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So Long, and Thanks for All the Value Meals

A cardboard soda cup from McDonald's sits on top of a black garbage can, surrounded by cigarette butts
Photo by Gwenael Piaser via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

All that time you spent trying to find a Boardwalk game piece on your McDonald’s fries was a waste: between 1989 and 2001, “Uncle Jerry” diverted over $24 million in cash and prizes from McDonald’s super-popular “Monopoly” promotion. The loot went to friends and family members, drug traffickers and strip-club owners, psychics and convicts and Mormons — all in exchange for a portion of the winnings. Jeff Maysh unravels the entire massive conspiracy in a piece at The Daily Beast.

Inside Hoover’s home, Amy Murray, a loyal McDonald’s spokesperson, encouraged him to tell the camera about the luckiest moment of his life. Nervously clutching his massive check, Hoover said he’d fallen asleep on the beach. When he bent over to wash off the sand, his People magazine fell into the sea. He bought another copy from a grocery store, he said, and inside was an advertising insert with the “Instant Win” game piece. The camera crew listened patiently to his rambling story, silently recognizing the inconsequential details found in stories told by liars. They suspected that Hoover was not a lucky winner, but part of a major criminal conspiracy to defraud the fast-food chain of millions of dollars. The two men behind the camera were not from McDonald’s. They were undercover agents from the FBI.

This was a McSting.

Who was Uncle Jerry? The man responsible for the security of the highest-value game pieces.

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The Unbearable Blandness of Water

a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a red jack holds a goblet of water in front of her face
Water Judge Karen Cara at the 2011 Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting. (AP Photo/The Journal, Chris Jackson)

Dave Stroup didn’t just attend the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting, aka the Academy Awards of Water, he became a certified water-taster and judge. At Eater, he tells us all about the experience of trying to judge a substance whose main characteristics are colorlessness, odorlessness, and tastelessness — and about the lengths water companies go to in the effort to distinguish their tasteless product from their competitors’.

There are no big brands at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting — no Dasani, FIJI, Evian, or Deer Park. The waters that compete tend to be local, niche, or super-high-end (think small-batch or mail-order only). There are four different categories, three of which are bottled — non-carbonated, purified, and sparkling — and municipal water. The bottled waters include all sorts, from ancient springs to waters that make claims of being specially pH-balanced or oxygen-rich. Alongside more typical fare, such as Hope Natural Spring Water from Virginia and even Berkeley Springs’ own purified drinking water, there’s Frequency H2O, from Australia, which is described by its manufacturer as “a synthesis of wisdom and evolution” that is “alive with the pulsations of the Universe” after being “put through a 2-stage kinetic energy process and infused at 528Hz, the Solfeggio frequency of LOVE.” Svalbarði’s Polar Iceberg water costs about $80 for a 750-milliliter bottle and literally comes from a melting iceberg off the Norwegian island of Svalbard.

Of course, it’s not all pontificating about the mouthfeel subtleties of expensive glacier water. There’s also space to discuss global water challenges. Well… sort of.

It’s probably not surprising that the seminar portion of the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting is so lightly attended. No one wants to be told the grim truth that much of the world, even here in the United States, lacks access to clean water, or of a Mad Max future with nations fighting wars over it. At least, no one wants to hear it in a hotel ballroom, next to an elaborate display of thousands of dollars of fancy bottles evoking the image of pure, flowing water.

Next year I’ll be entering water bottled from my very own kitchen sink; it’s municipal Roman water, and if you close your eyes you can just pick up a whiff of imperial ambition in the nose.

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She’ll Be Everything He Isn’t

Photo by Andryusha Romanov via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Larry Nassar molested hundreds of young athletes as the doctor for the U.S. gymnastics national team. One of those young athletes was Selena Brennan, who started seeing him for back pain at age 12 and saw him not just as a healer, but as a career role model.

Finally, here was a doctor with whom she shared a vocabulary, someone who did not need to be taught what a front walkover was. Here was a doctor who understood what was expected of her in the gym and who could treat her injury in a way that catered to that. It was through that lens that she started to see a future in sports medicine for herself.

