STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

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LOYAL TRAVEL WALLET | BY LOYAL STRICKLIN

Loyal Stricklin is one of my new found favorite brands, last week I featured their beautiful Ruck Sack, and I'm now drooling over their Loyal Travel Wallet, a handsome accessory handcrafted from high-quality leather. It features room for eight cards, a notebook, and has a boarding pass pocket, two secret slots, and a pen holder. Heck, even the pen and moleskin notebook are included! Available in three styles.

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This iPhone 6 Leak Looks Legit And Comes Direct From The Factory

http://youtu.be/eQopSbASO40

In just over 24 hours we’ll know what Apple has planned for the next version of its iconic smartphone. But do we have to wait that long? A new leak from China has emerged with a guy holding what looks to be a completely assembled and functional version of a larger-screened iPhone 6.

The video is sans subtitles, but it’s a great visual look at what’s probably going to be the iPhone 6.

It has a larger screen, thinner bezel and a few other niceties which I genuinely hope are true.

For what it’s worth, I bet it isn’t called the iPhone 6. I’m betting on some sort of “Air” rebrand.

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Iron Man 4 'Isn't In The Pipe' According To Tony Stark Himself

The first Iron Man film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a masterpiece. It was almost the perfect action film. The second in the series needed a bit more to it to call it “good”, but the third movement more than made up for it. So surely the fourth Iron Man film is in the works to delight us with the antics of Tony Stark once again, right? Well, not really according to Robert Downey Jr.

Variety caught up with Downey Jr. at the Toronto film festival over the weekend, where the actor admitted that “there isn’t one in the pipe,” and when asked about his role in a potential sequel, added that “there’s no plan for a fourth Iron Man.

Interestingly, this is something Downey has maintained for some time now. Back in 2013, the actor gave an interview to GQ where he said he’d be focusing on “Team Downey” projects with his wife. Film projects that were a long way from the world of suits and superheroes.

We will be seeing Iron Man in Avengers: Age Of Ultron next year, but will that be it for the world’s greatest genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist?

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The New Face of Richard Norris

For fifteen years, Richard Norris had a face too hideous to show. Then, one day, a maverick doctor gave him a miracle too fantastic to believe. Richard got a face transplant, a new life, and a new set of burdens too strange to predict. What's it like to live with a face that wasn't yours—and that may never quite be?

Richard Norris was 22 when he shot himself in the face. This was back in 1997. He doesn't remember how or why it happened, but his mom, who was three feet away, said it was an accident. She remembers pieces of Richard's face showering her body. This was in the living room. The gunshot had blown off his nose, cheekbones, lips, tongue, teeth, jaw, and chin, leaving just his wide brown eyes and a swirl of nameless twisted flesh.

The miracle that would come to define Richard's life begins with these tragic details. Like most miracles, with each retelling, the edges of the story sharpen, the colors become more vibrant, and the shadows disappear. Ashamed of his appearance, Richard became a hermit, living for nearly a decade on a foggy mountaintop in rural Virginia with his parents. They covered the mirrors in the house so Richard wouldn't have to look at his hideous face. He stayed in his room even to eat, wore a black mask on the rare occasions he came out. According to legend, one time the cops stopped him at gunpoint, mistaking him for a robber.

Then one day, searching on the Internet, his mom found Eduardo Rodriguez, a Baltimore reconstructive facial surgeon. He promised Richard he would make him normal. Over the next few years, Rodriguez performed dozens of surgeries using Richard's own flesh, fashioning a nose-shaped appendage out of tissue from his forearm and a small chin out of flesh from his legs, but these crude approximations failed to make Richard normal. Meantime, Rodriguez had a grander idea in mind. He was driven to achieve perfection. He had been practicing face transplants on cadavers. What he envisioned for Richard was the most extensive transplant any surgeon had ever attempted: He would give Richard a whole new face.

"It's showtime," Rodriguez said one day.

