*Adds to tattoo wish list*
My best friend is an obvious choice for the light side and I’m 100% dark side so we got the respective tattoos to match.
–debbfest
I'm an absolute Doctor Who fanatic.
—kirab4a76f1b85
Harry Potter got me through some rough times growing up, so when I decided it was time to get a tattoo, the banner from the Marauder’s Map was an obvious choice!
—bainidhe
Mark Nerys for BuzzFeed News
The customer laughing at me over the phone had a voice that sounded green. Green like overpriced avocado toast, bottled chlorophyll, spirulina, eco-friendly laundry detergent, and other “clean” affectations that seem to sum up a lifestyle that’s so natural, organic, and pristine only wealthy women with cold, tony laughs can afford to live it.
I was working for an on-demand grocery shopping and delivery service called Instacart, often referred to as “Uber for groceries.” I was wooed by stories of Instacart’s flexibility, and because I was a freelance writer, I required that kind of freedom. I also liked the idea of working via an app, because in theory, I could do my job without much customer interaction, which is something I’d grown weary of after years in retail. For about 20 hours a week, I worked at Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia shopping for busy people and shut-ins, selecting all of their groceries with the kind of attention and care that hardly anyone uses when shopping for themselves. It was an incredibly intimate job that involved fondling produce to check for bruises and other irregularities, thinking extensively about customers’ meal plans, and intuiting responses for clients who did not want to be contacted about their shopping lists.
I’d first found myself standing in front of a massive, seasonal apple display in the produce section of Whole Foods Market a few weeks before. Graham, the young, officious orientation leader for Instacart, had impressed upon all of us the importance of finding flawless produce — in this case, perfect honeycrisp apples — for our customers. I dismissed several apples with cuts, and a few that were a bit too small for the size specifications preferred by the app. Instacart times their shoppers, and I was getting further and further away from the desired 1.8-minute picking time per item, which would result in lower stats and possibly a lower tip — metrics that factored into my pay and place in the app’s order dispatch algorithm. Occasionally, a customer's hand would stray into my line of vision and I'd watch as an "OK" apple was plucked from the batch without much judgement. I would soon find out that my own judgment was far worse than I’d thought.
The woman who laughed at me was one of these customers with very discerning tastes currently causing me a lot of anxiety. I was looking over all of the items I’d carefully picked out for her when she gargled that curdling laugh, making fun of my flabbergasted response to her curt manner and rude replies to the questions I had asked about her order. For a second, I blamed myself for making the mistake of contacting her to ask a question. As I palmed an overripe Granny Smith, I thought about how similar my rude customer was to the laughing character in the pea-green dress from Toni Morrison’s Sula. (To pass the time, I often listed scenes from black women’s literature that featured grocery or market scenes.) Her laugh inspired another character, Eva Peace, to feel a "liquid trail of hate"; while I certainly didn't hate the customer who ridiculed me, I could relate to Eva's instantaneous recognition of her emotions and the quickness with which she adapted her outlook.
Still standing in the middle of the produce section with my phone against my face — the call over — I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. With “all my education,” as my family would say, two degrees and the student loans to show for it, I was nonetheless positioned only marginally better off than my grandparents, who ran errands and did other grunt work two generations removed from where I now stood. Activity continued around me, and this glaring manifestation of what it meant to only slightly improve over one’s predecessors was a quiet, personal revelation that somehow moored me and kept me from imploding. I recognized a shared struggle between myself and them, a sort of inheritance. And unlike my grandparents, who had grade school educations and did factory and domestic work, I had options. Or at least, I thought I did.
When I was a kid, I regularly parked myself in front of my great-grandmother’s wood-paneled swivel television that was slowly going bad. In between episodes of her “stories,” aka soap operas, she’d tell some of her own, about working for Jewish families in South Philly during the Depression. Little Mom — that’s what we called her — talked plainly about her revulsion at the dirty work she’d been given and how she’d strung together a number of these small jobs to support my great-aunt Betty and my grandfather, Charles.
