doubt the accounts. I just didn't experience it. Obviously, I wouldn't have been in a position to." To some extent, her view of the institutional homophobia was shaped by her friendship with Jeffrey Schmalz, a gay Times editor close to Arthur Sulzberger. He was "very powerful," Dowd said, and a "really important person at the paper. So I didn't see the homophobia because Jeff was just this person you thought would be running the Times someday. I think he would have ended up as the executive editor." (Schmalz, who had AIDS, died in 1993.)

Dowd believed the paper "was good for gays. I didn't realize until I read the accounts later that to some people it wasn't."

Gleick, who has nothing but kind words for Dowd ("fresh and exciting and a joy to work with"), gently disputed this. Like Kaiser, he was aware of "pressure" in the newsroom to 'never to print anything that could be construed as approving of homosexuals or homosexuality." The most pernicious result of this edict, says Gleick, was the Times' "shameful slowness to notice AIDS. She and I both would have known that."

According to Dowd, long after the story ran'she doesn't remember exactly when'Gleick told her that her job had been in "some jeopardy." Not, strangely enough, on account of the subject matter, but because it had taken so long to finish. The erstwhile editor disputed this, too. Said Gleick: "I don't remember saying anything like that, and presumably someone's exaggerating: either her memory, or me in youthful exuberance. Her job was never in jeopardy."

***

Reporting, the actual shoe leather stuff, is a young person's game. At some point in a successful writer's career, the desire to live only in one's own head, to not have to pick up phone, must be tempting. Dowd hasn't succumbed to the temptation, yet. She calls plenty of people, but few of them, rather understandably, want to end up in her column. When we talked, Dowd was most animated, not about the Gay Men's Health Crisis story, but another piece, that ran on B1 on November 25, 1983. She'd been sent to cover the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade: "I was so excited I went to every balloon party the night before and the parade. And I had to interview, like, forty kids until I got the one cynical little New York girl who was, like, Natalie Wood in Miracle on 34th Street. But I did the work because I knew what I wanted."

Of course, there were some precocious veterans on hand. When Superman wobbled maneuvering a corner on Central Park West, 7-year-old Jennifer Terban looked up in disdain.

"He should take flying lessons again," she said. "I hate it when they tilt. Superman got hit in the face last year and Bullwinkle got caught in a tree."

Jennifer gave only glancing notice to the grand finale of Santa Claus and his elves to the tune of "Jingle Bells." "He's not really Santa,"' she said. "He's just a fat man with a beard.'"

And she got what she wanted, particularly in those early days at the Times'during which she may, or may not, have been on the cusp of canning'that Dowd calls 'my favorite part of my career.' She continued writing like a madwoman, profiling Paul Newman, the new bohemia and New York's late-night scene. The latter story, which appeared a year after the AIDS story, is magnificent: she managed to tell the story of what it was like to be in New York in the early 80s in a svelte 5,112 words.

Clubs are no longer merely places to drink and dance. You gotta have a gimmick, an idea behind the night. At Heartbreak, cigarette girls jive their way through couples jitterbugging to 50's rock 'n' roll. At Visage, near the river on West 56th, mermaids and King Neptune descend on a swing from the ceiling into a pool; close to the dance floor, Hell's Angels ice-skate on a miniature portable rink.

Area, the hottest of them all, is totally redecorated every five weeks, when the theme changes. The club was outfitted with pink flamingos and giant Tide boxes for the suburban period; with wrestlers and trampolines for sports; with Mao posters and a huge sculpture of a hand with scarlet fingernails for the color red.

But finally, in 1986, she decamped for Washington, for politics and a Pulitzer. The dying men of NYU Medical Center were another lifetime. But why, I wondered, did she walk away? Had she made an effort to stay on the AIDS beat?

She did not, but she wishes she had. "I don't even know if I would have had the power to persuade them to do an AIDS beat at that early date," she said. "You know, in years past I've often wished I had at least kept it as a part-time beat." She was, said Dowd with a touch of regret, on "a different path to politics, but in my parallel, Gwyneth Paltrow Sliding Doors universe, I would have stuck with that beat."

Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

We're A Mistake

"A genetic process that went wrong 500 million years ago led to the evolution of humans and other vertebrates."
'I KNEW life was some kind of cosmic fuck-up! I KNEW IT ALL ALONG! I mean, it had to be. Now where do I go to get my money back?

How My Job Search Has Been Going

1. Weed through unpaid 'internships' and 'volunteer/experience' opportunities on Craiglist to find two postings I'm qualified for, would willingly do. Mood: Despondent.

2. Browse Mediabistro for jobs in San Diego, but most jobs are in L.A. Consider possibility of four-hour roundtrip commute. It might not be that bad??? Mood: Optimistic/crazy.