"You're my godsend," Richard's mom said.

"Let's do this thing," Richard said.

The surgery started at dawn on March 19, 2012. The face of a recently deceased 21-year-old man came off as one solid flap, skin, muscle, bone, nerves, blood vessels, tongue—everything as one piece. Rodriguez removed what was left of Richard's disfigured face, dissected down to the skull. He attached the new face midway back on Richard's scalp. He stabilized it with screws, tapped the jaw together, and finally draped the skin and sewed it down like a patch on a coat or a pair of jeans.

You can see the junction; the incision actually goes here in the coronal, extends in front of the ear, and goes posteriorly all the way down, uh, to the neck.

Rodriguez and his team worked nonstop for thirty-six hours, and when they were finished, Richard's mom looked at her son and felt like he was somehow resurrected. "We have Richard back!" she said on the phone to Richard's dad, who had not had much of anything to say for many years.

With his new face, Richard, now 39, became a media sensation for a time, the story of the miracle told many times over until it hardened even in Richard's mind into a kind of precious jewel.

Maybe we can scroll through some of the clinical photographs while we're talking. I feel very happy about the bony union here. That's the donor palate. And that's the donor floor mouth. The donor hair, it's a little darker than his. His is a little bit more salt-and-pepper.

Most of the thirty or so people gathered in the conference room are wearing white coats or lanyards or both, and they sit visibly captivated by the photographs Rodriguez is describing. The mood is electric, scrambled, like a show on opening night. The pictures show Richard, who's waiting in an adjacent room for his cue to enter. The expectation lends an extra edge of drama to the presentation. He's flown up here to New York from the foggy mountaintop where he still lives, so that the assembled doctors and other clinicians at NYU Langone Medical Center can meet him.

Richard as a young man in 1993 and as he appeared just before surgery in 2012.

Rodriguez is an imposing figure, tall and broad, with a big dimple on his giant chin, wide pinstripes, cuff links, and unbuckled galoshes affecting a disheveled nonchalance. In the wake of his world-famous work on Richard, he was just named NYU's chair of plastic surgery, a substantial professional promotion ("like I've just been handed the keys to the starship Enterprise," he told me). In part, he's been hired to get NYU into the face-transplant business, and today, as the hospital begins the process for its first one, he's brought his star patient before his new colleagues.

One of the things you'll notice is he has a couple of these scratches. He tends to pick and scratch a bit.

Since the first face transplant, in 2005, only three American hospitals have performed the procedure. Many of the twenty-eight transplants were partial, sections of the face transplanted from deceased donors. Richard's transplant was a full face and is said to be the most ambitious ever. Rodriguez likens the medically complex procedure to the Apollo moon landing.

Surgical difficulty aside, the fact that Richard didn't need a new face to survive raised an ethically grim question: Is a "life-enhancing" surgery worth the risk? There was a good chance he'd die—either on the operating table or later, if his body rejected the face. Of course, for people disfigured like Richard, the breakthrough represents something far beyond a mere enhancement. Here was new hope for millions of people disfigured by trauma, burns, disease, or birth defects. Wounded warriors suffering ballistic facial injuries would now have a surgical option that would go light-years beyond the currently available treatments. No more Band-Aid cosmetic surgeries. No more skin grafts that might only complicate your appearance. Now you could get rid of that face and replace it whole. "We've gone beyond the boundary of what we thought was even possible," Rodriguez tells me.

One by one, some of the specialists in the conference room who had a chance to evaluate Richard earlier today stand up to speak of their findings. Concerns emerge, principally about Richard's state of mind. Has he become too emotionally attached to Rodriguez, the medical attention, the fame? What will happen to him now that Rodriguez has moved on to a new hospital, new face transplants, new miracles?

We were both struck by how good he looks and the really excellent aesthetic result.

He reported to me no chewing or swallowing problems.

I was having trouble understanding him.

I asked: Do people understand you? Are you mostly intelligible?