“Just being able to be with a doctor who understood the sport made it a lot easier. It was like I could take a deep breath, and I didn’t have to explain how [I do] what I do. Sometimes primary care doctors give you some type of way to cope with the pain. But when you’re practicing that much in a gym, you’re constantly putting pressure on your back,” Selena said. “Those things don’t necessarily work, because there’s a ton more pressure on your body than the average person. It was nice to have reasonable tools be given and be like, ‘OK, this is something I can actually do, this might actually make a difference.’ After my [first] visit I was like, ‘I’m doing this.’ I ended up telling him, ‘I want to do what you do.’”

Alexanrdria Neason tells Brennan’s story at Bleacher Report — the abuse, the aftermath for Selena and her family, the shadow it cast over her dreams, and how she’s reclaiming her ambition.

Amid the campus activism—marches and protests, teal ribbons tied around trees, therapeutic fitness classes exclusive to survivors—Selena worked hard to untangle her love of sports medicine from Nassar. He was at once an example of what she wanted to be and exactly the type of person whom she did not want to become. She questioned her ambitions and worried she had been misled.

What if he was leading me down the wrong path, career-wise? She thought. What if he wasn’t giving me real advice, or what if he was setting me up to fail in my education because I was listening to what he was saying? I’ve based years off of this, so what am I going to do now?

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Sliding Toward Disaster

The Verrückt slide. Photo by Adele Chen (CC BY-SA 2.0).

On August 7, 2016, 10-year-old Caleb Schwab was decapitated on a water slide at Schlitterbahn, a water park in Kansas City, Kansas. Not just any slide: the world’s tallest water slide.

At 168 feet 7 inches tall, Verrückt, which means “insane” in German, was taller than Niagara Falls. Three riders inside a rubber raft would plummet down a nearly vertical seventeen-story drop at speeds reaching up to 68 miles per hour. The moment they reached the bottom, they would shoot up a 55-foot-tall incline—the equivalent of a five-story building—before racing down one last steep slope, finally coming to a stop in a long, water-filled runout.

Shouldn’t someone have been making sure Verrückt was safe? Sure: the park itself. In his Texas Monthly investigation into the incident and the slide’s creator –who’s since been indicted on second-degree murder charges — Skip Hollandsworth learns that water parks are something of a safety no-man’s land.

Although the federal government’s Consumer Product Safety Commission has the authority to set safety standards for such products as baby cribs and bicycles, it has no authority to regulate water parks. That responsibility lies entirely with the states. Some states have agencies that inspect water parks; others rely on the parks’ own insurance companies to do inspections. Texas law, for instance, says that a park must obtain a $1 million liability policy for each of its rides and must have all rides inspected once a year by an inspector hired by the insurance company. But there is nothing in the law that requires the inspector to have any particular certifications. Nor does the law require an inspector to evaluate the safety of such factors as the ride’s speed or the geometric angle of its slide path. According to Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins, the inspector is charged only with making sure that the ride is in sound condition and meets the “manufacturer’s specifications.” In other words, a water park is allowed to police itself.

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His Name Was Otto, and He Just Wanted a Little Adventure

Otto Warmbier is escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, North Korea. (AP Photo/Jon Chol Jin, File)

In GQ, Doug Bock Clark digs deep into the story of Otto Warmbier, the 21-year-old American college student who was arrested in North Korea for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster, sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, and was eventually sent back to the U.S. with severe brain damage. How he sustained the damage remains an unknown, but the Trump administration has a vested political interest in claiming it was a result of torture — even if the medical evidence doesn’t back that up.

Instead, in the vacuum of fact, North Korea and the U.S. competed to provide a story. North Korea blamed Otto’s condition on a combination of botulism and an unexpected reaction to a sleeping pill, an explanation that many American doctors said was unlikely. A senior American official asserted that, according to intelligence reports, Otto had been repeatedly beaten. Fred and Cindy declared on TV that their son had been physically tortured, in order to spotlight the dictatorship’s evil. The president pushed this narrative. Meanwhile, the American military made preparations for a possible conflict. Otto became a symbol used to build “a case for war on emotional grounds,” the New York Times editorial board wrote.