3. Contemplate sex work. Decide too old. Mood: Relieved.

4. Eat chocolate. (Love you, chocolate.) 

5. Take a look at my resume to boost confidence. (I've had jobs and will have jobs again!) Mood: Confidence not boosted.

6. Contemplate selling contents of ovaries ('eggs'). Realize I AM too old. Feel biological clock ticking. Mood: Tick tock.

7. Send out desperate sounding email to well-connected family and friends letting them know I'm on the hunt. Get three responses back (two from the same person), none of them a job offer. Mood: Helpless.

8. Wonder why I majored in journalism rather than something sensible like accounting. Mood: Regretful.

9. Perhaps I can get by by working as a barista. Look up barista wages. Perhaps not. Mood: Crying.

10. Wine.

11. Repeat.

12. Start browsing grad school programs.

 

Katie Peoples lives in San Francisco, for now.

'The Dreadful Woman' Who Ruined London's 1948 Olympics

This is a story'a true story'about Olympic highs and lows, triumphant wins and crushing defeats, the old and the new, and my grandmother and a horrible Dutch woman who leapt over her dreams like they were just another hurdle on her path to the gold.

The Olympic Games are coming to London this week, and with them will come crowded airports, crowded subways, crowded streets, and crowded stadiums'most built for the event and covered in corporate sponsor logos (which is better, aesthetically, than that heinous official Olympics logo or the terrifying mascot whose face is just one giant eyeball). British taxpayers will end up footing a bill of at least nine billion pounds'that's 14 billion dollars'for all of this. They won't get much in return. Tickets for many of the events (except soccer football) are difficult to come by, and most have been allocated to corporate sponsors or sent to other countries to sell to their citizens. Many Londoners won't even get a chance to see the games that their taxes paid for.

It wasn't always this way. Sixty-four years ago, in 1948, London last hosted the Olympic games, and they did it on the cheap. They had to. This was just three years after WWII, and Great Britain was still recovering from its losses. It didn't really have the resources to stage such an event. It did it anyway. The "Austerity Games" cut costs by using existing venues rather than building new ones and putting athletes up in existing accommodations (military camps, college dorms, and youth hostels) rather than building an Olympic Village. Athletes had to bring their own food, and use buses and the subway to get to their events. Concessions were purchased using ration coupons.

But it all worked out in the end. My Nanny (yes, I call my grandmother "Nanny" okay? That's how my family rolls) lived in London when the Olympics came to town. She loved to play sports (in high school she was so good at field hockey that she played on the boys' teams like an absolute badass), and had even trained at some of the same facilities as the British female track and field athletes. So watching the women she'd trained with compete in the Olympics'and win, as many of them were heavily favored to do (with the USSR refusing to participate and Germany and Japan not invited because of all the trouble they'd just caused, there was that much less competition)'was very exciting.

And then a Dutch woman they called "The Flying Housewife" ruined everything.

You were 18 years old then, Nanny?

Nanny: I was 18.

And how old were you, Grandad?

Nanny: 48.
Grandad: No! Do you mind?
Nanny: 1948.
Grandad: I was 24.

Were you excited about going to the Olympics?

Nanny: We didn't have all that hype about the Olympics, did we?
Grandad: Oh no, no. It was just the Olympics.

No Coca-Cola and McDonald's?

Nanny: No. It was just on at Wembley. I went with four friends of mine from the Pearl Sports Club, where we got tickets. I was keen on running.

How much did tickets cost?

Nanny: Two pounds.

They're more expensive now.

Nanny: Gosh, now they're'well you couldn't buy them for Bolt [She's referring to the the men's 100 meter dash as the "Bolt," as she's expecting Usain Bolt to dominate it again]. I mean, they'd be thousands. Nowadays, you apply for tickets and it doesn't mean to say you get them. You apply for tickets for horse-riding in Greenwich Park and you get hockey.

So you don't even get to see the events you want to see?

Nanny: No. Not the ones you want.

But in 1948, you could just buy a ticket for an event and go.

Nanny: Yes. And you got a seat. A good seat, yes. I sat with my four friends and got a good seat by the winning post.

Sounds like a fun time.

Nanny: I had a really enjoyable Olympics. The crowd was so nice. I walked up the Wembley mile. We used to call it the Mile, didn't we? The Mile. And you all walked up, and the crowd was lovely. And then coming back, you got the Tube back to London, there were no crowds and no pushing.

You don't think the crowd will be as lovely now?

Nanny: Oh, no, I wouldn't go! I wouldn't go now.

Why not?

