We have bravely chosen not to dox Kyrsten Sinema despite our ability to do so

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Last month, we filed a public records request for Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s divorce papers. The request came back with many enlightening insights, such as that the Congresswoman — who wrote the book Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last in 2009 and then declined to unite with her colleagues in passing the Build Back Better legislation that would have funded climate and social benefit infrastructure — kept her 1997 Nissan Maxima SE when she divided and conquered her marriage in 1999.

The records also included some other intriguing information. Specifically, they included Sinema’s social security number, bank account information, and drivers’ license number. It’s possible she has since changed one or more of these (her office did not respond to Gawker’s request for comment). Typically, documents requested through open records law come with sensitive personal information redacted. But in this case, the inclusion of Sinema’s personal information was not a clerical error on the part of the Maricopa County Court; we checked. (For the record, out of respect for Sinema and because we like our jobs, we won’t be publishing her number. The number above is from the Soulja Boy song “Kiss Me Thru the Phone”).

Because the documents were filed in 1999, they were not subject to the county’s current secure system for logging and storing confidential personal information. And because of Arizona’s public records regulations — which make legal documents much more accessible than those in the supposedly liberal states of say, California or New York — the clerk’s office said they were under no obligation to redact that information without a court order. On the whole, this is pretty good for transparency and what remains of the free press. The fallout is that anyone modestly familiar with navigating legal databases can obtain a United States senator’s social security number for $11 in processing fees.

Let's pray for Lady Gaga

One of the bravest things a person can do in the year 2022 is care about the Oscars. Becoming emotionally invested in which wealthy, beautiful person will get to take home a shiny gold man is not exactly cool, but it is what I’ve signed up for. As such, I dragged my ass to the YouTube livestream of the nominations this morning in order to get upset/elated/surprised about movies that I watched on Netflix two months ago.

In between jokes about presenter Leslie Jordan being short and a discussion of the nominated films with a guy who makes TikToks about being a production assistant on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, we got some great ???s and !!!s. ???s and !!!s are not snubs and surprises, but rather things that made you go, “Huh?” and things that made you go, “Oh!” For example, Judi Dench getting a nomination for Belfast is a ??? and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi getting a nomination for Best Director is a !!!. Do you get it now? Even if you don’t, let’s get started.

THE TOP ???S

No House of Gucci Acting Nominations???

As we all know, Lady Gaga has been vying harder than anyone in the race for a Best Actress nomination. There is a good chance she is still in character as we speak. The heart breaks imagining the head of CAA frantically calling up the best florist in Los Angeles to get a condolences bouquet ready — perhaps red roses interspersed with some salami to celebrate Patrizia Reggiani’s Italian heritage. That’s all well and good, but the real shame is that Jared Leto couldn’t eke out a nomination. Despite the fact that I find him morally repugnant, he is incredible in House of Gucci.

I could've really used ‘Baby Alicia Is Dying’ when I was 12

This weekend, a beloved friend (lets call her “Sarah” because that’s her name) and I were inspecting some of my many recent bruises. I’d been doing yoga and have never had a tender touch when it comes to pressing my fingertips against my own shins while halfway lifting; I fell off a stationary skateboard inside my own apartment trying to impress a man. These are both viable explanations for my contusions, but still, something wasn’t adding up. Sarah suggested it was leukemia. She said “Lurlene McDaniel” had taught her this much: when it comes to mysterious bruising, it’s always going to be leukemia.

I didn’t know who Lurlene McDaniel was. I assumed Lurlene McDaniel was some freak she went to middle school with. Sarah was shocked. We’re both readers, and Lurlene McDaniel, she told me, was one of the most famous authors of all time with regards to stories about children who have cancer, go blind, and/or are Amish.

Obviously, the first thing that caught my attention was the name Lurlene McDaniel, much to Sarah’s annoyance. Yes, her name is Lurlene, but that’s not even the freakiest part about her, she implored. She started listing Lurlene McDaniel’s many titles to me. Lurlene McDaniel wrote over seventy books, including:

Baby Alicia is Dying, about a baby who is born with AIDS

Six Months to Live, about a 13-year-old girl who won’t graduate middle school because, well, you know

If I Should Die Before I Wake, about a debutante named Deanne who doesn’t want to spend her summer on silly debutante activities like hanging out at the country club and flirting with the rich boys, preferring to spend time with the kids in the cancer wing at the local hospital

Mother Please Don’t Die, about yet another 13-year-old girl whose mother has a mysterious headache.

