By the time you finish reading this, we’ll be dead.

So you probably already know people suspect Barack Obama of being part of The Illuminati, a secret and ancient organization that controls the world.

Twitter: @Illuminati_Stop

Let's go through the "Day" playlist track by track:

"Ain't Too Proud to Beg" by The Temptations: This is a tangled web. The Temptations have a tragic streak of members dying very young or in accidents or by suicide. Michael Jackson (clearly murdered by the The Illuminati) offered to pay for the funeral of one member… Perhaps he sympathized with a fellow resistance fighter against the Illuminati?

"Live It Up" by The Isley Brothers: See below:

View Entire List ›

Katherine Heigl and Alexis Bledel in Jenny's Wedding.

IFC Films

Jenny’s Wedding is a 2015 independent film written and directed by Mary Agnes Donoghue. Jenny (Katherine Heigl) decides to marry her live-in gal pal, Kitty (Alexis Bledel) — but Jenny’s conventional Midwestern family has long since been under the impression that Jenny and Kitty are just roommates. As the wedding nears, Jenny’s parents and sister have to decide if they’ll accept Jenny for who she is, gayness and all. The film currently has a 15% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Four women invested in the representation of queer women in popular culture gathered by group Gchat to discuss why so few lesbian films actually manage to get made — and why those that actually do see the light of day are, for the most part, pretty bad.

youtube.com

Shannon Keating: What struck you guys as off about Jenny’s Wedding, if anything?

Sarah Karlan: First of all, Izzie Stevens playing a lesbian had so much promise, especially when you have Izzie Stevens dating Rory Gilmore. How did it all go so wrong when it was perfect in my head?

Brittani Nichols: It sure did lean on the "I can't change" part of that Mary Lambert song to do a lot of the emotional lifting. But I wouldn't say it was a bad movie. I'd say it was bad at being a lesbian movie. And boring. And long. And we've just been there before. But at the same time, I don't think we should stop making coming-out movies just because that story has been told before.

Ellen Cushing: I disagree, Brittani! Jenny's Wedding is, without a doubt, a Bad Movie, full stop — like, politics aside, it's just treacly and trite and weirdly boring. But in terms of queer politics, it felt like it was conceived of in a world that doesn't entirely exist anymore.

Sarah: Apparently Donoghue based the film off of her niece’s coming out (Jenny IRL). So my question is…what year did this all go down for their family? It feels like it takes place in a vacuum or in an underground bunker with no internet. I would have believed it more if they simply made the film take place a few years ago — placed some time markers in there that made it clear this is not 2015 — because it felt like 1990.

Ellen: It felt very '90s to me! And not just because of Katherine Heigl's wardrobe.

Brittani: I think we might be jaded, though. I mean, it's not like this [coming-out] story doesn't still happen today. It does. And as far as lesbian films go, this was sort of something new in terms of having big-name actresses.

Sarah: Speaking of being jaded, I searched for tweets about Jenny’s Wedding on Twitter and it’s clear a lot of people DID love this film. People were saying they cried, watched it five times, that it "hit to close to home."

Ellen: Huh!

Shannon: That's crazy to me.

Sarah: So for some it’s still filling that void of seeing your story on the big screen, even if it’s not exactly...well told.

Shannon: Totally. I do think that many queers are just so starved for any kind of representation that seeing A-list actresses tell this story could have been a big deal to them. But can we talk about the chemistry between Jenny and Kitty?

Brittani: There was a moment they hugged and I was like, "Oh no, they're going to act like this is a hugging moment when this is clearly a kissing moment" — but then they stopped hugging and backed away from each other and went in for a kiss and it was so awkward that I wished they'd only hugged.

IFC Films

Shannon: Total kiss count, of the whole film: three. Right? Three kisses.

Ellen: One of which was filmed from like 100 yards away.

Sarah: Three kisses, and no wedding kiss. That was unreal to me. I mean, I don't need a full-blown lez orgy sex scene. I don't. But if this is Jenny's Wedding, I would like to see the wedding kiss! Because I'm a romantic. And there was no romance to me in this.

Ellen: To be fair, it wasn't really a love story, though — it was much more about Jenny's relationship with her family, and Alexis Bledel's character was sort of an empty vessel.

Brittani: I think it was clear this was a movie made for the "mainstream" and not for lesbians. At least some lesbian movies, no matter how bad, were made with us in mind.

Sarah: That's true. It didn't feel like a "made by us for us" film. It was "made by them for them.” “Them” being the general population of non-queer people.

Shannon: Like in a "here's why you should accept your gay children" way?

Sarah: Was this for parents? WHO WAS THIS FOR? I thought the plotline about Jenny's sister's dead lawn was more enticing and filled with passion than Jenny’s relationship plotline.

Shannon: Yes! Jenny's sister and her deadbeat husband were a more interesting couple than Jenny and Kitty. Let the record show that the girlfriend's name...is Kitty.

Brittani: That was painful.

Sarah: Who signed off on that? Lesbian girlfriend: Kitty. Sounds good!

High Art

October Films

Brittani: I wanna see another version of this movie without a happy ending.

Shannon: Ah, Brittani, do we really need more sad lesbian films?

Brittani: But they're always sad in big, ridiculous, outrageous ways. This one would feel real.

Sarah: Wait. Do you mean unhappy as in the family doesn't come around? So the couple remains together but sans family support? I think that would have been super interesting. But I still would want the couple to make it, because in most lesbian films [the relationships] seem to fall apart.

Brittani: Yeah, like, They didn't support us, and look, we're fine. You can be fine.

Sarah: yes.

Ellen: In terms of inspiring people, that might actually be more meaningful! Sad in that way I could root for. Because not everyone's parents are going to just come around — but that doesn't mean you won't be all right.

Sarah: It's almost as if the family went to the wedding and *poof* everything was OK.

Ellen: That conga line cured them of their homophobia, Sarah.

Sarah: As conga lines often do.

Shannon: This film also came around basically right after the SCOTUS marriage decision, which makes the timing really interesting. It seems very much to be saying, "Just be a completely normal, wholesome, marrying couple, and everything will be fine!"

Sarah: Be a white, suburban lesbian couple, and it will be OK.

Shannon: And pretty and femme!

Ellen: YES.

Shannon: And not too sexual. Or really, any bit sexual.

IFC Films

Sarah: Super pretty, super femme, very safe and Midwestern. Your standard Midwestern lesbian, really. Hugging your partner in your turtleneck.

Shannon: Patting your partner comfortingly on their back while you’re both in bed, with clothes on.

Sarah: Which only further backs up the point that this film wasn't really made for lesbians? But I have to believe a film could be made for us AND the general population.

Ellen: It was also interesting to me that a lot of Jenny's conversations with her family were framed around feelings, not politics. Like, unless I'm remembering incorrectly, the argument was "accept me because I'm your kid," not "accept me because it's the right thing to do." Does that make sense?

Shannon: Oh totally, Ellen. This film stayed far away from any kind of political argument at all.

Sarah: Right, Ellen! Which is also why I was like...what year is this supposed to be? I wanted her to cite some politics in her arguments, some "catch up with the times" talk.

Brittani: I like that really the only reason for [Jenny’s parents] not being into gays was "we're old!"

Shannon: Lol Brittani. Yeah, they weren't particularly religious or anything, they were just old-fashioned? "We're not rebels!!!!"

Sarah: "We're not rebels!"

Shannon: Jinx, Sarah.

Sarah: Hahaha. Getting a bumper sticker that says "I'm not a rebel.”

Ellen: Which I think is what makes this movie really insidiously regressive! Being anti-gay shouldn't be written off as a a temperament thing, like not liking cilantro.

Sarah: Some people aren't fancy, they don't eat cilantro! They are normal simple people with no garnishes. They aren't rebels. This is making me think more and more the "unsupportive family" ending would have been so much better.

Shannon: Then maybe Jenny and Kitty could have banded together against them and shown a spark or two of personality. I still don't think the film being mostly about the family excuses their lack of ANY CHEMISTRY.

What this movie lacked, and what so many lesbian movies lack, is any kind of levity or sexiness or FUN.

Ellen: So, Sarah, to your point about how there's room out there for a good mainstream lesbian movie, I was talking to a friend last night about this, and she was like, "What we need is for Judd Apatow to direct a lesbian movie." Which I actually think is sort of a great idea! Because what this movie lacked, and what so many lesbian movies lack, is any kind of levity or sexiness or FUN.

Sarah: I was about to ask...so what do we WANT in a lesbian movie? The lesbian movie of your goddamn dreams, released tomorrow: Go.

Shannon: Not sure about Apatow specifically, but TOTALLY agree that we need more sexiness and more fun.

Sarah: Sometimes I would wonder, Where is the lady version of Brokeback Mountain? But we are beyond that, I think. Now I just want to laugh my ass off and watch two women fall in love.

Brittani: I think what I want is for the movies to not just be about being a lesbian.

Shannon: Agreed, Brittani. I want smart, funny lesbians with personality, who have an actual sex scene or two or three — and the plot is saturated with queerness, but it isn't centrally *about* coming out or dealing with oppression.

Sarah: Exactly, so the lesbian part is a nonissue. No big coming-out drama. No big family drama. Or it could be like, a sub-issue. But not the main issue.

Shannon: What I DON’T want is for a film to be so bleached of the gay element that the characters could be switched out with straight characters and the plot would remain the same.

Brittani: I think both should be happening. There should be [more traditional coming-out] stories but with people who aren’t cis beautiful white women, plus big movies where one of the characters just happens to be gay, plus genre movies about groups of friends that just happen to be queer.

Leighton Meester and Gillian Jacobs in Life Partners.

Magnolia Pictures

Shannon: Have any been successful so far? Are there any lesbian films that currently exist that you guys like?

Sarah: I keep thinking of all the tropes lesbian films have — lesbian falls for straight girl is common but always seems to keep my attention. Is it the drama of it all? Forbidden love / unrequited love is something everyone can relate to.

Brittani: I liked Life Partners.

Sarah: Here we go. It begins. Life Partners: Pick a side.

Brittani: Haha. It wasn't without its issues.

Sarah: I couldn't watch it all the way through, I don't know exactly why...but I do like that it focused on a friendship? They weren't in love; they were friends.

Ellen: I liked Life Partners too

Shannon: I wish I liked Life Partners more! I wanted to love it because my best friend is straight and Leighton Meester as a lesbian is a goddamn dream. But it focused too much on the straight best friend's straight relationship with dumb Adam Brody for me. I did like that it was about friendship and there was more than one lesbian character, though.

Brittani: Yes, the way Meester's situation ended wasn't cathartic at all.

Shannon: Yeah, the straight best friend had a happy ending, but Leighton didn't! Come on, man.