Nanny: Gangs, yes.
Grandad: People were much more civilized in those days.
Nanny: Oh, they were.
Grandad: We just had the discipline of the war, you see ' People behaved themselves during the war. You didn't have louts hanging about the place and shouting and screaming.
Nanny: No, we didn't. We didn't' I don't think my mother probably knew anything about it. My mother would've just thought I was doing something at the sports club. She wouldn't have known. My dad would've known.

Wouldn't he have wanted to see it?

Nanny: He didn't get the time off, you know.

Right, Great-Grandad was a policeman. They probably had to have a lot of police and security there, searching people's bags and things.

Nanny: They wouldn't search your bag, no. Oh no, you weren't searched. No.

Now they're putting all the police on security duty to make sure it's safe.

Nanny: Met police are having no holidays. They're just having a rest day. We're paying for that. Well, we are.

Even if you did want to go now, you'd have a hard time getting a ticket. They allotted so many to other countries so they'd all have a chance to see their athletes.

Nanny: You've got it. You've hit the nail on'that's it. It's other people buying them. It's a lot of corporate buying. They give them to banks and all that sort of thing.
Grandad: Out of all proportion, really.
Nanny: You wouldn't get near it now, the 100 meters'Bolt. And that's been'well, Coe [Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games] said it was being given to corporate, didn't he? Who are paying thousands.
Grandad: Didn't used to do it in those days.
Nanny: No.
Grandad: I mean, it was just athletics and people went to watch the athletics. They didn't go to have a slap-up dinner and sort of get half-drunk and then sort of glance under their eyelids at what was going on.

So the people going to see the Olympics now don't even care about sports?

Grandad: No.
Nanny: No, it's like Wimbledon. They have a ticket free and they go and have a good meal and then go home and the seats are empty. That's very bad.

Did a lot of people come to watch the 1948 games?

Nanny: Yes! Every seat was full, yes. We didn't have television. If you wanted to see it, you went. You didn't have much, you know, news people. If you wanted to see it, you went. No television in 1948.
Grandad: They used to have it on the radio, Doreen. Commentaries on radio.

Did people from other countries get to London for the 1948 Olympics?

Nanny: The people didn't come, did they? To watch.
Grandad: I don't know. They might have done.
Nanny: No.
Grandad: They might've come, Doreen.
Nanny: No.

Did they have concession stands there?

Nanny: We didn't eat food, no. We went for the afternoon. I went from work and after dinner I went with my four friends. We went for the afternoon.

There were only four running events for women in the 1948 Olympics: the 100 meters, the 200 meters, the 4 x 100-meter relay, and the 80-meter hurdles. British women were favored to win them all. At least, Britain thought that Britain was favored to win them all. They didn't count on a 30-year-old mother of two from the Netherlands named Fanny Blankers-Koen. Who would? Women competing after giving birth'and leaving their rightful place in the home to do so'were unheard of. And Blankers-Koen was so much older than her competition, but she had no choice: she lost her peak years to WWII. Blankers-Koen ended up qualifying for all four track events.

Nanny saw the 100-meter dash and the 80-meter hurdles. Dorothy Manley ran the 100 meters for Britain. She finished in 12.2 seconds. Blankers-Koen finished it in 11.9, winning the gold and tying an Olympic record. Manley got the silver.

This was disappointing, but Nanny still had the 80-meter hurdles to watch, seats on the finish line, and Brit Maureen Gardner was even more heavily favored to win this event than Manley was hers. Gardner ran quite a race, too'a new Olympic record of 11.2 seconds. Unfortunately, someone else also ran it in 11.2 seconds: Fanny Blankers-Koen. It was a photo finish. The crowd waited for the results.

You thought Gardner won?

Nanny: I thought she'd won. I was on the winning line and I thought she'd won. And all of a sudden "God Save the King" came up. And we all stood up and cheered, we went mad. But it was the Queen's birthday and she'd just arrived.

You thought they were playing the national anthem for Gardner, but it was just because the Queen happened to walk into the stadium.

Nanny: And they announced that this Fanny Blankers-Koen had won.

Not British.

Nanny: She was Dutch. And we'd never heard of her. I had never heard of her. And Maureen came second.

So both of the events that you saw'

Nanny: Fanny won.

And the British women you expected to come in first got silver instead?

Yes.

Were you angry?

Nanny: Well, I was yes. We hadn't heard about her, you know, and we didn't know where she'd come from. And we found out that she was a 30 year old with two children. Dutch lady. Mmm. Nobody had heard about her had they, Michael?
Grandad: No.
Nanny: And we never heard of her again.
Grandad: Oh, no, she did run afterwards, Doreen.
Nanny: Well. I didn't hear of her.

Nanny didn't hear anything about her, but many others did. Blankers-Koen set an Olympic record in every individual event she competed in (the only event she didn't set an Olympic record in was the relay, which is probably the other three women on her team's faults). She won the gold medal in every event she competed in. The only reason why she didn't also enter the high jump and the long jump, events at which she was also among the best in the world, was because the Olympics rules then limited participants to just three individual events. No female runner has matched Blankers-Koen's accomplishment since. The Guardian recently put that 80 meter hurdle race as number 10 in its top 50 stunning Olympic moments , the International Association of Athletics Federations named her the Female Athlete of the 20th Century, and there are not one, but two statues of her in the Netherlands. One is outside the Fanny Blankers-Koen Stadium, where the annual Fanny Blankers-Koen games are held.

In the end, out of the 33 track and field events at the 1948 games, Great Britain won a gold medal in' none of them. The Netherlands, on the other hand, won four medals. Britain did win six silvers'three of them in the four events Fanny Blankers-Koen won. Basically, Fanny Blankers-Koen ruined the Olympics for everyone. Or maybe just my grandmother. Same thing.

What was it like, watching Fanny run?

Nanny: Well, the 100 meters, I mean' I was just amazed. It was a bit sad' oh, nevermind.

Why were you sad?

Nanny: Well, I expected them to win, I mean, we had such good girls.

And you had seen Maureen train, working very hard.

Nanny: They all did.

Any good American athletes?

Grandad: There always are.
Nanny: They must have sent people.
Oh yes, course they did. Why shouldn't they?

Anything to add, Grandad?

Grandad: I saw the men's 100 meters. And I think the 5000. Yes, I saw that.
Nanny: I wasn't really interested in the men running long distance. I'm not now.

You'll be watching on TV this summer. What are you looking forward to?

Nanny: I want to watch the girls' sprints.

You'll watch the women again?

Nanny: Yes.

Do you think they'll win the gold this time?

Nanny: Well I'm hoping the, um'what's her name? The girl with the seven events will win.

Jessica Ennis.

Nanny: Jessica! I shall be watching Ennis. I hope she wins.
Grandad: She's a heptathlete, isn't she?
Nanny: Yes.
Grandad: Seven events.
Nanny: As long as she can do the javelin. She's not very good at the javelin.

Okay, but what if a Dutch woman comes in and'

Nanny: Oh, I shall go mad! I shall say "drugs! Drugs!"

Okay, so, 64 years later, another Dutch woman comes in and takes all the medals again, what do you do?

Nanny: I shall throw something at the TV. No, there is a girl who's quite good. I've forgotten where she comes from. She can do the javelin. I think she's an Eastern girl, isn't she? [I believe Nanny is referring to Russian heptathlete Tatyana Chernova, who is very good at the javelin.] It's a shame I didn't save my programs, wasn't it? I should've done.

The Museum of London has programs from 1948 there, under glass. They could've been yours!

Nanny: I know, I know. I never saved anything.

They called Fanny Blankers-Koen "The Flying Housewife" after her 1948 performance. Not Nanny. As soon as the recorder was off, she called Blankers-Koen "that dreadful woman."

Sara Morrison is a journalist in New York City. She's very lucky to have four amazing grandparents, none of whom are Dutch. Photo of Fanny Blankers-Koen statue by Ruud Zwart.

How to Watch "Battlestar Galactica"

Recently I've been rewatching "Battlestar Galactica." On a rewatch, I feel like it's a very long haul. And I've now seen a lot of people cruise through the first couple seasons then get bogged down in, say, season three. It's quite a bit of TV! For a non-fanboy or non-fangirl, it can get tedious. Reordering the Star Wars movies made so much sense; the so-called "machete order" for Star Wars (IV, V, II, III, VI, skipping "Episode One"!) is a work of genius. So I began to wonder, not so much about order, but: how can we chop down "Battlestar"? The answer: pretty easily. (DON'T KILL ME, FANS!)

But yes. You can skip up to 18 of the show's 75 episodes. That's 24% of the series! (Or if you're really ambitious, you can skip 22 episodes!)

For completists, very good suggestions have been made about where to insert the various miniseries and webisodes. (Another version here.) I am including those where appropriate. But guess what? "Battlestar" isn't best served by completism.

Here's the watch list, shaded by must-watch, can-watch and eh-don't-bother. There are some special groupings that you can omit as well. We're going to do this in two versions: in the first part, a guide for first-time watchers, with no spoilers. And after that, I'll make my case.