The stuff about work usually stayed hidden away, quite like the money she kept folded into a crease in her bosom. When she did tell these stories it seemed like she would almost black out in order to get the details right, listing the indignities she felt working these jobs with a laconic intensity and steady determination: washing the house’s windows inside and out, cleaning the mattresses and box springs, scrubbing the floors on her knees, a lunch of a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk offered by a client that was quickly rejected, getting paid $3 a day.
We do the work we have to do, but who wants to be the work we do?
In retrospect, I wonder if she was trying to contain that aspect of her memory so that it would not trouble her every day. We do the work we have to do, but who wants to be the work we do? I now had my own litany of insipid information: How many bananas made up two pounds, the quickest way to check for cracks on all sides of an egg, how many produce bags one needs to properly contain pointy sweet potatoes without ripping them all felt beneath me. I was supposed to be The Writer, not a beat of generational repetition. If, in some future, a granddaughter of mine sat on the living room floor and stared up at me while I remembered my own work, what memory would I have to offer her?
As I bent down to pick up a can of non-GMO chunky tomato bisque soup for a customer, I contemplated what it meant to have a “job.” My family’s work history, like that of many black American families, is one of ingenuity. My grandfather Charlie served in the Korean War, and when he returned to the States he became a longshoreman. He met my grandmother Cissy sometime after that and started a family with her, his second. In the '50s, when they met, my grandmother already had three children with an Italian-American barber who was not ready to commit to her because of the way interracial relationships were viewed at the time. My grandparents had four children together, and my mom is the youngest of that brood.
My grandmother Cissy worked at a storm door factory in Philadelphia for a time, supplementing her income by hosting parlor games like Pitty Pat and Tonk in her home each weekend, and charging each player $2 per hand. When she quit the storm door factory, the card games became her main source of income. Then she wrote numbers, or illegal lottery, for the local numbers man. Dream books, the thin, cheap consultation indexes that helped you pick a lottery number that corresponded with a subject from your dreams, were touchstones in all of the women’s kitchens in the neighborhood. My mom, grandmom, and great-grandmother all played their dreams to the numbers man, hoping to come up on a little more money they could use for a hairdo, or trips to Atlantic City, where they pulled levers until their elbows were sore, or for a more pressing issue like bail.
Cissy would hide money all around the house, because she couldn’t open a bank account due to the illegal nature of her work. My mom recalls her hiding money everywhere — in socks, holes in the walls, under mattresses; there were money stashes everywhere but the bank. My grandmother didn’t own that house, on Alder Street between Bainbridge and South, even though she was given the option to at one point from its owner. She rented and rented, and soon took the money, and her family to another home on Marvine Street. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, she lived in an apartment in the Martin Luther King housing projects with my mom.
Sometimes my mom expresses regret that my grandmother never purchased any of the homes she lived in, even though she had the money to do so. The owners of the Alder Street house offered to sell her the house for $500, but she declined. Because the job she created for herself was illegal, I think she felt she was unable to purchase the home, fearing inquisitions by tax auditors and police. Now, instead of commiserating with my mom about the lost opportunity, or talking to her about generational wealth disparities, I just listen, because there’s no real answer for that kind of disappointment.
Ever since I can remember, my mom has worked jobs she didn’t quite like. She had dropped out of high school in 11th grade and got her GED when my brother and I were little. At the end of elementary school, my mom worked as a telemarketer, then spent five years as a clerk at various state-owned liquor stores throughout Philadelphia. When I was in high school, she got a job as a front desk associate at a Marriott in downtown Philly. Lateness caused her to lose that job, and another at a Marriott property in Southwest Philly near the airport. After she was first fired, she decided to go back to school to become a diagnostic technician, and she enrolled at the Community College of Philadelphia. I don’t know why she picked that field. She thought for sure that she was finally positioned to have a career and not just a job. Eventually she quit CCP because she couldn’t hold down a decent full-time job and go to school at the same time. Now, when my mom changes jobs, I like to frame these experiences as new adventures, and “fresh starts,” and in some ways they are. Yet, no one I know over 50 has ever started an adventurous job — or at least one that did them any good. My dad’s the perfect example of why that’s true.
