This morning, The Observer published a column by culinary bon vivant, chef, restaurant-owner, and writer Eddie Huang on the matter of Red Rooster, the Harlem fine-dining restaurant serving the nu-soul food of culinary darling Marcus Samuelsson, whose memoir Yes, Chef comes out this week. The reaction has been—to say the least—fiery.

Now, Marcus Samuelsson himself has weighed in.

In an interview with Paper magazine's website pegged to the book, the site got a question in about today's column—which was none too kind to Mr. Samuelsson's book (which earned a comparison to Rudyard Kipling) or restaurant (and what it means to the neighborhood)—in which Mr. Huang had a Harlem native, rapper-producer Shiest Bubz, accompany him to dinner.

Via PaperMag.com (emphasis ours):

How did you feel about Eddie Huang's piece in the Observer today, in which he basically calls you out as an outsider in Harlem?

I feel that the more you try to be positive, the more you try to make change, and the more people are going to have a point of view on it. It's not like he's a relevant person in this place, but we live in a diverse environment where people have every freedom to comment. I can live with the fact that we have created jobs and that we make people happy. I stand by our work every single day regardless of who has a comment.

We would dare argue: On the contrary, Mr. Samuelsson!*

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

[*Who, of course, would have to have some idea of Eddie's 'relevance,' having co-signed at least one of the same massive undertakings as he.]

Yesterday evening, after the story about a shoe began to run at the top of sites around the country, The Observer ran a piece explaining the creative origin of the shoe, something nearly every other news outlet running a story about the sneaker neglected to mention: It was very plainly and clearly inspired by a My Little Monster, a 90s cartoon, something that emerges as a common theme in Jeremy Scott's work.

Scott nor Adidas had mentioned this throughout the controversy. Furthermore, the sneaker hadn't been news since January. How, we wondered, did the sneaker get railroaded so quickly? What was the viral timeline of this story—which had a beginning and an end, and moved at an astounding pace—like?

As far as we can tell, it went like this:

January 31, 2012: Jeremy Scott's JS Roundhouse Mid ‘Handcuff’ for Adidas is announced, and fashion blog High Snobiety picks it up.

June 14, 2012, 5:33 AM: Almost six months later, Adidas posts a photo of the sneakers to their Facebook page. "Tighten up your style with the JS Roundhouse Mids, dropping in August. Got a sneaker game so hot you lock your kicks to your ankles?" The first few comments on the Facebook page:

June 14, 2012, 5:40 AM: One Facebook fan of Adidas asks: "my pet monster?"

June 14, 2012, 4:20 PM: Shadow and Act, an IndieWire film blog about African-American cinema, posts about the shoes after one of their contributors sends in link to Adidas' Facebook page.

Maybe inspired by "slave-movie-fever" perhaps? Adidas brass looking to capitalize, as Anthony noted in his email? Or is this just entirely unintentional on Adidas' part, although ignorant of what the design of these new kicks might suggest to some? Or not even worth discussing?

June 15, 2012: An NBC Blog, The Grio, posts about the shoe, linking to the IndieWire post.

June 16, 2012, 1:44 PM: A Syracuse professor posts to YourBlackWorld.net with the headline "Adidas Releases New Slave Shoes with Shackles and All."

June 17, 2012, 1:19 PM: Hip Hop Wired posts about the sneakers, linking to IndieWire.

June 18, 2012, 9:09 AM (GMT): Huffington Post UK picks up the story, linking to both IndieWire and YourBlackWorld.net, and quotes extensively from the Facebook page.

June 18, 2012, 10:43 AM (EST): The New York Daily News picks up the story on their site, using the IndieWire post as a source, but incorrectly cites sneaker blog Kicks on Fire as debuting the shoes in February.

June 18, 2012, 11:35 AM: The Huffington Post US picks up the story in an unbylined post, correctly identifying the sneaker's drop-date, but linking only to Adidas' Facebook page. They're the first to get quotes from both Adidas and Jeremy Scott denying any racial motivations to the shoe.

June 18, 2012, 11:05 AM: DrJays.com, a lifestyle site, picks the story up. Their story is later linked by USA Today.

June 18, 2012, Noon: The story is beginning to go viral. Rush Limbaugh discuses the shoe on his show that morning, and the transcript—released almost instantly—reads:

If you show 'em to a black guy and they think slavery... And he had no idea it was coming, so I'll defer. I'll defer on this one to [Limbaugh acquaintance] Mr. Snerdley with his 100% slave blood. What do you bet these shoes never see the light of day? A couple or three pairs will end up on eBay. They'll be collectors items. They'll be sold. They'll show up on a Hitler video or something like that. (laughing)

Fox News posts it, and puts it on their news wire. The Christian Post picks it up and quotes from YourBlackWorld.com and the New York Daily News' report (the post, dated for this morning, was indexed by Google yesterday afternoon).