He hasn't done any exercises.

He said he just wants to move on, do his own thing.

I think he's maybe overwhelmed, like you said.

He is not in any kind of psychotherapy.

He seems to have somewhat habituated to all the media attention.

He's sort of had this Mick Jagger status.

He feels there's a sense of abandonment.

I did not get the sense that he was open to therapy at this time.

In terms of any concerns about suicidality or low mood, severe depression, I would say that he denies it. I don't know fully if that's exactly accurate. I would want to speak with him again.

When Rodriguez gives the nod, the door flies open and Richard saunters in, dressed in a bright purple Baltimore Ravens hat and jacket. He's been living with his new face for two years now, and he's undeniably attractive—clean-shaven, youthful, the kind of guy you would hire to run the front office. He takes a seat facing the crowd, arms splayed out, cool as Justin Bieber on a late-night talk show. Everyone stares at him, and some cock their heads. He's used to this; sometimes people applaud. Is he smiling? His new face doesn't move a lot. Does it move at all? He might be smiling, or it might just be the will of the room. His eyes, the one part of his original face still intact, dart like anyone's eyes, and I find myself chasing them, the only reliable clue as to what might really be going on in there.

One of the things I wanted to know when I first reached out to Richard was how he felt about the miracle. What was it like to walk around with someone else's face? I thought it might be kind of unsettling, or confusing. You're chewing with another man's teeth? When I wrote to him to ask, he told me he had an agent. Cal Ripken's agent, he pointed out. He said everything about his new face was great. He has received thousands of letters from fans. One of the fans is now his girlfriend. She lives in New Orleans. He said he was planning to go meet her in person. He said he was in college now, wanted to focus on school, on being normal. Then he invited me to the foggy mountaintop. The fog was famous, he said, had recently made national news when it caused seventeen pileups involving ninety-five vehicles in one night.

When I get there, the sun has already burned the fog off the morning, which is oddly disappointing. Richard's house isn't actually at the top of the mountain. There's a street carved about midway up with a dozen or so homes, and his is a small yellow double-wide with red trim, a carport, and a for sale sign out front. The storm door has a bear etched into the glass. Richard opens it and welcomes me inside. He's wearing a black Under Armour shirt and cargo pants and he's thin, old-man thin. His posture has curved into a slump from years of hanging his head low, from years spent feeling he was hideous to look at, so now he has to make a conscious effort to stand up straight.

He seems nervous. His hands tremble, bringing constant sips of water to his mouth. His lips can't quite grip the bottle, so each sip is more a little pour. He fights a constant drool with the help of a towel. His new face is a marvel nonetheless. It's a new face. Wide and open, the cheekbones of an Irishman and the wrinkle-free complexion of a college kid. It's difficult to reconcile the youthful face with the body of a man nearly 40. I am trying not to stare. I am trying to stop looking for the seams, where the new connects to the old, the eyelids, the neck, the scar in front of his ears. I am trying to stop thinking about his beard, which isn't really his beard, except now it is, and it grows. I'm distracted by a thousand little thoughts like these. Coupled with his lack of facial expression—a solid, largely unmoving veneer—in all these ways the barrier to getting to know Richard feels to me immediately and appreciably steep. Microexpressions, split-second movements of the face, are said to communicate wide arrays of meaning. Even infants who are blind are said to use facial cues to tell their parents how they feel. You don't recognize how true these theories likely are until you are with someone with a face frozen in place.

"Here you go," Richard says, picking up a DVD. It's a copy of the hour-long TV special Ann Curry did about him. He takes a Sharpie from his pocket, signs his name on the DVD, hands it to me.

It's a little bit awkward. I don't know where to begin. A face is a surprisingly intimate and complex subject. Part personal, part public. Partly a thing, partly an idea. Part physiology, part psychology.

I spin the Ann Curry DVD on my finger.