My dad wrote short stories and scripts, and moved to New York City to become an actor.
My dad was plucked off of the streets of South Philly by a neighborhood gang when he was young, grabbed by the scruff of his neck by the wrong big dogs. At 16, he was charged with murdering a man, and met his own father for the first time in prison. My paternal grandfather “Doc” had reportedly robbed a bank, truly earning his nickname, a reference to the legendary gunfighter Doc Holliday, and was spending a chunk of years in prison. When my dad got out, he wrote short stories and scripts, and moved to New York City to become an actor. The only fictional work I’ve found of his is a script called The Prince of Thieves, based on a radio play called The Yearning, which aired on college radio in the ‘70s. It’s about two con men who hatch a plan to reform public housing. I only have four pages — one on typewriter paper and the other three handwritten on a yellow legal notepad. Because I’m missing the rest of the script, there are gaps in the story.
Likewise, much of his personal life is a mystery to me. I do know this: When he married my mom and had my younger brother and me, he cut his dreadlocks, his drug habit, and his dreams of a writing career to begin working for the pretzel chain Auntie Anne’s. After a short while, he was promoted to manager, and in 1994, he was selected to open a new franchise in Arlington, Texas. My family moved, and to supplement his income, my dad sold Amway products, or at least tried to — I don’t know if Amway has ever been a successful venture for anyone.
I grew up ashamed of the fact that my dad worked in food service. My mom, who worked the counter for Fashion Fair cosmetics, a beauty line made for women of color, at least had a glamorous association, and beautiful headshots that went with the job. (The beauty section at Dillard’s department store in Dallas was a magic emporium.) But my dad made pretzels for kids to eat in a mall. When I spoke of my dad’s job, I’d get tongue-tied and twisted up, like the elegant motion he used to contort pretzel dough. At the time, it was my observation that while you could dip a pretzel in cheese whiz and get the cinnamon-sugar stuck on your fingertips, you could not cherish or value a pretzel — it wasn’t “real” food. The process of making pretzels, which involved dipping one’s fingers in warm salt water and kneading out dough, was mesmerizing to watch, and fun to do (he let me practice a few times) but didn’t feel like a meaningful skill. I think my dad began to feel the same way at some point, though for a different reason. He was pushing 50, and like the teenaged employees he supervised constantly reminded him, both he and the job were getting old. Then, when we returned to Philly because my grandfather Doc got sick, my dad began to sell drugs.
Weeks before my dad’s murder, he woke up with a start in the middle of the night. He had predicted death in a dream. He also saw skulls in the depressions of two trash bags filled with laundry, which sat in lumps on the loveseat near the bed he shared with my mom. This was the ultimate omen, illuminated in the liminal space that is twilight time. On Christmas Eve 1997, my father’s work caught up with him. He was outside of our house changing a tire in advance of a trip to drop off gifts when my mom, brother, and I heard fireworks below. Afterward, we blamed the lifestyle — the fast money, the decision not to schlep like the average working man — for his downfall.
Perhaps for the women in my family, the existential light bulb that showed profound truths about their lives didn’t click on like the trunk light of an asbestos-dusty Corsica, revealing an interloper in the dark. Or when the blast from a gunman’s barrel flickered in the night, extinguishing my dad’s bright life. I imagine that their intellectual acceptance of the trajectory of their lives did not come from some outside, showy, mano-a-mano understanding of being utterly stuck. It came for them like it came for me, indoors, gradually, though when it finally arrived it did so with a suddenness that felt shocking.
My uncles made use of their options by engaging in street life and an endless cycle of recidivism.