June 18, 2012, 5:13 PM: The Observer posts the actual inspiration for the shoe, which was not—as widely reported or speculated—human slavery.

June 18, 2012, 6:48 PM: Jeremy Scott Tweets out a picture of the toy that inspired his shoe. At 6:52, he Tweets out the Observer's report, ostensibly confirming our theory about his work.

June 18, 2012, 8PM: Later in the evening, word gets out that Rev. Jesse Jackson has released a statement denouncing the shoe.

Jackson told CNN this morning:

"I am stunned at the insensitivity," Jackson said. "It was a gross insult. We were prepared to engage in a boycott in 50 markets. We contacted Adidas yesterday and contacted [National Basketball Association Commissioner] David Stern, who, in turn, within a few minutes called Adidas and had it cancelled. They cancelled it because they got a call from David Stern and the threat of a real boycott," Jackson proudly declared.

June 18, 2012, 8:36 PM: Adidas announces that they're canceling the shoe.

June 19, 2012, 3:43 AM: The New York Post files a story about the shoes to go on the 15th page of today's paper. The only sources quoted are users from Facebook, and the Adidas PR rep.

June 19, 2012, 3:15 PM: The words "Jeremy Scott racist" index 221 results from the last 24 hours on Google News, despite fairly irrefutable proof that designer Jeremy Scott had no intention of offending anybody so much as paying tribute to a 90s cartoon he liked.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

For some reason, Blodget has authored a troll-baiting piece on Business Insider asking why people do not like Jews.

The post initially looked like this. Note the slightly conspiratorial Hasidim and the assumption that "people" (non-specifically, in general) hate Jews:

Now it looks like this. Note the beautiful Hollywood Jedi/Jewess Natalie Portman, who is non-threatening and beautiful, and the clarification that only "some" people hate Jews:

Rather than link to it—or even, for that matter, bother reading it—let's just look at the superficial product he's produced here, which is likely to be the majority of what most people engaging in this will give anything resembling serious consideration to (a result partly produced by Blodget's commitment to headlines that write checks the stories below them can only occasionally cash).

Seeing as how Blodget himself is not Jewish, this is an odd question to ask, considering every race, religion, culture, ethnicity, nationality, and so on has been hated by another. If I were to ask, "Why do people hate Thought Catalog writers?" I would expect—and hope—the general population would assume I hate Thought Catalog writers, because I am "people." I am speaking as a "person."

In other words, to have a persecution complex about a religion you are not of might invite one who is of that religion (like the author of this blog post) to ask him:

Why do you think people hate Jews? Is it because you hate Jews?

For the record, I don't think Henry Blodget hates Jews.

I'm pretty sure he even has a few in his employ who he doesn't whip while building his SEO pyramids on a daily basis.

And I don't wonder whether or not Henry Blodget knows this might not be the best way to have a discussion about race and ethnicity and Anti-Semitism. Not that candor isn't appreciated, but The Internet Being What It Is, his post will no doubt invite a slew of nasty comments that will muddy anything that could remotely resemble an intelligible dialogue. And Henry Blodget is intelligent enough to know that this is the case, because he runs a business on the Internet.

Henry Blodget knows this is not the best way to have a discussion about race and ethnicity and Anti-Semitism.

The only possible motivation for writing a headline like that is to attract attention, and pageviews, and it's the kind of attention that will (naturally) only inflame parties on all sides (be they Jews, Jew Haters, Self-Loathing Jews, and so on). You can rest assured that whatever genuine intellectual curiosity Blodget has about this issue—and compassion towards marginalized and/or persecuted peoples, which I don't doubt he has—was made a moot point by that headline.

And as a Jew, I can tell Blodget, this does not necessarily help our cause.

All of which is to say: Blodget does love a juicy headline, and if he found the question at hand worth asking himself, well, it's obviously worth asking of him. Even if it's unfair to assume that Henry Blodget hates Jews.

Again, he probably doesn't.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

John Derbyshire, expert on the Blacks (Wikipedia)

We're still a little confused about the spirit in which to take articles written in Taki’s Magazine, socialite/journalist Taki Theodoracopulos "politics and culture" website. With long, often  provocative essays by everyone from Pat Buchanan to Jim Goad to Gavin McInnes, we're not sure how seriously the 'zine takes itself.
For instance, how tongue-in-cheek is this John Derbyshire essay, The Talk: Nonblack Version, in which the National Review journalist lays down several points on how he plans on discussing race with his children. It's...well...bold, we guess you can say.