A disclaimer: If you skip episodes, you will not just be saving yourself time, yay, but you will also be missing information. In the vast majority of skippable episodes, there is likely one important backstory or plot point or piece of information. For the most part, you'll be fine. Every once in a while you'll be like "Oh hey what happened to that person?" or "Hey where did that thing go to/come from?" But guess what: that kind of happens anyway, even if you don't skip. It's a big series! And it's a TV show. Sometimes people, in the age before DVRs, missed episodes and everyone lived. But it's important that you don't think you can skip a bunch of episodes and totally NOT notice. Anyway: ONWARD!

***
SPOILER-FREE
IT IS SAFE TO READ BELOW HERE IF YOU WANT TO WATCH THE SERIES AND HAVE NOT YET.
***

If you want to jump to the annotated version for people who've seen the show already, let's go.

SEASON ONE

Miniseries, parts one and two. (Technically called Night, Part 1 and Night, Part 2.")

1.1 "33"

1.2 "Water"
If you're feeling gangster, you could pass this. No one should skip an episode this early. (20 episodes later, you'll maybe wish you had!

1.3 "Bastille Day"

1.4 "Act of Contrition"
I like this one; you should probably take it but you can leave it.

1.5 "You Can't Go Home Again"

1.6 "Litmus"
I would only skip one of these two. Of the two, I think I'd skip'.

1.7 "Six Degrees of Separation"
' This one.

1.8 "Flesh and Bone"

1.9 "Tigh Me Up, Tigh me Down"

1.10 "The Hand of God"

1.11 "Colonial Day"

1.12 "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1" and 1.13 "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 2"

SEASON TWO

2.1 "Scattered"

2.2 "Valley of Darkness"

2.3 "Fragged"

2.4 "Resistance"

2.5 "The Farm"

2.6 "Home, Part 1" and 2.7 "Home, Part 2"

2.8 "Final Cut"
You've been in a long unskippable series! In part because the episodes were so tied together. Sometimes it was a bit of a slog, I know. Now, this one is a very beautiful episode; and it's a nice palate cleanser, but it's not necessary.

2.9 "Flight of the Phoenix"
Also a pretty episode! Has a backstory you can live without.

2.10 "Pegasus"

2.11 "Resurrection Ship, Part 1" and 2.12 "Resurrection Ship, Part 2"
These get their own color because they're a different kind of animal. You can skip 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12. This would be a mistake probably, just on the principle of viewing pleasure. But you don't actually need them, in terms of overall plot. You can skip right to 2.13 from either 2.7, 2.8 or 2.9. Are you in a huge hurry? Then you could skip from 2.7 to 2.15, 2.16 or even to 2.17. BUT it must be said: I would find the show worse for not having enjoyed 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12.

2.13 "Epiphanies"
This is totally possible to skip but it sets up something that happens like, a million years later. (I don't mean that timeframe literally, don't panic.) So don't be annoyed when that happens.

2.14 "Black Market"
Any revelations that occur in this episode are handled again later.

2.15 "Scar"
Eh.

2.16 "Sacrifice"
This is a not particularly great episode but is not terrible.

2.17 "The Captain's Hand"
This is a good episode but not needed.

"Razor"
I agree with the nerds that, if you are going for completism, this is the appropriate time to watch "Razor," which is nice if you just skipped a couple of episodes particularly, AND which is a bit longer than the episodes, so it provides a nice variation.

2.18 "Downloaded"
A must-watch. Skiping directly here from 2.13 to 2.14 works out really well actually!

2.19 "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 1" and 2.20 "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2"
Um yeah, this is important.

SEASON THREE

3.1 "Occupation"
Uh yes.

Webisodes: "The Resistance"
Nerds say you should watch this at the end of season two. I disagree; I think it should go here.

3.2 "Precipice"
Oh my God.

3.3 "Exodus, Part 1" and 3.4 "Exodus, Part 2"
Hello?

3.5 "Collaborators"
This episode, surprisingly, is not strictly necessary; you can skip right to 3.6 with no ill effects. I like it however.

3.6 "Torn"
This one actually plays a lot better without 3.5 before it!

3.7 "A Measure of Salvation"
Not strictly necessary but not uninteresting.

3.8 "Hero"
This is something of a standalone. It's a good one! But.

3.9 "Unfinished Business"
If you skipped 3.5 and 3.8, this episode is way more satisfying, and works a lot better!

3.10 "The Passage"
Not terrible or annoying; just skippable.

3.11 "The Eye of Jupiter"
I actually hate this episode and find it annoying, but it does play better after 3.9. And it is important.

3.12 "Rapture"
Essentially part two of the previous. Mandatory.

3.13 "Taking A Break From All Your Worries"
This is totally worth it just for the acting.

3.14 "The Woman King"
Annoying standalone. Pass!