Richard leads me through the living room past his mother, who is on a recliner, staring into a laptop. She does not look up. He shows me his room. It's neat as a hotel. No clutter. Just pictures on the walls, every newspaper and magazine article ever written about him, each of them framed. "They even did me on Ripley's Believe It or Not!," he says, pointing to one of his clippings. "In Japan I got rated in the top fifty miracles."

Richard, with his mother, Sandra, was told he had only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the operation.

I ask him about school, how it's going, how it feels to interact with students. Do they know he has a new face?

"I don't have any classes right now," he says. His voice is muffled, like it's coming from the same place his eyes are, somewhere deep inside. New lips, new mouth, new tongue—it's remarkable he can form words at all. He says he's between classes. At the moment. Well, he isn't actually in school. He's taken some online courses. A lot of what Richard presents to the world is vague. The girlfriend. He says they're soul mates, but so far she's still just a Facebook profile. He says they text all the time. He can't wait to meet her in person.

He leads me back into the living room, where his mom is poking her keyboard angrily. He leaves me here. Two dachshunds sniff at my feet.

"So you like my two little wieners, huh?" his mom says to me, closing her laptop. She has a round face surrounded by gray curls, a soft neck, wide arms. "That one is Raven and that one is Mark—after the race-car driver. She's spoiled rotten. Mark is, too. He's got cancer."

Raven climbs a set of doggie steps up to the couch, digs intently at a blanket, around and around, until she has made herself a cocoon fully covering her body, with just her little nose popping out.

I compliment Richard's mom on the house, the homey feeling, the beautiful views off the back deck.

"You want to buy it?" she asks. It was a mistake moving up here, she says. She never liked it, and neither did Richard. The old house, they gave it to Richard's sister, because she was having trouble making rent. "We're below poverty line," she says. She invites me to sit down on an adjacent recliner. "I have fibromyalgia," she says. "That's why I have these heated blankets."

Richard comes back, carrying pill bottles. "This is what I take every day," he says. "These are my pills." It's a five-pill maintenance regimen he'll need to keep up for the rest of his life; his body will always regard his new face as a foreign object, prompting his immune system to constantly attack it. The drugs trick the immune system by kicking it into its lowest possible gear. This leaves Richard vulnerable to every conceivable health problem down the line. Cancer, diabetes—all the majors.

"He's not supposed to smoke," his mom says. He can't get sunburn. He can't get a cold. He can't drink. He can't fall and risk injury. He can't afford to tax his immune system at all. Even a cut could trigger rejection. It starts as a blotchy rash; it means his body is winning the fight to reject the transplant, and Richard has to be flown to the hospital to receive rounds of emergency drugs intravenously. Uncontrollable rejection would mean an almost certain death; the only things left of Richard's old face are his eyes and the back of his throat. Everything else is now gone for good. "I have to keep watch that his face doesn't go yellow," his mom says. "He's had two rejections so far."

"I'll leave you two talking," Richard says, and he heads outside for a smoke.

His mom motions toward the mantel on the fireplace, where two framed photographs stand side by side. One is Richard's high school portrait. The other is Josh, the 21-year-old donor, who used to have the face Richard now has.

"Isn't that amazing?" she says of the resemblance.

It really is. I don't know which is which, who is which, or what. Pronoun problems emerge. I didn't know Richard as a young man, and now the young face of one is attached to the aged body of the other.

"The likeness?" she says. "It's Richard." She tells me she met Josh's mom, visited her at her home. "Real down-to-earth person. I said, 'I really like your kitchen.' That was the kitchen I wanted. Island in the middle of it. Her cabinets had glass in them. I said, 'I'm gonna have to get Eddie to make me a kitchen like that.' "

Eddie is Richard's dad. He used to be a long-haul trucker, but he had to quit when he started needing insulin. He was not in favor of the idea of Richard getting a face transplant. "I like your regular face," he said at the time. Richard's mom told him to back off. "It's Richard's choice," she said. Rodriguez told Richard and his parents that the surgery would be extremely risky—it would take a day and a half—and that Richard would have only a 50 percent chance of surviving it. "And he told us that if the face transplant didn't take, Richard would die because there would be nothing of his old face left," his mother tells me. "But it worked out great."

After thirty-six hours in surgery, Eduardo Rodriguez presented to Richard the new face that would change his life.

I ask her if she thinks Richard has changed since his surgery. Does she see a big difference in his personality?

"Yeah, he gets out a little more than what he did," she says. Which still isn't a whole lot. He can't drive, because he could have seizures. She can't drive on account of her fibromyalgia. So the two of them are mostly stuck here, dependent on Eddie.

I lean up in the recliner, stretch my legs out straight. Right now this story is not screaming: miracle.

"What Richard is, he's a lab rat," she says. "He gets to be a brat sometimes. Gets on my nerves so bad. I've always told my kids I don't care if I'm 95 years old, if you do something I don't think you should, I'll climb up on a chair and I'll slap you good."

I ask her what she means by "lab rat," and she says exactly that: an animal people do experiments on. "Lab rat," she says. "I don't think he'll ever be able to work like in a normal life. He spends his time in hospitals, everybody poking and prodding, studying him. A boss don't want somebody that's gonna be absent 99 percent of the time."

She says Richard doesn't complain about being a lab rat. He'll do anything for Rodriguez, and so will she.

"Did you meet Dr. Rodriguez?" she asks me. "Me and the nurses, we said, 'Yeah, he sure is good candy-looking stuff.' "

Rodriguez, 47, didn't start out wanting to be great. Or not this great. He was in dental school. His parents had emigrated from Cuba. A Miami drill, fill, and bill dentist—that was his destination.

He speaks in the present tense when he talks about his past. "It's this pursuit of understanding," he tells me, sucking on a peppermint. "Pursuit of knowledge." He tells me about medical school after dental school. General surgery. Plastic surgery. Microsurgery. "Pursuit of being better. Aim for excellence. I think humility is an important factor." He discovered in himself all the components of a star surgeon, and he could not quiet his urge to learn: "Like being in a library and you keep looking, and it leads you to another thing and you keep going." Soon he's in surgery heaven, in Taipei, Taiwan, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, a mecca for craniofacial and microsurgery, ninety-nine operating rooms, reattaching fingers, attaching toes to hands, round-the-clock microsurgery, free flaps—taking tissue from one part of a person's body and attaching it to another—a hundred free flaps every single month. "Crank it up," Rodriguez tells me, bouncing his head with the memory. "Push and push and push."

Eventually he comes home, accepts a post in Baltimore at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. "Now I'm treating soldiers. Gunshot wounds. Explosions," he tells me. He's fixing faces. A guy needs a nose; Rodriguez takes flesh from his leg and makes him a nose, a chin, a cheek. "Everything is, like, happening now. These patients start coming out of the woodwork. 'There's this crazy guy in Baltimore; I think he might help you.' It's like Doctor Dolittle. People just come from everywhere."

But there are limitations, sculpture-wise, when it comes to making a nose. It would be so much better to put a real nose on someone. People had of course been doing organ transplants for years. But a face is a whole new ball game.

Josh, the 21-year-old donor who died in a traffic accident, provided six people with organs after his death.

A face isn't an organ, like a liver or a heart. A face is muscles, nerves, bones, and skin. A face is more like a hand or a foot. These kinds of transplants, composite-tissue transplants, sparked a fiery ethical debate from the beginning, back in 1998, when the first successful hand transplant occurred. This sort of surgery was, after all, elective surgery. Would it be worth the risk that a lifetime of immunosuppressant drugs would present? Composite-tissue transplantation became a reality when Clint Hallam, a 48-year-old man from New Zealand, got a new hand that was bigger and pinker than his other hand. But it was a hand. If they could do a hand, what about a face? Should they?