My mom’s jobs contrast with what her mother had done at the same age. Instead of cleaning some white lady’s house, my grandmother Cissy decided to lord over her own. She made money cooking and selling platters to card players in her own house. This was a way for her to do something different than her own mother, who cooked for the rectory of a Catholic church. I see writing as a similarly risky endeavor. I realize that I am more sympathetic to the women in my family, who rebelled against the employment options given to them in ways that were easier to understand, because they didn’t cause other people pain. I’d recently been talking to my mom about one of her brothers who had just been released on parole. My uncles made use of their options by engaging in street life and an endless cycle of recidivism, and I never quite took seriously the idea that the choices they had were shaped by their parents’ jobs. Now the connection feels clearer: My grandmother was a card shark, my grandfather was largely unavailable when it mattered, and my uncles worked with what they were dealt.
While shopping at Whole Foods one day, maybe for sliced cheese that a customer requested be cut a level of thickness described as “the size of five cards stacked together” as the note on the app read, I started drifting off, back to those fictional scenes in grocery stores. Grocery stores have functioned as sites of transformation in novels like Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and given my own experience, I understand why. The domestic association of the market makes it possible for turning points to occur, especially in female characters who are relegated there for various reasons. Shopping is such a personal, intimate experience that takes place in the public sphere. It’s an odd ritual for its mix of the private and social coexisting all at once. It is here that my actual foremothers and my literary ones converge. It occurs to me now that the reason I thought so often of fiction while working is not only because these books provided a convenient distraction from my circumstances and reminded me of my goals. It’s also because in these novels, black people who are employed as farmhands, models, and domestic workers are all conveyed with nuance and emotional depth.
Any misunderstandings I have toward my dad, brothers, certain uncles, and cousins are my own fault, and they’re due to the wariness I feel toward the external fighting they’ve done. I’m worried that, no matter how eloquently I describe the men in my family, or how much space I give them on the page, I’ll flatten my loved ones. I’m concerned that my family’s long-term generational mobility will be compromised, not only by bad choices and capitalism and the prison industrial complex but by my own ambitions, too. I’m scared the project of trying to illustrate how their choices have impacted my own will render them as unconvincingly as the characters in the bootleg films one of my uncles once sold. That, ironically, in showing our lineage of work I’ll have them do labor for me, narrative-wise, that they haven’t signed up for. In spite of my concerns, and with permission, I feel I must write it down. This is my story, too. Where do our stories and those of our predecessors diverge? Do they ever?
I stopped scheduling myself at Instacart after the incident with the laughing customer who mocked me, but I’m still a little afraid that I’ll need to return. Though, after doing this kind of soul-searching, I know I can’t go back to picking groceries for someone else. It’s difficult to pick up where the women in my family left off, to strike a balance between criticizing the actions of the men in my family and holding on to a deep belief that they truly are not what they do for a living, despite how it impacts the quality of our lives, and despite how the frequency of their jail trips builds a convincing argument that they have settled into the roles they try to convince us they’ve outgrown. I think I’m more understanding of their aliases and job-hopping and identity-shifting now. Our national history is rife with examples of black Americans facing exclusion from labor movements, as well as general workforce discrimination. It’s not hard to see how the effects of these policies have trickled down. I see my family’s work history, rendered briefly here, as a particular kind of ingenuity necessary for black Americans.
Despite feeling like my female relatives’ strategies are more relatable, I’ve picked up my dad’s job of writing. When I first read his fragmented screenplay for The Prince of Thieves, I read it as veiled autobiography. Now I’m not so sure. I imagine that my dad writing about con men in his script was a referendum on the kind of job he’d left, and then returned to. Although he didn’t make money as a grifter, I think the fact that he was an actor, hustled illegally, and worked multiple regular jobs connects in ways I hadn’t put together before. Both the writing and acting were concerted efforts to recast himself outside of the roles he’d adopted or had handed to him. For a black man of his generation to embrace the circumstances of his criminality, which prompted him to escape in the first place, had to have been a complicated thing to do. Similarly, I see my writing as both a way into and out of familial traditions. It’s a way to look forward without turning my back. It’s the work I want to own.