Pariah

Sundial Pictures

Sarah: I liked how it touched upon straight women/gay women friendships and how that is sort of a unique thing that can be rocked when one of us pairs off. That was new and interesting. And Leighton Meester's orientation was more or less treated matter-of-factly and without a big It's So Hard to Be Gay arc.

Ellen: YES. Yes.

Sarah: She just was, and they laughed about it and joked about it.

Shannon: Yes. But she was still very much unapologetically gay! Like she wasn't an apolitical gay who doesn't talk about being gay at all. I really appreciated that.

Ellen: Right! And while she certainly wasn't *butch*, she wasn't entirely femme-y either. She seemed like a person I might know in real life.

Sarah: So maybe that's the formula for a good lez rom-com? Make the gay part a nonissue and focus on all the other things that everyone can relate to: love, breakups, being single, just trying to live your goddamn life?

Shannon: I would love to have seen her SUCCEED, though. Idk, we don't see ourselves succeeding enough. It would be awesome to see a lesbian character triumph, especially in a non-romantic way. Not to say we can't see failures and sadness too, because that's true to life obvi, but failing and sadness is very much the way the tiny market is skewed right now.

Sarah: I think there is just so much more comedy to be had. Being gay can be so funny. IT IS A HOOT. So many awkward little situations a lot of us can relate to navigating a mostly hetero world.

Shannon: "Being gay is a hoot" —Sarah Karlan.

Sarah: I want to see the "I'm a single twentysomething struggling to get my shit together, oh and I'm gay too, but that's just part of my life" movie. That's what I'm craving, I think. Because that's me right now.

I have to believe a film could be made for us AND the general population.

Brittani: Yeah, and I think this weird thing happens with "lesbian comedy" where the jokes that we've told a million times get told onscreen for the first time and so it feels corny.

Sarah: +1, yes.

Brittani: We've seen the schlubby white dude who needs a woman to help him get his shit together a million times, told a million different ways, so we should just keep going until there's a movie about a schlubby lesbian that needs a woman to help get her shit together. Starring Sarah Karlan.

Sarah: More schlubby lesbians, please. I can be that schlubby lesbian.

Brittani: You'd def have to up your schlub factor. Start eating cheese fries right now.

Shannon: But I want to see the schlub lez come on top in the end! A schlubby winner. I'd also love to see a baby comedy but with lesbians. Like a Baby Mama or a Knocked Up.

Sarah: Lez Mama Drama. I guess there was The Kids Are All Right.

Shannon: Oh no.

Sarah: Hahahaha. I know.

Shannon: Why did Mark Ruffalo have multiple good sex scenes in that movie but the queer leads had a sad two-second lesbian bed death scene????? Will never be over it.

Brittani: Another unpopular opinion: I liked it despite things like that.

Shannon: Oh, I did too. I didn't hate it as a film. And Julianne Moore is a great gay.

Sarah: Mark Ruff is like...an honorary lesbian to me. He's all right. The kids are all right, and so is he.

Shannon: I am also a fan of the Ruff.

I want smart, funny lesbians with personality, who have an actual sex scene or two or three — and the plot is saturated with queerness, but it isn't centrally *about* coming out, or dealing with oppression.

RT if you’re a ’90s kid.

Google went public in 2004.

Ben Margot / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Amazon: 1997.

Andy Rogers / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Microsoft: 1986.

Barry Sweet / AP

Yahoo: 1996.

Getty Images

View Entire List ›

Conversations like mine will begin happening all around the world starting today.

I couldn't help myself. When I heard, last night, that the data dump from the Ashley Madison hack was online and searchable, I navigated toward it almost automatically. On a crowded subway platform coming home from a baseball game, three beers and a hot dog into my evening, on my tiny little phone, I started tapping every email address I could remember by heart into that empty white box, almost without thinking.

The first email address I entered was my father's (no dice, mercifully). The second was my ex's, and I searched it half by virtue of the fact that three years together has a way of searing an email address into your brain and half because I felt almost gleefully certain that I knew what I would find. Two summers ago, I'd found out he'd cheated on me with a woman he'd met online. It seemed like if anyone I knew was among the millions of people whose email addresses were exposed by the hack, he'd be it. Anyway, muscle memory and morbid curiosity make for quite the cocktail.

Of course, I was right:

I remember the moment I found out he cheated on me in a way that's so vivid it's almost physical: the scratchiness in my throat, the rag-doll crumple of my knees, the ringing in my ears. The vertigo. I felt disoriented for days after. It's a feeling a lot of people — maybe thousands — will be having this week.

We stayed together for months afterward — my choice. There are a lot of different kinds of infidelity, was my argument, and a lot of different ways to be in a relationship. There are a million different ways to be cruel to the people you love, and only a fraction of them involve pulling your browser up to a page you shouldn't and clicking "sign in." I'm still really happy I made that decision.

During that time, I was asked by probably two dozen people whether I would have preferred not to know, if such a choice were possible. I always said yes.

Ultimately, we did break up, partly because of the cheating but also, in some ways — more ways than you might imagine — not at all because of the cheating. We ended it sitting in his parked car outside a 24 Hour Fitness, and it was awful. But we have, perhaps somewhat improbably, retained a very tender, if sometimes strained, friendship. So I texted him to ask about the hack.

View Entire List ›

A partir de hoy, en todo el mundo comenzarán a aparecer conversaciones como la mía.

Ashley Madison

¿Entraste al sitio mientras estábamos juntos?

No me pude aguantar. Cuando anoche escuché que subieron la información hackeada de Ashley Madison y tenía un buscador, comencé a investigarla casi en forma automática. Dentro de un subterráneo atiborrado, mientras volvía de un juego de baseball, con tres cervezas y un perro caliente encima, comencé a buscar con mi teléfono móvil cada dirección de email que pude recordar de memoria, casi sin pensar.

La primer dirección que ingresé fue la de mi padre (por suerte, no hubo resultados). La segunda fue la de mi ex; la ingresé en parte porque tres años de relación son suficientes para marcar a fuego en tu cerebro una dirección de email, y en parte porque estaba casi segura de que sabría lo que encontraría. Dos veranos atrás, me enteré que me engañó con una mujer que conoció online. Me pareció que si había alguien de mi entorno que figuraría entre los millones de personas cuyas casillas quedaron vulnerables por el hackeo, sería él. De cualquier modo, fue un cóctel de buena memoria y curiosidad morbosa.

Acerté, por supuesto:

¿Tu perfil es parte del hack the Ashley Madison? Ingresa tu casilla de email: xxx@xxx fue encontrado. De acuerdo a la base de datos, la casilla de mail fue confirmada por...

View Entire List ›

La publication des adresses mails de clients infidèles par le site de rencontres extra-conjugales va provoquer pas mal de conversations.

Ashley Madison

Tu y as été quand on sortait ensemble?

J'ai pas pu m'en empêcher. Quand j'ai entendu, mardi soir, que toutes les données du piratage du site Ashley Madison étaient en ligne et qu'on pouvait y faire des recherches, j'y suis allée presque automatiquement. Sur un quai de métro bondé en rentrant d'un match de base-ball, après trois bières et un hot-dog, j'ai pris mon minuscule téléphone et me suis mise à taper dans la petite case blanche chaque adresse mail que je connaissais par cœur, presque sans y penser.

La première adresse mail que j'y ai entrée était celle de mon père (aucun résultat, Dieu merci). La deuxième était celle de mon ex, et si j'ai cherché c'est en partie parce que trois années passées ensemble ont le don de vous incruster une adresse mail dans le crâne, et en partie parce que j'avais la certitude presque jubilatoire de ce que j'allais y trouver. Il y a deux ans, j'ai découvert qu'il m'avait trompée avec une femme rencontrée sur Internet. Il me semblait que si une seule de mes connaissances figurait parmi les millions d'adresses mails exposées par ce piratage, ce serait forcément lui. Bref, bonne mémoire et curiosité malsaine font un sacré cocktail.

Evidemment, j'avais raison:

Capture d'écran de la page où j'ai pu voir que l'adresse de mon ex faisait bien partie du leaks.

BuzzFeed

View Entire List ›

He was pretty good at it.

Senator Mark Warner spent a few days in San Francisco this week, meeting with tech companies, trying out virtual reality, and experiencing the chilly summer weather in the city by the bay. He stopped by the BuzzFeed office to talk about contract labor and the future of work, and while he was here we sat him down to play a quick round of "Startup or Made Up," a game we…made up.

Thuuz

"If I'm wrong, it should be made up, because it's a pretty crummy name."

Incorrect! Thuuz is “an award-winning mobile and connected TV service revolutionizing how sports fans discover and connect to sports programming.”

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed

OOOOOC

Correct! OOOOOC is a startup. But it's not from the Bay Area.

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed

Swrve

Correct! Swrve is a startup, and people in the Valley are real.ly bad at spellyng.

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed

View Entire List ›

The investment will help Walker and Co. expand into Target stores starting next year.

Walker

The downtown Palo Alto office of Walker and Co., the two-year-old cosmetics company founded by former Foursquare exec Tristan Walker, doesn't look like much — white walls and few design flourishes, a tech-office standard open plan and affinity for Macs — but it smells incredible: like lavender and black tea, with the faintest little hint of mango. It's less candle-store cloying than like a very elegant person's bathroom, and it is, to use an industry cliche, delightful.

Walker is certainly a tech guy — in addition to the Foursquare stint, he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, and he's also long been a favorite at South by Southwest and on tech Twitter. But Walker and Co. is far from a traditional tech shop. His flagship product isn't software, or even hardware; rather, it's a very beautiful single-blade razor (plus attendant creams and accessories), called Bevel, that is designed to, in Walker's words, "eradicate shaving irritation" in coarse-haired (meaning mostly, but not entirely, black) men.

That's not, however, to say that Walker and Co. doesn't raise money like a tech company. On Monday, the company announced that it had raised $24 million in Series B funding; the round was led by Institutional Venture Partners with the participation of various valley VC firms — Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, several others — as well as a veritable murder's row of celebrity investors, including basketball players Andre Iguodala and Earvin "Magic" Johnson, Vine star King Bach, singer John Legend, and San Francisco 49ers CEO Jed York. The company also announced that Bevel will be sold in some Target stores and on Target.com, starting next year.

Last spring, the company raised nearly $7 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz; according to Walker, he still has a lot of that in the bank, "so we didn't really need to raise." But he clearly has big ambitions for the company, which he is fond of likening to a sort of Procter & Gamble for people of color. This new round will help with a three-pronged expansion that includes the Target deal, a hiring push (especially in customer service and engineering), and, in 2016, a new brand. Walker was coy about the details of that new brand, but he stressed that — true to the Procter & Gamble vision — Walker and Co. was never intended to be just Bevel but several different brands, all targeting consumers of color.

"The thing that we proved with our first brand is that we can actually develop a suite of products that solve a really important problem that has existed for 100 years and no one has solved," Walker told BuzzFeed News. "So we're going to continue to iterate on that. Each of these subbrands will have their own personality, but still have the Walker and Co. values. For example, a lot of women use our product. Could there be a better profile for that use case?"