3.15 "A Day in the Life"
If you are in love with the main characters, as you should be, you'll appreciate this episode. There is no forward movement however.

3.16 "Dirty Hands"
This is a good episode but largely unnecessary.

3.17 "Maelstrom"
This is a good update from 3.9. Now'. an important thing does occur in this episode? But you'll just take it for granted if you bypass.

3.18 "The Son Also Rises"
Largely important.

3.19 "Crossroads, Part 1" and 3.20 "Crossroads, Part 2"
Very very important.

SEASON FOUR

4.1 "He That Believeth In Me"
Yup.

4.2 "Six of One"
Mmm hmm.

4.3 "The Ties That Bind"
Hoo boy.

4.4 "Escape Velocity"
Still greedy to get to the end? Go on, pass this puppy!

4.5 "The Road Less Traveled"
Aaah.

4.6 "Faith"
Nuttiness!

4.7 "Guess What's Coming to Dinner?"
Big stuff!

4.8 "Sine Qua Non"
*Braaawwnngh*

4.9 "The Hub"
By this point, you'll be so happy you skipped some of the early episodes!

4.10 "Revelations"
*Screaming*

4.11 "Sometimes a Great Notion"
It's important to remember here that a really long time passed between the airing of 4.10 and 4.11! People were freaking out.

"The Face of the Enemy"
These were also webisodes, and people say you should watch them here. I did not!

4.12 "A Disquiet Follows My Soul"
Yuppers.

4.13 "The Oath"
A smooth continuation of 4.12.

4.14 "Blood on the Scales"
Part three, essentially. Now: you technically could skip 4.12 through 4.14, but what would be the point of that?

4.15 "No Exit"
You want answers? Here are some.

The Plan
People say you should watch this here. It makes sense! It is an extended flashback; if you can't handle that' then don't!

4.16 "Deadlock"
*Hnerf!*

4.17 "Someone to Watch Over Me"
Are you enjoying yourself? Then watch it! Are you anxious and impatient? Skip it! You'll miss a plot point that just won't matter. But'

4.18 "Islanded in a Stream of Stars"
Hoo boy.

4.19 "Daybreak, Part 1" and 4.20 "Daybreak, Part 2"
Well, here we are. You did it! And you saved yourself hours of your life.

***
IN WHAT FOLLOWS, THERE BE SPOILERS.
***

Here is the annotated skip list, for people who have already watched the series.

SEASON ONE

Miniseries, parts one and two.
Obvs. From the genius opening to the stage setting to the role establishment, A+.

1.1 "33"
Absolutely. Battlestar on the run, cylons attacking every 33 minutes. Good stuff.

1.2 "Water"
All that happens is Boomer suspects she's a cylon and there's an explosion on-board Galactica. Zzzs. That being said, no one will skip an episode this early. (20 episodes later, you'll wish you had!)

1.3 "Bastille Day"
Important! Introduces Tom Zarek, lets President Roslin talk about forbidding slave labor, Zarek's prisoners take hostages, and presidential elections are promised.

1.4 "Act of Contrition"
I like this one; you should probably take it but you can leave it. This is a Starbuck episode, and there's lots of flashbacks about Zak Adama, so it sets a lot of background for the Obama family/love triangle (love quadrangle?) issues to come. Also has the Doc telling the President her cancer is inoperable.

1.5 "You Can't Go Home Again" This is the one where Starbuck learns to fly a cylon raider.

1.6 "Litmus"
Dicey! Number Five (Aaron) sneaks onto Galactica and sets off a bomb. Also this is the big scary investigation into the events of episode 1.2, but weirdly, you don't need to have seen 1.2 to make it work! Meanwhile, back on Caprica, this is when Helo "rescues" Sharon from a 6. Honestly? SKIP IT. The whole "trapped on Caprica" plot draaaaags on.

1.7 "Six Degrees of Separation"
Haha, this is when a 6 shows up and is like "Gaius Baltar destroyed Caprica"! And then Baltar goes to the brig and then it all gets cleared up and nothing happens and the 6 disappears. There's nothing wrong with this episode'but anything you can do to have less Baltar in your face is worth it. SKIP!

1.8 "Flesh and Bone"
Oddly, this episode does not move things forward much but should absolutely be watched, mostly because it's a Starbuck episode'and it introduces the Two, Leoben. It also moves forward the Sharon story importantly, both on Galactica and on Caprica, ta da!

1.9 "Tigh Me Up, Tigh me Down"
Well, shouldn't be skipped, as it introduces Ellen Tigh, and is actually a funny episode. If you want to go hardcore, you'll miss nothing by skipping it though!

1.10 "The Hand of God"
This is the one where President Roslin becomes a prophet and there's lots of space action, seizing a tylium planet from the cylons.

1.11 "Colonial Day"
All politics all the time; gets Baltar elected as vice-president. On that basis, I'd say skip it'but it's also where, back on Caprica, Agathon finally finds out Sharon is a cylon.

1.12 "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1" and 1.13 "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 2"
Well you can't very well skip a season finale.

SEASON TWO

2.1 "Scattered"
And you can't very well skip a tasty season return from a cliffhanger!

2.2 "Valley of Darkness"
More resolution, more chaos, action, cylons aboard Galactica.

2.3 "Fragged"
Hmm, you pretty much have to continue the through-thread here; this resolves the people stranded on Kobol since 1.10, and also has Tigh declaring martial law.

2.4 "Resistance"
This is when Starbuck meets Anders on Caprica! Also the martial law issue is dealt with.

2.5 "The Farm"
Cannot possibly skip the episode where Starbuck wakes up in a mysterious hospital. Also, Roslin splits the fleet.

2.6 "Home, Part 1" and 2.7 "Home, Part 2"
Starbuck returns. With Other Sharon. And they all go to Kobol with the arrow of Apollo! And figure out what it does!

2.8 "Final Cut"
So, you can completely skip this one. It's worth it artistically, in that the ending is phenomenal, and introduces a new character (special guest star!). But you get to that character anyway eventually, and you don't need the whole episode to get her. Still, this one is highly pleasurable.

2.9 "Flight of the Phoenix"
Chief starts building the stealth fighter; Sharon saves the ship from a cylon viral attack. Nothing wrong with this episode at all. It's simply unneeded.

2.10 "Pegasus"
Well, yes, The Pegasus shows up.

2.11 "Resurrection Ship, Part 1" and 2.12 "Resurrection Ship, Part 2"
So! This is tricky. This is the whole Pegasus-Galactica plot. You can skip 2.10, 2.11 and 2.12. This would be a mistake probably, just on the principle of viewing pleasure. But you don't need them, in terms of overall plot. You can skip right to 2.13 from either 2.7, 2.8 or 2.9. TECHNICALLY, you could skip from 2.7 to 2.15, 2.16 or even to 2.17. I would find the show worse for not having enjoyed this three-episode tangent however.

2.13 "Epiphanies"
In this, Roslin is dying, "peace activists" are sabotaging Galactica's ammunition, Baltar goes to visit the Six, and Sharon's fetus saves Roslin. Then Baltar gives the 6 a nuclear warhead??? Bizarre. I've never understood that. I suppose you have to watch it for Roslin's salvation. You will survive if you don't.

2.14 "Black Market"
Hmm. The one important bit of information is that Roslin remembers seeing Baltar on Caprica with Caprica 6. Apart from that, this episode is useless. Guess what, there's a black market. Go figure.

2.15 "Scar"
So there's a cylon ship named Scar. Also, Lee and Starbuck make out. That's it.

2.16 "Sacrifice"
Another standalone episode: terrorists take over the lounge in Cloud Nine! VERY skippable, but not bad.

2.17 "The Captain's Hand"
The abortion episode. Lee becomes the captain of Pegasus. Baltar announces his run for presidency. This is a TOTALLY good episode but you can do without.

"Razor"
I agree with the nerds that, if you are going for completism, this is the appropriate time to watch "Razor," which is nice if you just skipped a couple of episodes particularly, AND which is a bit longer than the episodes, so it provides a nice variation.

2.18 "Downloaded"
A must-watch. One reason to skip episodes to move faster is that it takes far too long for us to get a look at things from the cylon side. Skiping directly from 2.13 to 2.18 works out really well actually!

2.19 "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 1" and 2.20 "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2"
The election nears; the rescue mission to Caprica; Cavil is introduced; the election comes; a year passes. I mean, obviously, yes.

Webisodes: "The Resistance"
This is where nerds say you should watch the 10 short webisodes documenting life on New Caprica. They're like, three minutes each.

SEASON THREE

3.1 "Occupation"
Are you kidding me.

Webisodes: "The Resistance"
Nerds say you should watch this at the end of season two. I disagree; I think it should go here.

3.2 "Precipice"
Oh my God.

3.3 "Exodus, Part 1" and 3.4 "Exodus, Part 2"
Hello?

3.5 "Collaborators"
E'rybody back on Galactica! Bad times. This episode is not strictly necessary; you can skip right to 3.6 with no ill effects.

3.6 "Torn"
This one actually plays a lot better without 3.5 before it!

3.7 "A Measure of Salvation"
Resolves 3.6. Not strictly necessary but not uninteresting.