Sixteen and Dying, about an HIV-positive teen who gets one special wish from an anonymous benefacto

Hi! I'm Johnny Knoxville and welcome to vivid memories of your childhood

I ran around with a group of stinky, troublemaking white boys in my youth — the kind that should have had some sort of pithy nickname but didn’t. This was suburban Vegas, so my pickings were slim. There was the Junior Olympian who loved to come over to other kids’ houses but rarely invited us to his. His parents were divorced, which seemed to be a source of shame for him, even though both places were extremely nice and sterile, like a doctor’s office. There was the kid who got cancer, for whom all us boys in class shaved our heads in solidarity, before he became improbably good looking and popular after he went into remission and ditched us, which was fair enough. And then there was Aaron: white, but the only person in our grade who came from a visibly damaged and working-class household and therefore, I thought, someone who could relate to my acute sense of loneliness.

Aaron and I were fast friends, both of us sweetly, pathetically desperate for company. I was an only child, and while Aaron wasn’t he might as well have been. We got along because we didn’t ask many questions about our respective family lives. I didn’t understand half the things his divorced parents argued about, nor did I understand Aaron’s idealized vision of his absent older brother, but I could see how this all affected him and recognized some of the same cracks forming in my own family. We hung out to get away from all of that, as best we could.

So, what do emotionally underdeveloped, suburban boys in the mid-aughts do with their free time? Mainly take turns hurting ourselves trying to re-enact Jackass stunts.

The words “Hi! I’m Johnny Knoxville and welcome to Jackass” still inspire an almost reptilian chemical reaction in my brain. The back of my neck tingles, there’s a phantom odor of shit, and I have the sudden urge to jump in the air. Jackass was, to us, one of those taboo TV shows we assumed we weren’t allowed to watch because there was a lot of cursing and a general comfort with grown-up vices like drinking and smoking. The other stuff — encounters with venomous animals, the broken bones, the gratuitous amounts of piss and vomit, the open wounds — we saw every day (a classmate once found a rattlesnake skin in the middle of the soccer field and spent the entirety of a recess sitting next to it before a teacher came by shrieking because it was actually a used condom).

It always has

Two full years and five or six waves, or surges, or spikes — whatever your preferred terminology — into the Covid-19 pandemic, with more than 850,000 dead and millions more lives, families, and communities still staggering under the weight of the loss of life and the prospects of lifelong debilitating illness for many who survived the disease, America’s editorialists, Chambers of Commerce, armchair epidemiologists, and much of our political class have determined that the country, at last, faces a truly grave crisis. Too many Americans are calling off sick. They are actually taking their sick days, or even taking unpaid time off, to care for themselves and for their families, which they are not supposed to do. These cashiers and pre-K teachers, dental assistants and chicken packers, call-center employees and delivery drivers are violating one of the core principles of American capitalism: your time, your health, and your life are not your own.

Throughout the pandemic, the voices of economic orthodoxy, from academic economists to biostatisticians to politicians and commentators across a surprisingly diverse ideological range in these supposedly fractious, polarized times, have loudly worried that policy interventions to prevent, or even to slow, the spread of the novel coronavirus would have grave impacts on the last god that humanity has left standing, the Economy. Occupancy restrictions, temporary business closures, public indoor masking, limited quarantines, individual cash assistance, child tax credits, and even workplace vaccine requirements — all have at some point come in for the same wearyingly self-similar criticisms: that they disrupt business and consumption; that they keep workers off the job; and that, therefore, these piecemeal responses to a plague represent the graver threat to some totemic “return to normal” than that plague itself.

These arguments have settled in as conventional wisdom, though as usual in the American commentariat, the loudest spouters of the most banally conventional opinions insist that they, in fact, are the bold iconoclasts. Governors have lifted mask mandates and are rolling back vaccine requirements; the Supreme Court — increasingly America’s only remaining, functioning national government, albeit as thorny a collection of crackpots and weirdos as you’ll find at the craziest local school-board meeting — has ruled that OSHA, the occupational safety and health organization, cannot regulate occupational safety and health. The feckless Biden administration “is plotting a new phase of the pandemic response aimed at containing the coronavirus and conditioning Americans to live with it.” Happy days are here again.