There's clearly room for Walker and Co. to grow. Walker pointed out that while health and beauty is a $400 billion industry, it's one that has historically underserved people of color. Meanwhile, according to a 2013 Nielsen report, "blacks consistently place a higher emphasis on grooming and beauty categories and at the top of that list is Ethnic Hair and Beauty Aids (HABA), which Blacks purchase nine times more than others."

Which is certainly part of why Walker was able to attract this round of investment, but Walker says many of his investors had been fans of Bevel before opening their wallets.

"Most of those folks are also consumers of our product," Walker said. "One thing that's really important [with celebrities] is not just using them for their reach. What's great about most of our investors is, they all walked down the same aisles I had to walk down. They picked up the same dirty packaging that I had to pick up. And they're interested in solving the problem we're trying to solve."

"[The investor pool] is diverse because I want it to be," Walker, who is also cofounder of Code2040, a nonprofit that creates "access, awareness, and opportunities" for young African-American and Latino/a engineers, continued. "Walker and Co. is majority minority, majority women, all great leaders, and I wanted my investor base to reflect not only the diversity of our team but the diversity of our customers, too."

What about the smell, though? Is it a collective and uncommonly good sense of personal hygiene among Walker's staff of 20? Do they spray something in the air?

"I think," Walker said, joking, "it's just our being awesome."

Because you have seen a heart before, but are too stupid to recognize a star.

We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we'll be calling them likes. We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite.

The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.

Sure. OK. Here are some immediate thoughts:

No more hate faves.

On the other hand, there's something deliciously sneering about a hate-heart.

magicandstardustgifs.tumblr.com

You might be my favorite dental floss but I still don't like you.

View Entire List ›

Of the many small indulgences and unbidden conveniences the current tech boom has given us, one of the most enticing might be the luxe meal-kit-in-a-box: A cardboard box of pre-packed ingredients, delivered to your door once a week or so with idiot-proof recipes included. For anyone who's come home after a long day at work to find an empty fridge and an utter unwillingness to cook or shop the appeal is obvious: A kit offers the ease of takeout, but the joy (or bragging rights) of cooking, all for the low, low price of (roughly) $10 per meal.

Indeed, the consulting firm Technomic estimates that over the next decade, the meal-kit market will become as big as a $5 billion industry. More than half a dozen venture-backed, slickly marketed companies — among them Plated, Purple Carrot, HelloFresh, ChefDay!, Chef'd, GreenChef, Din, Peach Dish, and Blue Apron — are chasing the space, all with slightly different glosses and specialties. But at three years old, Blue Apron appears to be the breakout, with a $2 billion valuation, a footprint covering the majority of the country, and monthly delivery rate north of 5 million meals a month, according to a November Forbes profile. (Blue Apron declined be interviewed for this article.)

Last week, the service offered omnivores on the two-person plan "trattoria-style cheeseburgers with crispy rosemary-garlic potatoes and aioli," "seared chicken and roasted sweet potato rounds with a chestnut and Brussels pan sauce," and "North-African spiced shrimp with dates, kale, and carrots" — all delivered to your door in pre-portioned packages, and with prep times of about 45 minutes at most. Here's what it would all look like on the table, according to the recipe cards enclosed:

And straight out of the box, this is what it looked like:

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News

And this is what remained, after cooking: Nine plastic baggies of varying sizes; four clamshells, also plastic; a pair of tiny containers that had held about a tablespoon of chicken demi glace and a pat of butter, respectively; a sheaf of recipes, instructions, and promotions printed on thick cardstock; the foil bag from a few tablespoons of tomato paste; three paper bags, now soggy and damp from refrigeration and condensation; a cardboard box stamped with cheerful, cartoonified cooking implements; three thick plastic meat packages; two gel-filled icepacks; and a foil bag not unlike the ones marathoners wear to keep warm. (Plus the compostable peels from three lemons and skins from a head of garlic and a purple onion.) It was, in other words, a lot of waste for three meals for two people. But that's just a mere six meals; consider Blue Apron's 5-million-meals-per-month figure, and you start to get a sense of what kind of waste it produces — to use a Silicon Valley term of art — at scale.

Michelle Rial / BuzzFeed News

Blue Apron argues that by portioning out its ingredients exactly, it helps cooks reduce the approximately 31% of post-harvest food that goes wasted in the country. That's a compelling argument on paper, and one that makes intuitive sense to anyone who's ever tried to follow a fancy recipe exactly and ended up with a partially zested lemon and seven-eighths of a head of black garlic in her fridge. (WTF, black garlic?) But it's a little harder to swallow when you're staring down a plastic bag containing about three tablespoons of all-purpose flour — a bag that's likely been shipped across the country to your doorstep.

According to that same Forbes article, Blue Apron sources its ingredients from 100 different family-run farms, and according to an August Pacific Standard report, it delivers to 85% of the country from two distribution centers nationwide — meaning that before it makes it to your doorstep, there's a decent chance your lacinato kale and premium ground beef crossed the better part of the United States in a refrigerated truck.

Blue Apron also makes a point that "all of [its] packaging material is biodegradable to recyclable" — in fact, it's stamped right on the box, under a headline saying "Eco-Friendly Packaging." And its website offers an extensive (if hard to find) guide to recycling packaging. But as Nathanael Johnson points out in a deliciously irate Grist post titled "Blue Apron, You're Just Making it Worse," all that recycling is easier said than done.

Those tiny baggies, for example, are made of low-density polyethylene, a type of plastic that is nominally recyclable, but that most cities won't accept for curbside pickup. (Mine is one of them; Blue Apron's "recycling locator" tool suggested that I walk the trash about three-quarters of a mile away to, ironically, my local grocery store.) The ice packs are only recyclable once you "let [them] thaw, cut off a corner, and empty the water-based solution into the trash," according to Blue Apron's own guidelines. The foil liner is #7 — "miscellaneous" — plastic, which, according to Earth911, "many curbside programs will not accept at all." Of course, you can always take all this stuff to your municipal waste facility, but it's hard to believe that the type of person who doesn't have time to go to the grocery store would willingly hop in the car for a weekend trip to the local recycling plant, either. Blue Apron also offers cooks the option of sending back the waste (save for "any meat or seafood packaging") — once it's been collected from at least two deliveries, and rid of food residue, carefully rinsed, and compacted.

Blue Apron does seem to be thinking about this stuff. The recycling guide is helpful, if optimistic, and founder Mathew Wadiak told Pacific Standard's Keira Butler that the company "buys from environmentally conscious suppliers — farms that use cover crops and no-till techniques instead of carbon-intensive synthetic fertilizer, for example." (BuzzFeed News couldn't verify this.)

And besides, industrial food production is already an incredibly complex and tangled process. Meal-delivery services might produce a whole lot of landfill waste, but for someone who lives miles away from a grocery store, the fossil-fuel impact of hopping in the car and picking up a meal's worth of ingredients — which were likely also shipped across the country, or even across the planet — might be worse.

But the shrimp and couscous were genuinely delicious, and all the rest of it was pretty good. And cleanup was a breeze, because everything went straight into the trash.

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

When Kink.com severed ties with adult film star James Deen, the company’s disavowal was swift and unwavering. Two days after Deen’s ex-girlfriend, Stoya, alleged on Twitter that he had raped her, the San Francisco-based BDSM and fetish porn studio said it would cease all ties with Deen, who had appeared in more than 250 of its films, effective immediately. “Consent and respect are sacrosanct,” the company said in a public statement. “Our performers deserve not only safe sets, but the ability to work without fear of assault. Rape or sexual assault, with or without a safe-word, off-set or on, should never be accepted as a hazard of adult production.”

What has not been previously reported, however, is that Kink is at the center of four lawsuits filed this year that each allege unsafe working conditions with consequences ranging from retaliation to HIV transmission.

The company's name also came up repeatedly as more women came forward with allegations against Deen. Adult film performer Ashley Fires told the Daily Beast that Deen had assaulted her a communal bathroom at Kink.com. A few days after that, another porn actor, Nicki Blue, told the Daily Mail Online that when she complained on a Kink.com forum about being brutally raped by Deen at a party, her post was deleted. “There's a lot [Kink] could have done so that it didn't happen, so that people don't end up getting raped,” Blue told the Mail. Last week another performer, Lily LaBeau, alleged that Deen assaulted her on a Kink set in 2012. Deen was not scheduled to film and was eventually “ejected” from the shoot. Michael Stabile, a spokesperson for Kink.com, said that as the news unfolded, the company discussed ways to improve its detection of seemingly isolated incidents. Kink.com needs to do a better job, he said, of making sure directors aren’t siloed and making sure that performers know exit interviews after a shoot are confidential and there won’t be any retribution. Stabile said the alleged assault against LaBeau was likely discussed with talent and booking, but “other directors continued to work with [Deen] and had good experiences.”

Of the four suits, three — filed by performers Cameron Adams, Joshua Rodgers, and an anonymous John Doe with the same lawyer, Sandra Ribera — allege that their respective plaintiffs contracted HIV on Kink sets as a result of negligence. (Kink.com maintains that neither Adams nor Rodgers, who were a couple at the time, performed with someone who was HIV-positive.) The fourth lawsuit, filed in June by a different lawyer, is from a former employee of Cybernet Entertainment, the company that operates Kink.com, who claims her managers did not protect her from assault while filming a public bondage segment, and then retaliated against her when she complained about unsafe working conditions.

All four lawsuits are still in the early stages. Kink.com has challeged the legal basis behind all three cases represented by Ribera. A hearing on Kink’s objections will be held in February. Last month, the company filed an answer to the complaint from the ex-employee denying all the allegations.

The courts, or a settlement, will decide the merits of each case. But the filings present a vivid depiction of what life inside the Armory — Kink’s 2.2-acre studio in San Francisco — can be like for some performers. The court documents also address the protocols for BDSM shoots put in place by an industry that has largely been left alone by regulators when it comes to sexual assault and allowed to police itself. Deen’s female accusers have tried to explain the hardships of speaking up when boundaries have been crossed. These cases speak to those challenges.

The complaints describe a working environment in which employees and contractors are pushed beyond their limits and on-set issues are dismissed — an image that’s quite contrary to the one that the company has projected in the wake of the allegations against James Deen. That image also runs counter to Kink.com’s longstanding reputation as the progressive man’s (or woman’s) BDSM site — a company with strong worker protections, and one that “upholds an ironclad set of values to foster an environment that is safe, sane, and consensual,” according to the official synopsis of Kink, a 2013 James Franco-produced, Sundance-approved documentary about the company.

BuzzFeed News contacted several Kink performers, and those who responded said that the allegations detailed in the suits don’t match their own experiences at the 18-year-old studio. Madelyn Monroe, who appears in several Kink videos, told BuzzFeed News that she was “shocked” by the lawsuits, and that Kink.com “follows protocol more than anybody. They’re really on their shit.” Another, Roxanne Rae, told BuzzFeed News in an email that Kink is “the best and most professional company I've ever worked for.”

Mona Wales, who has performed in more than a dozen videos for Kink’s Public Disgrace series — including one at the center of the ex-employee lawsuit — said the same. “People are not running around like maniacs raping each other,” she told BuzzFeed News. “That’s just not what goes down in my day-to-day existence. I would not be a part of that community.”

“Kink.com is about the safest place to make a BDSM porn,” she said.

In interviews with BuzzFeed News, Karen Tynan, the lawyer defending Kink.com in all four cases, characterized the lawsuits as frivolous and not reflective of the company’s record as an employer. The suits represented by Ribera were already dealt with as workers' compensation claims previously filed, said Tynan. “I think that having one employee sue you every 10 to 15 years is a pretty good batting average."

However, both Tynan and Stabile also expressed regret that Fires and Blue did not feel comfortable coming forward earlier. “We have quite a few cameras in the building,” said Tynan. “We have security in the building, and we would expect that if any model ever felt that they were criminally assaulted,” that Kink.com could help. The Armory deletes the footage from its indoor and outdoor cameras after seven days, unless the company is “notified of an issue” or receives a police request.

In the next few days, Kink.com plans on releasing new shooting guidelines as well as an update to its Model Bill of Rights, “establishing clearer, and perhaps anonymous, ways for performers to report incidents,” said Stabile.

He told BuzzFeed News that LaBeau did not use her safe word on the set where Deen was ejected. “Maybe because she was too scared, or she was stunned. That’s when we rely on the director or the crew to call the safe word for them.” Derek Pierce, an actor and director, told Vocativ that he asked Deen to leave the scene after he saw LaBeau mouth the words “Help me.”

“When you’re dealing with BDSM, you’re dealing with physical contact, pain, and violence and it can be difficult in the moment to say where does consensual activity turn into cruelty,” said Stabile. “One thing we talk about it all the time is how does commerce affect consent.”

Typically on a BDSM porn shoot, in addition to a safe word, models will fill out a checklist indicating which sex acts they’re comfortable with, sometimes referred to as a “no” list. Kink.com also conducts on-camera interviews after a shoot where performers can talk about the experience. There’s a financial incentive for exit interviews as well since credit card processors have restrictive rules for online porn, including concerns about consent.

Chris Hondros / Getty Images

Plush Talent, a New York City-based agency representing adult film stars, recently started giving new clients a welcome guide to the porn industry. Along with tips on social media (“Twitter is a must have for every porn star, period.”) and taking photos for producers (“Don’t use filters”) the guide has a section on “Reputation.” It begins: “The adult industry is a lot smaller than you think and everyone talks, especially if they run into a problem with someone. What I tell the girls is, they are to act like robots …. Little adorable performer robots.”

Telling women to be well-behaved may sound repressive, said Kelli Roberts, the 19-year industry veteran who wrote it, but her intention was to warn female performers to let their agents handle on-set issues. The guide even suggests that if an issue arises, they pretend to go to the bathroom to make the call.

Roberts, who serves as kind of den mother/advocate for young women in the industry, said on-set issues tend toward “jackass producers who try and change what they agreed to at the last minute,” like one director who booked a model for a blow job scene then asked her to perform in rape fantasy once she was on location, or adding new partners to a scene last minute.

Her advice is a reminder that on-set “issues” in the porn business are common enough that models literally need a guidebook to help navigate them, and that there’s a wide gulf between what happens on paper and what happens on set.

That ambiguity extends far beyond respecting agreements about what people are willing to do on camera. In interviews with dozens of performers, producers, directors, and agents, BuzzFeed News found that not only are avenues for reporting sexual assault on a porn set unclear — it’s even a point of contention whether such assaults are common. Many described the industry as a close-knit community that bands together to drive out bad actors, where assault is rare and consequences for it unforgiving.

Many also argued such an environment leaves performers, especially those new to the industry, vulnerable to abuse, with little formal recourse if something goes wrong. And the events of recent weeks have shone a harsh spotlight on the industry and one of porn’s few household names, who has been accused of — and vehemently denied — sexual assault against co-stars and fellow performers dating back years.

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

Since late November, nine women have claimed that James Deen sexually assaulted them, quickly elevating the issue from the insular porn community to the national stage.

Two of the allegations were related to incidents said to have occurred in his personal life, but the others allegedly took place in a professional context, at a shoot or in a porn studio — during and after a scene. None of Deen’s accusers formally reported the alleged assaults at the time; in the instances where the women did speak up in the moment, neither the studio nor the director investigated further.

The lack of reporting is a red flag, many believe. “The question I think our industry has to ask ourselves is why did the women feel that they wouldn’t be heard or why didn’t they feel safe coming forward?” Diane Duke, CEO of the Free Speech Coalition, a trade association for adult film producers, told BuzzFeed News. “The avenues are there,” she continued. “Why don’t people feel comfortable using them?”

In contrast, the industry’s response to the women going public — long after the fact and without the involvement of authorities — has been unequivocal. “He’s the biggest performer in the industry,” said Eric John, a longtime actor and producer. “And they blacklisted him.”

Fabrizio Bensch / Reuters

Mark Spiegler, a prominent adult film talent manager dubbed the “Ari Emanuel of porn” by The Hollywood Reporter, explained how agents and other non-performers (such as directors and studio owners) help protect actors from sexual predators and sexual exploitation.

Spiegler tells his clients, many of whom do hardcore and BDSM work, to contact the agency if they are asked to do anything on set not agreed upon beforehand. “I tell ‘em, if anything changes, call us,” he said. “We’re there to help you, and also we’re there to look out for you.”

While Spiegler has never had an incident where a performer required a trip to hospital or the involvement of police, there have been times when performers get bruised or visibly injured, despite a prior agreement that they wouldn’t be marked in any way.

“They try to adhere to the girls’ limits, but sometimes you might get a little mark and they can’t work the next day, because the director doesn’t want to shoot them,” Spiegler said. If a flogging scene, for example, leaves a girl marked and she loses work, the studio may compensate the performer upwards of a few hundred dollars for the loss, according to Spiegler.

Kink, a high-profile BDSM studio, confirmed it has paid compensation in the “rare instance” where a performer has lost work.

Occasionally, the industry’s attitude toward consent mirrors the mainstream reaction to intimate partner violence or sexual assault. Even advocates for performers sometimes place the burden on women to speak up in the moment.

“Unfortunately what a lot of girls do in the biz — a scene will get a bit too aggressive — instead of them vocalizing on the set, the girls keep their mouth shut, then they call the agent afterwards and I’m like, ‘Well did you ever use the safe word?’” said Shy Love, a performer and founder of the talent agency The VIP Connect.

“Then I have to curse out the director,” Love told BuzzFeed News, “but at the same time you have to yell at the girl. She had the opportunity to give the safe word.”

Young women who enter the industry are coming “into a different lifestyle,” said Love, and that can discourage speaking up. “They see a lot of money and they think if they say something, they’ll lose that money. In their head, they believe that.”

Mario Anzuoni / Reuters

Bad behavior can begin well before a model steps on set. In the past few weeks, Roberts said three actresses had called her to complain about a director for a major porn studio who is running a Los Angeles “model house” — the term for shared living quarters where performers stay while traveling for work — where “you have to sleep with the guy who runs it.”

Roberts mentioned the predatory director on an industry forum and was immediately threatened. In the online discussion about improving safeguards she was told to “shut the fuck up.” Later she received a message warning that someone was passing around her real name and address. “I’ve been in this business 19 years, [so] that doesn’t affect me as much, but I do think about the 18- or 19-year-old girls,” she said.

“Our industry loves to say we empower females,” said Roberts, “and then behind the scenes we have to keep them in line.”

Still, Roberts said assault was very rare. “In terms of society, we’re off the charts low.” In nearly two decades, she had only heard of three rapes. In one of those cases, Roberts said she made the mistake of telling the actress to go to the police rather than the hospital. Although the women was “brutally beaten, her face was bloody,” Roberts claims the officer listening to her report just stared at the victim’s breasts. A report was filed, but “she just kind of got laughed out of there.” Roberts declined to share the woman’s name because she quit the industry after this incident.

Tobias Schwarz / Reuters

The porn industry is in flux. The internet has had a staggering impact on performers’ earnings and companies’ bottom lines, and fueled demand for what some described as increasingly violent porn.

The industry’s new economics have also led to a consolidation of studios, and in many ways, the business has professionalized. Protocols have been introduced, like model releases in which performers can specify their boundaries, "no" lists where models can name people they don't want to work with, and on-camera exit interviews that formally codify consent. Such standards have been enough, at minimum, to placate the credit card processing companies that require proof of the matter from the studios they do business with.

But porn is still largely self-policed. Regulatory oversight is limited to narrow, sometimes legalistic details such as verifying a performer’s age or keeping proper records. Studios were nearly unanimous in fighting mandatory condom regulations, arguing that anti-porn advocates were behind the supposed health campaign. The years of federal obscenity prosecutions may be over, but the business is still resistant to outside efforts to reform its practices, arguing that government agencies are biased against porn.

Recent investigations into rape in the military, agricultural work, and night-shift janitorial work have demonstrated that sexual assaults in work environments are rarely reported. Across the country, an estimated 68% of sexual assault goes unreported.

Porn performers face added roadblocks. The small size of the community can hurt assault victims as much as it helps, with added pressure not to alienate a studio, director, or actor. If the community acknowledges the claim, however, the power dynamic can flip and alleged predators are sometimes shunned immediately, as was the case with Deen.

Claims seldom make it to the authorities, who have historically stigmatized sex workers. Actors told BuzzFeed News they are especially reluctant to come forward if it means facing the false notion that porn performers are “unrapeable.”

Self-policing means that standards vary. Models may have "no" lists with the names of performers they don't want to work with. Some studios, like Kink.com, have security guards present during the filming. Others rely on the production staff or talent department. Exit interviews also depend on the studio. Kink asks for feedback from performers on camera and off camera; others have a more informal approach. In a producer’s mind, those interviews are a safe space to air grievances.

Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, emphasized the distinction between “traditional” adult film studios and some of the more extreme, BDSM production houses. Eric John, who works almost exclusively works on “traditional” shoots, said that Kink shoots are simply “higher stakes” — a lot more can go wrong when chains and whips are involved. “The likelihood of a limit being pushed on a normal boy/girl shoot is so much less.”

Dee Severe, founder of the fetish production company Severe Sex, sees things differently. She was appalled by the stories she heard voiced in the wake of Deen allegations, but said the type of pornography was not the problem. “All anyone on our set has to do is say ‘hold,’” said Severe. “It would make me horrified to think that someone was having a bad time.” Her studio produces instructional DVDs where consent is a central theme. “It’s kind of an easy answer to blame the BDSM community,” she said.

Both Severe and John, however, stressed that shoots were “a very structured environment,” as he put it. “I have never been on a set where someone said a specific thing and the person did a thing anyway. It wouldn’t happen.” According to John, what’s more common are “self-corrections” like “That’s too rough," or "That’s the wrong angle.”

Michaela Rehle / Reuters

Studios and directors are quick to bring up the model releases and exit interviews as proof of the industry’s progressiveness. However, those safeguards were initially designed to protect producers, not performers.

Lawrence G. Walters, a First Amendment lawyer and longtime counsel for adult film studios, said release forms were created 20 years go to help clients comply with the law. There has been “substantial litigation” around the forms, he said, but most cases were about enforceability — where a model argued she was intoxicated when she signed the document or that English was not her first language — or privacy and publicity rights.

In a similar vein, on-camera exit interviews became more prevalent during “the reality porn phenomenon” in the late '90s, said Walters. He pointed to a series called Bang Bus, shot by a large production company called BangBros. The films showed “a bus going around to pick up neighborhood girls,” said Walters, and “the public believed it hook, line, and sinker, and thought these things were really happening.”

It was around that time that companies became “motivated to make sure that they retained evidence” that the shoots were staged and the performers consenting. The exit interviews, he said, had “the side effect of protecting performers who had an issue or concern.”

But Roberts was dubious about a performer’s ability to speak freely during an exit interview, even when they’re not on camera. “If some guy sat in front of you with a paycheck,” she said, “how honest do you think that off-camera interview is?”

In addition to the release, federal regulations state that models have to fill out a 2257 form, which requires producers of sexually explicit material to get proof of age. Kink.com’s version of the form (embedded below) also requires models to sign a number of wide-ranging waivers, including releasing the producer and his employer from sexual harassment claims and “injuries (both physical and emotional).”

The nature of the porn industry influences what types of legal claims can be made, attorney Sonia L. Smallets told BuzzFeed. Smallets is representing the plaintiff in a harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit against Kink.com. “There’s no legit reason for your co-worker to be naked if you’re working in a bank,” she explained, but just because the bar may be higher in porn, “it doesn’t mean than an entire industry gets a free pass.”

Harassment issues are more “difficult to sort out,” in sex work, said Smallets, “but a sexual assault is, by definition, an act done without your consent. Nobody consents to being sexually assaulted.”

Michaela Rehle / Reuters

Mi scusi, mi scusi!

Magnifico!

Instagram: @thequietrevolutions

View Entire List ›

Noel Tock / Via Flickr: noelinthebahamas

Megan Osinski is a 27-year-old operations manager at a Los Angeles pet product company; like many women in L.A., she uses ride-hail a few times a week — but she only ever uses Lyft. "I've had friends who've had Uber drivers save their address and come back later,” Osinksi told BuzzFeed News. “I've been in a car before and a driver has said, 'You shouldn't wear that unless you want someone to have sex with you.'"

At this point, Osinski has taken to trying to convince her friends not to use Uber: "Whenever someone says they are taking Uber I will always tell them to check out Lyft instead, usually saying that the price is cheaper and the drivers aren't as creepy."

Osinski's not the only person who's adopted Lyft as a sort of conscious consumer choice. In interviews with more than a dozen women in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Austin — the cities where Lyft has had the biggest market share — the prevailing sentiment seemed to be that people think Lyft is the lesser of two evils — whether or not they actually have much evidence to support the theory.

"This could just be really good PR, but I think Lyft is friendlier than Uber," Rita Rausch, a 25-year-old law firm coordinator living in Los Angeles, told BuzzFeed News, adding that the service "seems to be more grassroots."

"Uber is like Walmart and Lyft is more like Target," said Chloe Feller, a 20-year-old video producer from Los Angeles. "I don't shop at Walmart because of their business practices and how they treat their employees ... I tell people who are visiting, don't take Uber, take Lyft."

Indeed, whether by virtue of its strategic silence on policy issues, its underdog position as the second in the market, or those fuzzy pink mustaches, Lyft seems to enjoy a reputation as a kinder, gentler ride-hail company. But it takes two to race to the bottom, and on a number of policy issues the two companies are more alike than they are different. Both rely on an army of contract labor, both have tussled with local governments, and both have far from spotless records on rider and driver safety.

Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News published screenshots of Uber’s internal customer complaint tracking database that revealed that the company has thousands of support tickets containing the phrases “rape” and “sexual assault.” While it's true that there have been fewer cases of alleged sexual assault by Lyft drivers in the press than there have been by Uber drivers, that company has not been immune from sexual assault and harassment allegations either. (And, of course, there are fewer Lyft drivers to begin with.)

In February, a University of North Florida student sued Lyft, alleging that her driver had sexually assaulted her. And in November, Austin police stated that they had received seven complaints about alleged sexual assaults from ride-sharing drivers — five Uber drivers and two Lyft drivers.

"It feels like Lyft has very little politics, and Uber has bad ones."

But perhaps the strongest evidence that the two companies are not so far apart on safety came in the way they acted in concert to shoot down a law in Austin that would have required drivers to be fingerprinted. When voters in Austin upheld a fingerprinting requirement for ride-hail drivers, the vote was a major defeat for both companies. Together, the two companies poured more than $8.6 million into the fight (orders of magnitude more than the estimated $100,000 their opposition spent). Following the defeat, both companies ceased operations in the city.

The fingerprinting rule in Austin could soon be repeated all over the country. Atlanta, Chicago, and California's Public Utilities Commission, among others, are considering similar measures. And that these rules are coming from legislation — rather than from voluntary measures within the companies themselves — indicates that Uber and Lyft may be politically united, even as the businesses battle it out for market supremacy.

Much of Lyft's positioning may be the result of savvier — or at least quieter — PR. While Uber has made an M.O. out of entering new markets and clashing with local regulators, Lyft's strategy has typically been to follow, entering the same markets with less noise and less friction. In 2014, when Uber saw major fallout from revelations that its employees could (and in some cases did) track individual riders, Lyft silently removed its own employees' ability to do the same.

And while Lyft's co-founder and President John Zimmer has largely flown under the radar, suffice it to say that Uber's has not. Feller, the L.A. video producer, called Uber CEO Travis Kalanick "very self-serving and negligent," a sentiment that was echoed by several other women who spoke to BuzzFeed News.

“Honestly, I don’t know that much about Lyft," said Toni Rocca, who lives in Oakland, California. "If it came out that Lyft was doing something awful, I wouldn’t really be shocked. For all I know, Lyft could do something egregious that I know nothing about. It’s been very public that Uber has done some egregious stuff. Lyft flies under the radar, I think … Ultimately, it feels like Lyft has very little politics, and Uber has bad ones.”

Michael Pelletz is a Boston entrepreneur who saw a gap in the market for a safer ride-hail product, one that’s functionally the same as Uber or Lyft but which requires more stringent background checks and — crucially — is for women only. In March, the local business blog BostInno published a piece about Pelletz's fledgling company SafeHer. After that — and with what Pelletz said was no effort on the part of the company — a grassroots movement in support of it arose on social media, pegged to SafeHer's launch date, April 19 (Pelletz has since pushed it back to the fall to keep up with overwhelming demand). Tellingly, the hashtag was #DeleteUber.

Pelletz, for his part, said that his market research revealed the two companies to be “more or less the same,” business practices–wise. So why is Uber perceived any differently than Lyft? As Pelletz said, “Uber has no problem acting like the big bully on the block."

Back in Austin two weekends ago, Lisa Kettyle, a 37-year-old musician and pedicab driver, voted in favor of keeping the fingerprinting measure in place — even though Uber and Lyft had said they would leave Austin if the rule was voted down. "I think both are huge corporations that want to get around the regulations and make as much money as they can without regard for drivers or passengers," she wrote in an email. "If they cared about their drivers and passengers, they wouldn't be threatening to pull out of our market."

See if you can make it through the night as one of the more than 6,500 homeless people living in San Francisco.

Between the thousands of San Franciscans without a place to live and the dozens of shelters meant to provide them housing lies a massive, many-armed social-services organism bound by complex rules and layers of bureaucracy. One wrong turn or a small procedural mistake can mean the difference between a warm bed for the night and sleeping on the street.

This Choose Your Own Adventure simulation is intended to replicate what happens after a person — in this case, a domestic violence survivor and mother of two — first loses their home.

The scenarios laid out here are personalized to a fictional (though all-too-common) situation, but they are based on BuzzFeed News reporting into every step of the city's emergency-shelter system. If you were to end up homeless in San Francisco tonight, chances are good your experience would look a lot like the simulation below.

Josh Edelson / AFP / Getty

View Entire List ›

Brent Thompson, 43

Brett Thompson / Via linkedin.com

Officer Brent Thompson, 43, was the only Dallas Area Rapid Transport (DART) officer killed in the attack.

DART tweeted that he joined the force in 2009 and is the first of its officers to be killed in the line of duty.

In a statement, DART said:

As you can imagine, our hearts are broken. This is something that touches every part of our organization. We have received countless expressions of support and sympathy from around the world through the evening. We are grateful for every message. Thank you.

DART Chief of Police James D. Spiller told reporters from ABC affiliate WFAA Channel 8 and CNN that Thompson married a fellow officer just weeks ago. In an interview with MSNBC, Spiller described Thompson as a "great officer. He has served admirably during his time here at [the agency."

According to his LinkedIn profile, Thompson joined DART after spending four years working as an international police liaison for DynCorp in Iraq, where he oversaw American officers training their Iraqi counterparts.

The profile states he was responsible for the day-to-day operations of American police officers working in training environments in the country in an area spanning from Baghdad to the southern border with Kuwait.

He trained at Navarro Police Academy in Corsicana, Texas, graduating in 2004.

Patrick Zamarripa, 32

Via facebook.com

Patrick Zamarripa was a 32-year-old husband and father who had survived three military tours in Iraq, according to the Washington Post, which reported that he joined the Dallas Police Department about five years ago.

Zamarripa was an avid Dallas sports fan and dedicated father to his 2-year-old daughter, Lyncoln. On Thursday night, Zamarripa's girlfriend, Kristy Villasenor, was at a Texas Rangers game with their daughter. Zamarripa was also "like a father" to Villasenor's 8-year-old son, his family told news outlets, and they would frequent sports games together.

According to Zamarripa's stepmother, Maria, Lyncoln recently learned to talk — a fact that delighted her father.

“We were just happy to hear her putting words together and he had a big smile on his face,” she told the New York Daily News.

Zamarripa's father, Rick, told the Washington Post that his son had returned from his tours of duty to "protect people here — and they take his life."

“All this fighting, all this racism, this must stop,” Rick added while speaking to The Guardian.

“You always think of somebody that would die in war or get killed in Iraq in a foreign country. But not here,” Maria Zamarripa told the Daily News.

On Twitter, where he described himself as "addicted to the thrill of this job," though his father told The Guardian that, “After being in Iraq, he never spoke about policing being dangerous,” Rick said. “Maybe he thought about it in the back of his mind, but he was always positive, always hoping the best thing would happen.”

Zamarripa frequently posted about his daughter, his work with the police department — including patrolling anti-police protests — and in support of other fallen officers.

Vice Admiral Robin Braun, chief of Navy Reserve, on Friday released a statement in response to Zamarripa's death and the "horrific loss of life" in Dallas.

They and their families will remain in our thoughts and prayers.

On Friday, Joey Gallo of the Texas Rangers also posted on Instagram that he had met Zamarripa earlier this year.

Instagram: @joeygallo24

A couple months ago @nomazara26 and I were walking down the street in downtown Dallas. When an officer stopped us, Mazara and I immediately became nervous, "I know who you guys are" he said. "Joey Gallo and Nomar Mazara, can I get a picture with you guys please?" It was definitely a first for me and Nomar to have an officer, a true hero, want to meet us. His name is Patrick Zamarripa, one of the officers killed in last nights shootings in Dallas. I'll never forget how kind and down to Earth he was. We ended up having a 15 minute conversation about sports with him. He was an avid Rangers fan. But more importantly a great person, and family man. Please keep Patrick, and all the officers affected and their families in our prayers today. #prayfordallas

Valerie Zamarripa, Patrick's mother, arrived at the Southwest Division of the Dallas Police Department just after 2 p.m. on Sunday.

She exited the police in which she arrived car calmly, flanked by a family member on her left and then a female officer on her right. And then she cried. Covering her face, it had seemed as though she did not want to believe that the picture on the far right of the memorial, a blue candle lit beneath it, was her baby.

She approached the makeshift memorial silently, only crying. Another family member placed a large photo of him down on the ground, another candle in her left hand.

She was greeted by officers, one who hugged her tightly and said, "He was a good man — a great man.

Passing a sign that read, "Heroes — they were the minute that put on the blue" they went inside.

According to the Washington Post, Michael Krol was a 40-year-old Detroit-area native who had graduated from the Dallas Police Academy in 2008.

“He was a big guy and had a big heart, and he was a really caring person and wanted to help people,” Krol's brother-in-law, Brian Schoenbaechler, told the Post. “It doesn’t seem real."

"He knew the danger of the job but he never shied away from his duty," his mother, Susan Ehlke of Redford, Michigan, said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Before moving to Dallas and joining the DPD, Krol had worked as a hospital security guard and in the Wayne County jail system, according to media reports.

“We are saddened by the loss of the dedicated officers in Dallas — one of whom was a former member of this agency — and also the wounding of the other officers,” Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon said in a statement to Detroit News. “Those officers made the ultimate sacrifice and died honoring their oaths to protect and serve. Our thoughts and prayers go out to their families and also the Dallas Police Department.”

Michael Smith joined the Dallas Police Department in 1989 after graduating from Lamar University, according to the Dallas Police Association. He was also an Army Ranger prior to joining the department.

Smith leaves behind a wife of 17 years and two daughters, aged 14 and 10, according to a GoFundMe page established by family friends to help pay for his funeral and other expenses.

In February 2009, he received the "Cop's Cop" award from the Dallas Police Association. "During his career, it is noted that he comes to work with a positive attitude and strives for excellence," the DPA noted in its newsletter. "He has attacked each problem given to him to the best of his ability and then some."

During his career, Smith worked in narcotics, as well as with "at risk" children, developing a racquetball program for kids at his local YMCA, according to the DPA.

More than a decade ago, Smith was attacked by a gang member when he intervened to protect his partner, suffering an injury to his hand.

"He is recognized as conscientious, dedicated, and professional," the DPA said.

Lorne Ahrens, 48

A 14-year veteran of the department, he leaves behind a wife — herself a Dallas police detective — and a 10-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. According to the Washington Post, he died at Baylor Hospital after undergoing surgery.

Ahrens' father-in-law, Charlie Buckingham, told the Post that before joining the DPD, his son-in-law had been a semiprofessional football player and a California sheriff's deputy.

In a Facebook post, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department mourned their former colleague, who served in the department between 1991 and 2002.

"He is remembered by the LASD for serving at the Lennox and Lancaster Sheriff’s Stations as a highly regarded and respected public servant," the Facebook post read. "His colleagues today at the LASD are describing him as the type of person who always had a smile on his face and greeted you with kind regard."

“Lorne was a big guy with an even bigger heart," Captain Merrill Ladenheim said.

When he left the Sheriff's department as a law enforcement technician on January 23, 2002, he began his career with the Dallas Police Department just two days later, according to the LASD.

“There are very few officers I’ve met who are more passionate about doing the job right than that man,” former Dallas County prosecutor Timothy S. Rodgers told the New York Times.

LINK: Here’s What It Was Like Minute-By-Minute During The Dallas Ambush

LINK: What We Know About Those Injured In The Dallas Attack

Ellen Cushing / BuzzFeed News

Drive about 25 miles east from Reno, Nevada, along vacant, sweaty desert highway, and soon enough you’ll see it, white edges rising from red dust like a giant domino plunked down on Mars.

Just over 14 percent completed, Tesla’s new battery factory already operates on a scale so big that the company had to make up a new word for it: “Gigafactory,” because apparently “factory” wasn’t quite grandiose enough.

When construction is over, this will be the largest building in the world by footprint — large enough, as Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk is fond of saying, to fit 93 747s, one Vatican City, or 50 billion hamsters, whichever image you find most evocative. (I like the hamsters.) By 2018, it will, according to Tesla, produce more lithium-ion battery cells than were produced by every factory on the face of the planet in 2013.

It will also be a proving ground for one of the already audacious company’s biggest moonshots, manufacturing the batteries that will power the Model 3. This is Tesla’s first foray into mass-market cars, and the vehicle that will — or won’t — bring electric vehicles to the mainstream. Last year, Tesla produced 50,000 cars. In 2018, it aims to produce 500,000. That’s a lot of batteries, and it’s a lot of ambition for a company that has a long history of missing its deadlines, and that is currently under federal investigation after an Ohio man fatally drove into a tractor trailer while using his Model S’s “autopilot” mode.

But on Friday night, the factory was mostly just a really surreal venue for a really big party. About 2,000 Tesla superfans had been summoned here to the high desert to celebrate the Gigafactory’s opening — why wait until 2018? — and boy, had they heeded the call. By 4:30 p.m. or so, more than an hour before the event was to start, the line of Teslas and charter buses waiting to drive onto the grounds stretched more than mile down a road aptly called “Electric Avenue.” The Teslas had been driven in by their owners from all over North America, the charter buses from a downtown Reno climbing gym-slash-boutique hotel, where the company had reserved a block of rooms for party guests. (That afternoon, its lobby boasted a massive, slowly melting ice sculpture in the shape of Tesla’s signature lethal-looking “T.” Lots of people took selfies in front of it.) Bus riders took video and chattered about the cars surrounding them, pointing out rare paint jobs and models. The line was so long that a little boy in a tiny sport coat had to hop out of his father’s Model X and take a leak on the highway’s tree-bare shoulder.

Walk across a dusty pavement runway, stand in a roped-off line, get a badge, follow the thudding bass 'til you turn a corner, and you’ll enter a white tent about twice the size of a basketball court. It had been erected just for the occasion, at a reported price of $300,000. The company had trucked in the full Fancy Party starter pack: plush, sand-colored carpet, purple and blue lights, low-slung, immaculate white leather couches, tabletop terrariums, full-size palm trees. Waiters circled with ham and grilled cheese sandwiches, mozzarella and tomato salad, and those little wooden-spoon thingies filled with tuna crudo.

Ellen Cushing / BuzzFeed News

Tesla PR’s department repeatedly invoked Burning Man in its press pitch, but save from the setting and possibly the money, the vibe was more Dad’s Night Out than techno-futurist bacchanal. Average age: 50s. Prevailing demeanor: Unchecked earnestness. Unofficial dress code: Polo tucked into jeans. Most popular snack: Salami. Line chatter revolved around specs and components and what exactly do you think is going into the cathodes? About 300 yards away, the factory remained running all evening — about 1,000 humans and untold robots staff are staffing it for the time being, and they seemed more-or-less unbothered by the packs of people walking through on guided tours, taking photos.

“Some guys go out and get their Harley when they have a midlife crisis. I got a Tesla.”

Near the entrance, attendees posed gleefully in front of Powerwalls — poster-sized, wall-mounted battery packs — the way Disney World visitors might in front of Cinderella's Castle. At the tent’s far edge, they examined a scale architectural model of the finished factory with scientific fastidiousness, taking notes and shooting video. They wore T-shirts with slogans like “Don’t Mess With Tesla” and “Occupy Mars” and “Watch Elon Go!" and “Tesla: It’s Not Just a Passion, It’s My Obsession.” They lined up eagerly for tours of a partially built battery factory and test rides of a car many of them already owned. They beamed.

Ellen Cushing / BuzzFeed News

They had come from Virginia Beach and Chicago and Denmark and Switzerland and, of course, San Francisco, to be here. One guy drove out over four days from Orlando with a fellow Floridian Tesla enthusiast that he’d met in a forum; in the drinks line, over the deep-house remix of “Gimme Shelter” thumping through hidden speakers, he eagerly pulled out his phone to show me a picture of his new vanity plate, which read “Tedsla X.” (His name, he explained helpfully, is Ted.) A handful of customers had flown in from Australia and wore matching "TESLA SYDNEY" T-shirts. They communicated via WhatsApp — and then, once the group grew too large for that platform, Slack — explained a 36-year-old engineer from Canberra. He had flown 30 delay-beset hours to the sweltering middle of nowhere for the weekend, leaving his partner at the hotel for the evening because he had just one ticket. But his only complaint was about the car he drove in from the airport: “I rented a Porsche. It’s way slummier than my Tesla.”

Aside from entrepreneur and noted Tesla fan Jason Calacanis, nearly everyone there — or at least those I talked to — had fairly normal upper-middle-class, white-collar jobs: Lawyer, doctor, web designer. They weren’t exactly what one Midwestern attendee described as “The Tesla stereotype: Rich, 1-percenter. California. Greedy douche bag.” By means of comparison, the 2016 Tesla Model S starts at less than $60,000 with federal incentives. The Mercedes-Benz S-Class, another high-tech luxury sedan, starts around $96,000. As Calacanis himself has correctly pointed out, it’s “not exactly a Maybach.” (Those, for the record, start as low as $185,000 or so but can go up to $1,350,000. As much as Teslas have become a symbol of outsize urban wealth, it’s hard to imagine Kanye West driving one around in a music video.)

Ellen Cushing / BuzzFeed News

Many got the invitation because they’d referred five other people to put down deposits on the cars. Others had entered a lottery open to people who already owned Teslas. Still others came as the lucky plus-one to someone who’d won the lottery or made the five referrals. In many of those cases, they’d only ever met their host on forums.

A Chicago-based graphic designer in Tommy Bahama-plaid shirtsleeves had won the lottery. “When you get an invitation like this,” he said, “you go.”

I guess you do. For the uninitiated, however, it’s hard to understand what, exactly, is drop-everything appealing about a high-summer invitation to eat finger salami in the 100-degree heat. One skeptical plus-one compared it to his teenage daughter’s One Direction fandom, but the more popular — and apt — comparison seemed to be early-stage Apple fandom: a community, an identity, a consumer choice made by people who hope it conveys something elemental about themselves.

“It’s like the first time you saw an iPhone,” said Kevin, a self-described “gadget guy,” “Elon nerd,” and father of two from Chicago.

Chris Alessi II, a single father living in Madison, Wisconsin, offered an analogy. “A gas car is like a Nokia flip phone. A Tesla is like an iPhone 6S. It’s a completely different experience.”

Alessi, who wore a fedora and goatee, was affable and talkative. He bought his first Tesla — number 9846, he said, proudly — in 2013, after “getting rid of the ex-wife.” Shortly thereafter, he began filming videos about his car and putting them on YouTube.

“Some guys go out and get their Harley when they have a midlife crisis,” he said. “I got a Tesla.”

Ellen Cushing / BuzzFeed News

Three years later, his channel has more than 14,600 subscribers, and he supports his family on its ad revenue, plus a small amount of side work in scooter repair, videography, live video streaming, and chauffeur services, according to his business card, which he hands out readily and which includes an Uber promo code on the back. Over the course of a 20-minute conversation, fans repeatedly interrupted him to say hello, asking after his sons and posing for selfies with him. “I’ve shaken so many hands tonight I probably shouldn’t even be touching my food,” he said, gesturing to a plate full of ham and cheese.

“The Tesla is safe, economical, functional,” he said. “Pure bliss to drive. It’s just purely superior in every way, shape, or form.”

Pure bliss. For all of this company’s high-minded environmentalist ambition — for its multiple master plans and Musk’s discussion of ending global reliance on fossil fuels — the prevailing sense under the tent was Teslas are superior simply because they are really fucking fun to drive. If this is environmentalism, it’s a messy kind of environmentalism, one that has less in common with granola than it does with, say, Soylent. “I can tell you that there’s more Republicans driving Teslas than there are Democrats,” Alessi told me. “I don’t drive them because I want to save the planet. I drive them because they’re a superior vehicle.” The appeal is not exactly that Teslas are better for the environment, it’s that the future happens to be in electric vehicles, and these people want to be first to the future, whatever it looks like. Environmentalism isn’t the end, it’s the means. Have some more salami.

“For a long time, [electric vehicles] have been associated with, like, Ralph Nader,” Kevin, the Chicagoan, said. “But the Tesla isn’t a compromise car. It’s fast as hell, can go far, quiet, safe. This feels like a vision of the future.”

“In a good way,” he hastened to add.

Around 9 p.m., Musk took the stage, bathed in light, for a short speech. He went over statistics about the factory’s size and answered a few questions, a chorus of whoops and hollers filling up every pause.

Ellen Cushing / BuzzFeed News

“The Tesla mission is to accelerate the world through sustainable energy,” he said. “It matters to the world. It matters if it happens sooner or later. It matters if it happens at scale.”

“It’s about making enough electric cars, enough stationary battery packs that it actually moves the needle from a global carbon-production perspective — that it actually does really change the world,” Musk continued, with all the audacity of an ice sculpture in the desert. “It has to be big because the world is big.”

“Beam me up, Elon!” someone shouted from the front.

Musk smiled. Here he was in a temple bigger than the Vatican, surrounded by people who believe in his vision so much they came here to see it 14-percent built. You’d be smiling, too, but of course it helps when your handlers remind you to.

By 11 p.m. or so, not a soul was on the dance floor for a funk cover of “Get Your Freak On,” but the line for factory tours still snaked 40 or 50 long through the ballroom. A guy wearing a matching blazer, pants, and T-shirt in Tesla’s blood-red chatted up a Chinese car vlogger toting a massive video rig. By midnight, an hour before the party was set to end, the room was nearly empty and the bar staff had begun packing up. No one was here for the free drinks, anyway.

Ellen Cushing / BuzzFeed News

They wore T-shirts with slogans like "Don’t Mess With Tesla” and “Occupy Mars” and “Watch Elon Go!"

Trump in Albuquerque on Sunday.

Evan Vucci / AP

LAS VEGAS and ALBUQUERQUE — Nine days before Election Day, Donald Trump’s supporters had a message for him: Keep being Trump, but please don’t screw up this opportunity.

BuzzFeed News attended two rallies Trump held Sunday: one in Las Vegas at the Venetian hotel, and another that filled an aviation hangar in New Mexico, right outside the Albuquerque airport.

His backers were as invigorated as ever, especially in light of the renewed email headlines plaguing Hillary Clinton. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” supporters said they would advise their candidate, who gleefully hammered Clinton all weekend over the email scandal.

But many also said they hope Trump, who is known for his off-the-cuff remarks, keeps his cool and stays on the email script in the few remaining days until Nov. 8.

“Don’t tweet nothing for the next 10 days,” Chad Towe said he would advise the candidate. Towe had driven into Las Vegas from Sacramento earlier this week to volunteer at Trump’s rally.

Hope Villegas, a 43-year-old who lives in Albuquerque, attended the rally there wearing a shirt that said “Deplorable Me,” which featured a Minion-like character with Trump’s hair. She said Trump should “just leave everything alone.”

Priya Anand/BuzzFeed News

“If they come out with some hard hits, because they’re going to, just don’t talk about it,” she said. “But that’s not his nature. He gets hit, he hits back.”

Many supporters interviewed by BuzzFeed News said their main guidance to Trump would be to remain on brand as the election draws nearer. But those people also said he must focus on remaining on message so as to not alienate voters last-minute.

Norman Beerhorst, a racecar engineer who happened to be in town from Indiana for the Las Vegas rally, told BuzzFeed if he could give Trump any advice, it would be to “think about his remarks before he says them.” Like what? The “guy talk,” he said, referring to the video that surfaced earlier this month, in which Trump said he can kiss women without consent and “grab them by the pussy” because “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”

Beerhorst said he “knows a lot of women who were voting for Trump are hesitant now.”

In Albuquerque, Ben Mcelyea, who is retired from the military, echoed a similar sentiment.

“Don’t talk about any scandal stuff. Don’t talk about women. Don’t talk about Anthony Weiner. Just talk about the issues,” Mcelyea said. “Anything can come up. I wouldn’t change anything. You’re in your last week.”

Ron and Christy Anderson of Rio Rancho, New Mexico, said Trump should "stick to his guns" for the next week and a half until Nov. 8.

Priya Anand/BuzzFeed News

“Stay on topic,” said Liz Brown, a 60-year-old from Alamogordo, New Mexico, at the Albuquerque rally. “Talk about Hillary a lot.”

“Keep calm,” said Sunny Rush, 41, from Rio Rancho, New Mexico. “Be persistent with closed borders, vetting, and background checks.”

When Trump last visited Albuquerque in May, the rally became violent as protesters and police clashed. Demonstrators threw rocks and bottles at police officers, and burned shirts. This time, while Trump supporters waited in line, organizers told them not to touch any protesters, and to alert law enforcement if they spotted anyone who clearly wasn’t there to support Trump.

Later, protesters blew siren horns outside the gate, and police formed a barrier around the hangar entrance.

Further down the street, a small scuffle broke out.

There were also some testy moments at the rally in Las Vegas. Matt Fox, who attended the rally but is from Palm Springs, California, shouted slurs at cameras.

Fox told BuzzFeed News Trump should “keep toeing the line that Hillary’s a criminal.”

As for Trump’s messaging over the next week and a half, Mike Henneborn, who works in construction and lives in the outskirts of Albuquerque, said he thinks Trump has improved at “not flying off the handle.”

“When he first started, he used to get a little excited and go off script,” Henneborn said. “He’s done really good at wrangling that in and keeping control of himself.”

Priya Anand reported from Albuquerque. Ellen Cushing reported from Las Vegas.

Dreamforce is an annual conference hosted by the software company Salesforce. It’s a massive event that tends to subsume downtown San Francisco — blocking off city streets, clogging traffic, booking up Airbnbs, filling up every over-the-top nightclub in the vicinity. This year, Salesforce even commandeered a cruise ship, docked in the San Francisco Bay, to act as a floating hotel.

That accommodating attitude extends to food offered to conference-goers. This year, the spread was so abundant that a nonprofit group called Food Runners San Francisco was able to rescue 4,000 boxed lunches that would otherwise have gone to waste. “That’s only the 4,000 that I know about,” Nancy Hahn, director of operations at Food Runners, told BuzzFeed News. “The year before, it was probably similar,” said Hahn. “Those are the ones that we see; it could be more.”

Excess like that from tech companies is not hard to find. Airbnb, for example, left 1,855 pounds of extra food on the table last year at its annual employee convention called One Airbnb.

Airbnb’s numbers are more precise because the company made a rare move by paying Food Shift, a nonprofit focused on reducing hunger, to manage the recovery. Food Shift’s tally from just one breakfast and lunch during the four-day conference totaled 761 pounds of excess food, including 138 pounds of polenta, 78 pounds of scrambled tofu, 153 pounds of yogurt, 15 pounds of bacon, and nine pounds of Mascarpone cheese. At another recent pickup, from a 140-person tech-company lunch, Hahn found 75 leftover burritos. “How do the amounts get to be so large?” Hahn asked.

Boom times beget decadent behavior, and the only thing flowing more freely than startup funding right now is free food. During the height of the dotcom bubble, companies like Google began offering meals as a perk to maximize productivity from employees who worked long hours. But like other aspects of Silicon Valley culture — hoodies, pingpong tables, sleeping at the office — what was once utilitarian has mutated into parody. “The opulence and the abundance and the excess [of food] is kind of synonymous to what was going on in Rome before the crash,” Dana Frasz, the founder of Food Shift, told BuzzFeed News.