“This is the first time I’ve felt this unwelcome at a games event,” one woman said.
"I did speak with several women after deciding to leave the party and their views were all consistent with mine."
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
Just days before the courtroom showdown between the Justice Department and Apple over a locked iPhone used by the man behind the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Judge Sheri Pym has allowed both sides to cross examine witnesses, offering the parties a chance to challenge the sworn statements offered by their experts.
In a call with reporters Friday, Apple’s attorneys said Judge Pym was asked by the Justice department to allow for witnesses to be called during the hearing, a move the attorneys characterized as strange and last-minute, but said they nonetheless supported, to grant the court a more complete presentation of facts. Last month, Pym ordered Apple to help the FBI break into the encrypted device by designing new software that would defeat several security features built into the iPhone. Apple has challenged Pym’s order, and the hearing was arranged to settle the dispute.
The addition of witnesses adds an element of unpredictability to the hearing, a move that could invite contentious exchanges during cross examination, or a more in-depth technical discussion of the case's intricacies.
The Justice Department will have the opportunity to cross examine Apple’s manager of user privacy, Erik Neuenschwander, and Apple’s lawyer who handled the government’s legal requests during the initial investigation in San Bernardino, Lisa Olle. As part of Apple’s legal challenge to the court order, Neuenschwander and Olle previously offered sworn statements to the court.
Neuenschwander had addressed the security concerns that would arise from the new operating system, and cast doubt on the government’s claim that the new software would only be used once, characterizing the Justice Department’s rationale as “fundamentally flawed.” Olle spoke to Apple’s potential legal and technical burden. If Apple were ordered to comply, she stated, similar requests for security-suppressing software would pour in, forcing the company to employ legal and engineering teams whose sole purpose would be to comply with government orders.
If it chooses, Apple can cross examine two FBI technicians, Christopher Pluhar, and Stacey Perino. Both have indicated that the FBI has exhausted its technical capability to access the data stored on the iPhone in question. Their statements have been used by the government to support the claim that Apple alone retains the power to help unlock the device. Perino and Pluhar have also challenged Apple on the ability of the FBI to recover information stored on the phone through an iCloud backup.
Shortly after the iPhone was seized by the government, the FBI had the iCloud password linked to the device reset. Apple insists that had the password not been changed, a backup of the phone could have been made by connecting the device to a trusted Wi-Fi network, like Farook’s home, without having to enter the phone’s passcode. The government maintains that this method would not have worked because, as Perino States, “a cold-booted iPhone will not connect to WiFi networks trusted by the Subject Device such as a home or work network until the passcode is entered.”
At the in-person arguments next week, the issue of the password reset is likely to be a major point of contention, as it has already through court filings. In Apple’s latest brief — the last court filing before the hearing — the company cited FBI Director Comey’s testimony in front of Congress, where he described the password reset as a mistake. In court documents, however, the Justice Department described the reset as a “reasoned decision.”
“A forced backup of Farook’s iPhone was never going to be successful, and the decision to obtain whatever iCloud evidence was immediately available via the password change was the reasoned decision of experienced FBI agents investigating a deadly terrorist conspiracy,” the government has stated.
Apple and the FBI’s experts have also disagreed on whether an iPhone customer is able to disable iCloud back ups for individual Apple apps — mail, photos, notes, for instance. Apple’s Neuenschwander has described the statements of the FBI’s Pluhar and Perino as “incorrect” containing “several mistakes,” “false” and said of Pluhar that he was “likely looking at the wrong screen on the device,” when assessing the potential for an iCloud backup.
Apple’s lawyers said the hearing will begin with introductory comments from Judge Pym, followed by ninety minutes or so of witness testimony, and then about ninety minutes of legal arguments — with Apple going first and last, and the Justice Department presenting in the middle.