As the Trump administration and North Korea spun Otto’s story for their own ends, I spent six months reporting—from Washington, D.C., to Seoul—trying to figure out what had actually happened to him. What made an American college student go to Pyongyang? What kind of nightmare did he endure while in captivity? How did his brain damage occur? And how did his eventual death help push America closer toward war with North Korea and then, in a surprising reversal, help lead to Trump’s peace summit with Kim Jong-un? The story I uncovered was stranger and sadder than anyone had known. In fact, I discovered that the manner of Otto’s injury was not as black-and-white as people were encouraged to believe. But before he became a rallying cry in the administration’s campaign against North Korea, he was just a kid. His name was Otto Warmbier.

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Powerful On the Beam or Off

Aly Raisman gives her victim impact statement during the fourth day of sentencing for former sports doctor Larry Nassar, who pled guilty to multiple counts of sexual assault. (Dale G. Young/Detroit News via AP, File)

Aly Raisman is a world-class gymnast with six medals from two different Olympic Games. She’s also a survivor of abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar, the now-disgraced Michigan State doctor who assaulted hundreds of young athletes. In a profile for ESPN, Mina Kimes looks at Aly the athlete, and Aly the newfound activist.

When she speaks at colleges, men and women come up to her and share their stories of assault, sometimes for the first time. Afterward, she often wakes up in the middle of the night, restless and despondent. “A lot of people, a lot of survivors, come to me for advice on what to do,” she says. “I’m very honest with them, because I’m not an authority, I’m not somebody that can hold their abuser accountable. I wish I was.”

Raisman is quick to assert that while she never expected to be an activist, she’s grateful that people are listening — but admits the burden weighs on her. Often, when she speaks, she’ll stop and edit herself; at one point in our conversation, she grabs paper and starts furiously taking notes. She’s deeply fearful of getting something wrong, of committing the rhetorical equivalent of a slip off the balance beam. “There are so many people out there that are survivors, but there are few that have a voice,” she says. “I know that I’m one of the few that are being heard, so I just want to do right by people.”

When we’re done talking, I ask if I can see her notes, and she gives them to me before she leaves. Feel pressure to help everyone, she had written, but it’s so hard since I’m still processing myself.

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She’s Not Just a Girl in the World

Gwen Stefani performs during the 2017 Wal-Mart Shareholders Meeting in Fayetteville, Ark. (Jason Ivester/The Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette via AP)

Anne Helen Petersen does some of today’s best pop-culture writing, and for Buzzfeed News, she digs deep into Gwen Stefani  — who’s just started her Las Vegas residency, following in the footsteps of Celine and Britney. Did you not think you needed to read 7,500 words about Gwen Stefani? It turns out: you do.

Somehow, though, we’re still surprised every time Stefani tells us who she is. When Shelton was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive last year, it was treated as a moment to reflect: How did someone like Stefani end up with someone like him? Some might see the shift in Stefani’s public image as an inevitable ideological trajectory: the social liberal who, with age and distance from school, mellows into a more conservative version of their once radical self. But Stefani was never radical. She remains a white girl who grew up in the hotbed of the conservative movement in Orange County; she has always seemed annoyed by accusations of appropriation, reticent to claim feminism or the advocacy that stems from it, and has always spoken openly about her wish for a traditional family life.

Back in the ’90s, Stefani was the antidote to the caricature of the angry feminist. And if then she insisted on having it both ways — being just like the other girls, but not like the other rock girls — it follows that over the last two decades, she’s become an original brand ambassador for “having it all.” She’s evolved into an avatar of the cool, hot, successful working mom, even as she rejects the sorts of feminist conversations that have drawn that ideal into question. And she’s still less interested in being the kind of woman or the star you want her to be than the one she’s always been.