Hallam's own experience was not particularly encouraging. The new hand freaked him out. One hand his, one hand somebody else's. He couldn't handle it. "Take if off," he said to his doctors. They refused. He persisted. They refused. So he stopped taking his meds, hid the hand from view so no one could tell what was happening to it. Doctors ended up having to amputate what was left. A mess. How stupid can you get? Hallam, they said, was a psychopath. Physical rejection may be a conundrum, but psychological rejection was the stuff of madmen.

In 2003, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a year later, a national ethics committee in France, said that face transplantation would be going too far. The risk of complication would far outweigh the benefits. A new hand might be a reversible decision. But a new face? Once you take your old face off, you're committed. You live your whole life like that, taking medications to keep your new face on so you don't die. All this, for elective surgery?

Nevertheless, the first face transplant was performed in France in 2005. It caught the surgical world by surprise. It was a partial, a triangle. The nose and lips from a deceased donor were removed and sewn onto a woman whose face had been bitten off by a dog. Everyone had thought the first face transplant would be done in the U.S. Just a year earlier, the Cleveland Clinic had gotten ethical approval and had started testing prospective patients. But then France did it first, and the worldwide race to do something bigger, better, was on.

Meanwhile, Rodriguez—with all the cowboys in his field now talking face transplants—is imagining something bolder than what's been tried. He's practicing on cadavers, taking the face off one and putting it on another, not just the triangle but the whole face. He isn't sure about the procedure. Could he do it? Like a fighter pilot on a flight simulator, he practices the surgery on his computer. He's got all his training behind him, and all the technology before him, and he's looking at Richard. He's looking at two or three other people who might be good candidates. "But I'm not totally convinced yet," he tells me, still engrossed in the unfolding dramatization of his life. "I'm apprehensive about it. I think it's a big deal. Taking someone's face off." There is no turning back once you do something like that. The old face is mangled and useless; you can't put it back on. "I'm thinking about it very systematically."

He tells me about going to Paris, having lunch with Pascal Coler, a 30-year-old man who got a new face in 2008. Coler had lived with big tumors all over his face. A terrible life. "And I have a very good steak tartare," Rodriguez says. "And next to me is Pascal, chowing down the biggest porterhouse. As normal as can be. No one looks at him. He has a job, a potential girlfriend. I'm like, holy mackerel, this is huge. We've gone beyond clinical; now we can change someone's life."

I want to ask Rodriguez how one patient who seemed reasonably content during one meal is enough to quiet an entire internal moral crisis, but he's on fast-forward, the adventure playing out like an action movie.

"Let's go!" he tells me. "It's on!"

So in Baltimore, a team of five surgeons are mobilized—two to work on the donor, three on Richard—and the operating rooms are readied. "I go, 'Richard, if you want to pull the plug right now, do it,' " says Rodriguez. " 'I don't want you to feel any pressure; there's a lot going on here, and I just need you to tell me right now if you're ready, and if you aren't, we just walk away and it's all good.'

"He said, 'Let's go. We're doing it.' That's it. You get yourself in your mental game. It's fourth and goal, and we are going into the end zone. We're going to win the Super Bowl. This is the moment of no return. Complete silence in the room; like, holy mackerel. Tough moment. No failure. This is it. We're going to make this thing. The face is one unit. I'm picking it up. I'm laying it on him. I've got to get everything centered, it can't be off-kilter, the nose has gotta be straight, everything's gotta land perfectly.

"Now, this organ is not receiving blood. It needs to receive blood. The longer it takes to receive blood increases the chance for acute rejection. We gotta get this thing drinking.

"Connecting the artery, then the vein, and then we release, and it really is like a miracle. Impressive. You see the blood just coming from the neck, crossing the lips. Seeing the nose—it's white and it turns pink, like normal flesh. It takes seconds. And now we're thinking, Okay, I can take a little breather, but we still have to push ahead, I have to get Richard out of the operating room. We still have to connect the nerves, a lot of nerves. We have to suture the inside of his mouth and tongue; everything has to be sutured. And fix the rest of the bones. Line up the soft tissue. Line up his hairline. Line up his eyebrows. Get the eyelids. So all that needs to happen.