Because the San Bernardino investigation is ongoing, Apple’s lawyers said they have been restricted by confidentiality requirements to limit what they can say in public about the case. But since the Justice Department has requested that expert witnesses in the case be questioned during the hearing, Apple’s lawyers said they hope these restrictions will be relaxed to more fully inform the court.
The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Rhona Wise / AFP / Getty Images
SAN FRANCISCO — Donald Trump's alleged cell phone number, social security number and address were among personal details published Thursday by a hacker claiming to be part of the Anonymous hacking collective.
Many of of those details — such as the cell phone number and management agency — have been previously published online. A call to that number went unanswered, and it was unclear if the social security card number belonged to Trump.
A Twitter account associated with Anonymous tweeted triumphantly that the attack was a harbinger of what's to come.
Anonymous declared a "war on Trump" nearly two weeks ago, telling its supporters to focus their attacks on April 1. Trump's personal datas were published Thursday in a video featuring a digitally-altered voice.
"To show that we are very serious about stopping any proposed forthright by the fascist Donald Trump we have attached a gift of sorts," says the narrator in the video. "Trump's Social Security number, cell phone number and other details that might be able to assist you."
Those aligning themselves with Anonymous, however, seemed split on the anti-Trump campaign, with some arguing in #OpTrump chat rooms that even if they disliked Trump's campaign, they believed that freedom of speech was more important and that the Republican front runner had a right to his views.
Others asked if it was possible for Anonymous to realistically affect Trump's campaign.
A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump's website survived Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in December.
Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston.
Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP / Getty Images
Dropbox, the cloud storage startup facing questions about its $10 billion valuation, is expected to authorize a sale of its common stock at a 34% discount to its most recent round of private funding, according to documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The shares, to be sold by shareholders on the so-called secondary market, have been priced at $12.60 each. Yet, in January 2014, in its Series C round of funding, Dropbox sold preferred shares to big investors at $19.10.
Common shares often carry a discount to preferred shares, though the size of the discount can range widely, from 15% to 35%, according to valuation analysis firm Arcstone Partners. Preferred shareholders carry special rights, like the right to be paid before common shareholders when a company is sold. A bigger discount may reflect concerns about a company's ability to sell or go public at or above its current valuation.
The deal is being handled by EquityZen, a company that allows startup employees and others to sell stock in tech startups whose shares aren't publicly traded. EquityZen says on its website that all of its deals are approved by the companies whose shares are being sold.
While Dropbox itself is not the seller, the previously unreported transaction will likely be seen as setting a market price for the startup's stock.
Representatives of Dropbox and EquityZen declined to comment.
Dropbox, founded in 2007 and based in San Francisco, has faced skepticism from investors over its $10 billion valuation, amid a frosty climate for highly valued startups in general. Last fall, The Information reported that two of the startup's mutual fund investors had marked down their shares by a little more than 20%. Later, a third mutual fund company marked down its shares by 51%.
Valuing privately held startups is a tricky business, since their shares rarely change hands. Dropbox investors tend to look to Box, a publicly traded cloud storage company, as a point of reference. Box's shares have fallen 47% from the closing price after their trading debut in early 2015.
Any investors in the Dropbox deal won't be buying shares directly. They'll purchase an interest in an EquityZen fund that is expected to buy the common shares, according to the documents. Investors, who must be wealthy enough to be considered "accredited" in the eyes of regulators, have until April 5 to commit to buying shares. BuzzFeed News could not determine how many shares are being offered for sale.
These investors will be at a significant disadvantage compared with the institutional investors that have provided Dropbox with capital. The EquityZen documents pitching the investment do not contain any confirmed information about Dropbox's financial health.
Instead, the documents cite information from outside parties, like the data provider Crunchbase and the news sites Business Insider, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch.
"All figures are publicly reported unless noted otherwise," a disclaimer reads. "When not reported by the company or any of its representatives, financial information may not have been verified by the company."
Updated to clarify that common shares are often priced at a discount to preferred shares, though the discount can range widely.