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The Palette is Political

closeup of a green eye, heavily made up with deep pink eyeshadow
Photo by John Jones III via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

During a 2017 residency at an artists’ colony, trying to find balance between focusing on her her poetry and dealing with the barrage of violent U.S. politics pounding on the colony door, Hannah Louise Poston discovered a potent avenue of escapism: YouTube beauty videos. She writes about them at VQR.

Each night, when I finally began to doze and my mind’s eye drifted inevitably to the spectacle of Melania teetering, runway-ready, on the wet tarmac; or to the phrase “fire and fury”—which is what Trump had said he would rain on North Korea—I kept my agitated mind from jolting itself awake and forfeiting even a half-chance of a good night’s rest by visualizing myself walking into a Sephora store and approaching the Kat Von D counter with its display of Everlasting Glimmer Veils. Which color would I choose? Rocker was copper with gold glitter, very flattering to my ultra-pale but warm-toned complexion. I thought I would definitely be purchasing Rocker. I liked Thunderstruck, too, but they were $22 each. I was into the idea of a glitter lip, but would I be reaching for it frequently enough to spend $50 (with tax) on two of these? Maybe I should start with Rocker, then go back for Thunderstruck if the finish and the formula both turned out to be amazing. And what about Dazzle, the lipstick of the year?

Lulled by visions of color and glitter and entrancingly inconsequential questions, I slept.

Unfortunately, there is little in the world that is not in some way political — including, as Poston quickly learns, makeup tutorials.

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Big Pharma Has No Comment, But Would Still Like All Your Tax Dollars

From 2008 to 2016, the amount that state Medicaid programs spend on prescription drugs almost doubled. NPR and the Center for Public Integrity wanted to understand why, so reporters Liz Essley Whyte, Joe Yerardi, and Alison Kodjak interviewed dozens of people and dug through hundreds of pages of data, financial disclosures, and court reports. Following the money and influence led back to the people benefitting the most: drug companies, and the doctors on their payrolls.

Pharmaceutical firms have tremendous incentives to be included on states’ lists: It makes doctors far more likely to prescribe their drug to Medicaid patients and can encourage other insurers to follow suit. To nab spots on the coveted lists, drugmakers often offer the states discounts known as “supplemental rebates,” called supplemental because they come on top of other price concessions required by federal law.

The drug committee meetings where those list decisions are made are a frequent destination for drug company representatives — and those who benefit from their largesse.

At the Texas meeting alone, 12 people advocated for the state’s list to include brand-name antipsychotic drugs, especially the expensive ones. Five of the speakers worked for drug companies. One represented a patient advocacy group that gets significant funding from drugmakers. At least four of the remaining six, including Patel, had ties to drugmakers despite claiming to represent themselves.

Another psychiatrist, Matthew Brams, praised injectable mental health drugs and mentioned that he had researched them in the past. But he did not disclose the more than $181,000 their makers Otsuka and Alkermes PLC paid him to speak about them over the past two years, according to the federal Open Payments database.

Patel, Brams, Otsuka and Alkermes did not respond to requests for comment.

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I Paid $710 to Sneak Into This Club

Christian Dior runway show, Paris Fashion Week, February 2018. (Ik Aldama/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images)

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rachel Greenwald Smith dissects the slogan tee. Is wearing one a form of activism, or the saddest kind of slacktivism? A call for unity, or harbinger of humanitarian crisis? Evidence of revitalized political debate, or “evidence of the ease with which dissent can be marketed”? We wear them to signal our politics, to identify ourselves to like-minded thinkers — but maybe they mask more than they reveal.

At Powell’s Books, I see a woman about my age wearing a white T-shirt with the title of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book We Should All Be Feminists screen-printed on it in all caps. The letters are a little bit faded. She’s flipping through Roxane Gay’s Hunger, thoughtfully biting the nail of her index finger. Even though I know I’ve never met her, I have a rush of identification and unconsciously move closer to her, feeling comfortable in the proximity of a stranger who feels familiar.

When I get home, I Google the T-shirt and learn that it retails for $710 at Dior. That is when I learn that I can no longer tell the difference between friends and enemies.

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