3.8 "Hero"
A man from Admiral Adama's past appears in a space ship! I like this episode but it's in no way necessary.

3.9 "Unfinished Business"
So this is the episode where everyone gets in the boxing ring and has flashbacks to their love lives on New Caprica, basically. It's actually rather startling that they waited so long to address what happened in the long gap. So good news! If you skipped 3.5 and 3.8, it works a lot better!

3.10 "The Passage"
So all the fleet's food gets contaminated and they have to fly through some terrible bit of space (why? Never really got that) to get to the other side and make more food. I like this episode because I like the pilot Kat, but it's not necessary in the slightest.

3.11 "The Eye of Jupiter"
This is when they stop at this planet ("for food") and find this temple and the cylons want in on the temple too and there is trouble. Weirdly I hate this episode but it's kind of a tentpole. It's good after 3.9.

3.12 "Rapture"
Essentially part two of the previous. Mandatory. (They box the Threes! Boo!)

3.13 "Taking A Break From All Your Worries"
So this is mostly about Baltar returning to Galactica. This is really worth it just for Laura Roslin freaking out on him.

3.14 "The Woman King"
Lord. This is the one where the Sagittaron refugees are victimized. Pass!

3.15 "A Day in the Life"
This is Admiral Adama's wedding anniversary episode. Cally and Chief get stuck in a malfunctioning airlock. There are some charming Roslin-Adama moments, which of course are never to be missed' AND YET. Not a very good episode.

3.16 "Dirty Hands"
This is a good episode but largely unnecessary; it's a Chief episode, which is always "yay," and largely about labor. It also sets up the messianic Baltar a bit.

3.17 "Maelstrom"
Starbuck episode. Is a good update from 3.9, the boxing/relationships episode. Also weirdly, Leoben does this whole "Ghost of Christmas Past" with Starbuck and Starbuck's mom. How/why? (Head injury.) This episode is' unnecessary. There's lots more crazy Kara in the future! I KNOW that this is where Starbuck disappears! But yup: they play the tape in the next episode.

3.18 "The Son Also Rises"
The terrorism preceding Baltar's trial. Pretty important.

3.19 "Crossroads, Part 1" and 3.20 "Crossroads, Part 2"
DUH.

SEASON FOUR

4.1 "He That Believeth In Me"
Kara returns.

4.2 "Six of One"
Um yeah, chaos!

4.3 "The Ties That Bind"
Oh man, this is the one where Adama sits at Laura's bedside and reads to her, oooof. And then' Cally.

4.4 "Escape Velocity"
Attack on Baltar's commune. This one has its annoyances but is mildly important.

4.5 "The Road Less Traveled"
Leoben and Kara in spaaaaace.

4.6 "Faith"
The end of Kara's mission.

4.7 "Guess What's Coming to Dinner?"
BIG STUFF. Kara returns with a baseship. Laura and a hybrid. (*Inception noise*)

4.8 "Sine Qua Non"
Yeah, this stretch is all action all the time. (Also: Adama waiting for Laura! My heart!)

4.9 "The Hub"
By this point, you'll be so happy you skipped some of the early episodes! Time to unbox the Threes! Roslin in space! Balthar confesses!

4.10 "Revelations"
And how. (They land on' earth.)

4.11 "Sometimes a Great Notion"
(It's important to remember that a really long time passed between the airing of 4.10 and 4.11!) Anyway, welcome to Earth, it sucks! And the final cylon'.

"The Face of the Enemy"
These were also webisodes, and people say you should watch them here. I did not!

4.12 "A Disquiet Follows My Soul"
Yuppers. Laura goes jogging. A mutiny coming.

4.13 "The Oath"
These events stem from the events (Gaeta + Zarek) started in 4.12. Battle on board!

4.14 "Blood on the Scales"
Part three, essentially. The coup turns uglier. And' ends. Now: you could skip all THREE of these episodes together; but what would be the point of that? Why are you watching this anyway????

4.15 "No Exit"
A very large dose of cylon history. You want answers? Here are some.

4.16 "Deadlock"
Mommy's back.

"Someone to Watch Over Me"
The piano player. Eh. You could skip it! You'd be confused later about how Boomer gets off Galactica, but you wouldn't really care! Are you enjoying yourself? Then watch it! I mean you probably should. Skipping something this late is nutty. But are you anxious and impatient? Skip it!

4.18 "Islanded in a Stream of Stars"
Abandon shiiiiip.

4.19 "Daybreak, Part 1" and 4.20 "Daybreak, Part 2"
Well. Here we are. (Heh.) So' for those of you who HAVE seen the show, many of you feel like you can skip the finale. I hear you! But really, would you have NOT watched this? You had to! But' I feel ya.