Mr. Derbyshire's two children--who are 19 and 16, and probably don't need a talk from their dad about how to discuss Black people in public-- will be receiving such pearls of wisdom as:

(1) Among your fellow citizens are forty million who identify as black, and whom I shall refer to as black. The cumbersome (and MLK-noncompliant) term “African-American” seems to be in decline, thank goodness. “Colored” and “Negro” are archaisms. What you must call “the ‘N’ word” is used freely among blacks but is taboo to nonblacks.

Yahoo Sports' The Dish rounds up some of the reaction to the above image, broadcast after last night's Knicks game, which started flying around the internet after CNBC's Darren Rovell noted that the network was "walking a fine line" with it. The Sporting News called it "questionable." News networks and other newspapers, picking up on the outrage—exaggerated, realistic, or potential for it—are also chiming in with their own segments.

One blogger notes: "Hey MSG, he’s a person. He’s a real human with feelings. Maybe next time a little more discretion with your graphics, ok?" He then asks readers to buy his shirt advertising "THE YELLOW MAMBA."

Most of the posts fault MSG for creating the graphic. For their part, they note that they didn't actually make the graphic, a common misconception among reports:

Given that's the only output from them on the matter (no press releases, either), This probably won't sate anybody.

The only take The Observer has found worthwhile in this instance, however, comes from Alexander Chee at The Classical, who registers his "shocked silence" at the graphic, but turns it around on a positive note towards the end:

There’s a light coming off that giant horrible Fortune Cookie, and in it, you can see there are two games Lin is playing and winning—one is basketball, the other is the game the American media complex plays in making you think X about Asians. Winning one wins the other—he makes changing the world look as easy as playing ball. All that sad bullshit coming after him, the Jason Whitlock jokes, the “he’s just getting attention because he’s Asian” stuff, the Fortune Cookie graphics, it’s all an attempt to put him back in his place, back behind the curtain, to make sure he doesn’t really appear. And it’s too late. Many people were making money off of the way things used to be—now they are making money off of the new way. Something in the power of his game has tipped the balance and the kid is money now, literally—he has the ratings on his side, the web traffic, the new army of fans, his team. This isn’t an equal opportunity hire, no one at the Knicks did this to be nice to Asian people—the fortune cookie proves that. No, the people in the Skybox are getting paid. Lin has managed to make something bigger than their bullshit and he’s riding it out from behind the stage.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Seth Abramovitch—who previously worked for Gawker Media at Defamer, before the Hollywood vertical was folded into the main site, later returning to the company under Gawker.com's recently-ousted editor Remy Stern—wrote a post last night about Kanye West going on a rant over Twitter.

Written at 1:28 AM, the post was titled "The Top 10 Kanye West Tweets About DONDA, His New Everything Venture."

The offending passage read:

You think Tom Ford is full of himself? Kanye West shits Tom Fords for breakfast. Then he irons out the shits into cutting-edge fabrics, and frantically cuts, sews, and laces that fabric through the night and into the morning, until he has produced the most unbelievable clothes — nay, FASHION + ART = FARTSHION! — in the universe. And he calls these clothes DONDA. But he calls all that other stuff DONDA, too! DONDA will be your everything. Just you wait and see. And what is DONDA? It's an acronym for Dis Original N***a Dresses Aight.*

Originally, the slur was not censored, nor was it given a strikethrough, as it has now. A correction below the passage was later added to read:

*DONDA is actually the name of Kanye's deceased mother, not the acronym above, which was meant to be the kind of thing Kanye would make up in a late-night creative writing fit, but has offended many people. So sorry, to everyone who was offended, and for the confusion. Sorries all around!

Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio responded to The Observer's request to confirm that Mr. Abromovich was let go, but did not elaborate on whether or not it was explicitly because of the post in question, his last and most recent on the site. Mr. Abramovitch did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Related (tangentially) is Mr. Daulerio's first post on the site since his tenure started, in which he noted Monday afternoon:

The only sites that will be left intact amid the smoldering embers of the brief Longreads revival will be a few of your lonely cousin's FB-shared Buzzfeed links of newborn otters singing ukulele songs with Zooey Deschanel. That's a damn shame, because I had hoped that during my brief stint as Gawker EIC I'd finally manage to get Denton to write that "Why I Like Black Guys" essay I've begged him to do for two years.

Mr. Denton acknowledged the line over Twitter:

Today, one supposes, would be as good a day as any to give it a shot.

With additional reporting by Kat Stoeffel.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek