Women planning to have a beer at a barbecue this weekend have two choices: a brew from a sexist mass-market brewery or one from a sexist craft brewery.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But given the way beer is marketed, it’s not far off. For years, ads from the big beer brands have painted women as either bikini babes or nagging wives. A few have gone even further over the line—remember the Bud Light “Up For Whatever” campaign, which included the spectacularly inappropriate slogan, “The perfect beer for removing ‘no’ from your vocabulary for the night?” Craft brewers, meanwhile, have given their beers names like “Raging Bitch IPA” and “Midnight Sun Panty Peeler.” And while some companies seem to be attempting to course correct, it’s going to take an awful lot of Amy Schumer Super Bowl ads to undo the industry’s sexist rep.

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It seems silly to alienate such a large audience of potential customers. After all, women already consume about 33% of craft beer by volume, according to the Craft Brewers Society. And making beer more “gender friendly” could add about 5 million barrels to the industry’s annual U.S. sales (currently about 206 million barrels) over the next five years, according to Bloomberg reporting.

Enter High Heel Brewing, a new producer run by female master brewer Kristi McGuire. As you might have gathered from the company’s name, McGuire is targeting the women’s market. In fact, USA Today calls High Heel the only woman-run brewery “to cater specifically to women.” One of the company’s two beers, which are expected to hit shelves in June, is called “Slingback,” after the shoe style, and the packaging is heavy on traditionally feminine colors like pink and purple.

While it’s encouraging to see a woman at the helm, High Heel raises a question: Do women need a beer company devoted just to them?

After all, it’s not clear that women’s beer tastes differ drastically from men’s. Some research has found that female beer drinkers are more likely than their male counterparts to prefer some styles, such as golden ales or fruit-flavored beers, but, as McGuire says, taste isn’t binary: “There’s a whole spectrum of women out there.” She adds that she hopes men will enjoy High Heel’s beers as much as women will.

The most explicitly female-oriented aspect of High Heel, of course, is the company’s name and packaging. However, “girlie” branding can backfire if it makes female customers feel stereotyped or condescended to. “It feels tin-eared to me,” says Thomas Ordahl, chief strategy officer at brand consulting firm Landor, of High Heel’s marketing. “This kind of thing can reduce us to tropes.” Like beer companies still trying to appeal specifically to frat boys and macho dudes, Ordahl says that aiming a beer explicitly at women “feels dated—like a holdover from the past.”

McGuire says High Heel’s branding is a big part of its strategy. “We’re definitely deliberately trying to include women in craft beer—it’s not subtle.” But she doesn’t think the company is condescending to female drinkers, saying, “It’s just meant to be eye-appealing and fashionable.”

While it remains to be seen whether women will rush to end a long day by kicking back with a High Heel Slingback, you have to give McGuire credit for being at least a little more subtle than the last women-specific beer to hit the market: Chick Beer, a lager than came in a six-pack designed to look like a purse.

“We didn’t want to make a gimmick,” says McGuire. “We didn’t make the beer pink—we could have—but we didn’t.”

Summary: High Heel Brewing thinks they do.


If there’s one thing more annoying about the deluge of emails that LinkedIn, until very recently, sent to its users to get them to login, it’s the professional networking service’s antiquated “inbox” that makes email feel modern.

And LinkedIn knows this, which is why on Tuesday it said that would roll out an entirely new inbox design for both mobile and desktop users. The revamped version is more akin to chat service Slack or your favorite messaging app, complete with emoji and GIFs.

The overhaul is one is a series planned by CEO Jeff Weiner that will include new apps and services as well as redesigns of existing ones. The goal: entice users to not only log into LinkedIn more often, but also for longer. Or as Weiner puts it: providing more value for LinkedIn’s members.

LinkedIn’s design hasn’t changed much over the years, a reality that has started to alienate users. An attendee even created a somewhat uncomfortable moment at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference in July when he confronted co-founder and chairman Reid Hoffmann about the service’s design, or lack thereof.

With the redesigned inbox, users will find invitations from others to connect in the “People you may know” section. Previously, they showed up as a message in the inbox. In addition to emoji and stickers, they’ll also be able to attach documents to their messages, and LinkedIn says it’s revamped how it sorts messages and how it notifies users of new ones via email and push notifications.

Last month, LinkedIn LNkD released Lookup, a mobile app that lets a company’s employees find coworkers by name, title, and skills by logging in with their work email address. The company came up with the idea after surveying 814 North American professionals, who largely said they didn’t find their company’s intranet helpful for this, and wished they could look for coworkers based on specific skills. In April, LinkedIn introduced Elevate, an app to help employees share company and industry content on LinkedIn and Twitter.

And this is only the beginning.

For more on LinkedIn’s app Elevate, watch this Fortune video:

Summary: Will it be enough to entice more people to actually use their inbox?


Donald Trump has built a legend by clinching highly-creative deals, but did you know that he dodged perhaps the most potentially damaging lawsuit of his career by mollifying angry plaintiffs with, get ready for this, a big stake in a beauty contest? As far as this writer can tell, Trump’s gambit of trading a stake in the Miss Universe pageant for a pivotal legal settlement has never been reported in the press, though well establish in public documents. Yet the episode illustrates just how skillfully Trump deploys both imaginative stratagems, and relentless resistance, in giving those who sue him the absolute minimum, no matter what the merits of the case.

By the way, the Miss Universe franchise was a lot more famous than profitable, and it didn’t take Donald long to take back every share he’d briefly sacrificed.

In fact, repelling lawsuits is a core business practice for Trump, and he’s darn proud of it. “I don’t get sued because I don’t settle cases, I win in court,” Trump asserted during an MSNBC interview in early March, when questioned about whether he’d consider resolving a pending lawsuits over now-defunct, self-named real estate academy, Trump University.

Read more Fortune coverage of Trump as business:

In reality, while Trump, at least in legal circles, is well known for his intimidation-through-litigation tactics, Trump is also often on the receiving end. The Donald has gotten sued a lot. And he frequently settles. But he’s a master at extracting the best possible terms by dragging opponents through years of expensive legal maneuvers that drain their resources and sap their resistance.

The Miss Universe saga is a case study in Trump’s success in defanging suits that, when filed, look dangerous. Here’s the background: In June 1996, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Holdings, the mogul’s publicly-traded gaming enterprise in Atlantic City, announced the purchase of the Trump’s Castle, a property, later renamed The Trump Marina, that was 100% owned by Trump, who also served as chairman of Trump Hotels, (later renamed Trump Entertainment Resorts). The price appeared extremely high. The public company was paying $525 million according to its public filings at the time, for a property with a negative net worth. In addition to assuming $348 million in debt, Trump Hotels agreed to pay Trump himself $177 million in newly-issued shares of stock.

Alarmed by the flood of new shares, and a pittance in extra profits from the Castle, investors fled the stock. By the time the deal closed on October 7, 1996, Trump Hotels shares had dropped from $30 to $23, erasing over $250 million in market cap. Within days, angry shareholders filed lawsuits against the directors for approving an excessive price for the Castle and providing false information in the proxy advocating the ill-fated deal.

For five years, Trump waged a fierce counter-attack of motions, summons, and affidavits. Finally, in April of 2002, Trump Hotels quietly disclosed a settlement reached that past December. (By early 2002, Trump Hotels shares had slumped to around $1.) Without admitting or denying wrongdoing, Trump Hotels agreed to pay $3.15 million in legal fees for the plaintiffs, appoint an additional independent director, and adopt new rules requiring that a committee of independent board members assess any deals “in which Trump has a personal interest valued at over $200,000.” In addition, Trump himself agreed, as part of the settlement, to transfer one-half of his 50% ownership in Miss Universe LLC to Trump Hotels.

As it turned out, the Miss Universe franchise did little to strengthen Trump Hotels’ wobbly finances, even though 2002 was a notable year for the pageant. In May, football great Phil Simms and TV host Daisy Fuentes crowned Oxana Fedorova Miss Universe—the Russian to ever win the title—at a fabulous extravaganza at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan, Puerto Rico. But Fedorova wasn’t Miss Universe for long. In September, she gave up the crown, reportedly sacked for “not living up to the role.” The hoopla didn’t bring Trump Hotels much cash. Subsequent 10-ks reported that the casino company collected a mere $700,000 from its share in the contest for 2002, and zilch for 2003 and 2004, years in which Trump Hotels suffered almost $300 million in net losses. On the balance sheet, Miss Universe was invisible. Trump Hotels never showed its 25% share as an asset at all.

In November of 2004, Trump Hotels declared the first of its two bankruptcies. As part of an elaborate restructuring agreement, Trump recouped all of the 25% of the pageant he’d given to Trump Hotels. It’s impossible to disentangle from the arrangement what, if anything, Trump was paying to take back his stake, but given the paltry returns it was producing for Trump Hotels, it couldn’t have been much.

Trump’s presidential candidacy effectively ended his long romance with Miss Universe. After Trump assailed Mexican immigrants as “rapists” during his candidacy kickoff speech in June, NBCUniversal, his long-term partner in Miss Universe, condemned his remarks, and announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant. Spanish-language network Univision followed suit. In September, Trump purchased NBC’s share to become the 100% owner, then flipped the franchise to talent powerhouse WME/IMG for an undisclosed sum.

In the pageant’s last years under Trump, the winners made their victory turn in a diamond-encrusted, $300,000 crown whose contours recall the Manhattan skyline. Commissioning the regal headdress from the artisans of Czechoslovakia was the stroke of a great showman. But Trump got more than fun and fame out of Miss Universe. For The Donald, the pageant’s lasting legacy may be that it erased a major threat to the comeback that made him richer than ever, and culminated in his amazing drive for the White House.

Summary: The Miss Universe Pageant helped paved Donald's way to the White House


05/26/2016 AT 09:00 AM EDT

are getting into character for NBC's Red Nose Day Special.

PEOPLE has an exclusive look at the trio, who are also starring in the upcoming NBC drama

, donning signature red noses ahead of the special, which airs live Thursday.

The special, which raises money and awareness for children in need, is hosted this year by

. The star-packed event will also feature

In the last 25 years, Red Nose Day – created by Emmy Award-winner Richard Curtis – has raised more than $1 billion globally.

For more from Moore, Ventimiglia and Brown, check out the trailer for their upcoming show

airs Thursday at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.

Summary: The stars join Red Nose Day to help raise money and awareness of poverty


Nestled in the Himalayan foothills at an altitude of 10,000 ft. (3,000 m), entire villages and communities subsist on illegal marijuana production. These villages are far from any paved roads and are so remote that distances are measured in hours of walking.

Across thousands of acres of public and private land, villagers grow cannabis which is then turned into a high-quality resin know as charas. “On the global market, charas is sold as a high quality hashish,” says Italian photographer Andrea de Franciscis, who has been documenting these communities for the past three years. “The farmers who produce the costly resin get very little in return and struggle to survive against always tougher legislation.”

De Franciscis has chosen an anthropological angle to photograph these villagers, with the goal of producing a complete story that also focusses on culture and tradition. “Life is challenging in the mountain,“ he tells TIME. “Women work as much as men, and the feeling is that it’s rather a matriarchal society.”

Cannabis has deep roots in Indian society dating back to as early as 2,000 BCE within the Hindu scriptures. However, since the drug was outlawed in India in 1985 there has been pressure on a national and global scale to curb the cannabis production in the Himalayan valley. But, says de Franciscis, this has only “led to an increase of the price [of charas] on the global market, and has actually worsened the situation of the villagers whom have no real alternative for their livelihood.”

Andrea de Franciscis is a photojournalist based in India and Italy. Follow him on Instagram

Adam Glanzman is a contributor to TIME LightBox. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram

Summary: In the Himalayan, entire villages survive on illegal marijuana production


Studies have linked the use of social media to depression, but addiction to social media, rather than use alone, may explain the connection, new research suggests.

“We believe that at least having clinicians be aware of these associations may be valuable to them as they treat patients with depressive disorders. For example, they may wish to inquire about social media use patterns and determine if those patterns are maladaptive,” coauthor Ariel Shensa of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine told Reuters Health by email.

Shensa and her team randomly selected 1,763 participants, ages 19-32, and asked them about their depressive symptoms, social media use and addictive behaviors.

Social media use was measured by the number of visits and amount of time spent on 11 popular social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vine, Snapchat and Reddit.

To assess addiction to social media, the researchers modified a survey called the Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale, looking at addictive behaviors such as mood modification, withdrawal and relapse.

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In a presentation March 30 at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine in Washington, DC, the researchers reported that half the participants spent at least an hour a day on non-work related social media use and made 30 site visits per week.

Depending on whether the researchers used narrow or broad criteria for addiction, 14 to 44 percent of participants had scores that suggested a problem.

As expected, high social media usage was linked to higher addiction scores. But after taking addiction scores into consideration, social media use and depression were not significantly linked.

Addiction and depression did appear to be linked, however. Addiction seemed to explain roughly three-quarters of the effect of social media use on depression, the researchers found.

“Ultimately, it appears that the way social media is used, rather than the amount social media is used, leads to maladaptive outcomes,” says Lindsay Howard of the Virginia Consortium Program in Clinical Psychology in Norfolk, who was not involved in the study.

Gary Vaynerchuk Dishes Out Some Social Media Tips:

Howard found similarities in the study with her own research, which she also presented at the conference. Her team found that the act of seeking reassurance through social media may be related to higher degrees of dissatisfaction with one’s body and eating disorders, but the frequency of social media use was not tied to those depressive symptoms.

“Physicians should educate their patients regarding how social media use may be related to depression and other negative outcomes,” Howard said. “They might also recommend the use of applications such as ‘Freedom’ that allow patients to limit how often and when they use social media.” Howard says.

Summary: But social media isn't all to blame.


In his last weeks, Farhad Jabar started skipping school. Most mornings, in his school uniform, he would turn up alone to Parramatta mosque. That’s where Isaac first saw him.

“I attend the mosque on a daily basis as I’m walking to work. In the morning it’s quite empty,” Isaac says. “In the last two or three months I noticed this young person.”

A week after the death of Curtis Cheng, students at Arthur Phillip High School have remembered Jabar as quietly devout, a talented basketballer and a friendly but private classmate.

But what drove the teenager – a timid, withdrawn 15-year-old with no history of violence – remains a mystery.

Isaac, who asked for his real name to be withheld after calls by rightwing groups for attacks on Muslims, agreed to share with Guardian Australia his impressions of the young man he met in the mosque that day, and got to know over the next few months, until a “bizarre, concerning” final encounter a fortnight ago.

Jabar, in his school uniform, “stuck out” in Parramatta mosque the first morning he met Isaac. “He was just hanging out there, reading books, praying,” he says.

“It was 9am, he should have been in school … It’s not normal behaviour to isolate yourself.”

Their first encounters were frosty, but gradually the 15-year-old opened up. “He told me things weren’t going well at school, he wasn’t interested in school any more, that he was being bullied. He said he didn’t like it any more. He wasn’t interested because he wasn’t feeling good.

“He spoke about it with a sense of sorrow,” he says.

Isaac became concerned about the boy’s mental health. “Sometimes he would be quite bubbly. Sometimes he would be quite withdrawn. And those are typical signs of all sorts of mental health conditions, especially young people,” Isaac says.

“I presented my concerns to psychologists and other professionals and got some feedback. And the feedback was, these were depressive symptoms, these were symptoms of trauma, of anxiety.”

On Wednesday Isaac was still struggling to make sense of the killing of 58-year-old Curtis Cheng, a crime he said was “absolutely horrific”. He is haunted by the image of the boy, in traditional Islamic garb, waving a gun and strutting before the New South Wales police headquarters in Parramatta.

“It was a shock to the core,” he said. “[Jabar] was soft-spoken, really gentle, you got a really innocent boy-like feeling about him.

“[Friday] was the first time I’ve ever seen him in the tradition Islamic clothing. Just his mannerisms in terms of pacing up and down, trying to pump himself up, I’d never seen that sort of behaviour from him.”

In the past few weeks Isaac felt he had begun to make progress with Jabar. They arranged to have a hot chocolate. Isaac wanted to set him on the right path.

“I told him, I know you’re not happy at school, but what do you want to do with your life? I have all sorts of connections I can hook you up with. If you want to work, if you want to get into a trade, if you want to get into external study, let’s talk about it.”

He says his last encounter with Jabar, one week before the killing, was “bizarre, concerning”.

“Over the period of time that I got to know him he would greet me with a handshake followed by a hug. And he was generally always alone.

“But the last time I saw him he was with four males sitting down on the mosque floor, who I hadn’t seen before. And he saw me, but pretended not to see me, just gave me the cold shoulder.

“So I went over to the group, said to them Salaam Alaikum, peace be upon you. And he shook my hand, then brushed me off and the rest of the group didn’t respond,” he said.

“That’s a big deal in the Islamic faith. One of the rights you have upon a fellow Muslim is to greet them with the best greeting. But he responded really coldly. I got the sense he didn’t want the others to know we had an interaction going on.”

He discovered that Jabar was behind Friday’s shooting on Saturday, when photos of the teenager first circulated. “Honestly, it was as if my heart dropped. I was lost for words,” he says.

He is bitter about the way Parramatta mosque has been “dragged through the mud” in the past week. The prayer hall is known for its emphasis on community service, and he says the sermons are deeply spiritual and inspiring.

“They lift you up as a human, you could never draw any negative connotations from them. You could never draw any connection between what’s preached and anyone getting a radical idea.”

He had seen Jabar as a young man looking to be guided. “He was so vulnerable and so mentally confused or unwell that he was so easily susceptible to any figure of acceptance or group acceptance,” he says.

“As a young person growing up in Australia, especially if you’re of an ethnic background, what are you looking for? Acceptance, identity.”

Isaac says mental illness is still poorly understood within some Muslim communities, as it is in many other parts of society.

“[We] need to understand the religious and cultural implications that mental health has. A young Muslim person battling depression isn’t going to go out and talk about it.

“It’s seen as something, within the context of the community, it doesn’t feed into the notion of being a man, of being resilient.”

Isaac has passed what he knows to authorities. He is helping to organise a conference on mental health in an Islamic cultural context, work that has now taken on a new significance.

Summary: Exclusive: Before the Parramatta shooting, one man tried to help Farhad Jabar. He tells how this ‘gentle’ boy gave him the cold shoulder at their last meeting


An image of the Kevlar helmet that saved an officer's life. (Twitter/Orlando Police)

An Orlando Police Department officer was saved by a sturdy Kevlar helmet after being struck in cross-fire during a shoot-out with the gunman of Sunday morning’s massacre at Pulse nightclub.

The Orlando Police released an image of the heavily-dented helmet to their Twitter account, which has been providing rolling updates of the worst shooting in US history.

“In hail of gunfire in which suspect was killed, OPD officer was hit. Kevlar helmet saved his life,” the tweet read.

Orlando Police Chief John Mina confirmed at least nine officers were involved in the three-hour shootout, which led to the fatal shots fired at gunman, Omar Mateen.

The officer suffered an eye injury when the bullet struck his helmet, according Danny Banks, special agent in charge of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s Orlando bureau.

Read more: Gunman called police during massacre

Read more: Gunman's father supports Taliban in bizarre videos

The original tweet has been liked more than 12,000 times, and was met with a wave of support.

“Thank you for everything you guys are doing,” Lindsay Berry wrote.

“Very lucky man, what a legend,” Christopher Tamits commented.

However, others used the post to vent their anger at gun laws.

“You know what could’ve saved more lives? Smarter gun laws. Too bad citizens don’t get helmets,” Tim Geoghegan said.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, center right, and Orlando Police Chief John Mina, center left, arrive to a news conference on Sunday. (AP/Phelan M. Ebenhack)

“Pretty damn insensitive to gloat over a helmet with 50 dead,” Mike Jones wrote.

Chief Mina sent a heartfelt email to Orlando Police Department personnel, telling them the attack was “the darkest day of my 25 years at the OPD.”

Read more: Trump calls for Obama to ‘step down’

Read more: Police arrest armed man at Gay Pride parade in LA

He praised the work of the officers involved.

“We have trained again and again for this type of situation. It’s unfortunate that we had to put those skills to use today. But because of that training and your professionalism, we have saved dozens of lives this morning.

We are blessed beyond words that none of Our First Responders and SWAT Team were gravely injured or killed.

In pictures: Nation grieves after its worst-ever mass shooting

I know that you have all been affected by the tragic actions of a lone terrorist who cut short the lives of so many… Please hug your families tonight,” he said.

Summary: An Orlando Police Department officer was saved by a sturdy Kevlar helmet after being struck in cross-fire during a shoot-out with the gunman of Saturday night’s massacre at Pulse nightclub.


Co-working startup WeWork is wading into the competitive New York City apartment market, hoping to woo millennials with $1,375 per-person studios that offer "robust" social offerings such as karaoke nights, cooking classes and potluck dinners.

The furnished apartments, which the company says are geared to "unique individuals," could find takers because they eliminate much of the hassle of renting in Manhattan, which perennially ranks as one of the priciest housing markets in the U.S. WeWork vows to rent without credit checks or broker fees, for instance.

The first building to open under the "WeLive" concept is at 110 Wall Street in downtown Manhattan, while a second building is located outside of Washington, D.C. in Arlington, Virginia. If WeWork's co-working efforts are anything to go by, the apartment buildings will soon be filled with millennials drawn by the idea of a built-in community, as well as the amenities.

WeWork, valued at more than $16 billion, has tapped into the growing "gig economy" by providing shared offices for freelancers and other independent workers. While part of the appeal is the opportunity to claim a workspace in a funkily designed office, WeWork has also carefully cultivated a sense of community by adding arcades, screening rooms and common areas.

"Just as WeWork changed the way people work through its philosophy of shared space, services, community and social interaction, WeLive offers a disruptive alternative to the way people live," the company said in a statement.

The apartment buildings aim to connect residents "in ways formerly unattainable in apartment buildings," the company added.

Each unit includes custom-made cabinets; a kitchen stocked with plates, utensils and silverware; travel-size toiletries; flat-screen TVs; Bose in-ceiling speakers; and fridges stocked with what WeLive calls "basic refreshments": SmartWater, San Pellegrino beverages and beer. Other amenities include wifi, linens and towels.

The buildings also offer doorman security, front-desk pick-up for mail and packages, and features such as pool and ping-pong tables. Pricing starts at $1,375 per person for a two-person studio. Individual studios start at $2,000.

For a flat $125 monthly fee, residents also get cable, utilities, access to laundry facilities and, perhaps most important for busy young people averse to wiping down counters, monthly cleaning service. That charge also includes health and wellness classes, such as yoga.

That means a couple sharing the apartment would pay $2,750 per month, or slightly less than the average Manhattan studio rental price of $2,918 per month.

The buildings also offer larger apartments, from "studio plus" units that sleep four people up to 4-bedroom apartments that sleep up to eight residents.

Summary: Can a social life -- and no credit checks -- help the co-working startup crack one of the world's toughest housing markets?


In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, the American Chemical Society’s YouTube channel “Reactions” has boiled down the science of stuffing your face in a two-and-a-half-minute video. It explains how signals in the brain tell us when we are feeling full or when it is time to stop eating, as well as how antacids reduce the physical discomfort. Might be fodder for conversation after dinner when everyone is sitting around, running out of things to talk about and on the verge of slipping into a food coma.

MORE: Mall Will Fine Stores if They Don’t Open on Thanksgiving

Summary: Gobble, gobble


Kris Jenner still has some questions about her ex’s transition to womanhood.

The reality star appears in an upcoming episode of “I Am Cait,” and is shocked to learn Caitlyn Jenner has changed her name on several pieces of documentation, including her birth certificate.

“For the last four, five months, I had lawyers and everything changing my name,” the former Olympian shared in a sneak peek clip of the episode, which reunites the two exes.

“You can go all the way back to your birth certificate and change that. And I did,” she continued.

The “I am Cait” star revealed her license now says “Caitlyn Marie Jenner,” and lists her as female. She’s also in the process of changing her passport.

The confession that scrubbing of Bruce Jenner out of her life was something that clearly hurt Kris.

“That's kind of sad, though,” the 60-year-old momager responded.

“Wait a second,” the stunned mom-of-six added, interrupting her former husband.

“Does this mean that he didn't exist if you changed the birth certificate? Wait, was I ever married? Was I legally married?” she asked.

The couple was together for 23 years.

The question mirrors the confusion she had soon after the gender transition.

"I have these memories of this life and I feel sometimes like it didn't exist," she tearfully told her daughter, Kim Kardashian, during an episode of “Keeping up with the Kardashians,” which aired last year.

The lingering pain was evident during her soon-to-air appearance as the famous matriarch also reflected on giving away the clothes Bruce once wore.

“I thought, 'Wait a second! I spent 23 years building this fabulous wardrobe,'” she explained. “Who knew I was buying the wrong s---!”

Her 66-year-old ex looked grim as she shared the reflection.

In another recent cameo from last week, the pair argued about how much was divulged about Caitlyn's transgender desires during their marriage.

The couple were married for 23 years and separated in June 2013—two years before Caitlyn made her Vanity Fair debut.

Summary: Kris Jenner still has some question about her ex’s transition to womanhood.


I don’t usually enjoy a drive so much that I attempt to kill the car I’m driving. That was almost the case with the 2016 Mazda3 i Grand Touring sedan that I was piloting more than 500 miles southward, to visit family on the eastern coast of North Carolina.

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The roads were empty, partly due to the impending hurricane brewing in the Caribbean that looked dead set on pummeling the entire Atlantic seaboard. Luckily, Mother Nature would eventually intervene to keep my route relatively unscathed and free of flooding.

Too bad my intense focus on the forecast meant a near total lack of attention on the Mazda’s fuel tank. I’d keenly noticed the Mazda3’s 155-horsepower, 2.0-liter 4-cylinder was sipping regular unleaded to the tune of nearly 40 miles per gallon. That was really without really trying, too.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE 2016 MAZDA 3 SEDAN

With two hours left in a 10 hour drive, I finally turned my eyes from empty two-lane highway and real-time MPGs, and down to the fuel gauge itself.

Mazda gave the car world the incredible RX-7 sports coupe, along with the sharp handling MX-5 Miata roadster. Yet, not even Mazda’s engineering whizzes, or any amount of “zoom zoom” technical prowess is going to gift us an economy car that runs on thin air.

With an indicated 14 miles to spare, my Mazda3 sedan was finally able to fill its 13.2 fuel tank with enough juice for the rest of the ride.

This momentary lapse in test driving etiquette wasn’t intended to harm my faithful four-wheeled traveling companion. During a wide range of driving, the Mazda proved capable and eager to please. In the city, the Mazda3 is nimble and, at 180.3 inches in total length, it’s small enough to fit in tight parking spots without any problem.

Available as a sedan and hatchback, if push came to shove I’d have to recommend the hatch. It offers more cargo room (20.2 cu. ft. versus 12.4 in the sedan) and, in my opinion, it has a more European-centric look to its exterior. I like that, but I’m also fine if you prefer the sedan – it’s a pretty handsome little car, too.

As I already mentioned, highway economy held steady right around 40 mpg, which is on par with the Mazda3’s EPA estimated highway mileage of 41 mpg. I’m not a total lead-foot driver but, I’ll admit, it’s very rare that I come anywhere close to matching EPA mileage figures.

This is a Mazda, however, and Mazda’s are supposed to offer great handling and punchy engines. Does the brand’s least expensive model have any of the automotive DNA found in cars like the Miata, or even the midsize Mazda6?

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE 2016 MAZDA 3 5-DOOR

Yes, it does, for the most part. The electrically power-assisted steering doesn’t have the razor-sharp reflexes of the Miata, of course. But in the world of economy cars, this Mazda is a refreshing break from many ho-hum alternatives. I do wish the ride felt more planted, especially at highway speed. Over stretches of highway with a 70 mph speed limit, the Mazda3 could feel light on its toes and started drumming up more road noise than I like.

If long distance drives are the norm for your economy car, I’d still recommend the whisper-quiet Chevrolet Cruze – even if the Mazda3 is ultimately more fun to drive.

The MacPherson strut front suspension and multi-link rear does keep things even-keeled through corners. On the flip side, the 16-inch all-season tires fitted to my tester obviously favor economy and longevity, rather than ultimate grip.

My car was fitted with a 6-speed manual gearbox, which is something of a specialty for Mazda. There’s a very good reason that I’ve relied on Mazda products when it comes time to teaching someone how to shift for themselves. The clutch pedal is light and forgiving, and the gearlever slots precisely from gear to gear. Since the 4-cylinder has enough grunt not to bog down if you miss a shift, the Mazda3 won’t hiccup and sputter if you mess things up. And yes, even super cool auto journalists can screw up a shift now and then. A 6-speed automatic is also available, if you’re unwilling to go the manual route.

Despite the mega drive to N.C. and back, the front seats were supportive and comfortable. The rear seat gets dinged for being cramped, though I wouldn’t label it a penalty box. It’s fine for car in this size segment and price class.

Credit to Mazda for doing a fantastic impersonation of Audi’s highly respected MMI infotainment interface. A large knob on the center console provides easy scrolling through satellite radio stations, or quick adjustments to the satellite navigation system that was fitted to my test car.

You can load a Mazda3 to the gills with the more powerful 184-hp 4-cylinder and all options, and eventually crest $29,000. I think the sweet spot is much lower down the options scale, however. Including the aforementioned satellite radio and nav, my Mazda3 i Grand Touring stickered at $23,365 and came with features such as a Bose 9-speaker surround sound system, heated front seats, 6-way power adjustable driver’s seat, Bluetooth, and dual-zone climate control.

It’s definitely worth noting that the Mazda3 scores top marks in crash testing conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Available safety features include lane departure warning, automatic high beam control, forward obstruction warning, radar-based intelligent cruise control, rear cross traffic alert, and blind spot monitoring.

Attractive and economical, the Mazda3 is a strong player in an increasingly tough small car market. The fact that Mazda can fit with the big dogs (i.e. Toyota, Honda, Hyundai and GM) and win on so many fronts is testament to the company’s engineering expertise. The 5-door wagon speaks to my practical side – okay, and I also think it’s prettier – but any Mazda3 is an excellent value. This is a car that doesn’t feel built to a budget, even if it’s easy on yours.

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Summary: A car like the Mazda3 should be basic transportation, nothing more. Thankfully, Mazda doesn’t agree.


Over the last week, the risk of Britain voting to leave the European Union has soared. After months in which most polls have shown a comfortable majority in favor of staying in the E.U., a barrage over the last week has pushed the “Leave” camp ahead in the polls by up to 10 points. The latest survey, by YouGov, puts the pro-Brexit camp eight points ahead, once you take the undecided voters (15% of the total) out of the equation.

How has this happened, when everybody from the Bank of England to the International Monetary Fund, from Barack Obama to Shinzo Abe, from the Trades Union Congress to the Confederation of British Industry, have all warned of the major financial shocks in the near term and economic decline and geopolitical irrelevance in the long term after a vote for Brexit? After two months of campaigning, the chief issues appear to have boiled down to these:

Immigration. This could actually be arguments 1 through 10, but its many nuances are being boiled down to the essence of “there’s just too much of it, and most of that is because all E.U. citizens have the right to come and work here.” Net immigration to the U.K. has averaged some 285,000 people a year over the past three years, adding 0.4% to the population every year. Last year, the figure was 333,000, of which 184,000 came from the E.U. Even if you accept, as most do, that immigration has expanded the tax base and kept the price of both food and services down, the influx—for which there is no end in sight—is changing the face of the country too fast for the population to stomach, and the E.U.’s rules on free movement of labor are an easy target.

Sovereignty. The fear of being bossed around by a united, hostile, and alien Europe has been part of the British (more precisely, the English) national identity since at least the 16th century. During times of national crisis, that notion has galvanized the country, even saved it. More recently, it has been an intellectually lazy substitute for engaging seriously with the question that all small and medium-sized states face in a globalized political world: which powers does it make sense to share with other countries and under what conditions? The E.U. has tried to codify answers through an increasingly constitutional process since 1970. That grates with Britain’s constitutional flexibility (i.e., a strong executive tied down only by an ancient mesh of common law). There are some (see here for one) who can articulate the case for Brexit without resorting to pantomime foreigner-bashing. But it’s hard to present an energetic defense of, say, the European Court of Justice’s role in enforcing the Single Market, or for the European Arrest Warrant, while the country is succumbing to a flare-up of a chronic psychological condition.

Backlash against “Project Fear.” Prime Minister David Cameron and his team have relied too much on fear-mongering to make their point. The tactic succeeded wildly last year in persuading Scottish voters to vote with their wallets rather than their hearts and stay in the U.K., so Cameron and his Treasury chief George Osborne have doubled down with a series of apocalyptic threats, from World War III to cuts in state pensions and even—gasp!—falling housing prices, to keep people on board. Such over-egged warnings have cost the PM credibility, and weakened better-founded arguments about how Brexit would hit the economy. They’ve also allowed the often bogus claims of the Brexit supporters to acquire a sort of moral equivalence. Project Fear has always had one big weapon in reserve: the foreign exchange and bond markets. But they have remained too complacent for too long, and now it’s doubtful whether even last week’s 3% drop in sterling can turn the popular mood around in the nine days before the vote.

Insincerity. There are strong suspicions that the people leading the debate are less concerned with the country’s future than with their own political careers. One long-time friend and political ally of Cameron described him as someone who would privately prefer Brexit if he hadn’t staked his career on the opposite. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader who is half-heartedly campaigning for the U.K. to remain the E.U., is almost certainly another closet Brexit supporter, a Socialist who sees the E.U. as the stooge of global capitalism, eroding workers’ rights with its neo-liberal focus on the Single Market. Perversely, this perceived insincerity has hurt the anti-Brexit camp more than it has Boris Johnson, the Tory ex-Mayor of London, who has shamelessly changed his tune on the E.U. to make Brexit the instrument by which he can oust Cameron as party leader and take over as Prime Minister.

Resentment. All of the above are variations on a theme of popular resentment of an elite seen as out of touch. That has intensified every time an establishment figure criticizes those intending to vote for Brexit, whether it be Jean-Claude Juncker, the pantomime villain who heads the European Commission, or Barack Obama (who is genuinely popular and, for the most part, admired in Britain). It’s no accident that one of the few voices to have endorsed Brexit is presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, who plays to exactly the same feelings of alienation, disenfranchisement, and nationalism. Such resentment also explains why Scotland came so close to leaving the U.K. last year. In the end, after much venting, cooler heads prevailed. The pragmatic “nation of shopkeepers” that Napoleon derided could still do likewise, but it’s running out of time to calm down and clear its head.

Summary: And their uncanny similarity to a familiar U.S. political current


Mark Hurd had a problem. It was 2012, some two years after he had executed one of the most dramatic escape acts in corporate history. Just weeks after giving up his powerful perch as CEO of computer maker Hewlett-Packard HPQ in the summer of 2010, Hurd landed nearly at the top of software giant Oracle ORCL , with a critical assist from its co-founder and chief executive, Larry Ellison. One moment Hurd was fending off mortifying allegations of sexual harassment and expense-account violations; the next he was safely ensconced in a job that would pay some $40 million in his first year alone, working for a man who didn’t give a fig what envelopes Hurd might have pushed—so long as he made his numbers.

Now, though, Hurd faced a very modern conundrum: In the Internet Age, it’s nearly impossible to escape your past. For evidence, he had only to look at the results of a Google GOOG search of his name. High on the list was the website fuckyoumarkhurd.com, his reward for having methodically slashed costs at the famously hidebound HP during his five years at its helm. The site contained all manner of negative stories about him. Worse, search results persistently yielded photos of Hurd with Jodie Fisher, the reality-TV actress who’d helped him manage HP customer events around the world. Back in 2010, Fisher had hired the press-release-wielding lawyer Gloria Allred to allege that Hurd had harassed her, which set in motion the events that culminated in his departure from HP.

Anyone would be upset. Hurd, with a finely tuned sense of self-image, was livid. “All he could talk about was how he was seething about what happened at HP,” says an executive who preceded Hurd at Oracle and has since left.

To solve the problem, Hurd turned to a former investigative journalist named Glenn Bunting, who had repositioned his career as a media adviser for businesspeople with problems they wished would disappear. Bunting, who had held senior positions at the Los Angeles Times, had learned the black arts of crisis communications working for one of the field’s top practitioners, Mike Sitrick. It was through Sitrick that Hurd met Bunting, who shepherded the former CEO through the trying circumstances of his fall from grace.

Hurd’s instruction was simple: Fix my Google results. So on Oracle’s dime, Bunting embarked on a campaign to gin up new content about Hurd that would displace the seamy and steamy material that turned up in an Internet search. A combination of Bunting’s efforts and the passage of time did the trick, and chatter about the circumstances of Hurd’s exit from HP finally receded.

As that pall has lifted, a much sunnier picture is emerging: Hurd has thrived at Oracle, where he happily accepted the downward move of becoming co-president alongside Ellison’s longtime financial and operational consigliere, Safra Catz. Ellison rewarded both last September by naming Hurd and Catz joint CEOs of Oracle, bumping himself to executive chairman.

Hurd with Safra Catz (left) and Larry Ellison (holding wineglass) at an Oracle event in September 2010, soon after Hurd joined the company.Photo: Tony Avelar—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Suddenly Hurd is on top again. “A lot of people were skeptical of his ability to go from the limelight to the shadow,” says Tom Hogan, CEO of a mobile software company called Kony, who worked under Hurd at HP. “Now he’s emerging from the shadow with the co-CEO title. And it’s because he truly loves working for Larry.”

The story of how Mark Hurd returned from tabloid fodder to Fortune 500 leader is an epic corporate comeback. It’s a good yarn, and one that Hurd, who has significantly increased his profile of late, appeared eager to tell. Bunting, who continues to serve as Hurd’s personal publicist, approached Fortune, proposing an article about his comeback. Then, concerned there would be too much focus on the past, Hurd decided not to participate after all.

It’s a saga worth recounting nonetheless. And as Hurd knows full well, it’s not over by a long shot. He’s rising at a pivotal time for the 38-year-old company. Oracle is busily playing catch-up on an industry transition toward subscription-based, or “cloud,” computing that it badly missed.

Moreover, Hurd has now positioned himself as the possible sole CEO of the future. Of course, potential heirs to the Oracle throne have traditionally lasted about as long as Ellison’s marriages (there have been four of the latter at last count). There’s also another contender or two for the top job. All of which is to say, Mark Hurd won’t be able to ease up anytime soon.

Hurd is blunt and not shy about taking issue with almost anything. In a written statement, he dismissed the thesis of this article: “Redemption? While I appreciate the sentiment, I don’t think what I’m doing at Oracle has anything to do with redemption. I am thrilled to be at Oracle working with our team.” The statement doesn’t quite capture Hurd’s typical tone. He has vehemently denied any misbehavior at HP; to say he is unrepentant would be an understatement. (Hurd added, about his old company, “I don’t have much time to reflect on the past. I do have great memories of my time at HP, the fantastic results we achieved, and the people who made those results happen.”)

HP didn’t view Hurd so rosily when he resigned. (Contrary to public perception, he was not fired.) The company concluded his behavior had been inappropriate—but cleared him of violating its harassment policy. Still, he suffered an irreparable rift with key board members, who felt he hadn’t been straightforward with them.

It would be more than a year before details of an accusatory letter Allred wrote to Hurd became public. It contained a narrative of his alleged sexual advances to Fisher, including the claim that he once walked her to an ATM to show her the size of his account balance. Following a settlement of undisclosed terms, Fisher stated that Allred’s letter contained inaccuracies. But she never explained which parts were wrong.

Precisely one month after the scandal broke, Ellison delivered a masterstroke. Comparing what he called the stupidity of HP’s board to Apple’s AAPL long-ago decision to fire his friend Steve Jobs, Ellison hired Hurd as president of Oracle, responsible for sales and marketing.

Before sealing the deal, however, Hurd had to pass muster with Catz, a steely and powerful presence at Oracle who is fiercely protective of Ellison—and her relationship with him. “Safra spent six hours with Hurd before Oracle went public with the news that he was joining the company,” says someone with contacts at Oracle’s highest echelons. “She told him he wouldn’t live long enough to regret getting between Larry and herself or attempting to unseat Larry.”

Oracle co-CEO Catz at the company’s recent media day.Photograph by Laura Morton—Getty Images for Fortune

Oracle employees took the soap opera surrounding Hurd in stride. After all, Larry Ellison has often been linked to younger women, some of whom became his wives. And not long before Hurd’s arrival, the company witnessed the spectacle of the former girlfriend of his predecessor, Charles Phillips, plastering photos of the star-crossed couple on billboards in New York and other cities. “We got used to scandal and bad behavior,” says an Oracle veteran.

Hurd has not only flourished at Oracle but succeeded in getting along with Catz as well as Ellison. “Mark has been deft at contributing without competing with or criticizing Larry or Safra,” says the same well-informed source. Hurd’s main job is to help his massive sales force close deals with the world’s biggest companies. Says this source: “He’s great at his role, which is bagging elephants.”

Hurd and Oracle, it turns out, are ideally suited for each other. The 58-year-old spent more than two decades at tech equipment maker NCR NCR , rising through the sales-and-marketing ranks to become CEO before being recruited in 2005 to replace the recently fired CEO of HP, Carly Fiorina. Along the way he developed a reputation for directness, by-the-numbers analysis, and a zest for closing deals with customers and currying favor with investors. If Hurd didn’t always care for the niceties of making employees feel good, he always got results.

In Oracle he found a rough-and-tumble environment known for its bruising sales and engineering cultures. A former Oracle executive describes the company’s people as driven yet pompous and territorial. Oracle has a reputation throughout the enterprise technology world for pushing around even its best customers, especially after they have installed technology that would be prohibitively expensive to remove.

Oracle execs are known for their bombastic dismissal of competitors. Catz, who in addition to sharing the CEO title with Hurd is Oracle’s principal financial officer, once told a group of incredulous investors her company was going to kill upstart Workday WDAY , which sells subscription software for managing human resources departments, “before they get out of the crib.” (Now a decade old, Workday sports a decidedly grown-up $15 billion public market valuation and is a key competitor. Oracle declined to comment on Catz’s statement.)

Employees are quickly made to feel their place at Oracle. “I was there 20 years,” says another ex-executive. “The quality of people is very high. But you will never find Oracle on a list of the 50 best places to work. There are very few people in the spotlight, and the attitude is that everyone is replaceable.” For those who come in through acquisitions, the experience can be jarring. Before a deal closes, Oracle requires the to-be-acquired company to seek approval on any expenditure above $10,000. The company’s well-oiled M&A machine, which reports to Catz, has a template for a 100-day integration plan that explains to acquired employees exactly why Oracle is buying their company and whether they’ll still have a job.

When Hurd arrived at Oracle there was considerable fear, given his reputation for cost cutting. He was reviled at HP for slashing its multibillion-dollar research budget, but he wasn’t wrong: HP’s vaunted labs hadn’t produced much innovation in years. Hurd streamlined a bloated company—and Wall Street loved him for it.

Oracle, by contrast, was neither bloated nor broken. Catz had tightly maintained profit margins and made sure that acquisitions fit into the company’s financial plan. Oracle’s bigger problem was repositioning its product line toward subscription-based software as well as retraining its sales force to sell it. One of Hurd’s key initiatives has been to hire thousands of college students to conduct tele-sales for Oracle. The churn on the young recruits is as high as 50%, but the program achieved two objectives. It lowered Oracle’s selling costs for part of its sales effort and quickly freshened up the roster of salespeople. Meanwhile Hurd has reorganized the company’s sales force by product, buyer, and competitor, and doubled its size. Though that change hasn’t fully paid off yet, revenues are steadily climbing, and analysts are optimistic.

Hurd slotted in peacefully with the small handful of peers at the apex of the corporation, but he retained his sharp-elbowed ways elsewhere. He quickly clashed with Oracle’s head of North American sales, Keith Block, whose derogatory instant messages about his new boss showed up in court documents as part of an Oracle legal dispute with HP that wasn’t related directly to Hurd’s departure. Block griped that Hurd avoided international travel, contending he should “be a fucking global president.” Block also suggested there “wasn’t enough room for us both” at Oracle. He was right about that part. Block left in 2012, shortly after the messages were disclosed. He has since become president of competitor Salesforce.com, where he has recruited heavily from Oracle.

Ellison and Hurd watching tennis at Indian Wells, Calif., in 2011.Photo: Paul Buck—EPA

Hurd is notoriously competitive, about sports as well as business. In 2013 he showed up dripping with sweat for a sales meeting at Ellison’s private golf course complex near Palm Springs, Calif. He explained to a group of customers and Oracle executives that he had been working out with a tennis pro in preparation for an upcoming match. “It’s not that he doesn’t have good instincts,” says one sales executive now at a competing software company. “But he was always so unpleasant. People aligned with his what, if not his how.”

For all the attention on the three best-known Oracle executives—Ellison, Hurd, and Catz—the burden of helping Oracle make a critical and tricky technological transition rests on its younger, lower-profile president, Thomas Kurian. Oracle people refer to Kurian, who is 48 and has worked at Oracle for nearly 20 years, in reverential tones. He is the proverbial smartest person in the room and a demanding and workaholic manager who schedules meetings in increments of as little as 10 minutes. Promoted to president shortly after Hurd and Catz were named CEOs, Kurian is also widely regarded as Ellison’s most valued technical adviser. He is, says one top Oracle leader, “a pulsing giant brain that is most like Larry.”

Kurian’s mission today is to shepherd Oracle’s shift from making traditional business software its customers own and keep installed on their own servers to pay-as-you-go subscriptions for software delivered over the Internet and stored in the cloud.

By its own admission, Oracle got a late start on cloud computing. In a way, Ellison was ahead of the curve in the late 1990s with a mistimed product he called the “network computer.” But the Internet wasn’t far enough along for Ellison’s idea, so he shelved it even as he helped the next generation of companies focus on the trend. “Larry knew the cloud was coming,” says Andre Boisvert, a former top Oracle executive who went on to be president of software maker SAS Institute. “But he’d been burned by the network computer. He thought the market would wait for him. But it didn’t. Then he said, ‘Forget what I told you yesterday.’ He lost a bit of credibility.”

Kurian, who speaks just louder than a whisper and refers to the Oracle executive chairman as “Mr. Ellison,” began reengineering all of Oracle’s products nearly a decade ago. But given that cloud software was still in its infancy, he moved cautiously. “Back in 2006, 2007, when we started the engineering effort,” Kurian says, “nobody thought that cloud was going to be so fundamentally important.” Actually, someone did: Competitors from Workday to Amazon Web Services AMZN were far more successful winning subscription business, especially among cost-conscious smaller companies.

Oracle president Thomas Kurian at the company’s recent media day.Photograph by Laura Morton for Fortune

Oracle didn’t debut its first cloud offerings until 2012, but it has since come on strong. “Now, on average on a daily basis, 62 million people log in and use our cloud for various things,” says Kurian. Although subscription-based software accounts for only about 5% of Oracle’s $38 billion annualized revenue, it dominates Oracle’s public commentary and is an all-hands-on-deck effort internally. Kurian oversees three-times-a-week engineering meetings that run from 2:30 to 7:00 p.m. He says Ellison attends every meeting when he is in town, which is most of the time.

Oracle’s cloud pitch is a classic package deal: Buy everything from us rather than cobbling together programs from disparate vendors. It’s the same approach the company successfully used in an earlier era in which it consolidated the database-software industry through acquisitions. Its efforts seem to be paying off. “Oracle has the biggest number of features in the cloud world,” says Vinnie Mirchandani, an independent software analyst who has written extensively about Oracle competitor SAP SAP . “Not all of them sell well, and some aren’t the best, but they are the broadest. No question.”

On the last day of April, Oracle hosted a handful of journalists in its offices for what it billed as its first-ever media day. The event signaled a new openness by Oracle, a company whose founder’s yachting, girlfriends, and real-estate-buying exploits receive more attention than its products. The event featured presentations by Oracle’s top three executives but not Ellison, giving a real-time view of the top contenders for his job. (Other than relinquishing his title, Ellison has said nothing about retiring.) Catz, who is 53 years old and almost never talks to the press, stated she won’t stick around at Oracle when the 70-year-old Ellison leaves. When “Larry drives off in one of his fancy cars,” she said, “I’ll be in the passenger seat.”

Informed sources confirm that Catz has no designs on running Oracle alone. Indeed, it was Hurd’s idea that she be elevated alongside him, a recognition of her critical role. As well, those in the know say Kurian harbors a thinly veiled ambition to be Oracle’s boss. A well-placed source says Kurian has been assured he will get the position when Hurd and Catz’s time is over.

For now, though, the job is Hurd’s to lose—assuming Ellison ever decides to bequeath it. After keeping a relatively low profile for his first several years, Hurd has raised his head of late. He appears on CNBC to talk up Oracle’s prospects—the company’s stock price has doubled during his tenure—and he gives frequent interviews to the press and makes prominent industry speeches.

Hurd’s public comments tend to focus on Oracle’s complexity, with fulsome references to Ellison’s leadership and vision. In February, at an event in San Francisco hosted by industry pundit Mark Anderson, Hurd name-checked Steve Jobs, whom he knew when he was at HP. “Steve told me one time, ‘I don’t want to do your job. I don’t want to have to fly and go see customers. You actually go see customers and you talk to them, and they say mean things to you. It just doesn’t sound like fun to me. In my job, customers come to see me.’ ” The message: Enterprise technology is a tough business. In April, Hurd addressed a forum at Boston College’s business school on the subject of “Survive or Thrive? How Will You Modernize Your Business?”

Hurd clearly prefers some publicity opportunities to others. In early May, after previously canceling an interview for this article, Hurd agreed, via Bunting, to speak. As the date approached, however, Hurd begged off again, this time citing what he said were instructions from Oracle’s general counsel. The so-called quiet period leading up to Oracle’s release of financial results prohibited an interview, Bunting said. The prohibition apparently didn’t apply to Kurian, the company’s president, because he was interviewed by Fortune during the same quiet period with the company’s blessing (with the caveat that because of the quiet period, Kurian wasn’t permitted to discuss financial matters). Hurd, through Bunting, then offered up a third plan for an interview—after the quiet period and after Fortune’s publication deadline.

As this article went to press, Hurd was slated to give a “fireside chat” with a Harvard Business Review editor at a technology event called the Nantucket Conference. The event, attended by the news media, was scheduled to take place less than two weeks before Oracle reports its 2015 fiscal year results.

No matter how high his profile is, one obstacle Hurd faces to becoming the sole boss at Oracle is that the company has always been run by a technologist, which he is not. “Mark is a great operator,” says Boisvert, the former Oracle executive who has known Hurd since his NCR days. “He has an uncanny ability to look at reams and reams of numbers and understand what’s going on. But he’s not necessarily a technology visionary. You give him a product, and he knows how to position it and go sell it. He’s not someone who wakes up and thinks about how to disrupt an industry.”

The subject of succeeding Larry Ellison has been fraught for years. One person familiar with the company’s succession planning describes past pretenders to the throne as having entered the “Bermuda Triangle” of Oracle’s executive suite. What has tended to be the undoing of previous executives has been allowing their star to publicly outshine Ellison’s. Observes someone who has been in the Oracle orbit for years: “Larry is amused until he is annoyed.”

For now, however, Hurd is on top. Ellison is said to be thrilled with his leadership, and those in the know say Hurd’s promotion to co-CEO was intended to fend off suitors who try to entice him with chief executive jobs elsewhere. By one measure, Hurd has one of the smallest portfolios of any major-company CEO. Despite having 95,000 employees reporting to him, he has responsibility neither for finance, legal, or human resources (Catz’s domain) nor engineering (Kurian’s). And he serves at the pleasure of one of the industry’s founding figures, and a mercurial one at that. Hurd has been redeemed, all right. Staying at Oracle will be his continuing challenge.

A version of this article appears in the June 15, 2015 issue of Fortune magazine with the headline ‘The Redemption of Mark Hurd’.

Summary: Less than five years after his humiliating fall from HP, he's on top again. The tale of the comeback of a man ... who denies he ever fell in the first place.


just emerged from bankruptcy ... but the real news is that she went belly up in the first place.

Miller -- a dance instructor who owns a studio in Pittsburgh -- filed for bankruptcy Dec. 3, 2010 ... according to legal docs obtained by TMZ. She claimed assets of about $325K ... but owed more than $400,000.

The bulk of her debt -- a $245K mortgage that went into default and the $106K debt on her dance studio.

According to docs, Miller got into financial trouble after she fell behind in real estate taxes ... her property was teetering on foreclosure. She also claimed customer interest in her studio had waned.

But her fortunes began to improve shortly after she filed ... as she started earning money from "Dance Moms" which debuted in July, 2011.

Miller spent three years digging herself out of the hole ... and her case was officially discharged on New Year's Eve. Her lawyer tells TMZ all creditors were paid in full.

Fun Fact ... Under assets Miller listed her beloved dog, Broadway Baby -- and attached a value of zero.

Summary: "Dance Moms" star Abby Lee Miller just emerged from bankruptcy ... but the real news is that she went belly up in the first place.Miller -- a dance…


Football is not a safe sport, and the Super Bowl on Sunday was no exception, with one player out because of a concussion before the New England Patriots prevailed over the Seattle Seahawks. Even though players wear lots of protective gear and helmets to protect their skulls, it doesn’t stop what many are calling a “concussion epidemic” among U.S. sports. But, one scientist is calling upon the community to develop new materials that could make helmets much safer.

A new study published Wednesday shows former NFL players who played tackle football before age 12 were more likely to have memory and thinking problems when they’re adults. But scientist Ainissa Ramirez, author of the book Newton’s Football: The Science Behind America’s Game, says it doesn’t have to be this way. If helmets were made with better materials, players’ brains could be better protected. “Helmet material is too stiff, it’s not able to absorb the force,” she says.

MORE: How a Digital Football Could Have Saved Us From Deflategate

Ramirez and her co-author Allen St. John decided to ask the question: Why don’t other animals who hit their heads often get concussions? First, they looked at the woodpecker. “What we learned that woodpeckers don’t get concussions because they have small brains which means they can handle bigger forces,” explains Ramirez. “You know this intuitively, if your cellphone drops off your desk or your laptop drops off your desk, you’re not going to be too worried about your cell phone but you’re going to be afraid for your laptop.”

Next they looked at rams, and made a promising discovery. “Rams and big horned sheep hit each other at 40 miles and hour, and seconds later they are coming back for more,” says Ramirez. “They have brains comparable to our own size. They can survive and not get concussions because of their horns.” Rams’ horns are made out of a polymer called keratin. Keratin is in our hair, our fingernails, in tortoise shells, and porcupine quills for example. Ramirez says it’s very stretchy, and for rams, it acts like a crumple zone for a car, but with the ability to recover.

“We need better materials [for helmets] and we can borrow from nature. Maybe we need a material that’s sort of like keratin,” says Ramirez.

It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve borrowed from nature. Velcro, for example, was created in the 1950s when George de Mestral, a Swiss electrical engineer. After returning from a walk, he discovered his socks and his dog’s fur were covered in burs. Intrigued by how they worked, de Mestral looked at the burs under a microscope and discovered a bunch of little hooks, which became the inspiration for velcro.

Ramirez isn’t positive that keratin will for sure work as a helmet material, but she’s calling on the scientific community to try it out, or at least prioritize the search for better materials. Despite the fact that in 2013 the NFL launched a $10 million program to find better shock absorbent materials for helmets and other technologies to prevent concussions, there hasn’t been much of a race for finding the perfect material. One promising effort is from a team at UCLA that’s researching the use of a energy-absorbing microlattice material that could replace the foam in helmets.

You can watch a video of UCLA’s material below:

Ramirez says she thinks there are not many academics taking on helmet materials because the field isn’t “sexy.” “Scientists have egos like everyone else and if you’re sitting at the table working on helmet material, people think, ‘well what’s wrong with that person?’” says Ramirez. “It’s also hard to get an audience with the NFL. There are a lot of barriers.”

Still, the hope is that more priority and funding from the NFL and medical community will spur greater innovation for new helmet materials. We might see new technologies to prevent concussions in the near future, though not in time for the Super Bowl this weekend.

Summary: Better materials could mean fewer concussions


Jiddu Krishnamurti, the religious philosopher and teacher, died of cancer yesterday at his residence at the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai, Calif. He was 90 years old.

Failing health last month forced Mr. Krishnamurti to cut short his final visit to India, where he gave his last public talk Jan. 3 in Madras, the place of his birth. His last appearances in New York were at a gathering at the United Nations in April 1985 and two talks before capacity audiences at Carnegie Hall in March 1982.

Mr. Krishnamurti continued to draw young listeners as well as elderly admirers who remembered the years when many revered him as virtually a new messiah, a notion he firmly renounced more than 55 years ago.

His teaching - he was distrustful of the word - was based on self-reliance and unflinching self-knowledge. People, he said, must understand themselves without delusions, a challenge that only they can meet and that they must meet to change society for the better. Renunciation of Religions

Mr. Krishnamurti renounced all organized religions and ideologies in 1929, saying that religions, with their prescribed teachings and worship services, retarded self-awareness. In that spirit, he carried his message to audiences in many countries.

People who agreed with him supported him and the nonprofit foundations he set up in southern California, England and Madras. But unlike some other Eastern gurus with a Western following, he was rarely accused of exploiting their trust.

When he was not traveling, he spent his time mostly in Ojai, a resort town he first saw in 1922. He established the principal Krishnamurti Foundation there in 1969 and was still chairman of the board at the time of his death. Aside from an office and his residence, the foundation also operates the Oak Grove School, founded on the other side of town in 1975. With about 90 students from preschool to high school age, the school teaches regular academic subjects and encourages students to think for themselves, according to the foundation. Author of Many Books

Mr. Krishnamurti was the author of about 40 books, some of which were collections of talks and conversations. Erna Lilliefelt, a foundation trustee in Ojai, said a new book by him, ''The Future of Humanity,'' a series of discussions he had with Dr. David Bohm, a physicist, was to be issued by Mr. Krishnamurti's publisher, Harper & Row, in early May.

The foundation, which has no members, says it is impossible to estimate how many people might practice Mr. Krishnamurti's philosophy. But according to Mrs. Lilliefelt, the mailing list of the American foundation alone has grown to 20,000.

She said the foundation would continue its schools, including five in India and one in Hampshire, England, and the task of seeing to the publication of his books, most of which remain in print.

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born May 22, 1895, outside Madras, where the family later moved. His father, Jiddu Narayania, a poorly paid civil servant, was a devout Brahmin as well as a Theosophist who worked part-time in the Madras office of the Theosophist Society, a pan-religious movement. Theosophist Leader's Protege

When Jiddu Krishnamurti was a teen-ager, he became the protege of Annie Besant, president of the Theosophist Society. It was Mrs. Besant, who was highly visible in India as a political and social reformer, who hailed the boy as the chosen vehicle of what she called the Great Teacher or World Teacher.

The reference was to a messianic Buddha figure in Hindu mythology. To further the cause, Mrs. Besant in 1911 founded the World Order of the Star of the East, with Mr. Krishnamurti at its head.

He was privately educated in England and at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Mrs. Besant traveled with him in Europe and in the United States. His early visits to New York in the 1920's became choice items for the city's many tabloids, which feasted on the fervor of Mrs. Besant's followers and their notion of the new Messiah.

By the mid-1920's, Mrs. Besant issued public disclaimers noting that she and the Order of the Star had never made such claims. The World Teacher, she insisted, had spoken through the body of his disciple Jesus 2,000 years ago and had made Mr. Krishnamurti his ''vehicle'' this time. A Mission of Freedom

Mr. Krishnamurti made his break in 1929 by dissolving the order and repudiating the idea that salvation could be had by following a cult leader. Instead, he embarked on a mission to set human beings ''absolutely, unconditionally free.''

Mr. Krishnamurti, a tall, striking figure, with a full head of once dark hair, spoke with a proper upper-class English accent. A vegetarian, teetotaler, nonsmoker and practitioner of yoga, he dressed in Western suits or traditional Indian wear according to his surroundings.

Over the years, he counted among his friends such world figures as George Bernard Shaw, Henry Miller and Aldous Huxley. Huxley wrote in 1961 that listening to Mr. Krishnamurti was ''like listening to the discourse of a Buddha.''

In accordance with his wishes, there will be no memorial service. He is to be cremated, with his ashes scattered at the foundation sites in California, England and India.


Six Months That Changed the World.

Illustrated. 570 pp. New York:

From January to June 1919, the leaders of Britain, France, Italy and the United States met in Paris to decide the outcome of the war they had just won against the Central Powers. They faced a Herculean task. In the course of the Great War of 1914-18, four old multinational empires had fallen: the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German and Ottoman. The fate of hundreds of millions of people, from Strasbourg to Baghdad, from Hamburg to Aqaba, was unclear. Previous peace conferences -- including the best known, the Congress convened in Vienna in 1815 to reorder Europe after the defeat of Napoleon -- had confined themselves to adjusting the fates of dynasties and states. The peacemakers of 1919 had also to pay attention to principles, promises, public opinion and a fast-changing and unstable political scene. Russia was in revolution and much of central Europe seemed ready to follow suit.

The historian of the Paris peace talks (better known to history by the Versailles treaty in which they culminated) faces a task almost as daunting. Paris was awash in study groups, side negotiations and specialist discussions conducted simultaneously during those frenetic months. Every territorial demand, frontier rectification, ethnolinguistic claim and counterclaim -- and there were dozens of them -- had a history extending back many years before 1914. How is this story to be presented so that a modern reader can make sense of it without drowning in unfamiliar names and obscure Ruritanian conflicts?

To complicate matters further, anyone writing in English about the making of the Versailles treaty must even now struggle to escape from the long shadow cast by two young English participants in the Paris negotiations, who wrote their own accounts of the events. In ''Peacemaking 1919,'' Harold Nicolson sketched caustic vignettes of elderly statesmen adrift in a world they couldn't comprehend. And John Maynard Keynes, in ''The Economic Consequences of the Peace,'' demolished the credibility of the settlement itself, eviscerated the case for war reparations and predicted the disaster that must follow.

Margaret MacMillan's prose is no match for Nicolson's, and no one can compete with Keynes's intellectual firepower. But with ''Paris 1919'' she has written a very good history of the negotiations, full of colorful detail and as comprehensive as anyone could wish. The organization of the book leaves something to be desired -- discussing the 1919 creation of Yugoslavia without first explaining what happened in the Balkan wars of 1912-13 is confusing; so is the author's decision to tell the story of the breakup of the Hapsburg empire after her account of the little states that succeeded it. But the separate national narratives are very well handled.

MacMillan, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, is particularly good at describing and characterizing individuals, not only leading figures like Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, but also peripheral actors like Queen Marie of Romania and a string of hapless supplicants from Beijing to Budapest. Wilson does not come out well. Despite his good intentions, perhaps because of them, he was widely viewed as petulant, petty and vain. Lloyd George and Clemenceau, closeted with him for half a year, eventually grew tolerant of his obsessions and moods, but they never got used to his peculiarly American brand of idealism, so ill suited to a time when arm-twisting and old-fashioned horse-trading were required to achieve anything. Wilson's obsession with achieving his new League of Nations was not shared by the more realistic and pessimistic Europeans. And when the Americans did finally abandon principles and resort to bullying, they seemed hypocritical.

Nevertheless, the American president was the key figure in Paris. The French were understandably concerned with keeping Germany down for the indefinite future. The Italians wanted the territorial pound of flesh they had been secretly promised in return for switching sides in 1915. The British sought above all to stabilize Europe's peripheries and protect access to their imperial possessions farther south and east. Only the Americans had a Big Idea -- self-determination. The peoples and nations now released from imperial captivity were each to receive their own spaces, assigned after careful specialist attention to history, geography, language and other relevant considerations. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, Armenians, even Kurds were to have a place in the sun. Only Germans, and to a lesser extent Turks, were not free to determine where and with whom they would live -- the price of defeat.

The idea of self-determination was wonderful, the reality disastrous. As Robert Lansing, Wilson's secretary of state, predicted: ''It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until it was too late to check those who attempt to put the principle into force.'' He was right. The peoples of central Europe and the old Ottoman empire did not live in conveniently divided communities. They were typically mixed up together.

Summary: PARIS 1919   Six Months That Changed the World.   By Margaret MacMillan.   Illustrated. 570 pp. New York:   Random House. $35.


IN the photograph, the 11-year-old girl stands stiffly before a plain wall in her sleeveless, white crocheted dress, arms leaden, mouth shut. Her grave face is tightly framed by long hair and bangs, which almost conceal her eyes. She stares back at us from the shadow cast by the bangs, with a look that I might register as fear, although who is to say for sure? The heavy formality of the transaction between photographer and subject announces itself. The girl is clearly responding to the person making this portrait, whose presence we sense. By its nature the picture tells us who this photographer is. She makes sure that we know.

Diane Arbus once compared movies to photographs. ''When you go to the movies and you see two people in bed,'' she said, ''you're willing to put aside the fact that you perfectly well know that there was a director and a cameraman and assorted lighting people all in that same room, and the two people in bed weren't really alone. But when you look at a photograph, you can never put that aside.''

Two traveling Arbus shows have occasioned a fresh blizzard of tributes and invective. A full-dress survey, sanctioned by the Arbus estate, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the first major retrospective since the landmark posthumous one in 1972, will get to the Metropolitan Museum next year, when I'll make my way toward a fuller verdict on Arbus's whole career.

Meanwhile, another show, the appetizer to that event, you might say, opens on Monday at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. It has been organized by the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas.

The exemplary polarizing artist, Arbus, who was 48 when she committed suicide in 1971, was either a compassionate renegade who dignified and threw herself into the lives of the marginal subjects to whom she gravitated, or she was an exploitative narcissist of morbid eloquence for whom, as Susan Sontag acidly wrote 30 years ago, America was ''just a freak show, a wasteland.'' Ms. Sontag memorably elaborated: ''The subjects of Arbus's photographs are all members of the same family, inhabitants of a single village. Only, as it happens, the idiot village is America. Instead of showing identity between things which are different (Whitman's democratic vista), everybody is shown to look the same.''

This is not quite true, by the way -- some family members look more freakish than others in Arbus's photographs. But toward the end of her life, Arbus did say in passing that she imagined a kind of family album of her work. From this remark, the show arriving at the Grey, ''Diane Arbus: Family Albums,'' has devised its slender thesis.

The core of the exhibition is a cache of more than 200 previously unseen photographs, both contact sheets and finished prints, which Arbus made for a private commission at the end of December 1969. She was hired by a rich and prominent actor and theater owner, Konrad Matthaei, and his wife, Gay (a Mount Holyoke alumna), to shoot a family Christmas gathering at their Upper East Side town house. Their elder daughter, Marcella, was the 11-year-old. There were also a toddler son, Konrad Jr., and a younger daughter, Leslie, who, as the exhibition was being put together, decided she did not want any of the photographs of herself published; so at the last minute they were excised from the show's catalog.

Arbus started out as a commercial photographer working with her husband, then became an artist on her own. To support yourself as an art photographer during the 1960's, even if you were Arbus and your work had been shown in the Museum of Modern Art, was not easy. Divorced, Arbus continued to take commercial jobs to augment her income. The Matthaeis, being fashionable people who collected art, hired Arbus, a fashionable artist. She spent two days photographing them -- unobtrusively, according to their accounts, while they went about their business -- occasionally posing them on a sofa below their Monet, or shooting them singly, as with the photograph of Marcella and another one of Konrad Jr., a generic cutie on his rocking horse.

Because of the tight grip the Arbus estate has kept on the use of her photographs and private material, these family pictures have been received gladly by information-starved Arbus scholars, notwithstanding that this was clearly a minor gig for her. They provide some kind of window onto Arbus's working method while on commission, but with the exception of Marcella's portrait and one or two other pictures -- not a bad percentage, considering -- the photographs are uniformly routine and banal.

Beefing up the show to satisfy the publishers of the catalog, the organizers have thrown in whatever else they could that seemed relevant. This means more commissions: the Spencer Museum owns prints of photographs Arbus shot for Esquire magazine, along with some of their contact sheets; as with the Matthaei contact sheets, these suggest how Arbus operated on assignment and reveal which pictures she or her editors liked best.

She photographed Mae West, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Bennett Cerf, the famous atheist Madalyn Murray and Marguerite Oswald, Lee Harvey Oswald's mother. You see them negotiating their images in the contact sheets. Oswald smiles sweetly. Arbus manages a single full-length shot in which her expression hardens slightly. That's the one Esquire published.

Cerf wouldn't allow his corporate face to fall while Arbus tried posing him at the breakfast table, on the street, on his couch. A cropped, garish close-up, in which he laughs into a flash, makes him seem slightly maniacal. Bingo.

These works are mixed up at the Grey with a few others, including Arbus's famous photograph of a boy holding a toy grenade; the picture of Andrew Ratoucheff, the dwarf actor, in his rooming house; and the iconic one of twins. John Pultz, an associate professor of art history at the University of Kansas, and Anthony W. Lee, an associate professor of art history at Mount Holyoke, the show's curators, have latched onto the family album theme to tie all these disparate works together, a clever but vain gambit that is sometimes unintentionally hilarious. Oswald, Tokyo Rose and the stripper Blaze Starr are grouped under the heading ''mothers''; Norman Mailer, Cerf and Ratoucheff are ''fathers.''

This hopeful rubric says more about the practical difficulty of cobbling together an Arbus show than it does about the thematic weight of Arbus's remark about a ''family album.'' She also once likened her work to a butterfly collection. Arbus was the classic hunter-photographer shooting her fragile prey; her targets were rarefied specimens, exceptional cases; her mission was a clinical typology of difference. An element of violence was implicit.

Families are groups. Arbus, who called all families ''creepy,'' used her camera to measure individuals against society; she thought of herself as set apart, too, by talent. Although we erect facades, our true selves, which are evasive, can be captured by those with talent and the right butterfly net, she believed.

''Everybody has this thing where they need to look one way, but they come out looking another way, and that's what people observe,'' she said, adding, ''You see someone on the street, and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.'' That is what she noticed, at least.

I recommend the catalog essays by Mr. Pultz and Mr. Lee, who range intelligently across familiar topics like the rise of art photography, the postwar American Jewish family and social upheaval during the 1960's, and who recount the influences of Walker Evans, Weegee and August Sander on Arbus.

In fact, her differences from them are equally instructive. They all kept their distance. Arbus trafficked in a kind of hothouse intimacy, which can easily be confused (as she occasionally wished) with sympathy, a moral pose. But she was not a ''concerned photographer.'' Her work, like all allegorical art, comes down to formal manipulation. The cliché of her as the Sylvia Plath of photographers, combined with the way her photographs direct your attention to her presence, can obscure the difference between what is in the pictures and what we might like to read into them.

Summary: Michael Kimmelman reviews works by photographer Diane Arbus at New York University's Gray Art Gallery; photos (M)


EU antitrust authorities will decide by July 28 whether to allow the $130 billion merger of U.S. chemical company Dow Chemical dow and its rival DuPont dd , one of several large agribusiness deals.

The companies requested approval on Wednesday, according to a filing on the European Commission website.

The EU competition enforcer can approve the deal with or without concessions or it can open a full-scale investigation of about five months should it have serious concerns about the merger’s impact on consumers and rivals.

DuPont and Dow hope to close the deal around October or November. The U.S. Department of Justice is also examining the proposed merger.

Summary: After the companies requested approval


ST. LOUIS In sickness and in health, Jason Isringhausen's judgment still leaves something to be desired. One month to the day after he broke his right wrist by angrily slamming his hand against a dugout trash can, he concluded a conference call with reporters yesterday by calling Mets public relations director Jay Horwitz "Jew boy.

" Isringhausen apparently believed he made the comment in private. But Horwitz had not yet disconnected a speakerphone when the remark was made. "I wasn't offended," Horwitz said. "It was just a name. We kid each other with different names. He didn't mean anything by it. It wasn't malicious. "It was meant for my ears alone. Unfortunately I didn't get the phone down quickly enough. " Isringhausen, speaking from his home in Brighton, Ill., shortly after the initial call, insisted he intended no disrespect. "We all talk to Jay like that," Isringhausen said. ""Jay's almost like my brother. He is to everybody. That's stupid to think anybody would think anything bad about Jay.

" Assistant GM Steve Phillips later spoke with Isringhausen by phone and chastised him. "It was an inappropriate reference to make whether he was in private or in jest," Phillips said. During yesterday's game between the Mets and Cardinals, Phillips announced that Isringhausen wished to offer a formal apology. "I need to apologize for my comment, if it offended anyone," the pitcher said. "It was insensitive. Anyone who knows me knows I'm not like that. I didn't intend to hurt anyone, especially a close friend like Jay. I won't say anything like that again.

" Isringhausen had just concluded a 10-minute update on his physical condition when he addressed Horwitz. He said goodbye to reporters, but Horwitz beseeched him to stay on the line, saying "Izzy . . . Jason, Jason," while trying to disconnect the speaker. Isringhausen shot back, "Yes, Jew boy.

" Regarding his health, Isringhausen, speaking in a raspy voice, said he felt "100% better" than he did last week, but still does not know whether he has tuberculosis or a fungal infection. "I don't feel like I'm dying," Isringhausen said. "I'm able to think about other things. I don't have to worry as much.

" Isringhausen said he is experiencing "a little numbness" in his lower legs as a side effect of one medicine he is taking but doctors have not expressed concern over it. Isringhausen is scheduled to be examined again tomorrow in New York by Dr. John Olichney, the Met internist.

Summary:
ST. LOUIS  In sickness and in health, Jason Isringhausen's judgment still leaves something to be desired. One month to the day after he broke his right wrist by angrily slamming his hand against a dugout trash can, he concluded a conference call with reporters yesterday by calling Mets public relations director Jay Horwitz "Jew boy."
  Isringhausen apparently believed he made the comment in private. But Horwitz had not yet disconnected a speakerphone when the


There's a new Italian-American cook in town, and surprise: She's from New Jersey.

Laura Vitale and her husband run their YouTube channel, Laura in the Kitchen, together, and Vitale's videos show users how to make rhubarb crisp, ricotta pancakes, Nonna's stuffed calamari and many other dishes.

The recipes are easy-to-follow and Vitale's style is casual and approachable: Viewers won't be scared off by intimidating, complicated techniques. Who can't make one pot of spaghetti?

Vitale has more than 2 million subscribers and just published a cookbook called "Laura in the Kitchen." Vitale even has an upcoming TV show.

There's a sweet story behind Vitale's success: She moved to the U.S. from Italy when she was 12, and wanted to stay in touch with her Nonna back in her home country. She would call her grandmother every Sunday and go through the recipes her grandma cooked for Sunday suppers, and the two cooked together over the phone.

Summary: Feel out of the loop when it comes to the Internet's hottest stars? Click through to see 10 of the most popular YouTube personalities


's sister ... the tape is heavily redacted because of patient confidentiality, but TMZ has learned the nature of the emergency.

Law enforcement sources tell TMZ ...

TMZ broke the story ... paramedics examined Heather after her sister made the emergency call, and determined Heather

after she had taken a dangerous combination of prescription drugs and alcohol.

It's her second drug-related emergency in the last couple years -- Heather was hospitalized back in 2008 for what the 911 operator described as a "suicide attempt" ... after her doctor became concerned Heather may have OD'd on prescription pills. It turned out to be a false alarm.

Summary: TMZ has obtained the 911 call placed January 12 by Heather Locklear's sister ... the tape is heavily redacted because of patient confidentiality, but TMZ…