Indeed, if you are employed by a tech company in the Bay Area right now, or invited to their events, the supply of subsidized food within hand’s reach is almost endless. Silicon Valley campuses are now dotted with kitschy food trucks, Indian restaurants, and raw food pop-ups as an alternative to already-bountiful cafeteria buffets. Office micro-kitchens are brimming with free snacks and organic produce, cater waiters offer up artfully arranged hors d’oeuvres at hosted happy hours, fireside chats come with gourmet grazing options, and boxed lunches have been known to contain a fancy cut of meat. Elaborate menus, posted online, change daily. Last Friday’s lunch at Facebook’s Full Circle cafe, for example, was Hunger Games-themed, including dishes with names like Cinna’s Creamy Rosemary Orange Chicken and Prim’s Baked Grape Leaf and Basil Wrapped Goat Cheese. Startups like Zesty, ZeroCater, and Cater2me — middleman between offices and local restaurants and food vendors — have now begun to pop up, most backed by the same venture capital funding that propped up demand in the first place. (Some BuzzFeed offices use ZeroCater as a vendor.) “There’s a lot of pressure to never be caught without,” said Hahn. “No one can be one chip short. Ever.” Caterers have told her, “‘Oh my gosh, you should hear what we hear if we’re one portion short.’”

And all that food — spurred by the fear that anything less than abundance will hurt employee hiring and retention — leads to a lot of food waste.

But this is not another Google bus debacle, during which multibillion dollar tech corporations and their luxury shuttle buses quickly became a symbol of the industry’s indifference toward its neighbors. Silicon Valley has, for the most part, been conscientious about the community when it comes to surplus prepared food. Oftentimes that means signing up for free food-collection services, or partnering with pre-existing charities. According to Hahn, tech companies are the source of roughly 50% of the excess food picked up by Food Runners San Francisco, which now receives enough donations to deliver around 17 to 18 tons of food a week. And at Peninsula Food Runners, which is located in the startup-saturated South Bay, the percentage of surplus from tech companies is around 70%. Founder Maria Yap says hers is the only organization collecting prepared food in the area, so weekly she’s moving around 35,000 pounds of food. “GoDaddy, LinkedIn, a lot of these places have more than one cafeteria — and of course I deal with corporate caterers.”

But while nonprofits told BuzzFeed News they are grateful for all the surplus food, the deluge can be overwhelming. The burden of redistributing corporate spillover falls on agencies that offer their services for free and depend on volunteers. “I’ve heard so many people in the food recovery realm say it’s too much, when you have to send not just one car but three cars to a tech company to pick up what they have leftover in one day,” Frasz told BuzzFeed News. Nonprofits and church groups are overextended.

For-profit entities are entitled to their extravagances, of course. And food waste is a national issue, not unique to the tech industry. A 2012 report from the National Resources Defense Council found that 40% of the food in the United States goes uneaten. But surplus sounds callous from companies who claim to have a better vision for how the world should operate. It’s particularly troubling considering the number of neighbors who go hungry. In Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which encompasses Menlo Park, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale — and the headquarters of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Yahoo — one in four individuals is at risk for hunger. The national average is one in six people. In one of the wealthiest areas of the country that considers itself an incubator for the future, one in three kids are at risk for hunger.

To address the issue, in 2014, Second Harvest Food Bank launched “Stand up for kids,” a campaign co-chaired by Sheryl Sandberg. Second Harvest is the largest food bank in the region, serving 250,000 people a month, but it doesn’t work with prepared food. The agency is mainly seeking funding, and Silicon Valley has been eager to oblige. Tami Cardenas, vice president of development and marketing, said they have also been “trying to appeal to young tech workers,” including a Thanksgiving-themed spoof of Drake’s video for “Hotline Bling.”

Bon Appetit Management Company, which runs cafeterias for Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more, seems headed in the right direction. The company hired a waste specialist who doubled the amount of food recovered in her first year, and Bon Appetit recently announced ambitious company-wide goals for food recovery by 2018. So far this year, its corporate accounts in the Bay Area donated 58,965 pounds of food.

When it comes to surplus food, the pickup and delivery process is about as intricate as Facebook’s daily menus. From big tech companies with an in-house kitchen, Food Runners San Francisco is seeing 12 to 20 trays on a daily basis, said Hahn. “That’s like food for 75 to 100 people. Sometimes the shelters get full. Some shelters don’t take catered food at all. Some of the really large soup kitchens, they’re trying to serve 2,000,” so “40 of this and 50 of that” doesn’t always fit their needs.

“I know this is gonna sound really crazy,” said Hahn, but one of the challenges early on were the lids for foil catering trays. “We would go for pickup and the lids would be nowhere in sight.” The food providers would explain that they took away the lids because “the clients don’t like to see them.”

Peninsula Food Runners’s criteria for free pickups is whether the food would be able to feed 10 people. “They don’t think who is actually eating this,” said Yap. “Come on, you guys, let’s be green about this: Would you want a driver to come out just to get your mayonnaise and ketchup?”

Ironically, the issues plaguing food recovery are the type of problems currently in vogue with startup founders. There’s a two-sided marketplace (donors on one side, shelters and food banks on the other). It requires real-time responsiveness (donations come in at peak hours and prepared food must be delivered in a timely manner). The process is riddled with inefficiencies (mismatch between the size of a donation and the needs of a shelter). The labor force is crowdsourced and fractured (on-demand apps require cheap couriers whereas nonprofits rely on volunteers).

“I make a joke sometimes, ‘Well, there oughta be an app for that!’” said Hahn. “What if when you walked in the office in the morning you [pressed a button] that said ‘Yes, I’m having lunch’ or ‘No, I’m not having lunch today.’” Perhaps, said Hahn, companies were using waste prevention measures. “Sometimes, based on the amounts of food I see, it doesn’t seem like they’re doing that."

Yap built an application called Chow Match to make donations easier. “The programmer happens to be my husband. He was just so tired of me talking about all this inefficiency,” she said. Yap said with more resources she could educate corporations concerned about the liability for donating prepared foods or whether or not there is a tax write-off. (Taxes are a concern with this perk. Last year, the IRS put “employer-provider meals” on its list of top priorities.)

Airbnb tasking Food Shift to manage those extra pounds of mascarpone and bacon is a great example of a successful partnership, Frasz said. For one, based on the feedback loop, waste was reduced by 191 pounds the next day. And secondly, Airbnb was willing to pay for the service.

In June, Food Shift released an in-depth report about waste in Santa Clara county, which includes Cupertino, Palo Alto, and Mountain View. “It exposes the hidden complexities around food recovery,” said Frasz. “I don’t think people realize how under-resourced these people are and how $300 would actually make a big deal.” It’s frustrating, she said, when “the tech company isn’t even willing to pay for the containers.”

instagram.com

LINK: Read more about what Google, Airbnb, Uber, and more do with their food waste here.

Ty Wright / Getty Images

Three weeks after watching their candidate's unexpected victory, Donald Trump's supporters again pulled out their T-shirts and buttons, got in their cars, and packed into a cavernous rally hall to show their support for the outsider turned commander in chief.

They were hopeful, happy, and mostly on-message. Save for the verb tenses and the knot of protesters outside, President-elect Trump's first rally didn't feel all that different from any of candidate Trump's.

John Sedlak, a police officer who'd driven in from nearby Hamilton, said he was "ecstatic. It's been three weeks and he's saved jobs in Louisville and Indiana already, I think he's doing pretty darn good." Standing in the snack bar line, Sedlak named economic issues and "getting tough with ISIS" as his first-day-in-office priorities for Trump.

Jack Clark, a student at nearby Covington High School, told BuzzFeed News he hoped to see Trump repeal Obamacare and bring more jobs to the region. Ethan Appelman, another local high school student, also named jobs as a day-one priority.

Blake Botner drove two and a half hours from a small coal town in southern Kentucky to attend the rally. The president-elect "seems like he could articulate to the American people what we actually think," he said, adding that it was the first presidential debate that swayed him toward Trump. Last month, he played Trump in his high school's mock election, shaving his beard, styling his hair, and practicing his candidate's signature closed-mouth frown. He won by 80%.

Mike Segar / Reuters

"First off, renegotiate some of these trade deals and stuff," Botner suggested when asked about Trump's top priorities. "Start the wall, get to work on Obamacare."

This rally — which took place at the US Bank Arena, home of the minor-league hockey team the Cincinnati Cyclones — was the first of many stops along Trump's post-election, pre-inauguration "Thank You Tour." The rallies come at an interesting moment for a political movement that gained so much of its velocity by defining itself as the underdog, the outsider, the opposition to Hillary Clinton, but which now finds itself in charge and on the inside, with more diffuse enemies to fight. With Trump (soon to be) in the Oval Office, what's a Deplorable to do?

Here in Cincinnati, the answer was: mostly what they were doing before, perhaps a little more quietly. The crowd were no rowdier, no louder, no more empowered (and notably smaller) than similar ones had been at pre-election rallies. The mood was something closer to calm satisfaction than in-your-face jubilance.

There was very little gloating, at least from the audience, nor was there much of the anger — specifically directed at Clinton — that characterized the campaign. Though one man came painted as the stoner meme turned alt-right icon Pepe and many others came covered in Trump-Pence buttons, few wore the HILLARY FOR PRISON T-shirts that were ubiquitous at rallies during the summer and fall. There were no Hillary effigies, no Hillary masks, no calls to "execute her!" In the crowd, people chatted amiably about their families and jobs.

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

Outside, merch hawkers told BuzzFeed News business was roughly as brisk as it had been earlier, though instead of selling T-shirts that said "Adorable Deplorable" and "Hillary Sucks (But Not Like Monica)," they offered ones that showed a content-looking Trump resting inside the presidential seal. One vendor named Art said his current bestseller was a relatively austere long-sleeve shirt that said "Disaster Relief: Trump 2016–2020" on the front and boasted a list of the 29 states Trump won on the back.

About a hundred protesters gathered too, holding signs saying things like "Home of the Reds But We Voted Blue," "Make America Kind Again," and "We Are Still Here." Meg Bruck, a 67-year-old retired social-services worker in a "Black Lives Matter Cincinnati" T-shirt, told BuzzFeed News she spent Nov. 9 "really angry and really determined." She, like many others, had heard about the protest on Facebook. The crowd shouted chants like "education, not deportation" as rally attendees streamed in, and a sole counterprotester who told BuzzFeed News he was "with Jesus, not Trump," shouted, "2-4-6-8, chop off her head and put it on a plate."

Inside — and after short speeches from Vice President-elect Mike Pence and others — Trump stayed mostly on-message too. He talked policy, pushed inclusion, announced his selection of retired General James Mattis as secretary of defense, and steered conspicuously far away from Clinton. But he also frequently went off-script, returning to campaign trail hobbyhorses including the "dishonest" press and his anti-immigration agenda, often to cheers and applause, despite the half-empty stands.

And he basked in victory: "We won in a landslide. That was a landslide," he said. "The bottom line is we won."

After a nearly hourlong speech, the crowd filtered out into the gelid Ohio winter, rubbing their hands and occasionally breaking out into a short-lived U-S-A! U-S-A! chant. Zach Foxx, a 23-year-old warehouse worker from nearby Trenton, Ohio, had come expecting a "pretty sweet regroup" after the election, something not unlike a parade for a winning sports team. Asked what he made of this event, he shrugged. "I guess it was a lot of the same."