"We're at about eighteen to twenty hours. We've still got a lot to go. I predicted twenty-four to thirty-six hours. I think the unique thing about this face transplant is that it was so extensive and comprehensive. I say this very humble, up to that point, nothing of that level had been performed."

Doubt, when it comes to miracles, is like steam on a mirror. You have to wipe it off if you want to see anything. And what choice do you have? You've already moved forward. You've given a guy a new face. You've gotten a new face. Your kid has a new face. There is no turning back.

One day on the foggy mountaintop, Richard and I get bored sitting around his house, so we decide to take a drive. He is a man of hard-earned platitudes. "Sometimes God will put you on your back to make you look up. Sometimes you need that nudge." He's grateful for his new face. He's grateful to Josh, the donor. Five other people are now living with organs from Josh. "It helps you understand...I'm not going to say the afterlife, but what you do here on earth and what you leave here on earth—it's totally two different things." He tells me about his efforts to raise awareness for organ donation; he's become something of a national spokesman for the cause.

In the car, we talk about all the fun things we'll do on our drive. His sister lives about an hour away, in the house Richard grew up in, the house where this whole mess started fifteen years ago, when he shot himself in the face. We haven't talked much about the accident. He doesn't remember anything. Morning or night, nothing. "It's just a cobweb." He suggests we stop at a beautiful lookout place, too. First, though, he asks me to stop at a store. "Something for my throat," he says. He comes out of the store carrying a brown bag. We continue our journey, go up into the voluminous mountains rolling every which way you look.

We talk about cracked iPhones. He's going to start a business fixing cracked iPhones. We talk about his girlfriend. "Melanie," he says, pulling up a picture of her as if to offer proof. "She's real." He can't wait to meet her in person. We talk about being a lab rat. On this matter he says he's honored. In a way, his whole life has been volunteering. When he was in high school, he was a volunteer firefighter. Now, with his new face, doctors are learning so much about how to treat soldiers suffering ballistic facial injuries. He likes helping people. He likes giving people hope. "A drop of hope can create an ocean," he says. "But a bucket of faith can create an entire world."

"That's true," I say.

"My throat," he says. We're getting higher, and my ears have popped. He's stretched out, relaxed. He reaches into the brown bag, pulls out a bottle of Wild Turkey.

"For my throat," he says. He can't take over-the-counter medications, he says. Too risky with his meds. There's a backpack at his feet. He opens it, pulls out some tubing and a wide syringe, about a half-inch across, the kind you use to give medicine to horses.

"I don't like the taste," he says.

He hooks the syringe to the tubing, lifts up his shirt. I think I'm supposed to pretend this is not happening. I'm driving. There's a port under his shirt, connected to his stomach. I was not aware of that. He hooks the tubing to the port, so now the fat syringe is standing straight up.

He opens the Wild Turkey and starts pouring.

"Richard, I don't think Dr. Rodriguez would want you doing this—"

All this talk of risk, all the meds, no smoking, no drinking, no falling. A lab rat. Everything measured and quantified and documented.

The Wild Turkey isn't going down. It's clogged. He jiggles the syringe. Nothing is happening.

"Can you pull over?" he asks. "This isn't working right."

I pull over. There are no cars anywhere. We are deep into the mountain range.

He gets out, flips the syringe, emptying it. He gets back in and examines all the tubing, pinches this and that, allowing some stomach juices to squirt out.

"So that's how you eat?" I ask. "You use the tube?"

"No," he says. He used to. He doesn't need it anymore.

He reconnects everything, pours again. The whiskey goes quickly inside him, like water down a drain.

He looks at me. "This is how it's supposed to work."

"This is for your throat?"

"I can't take over-the-counter medication," he says again.

Everything about him is vague. Except this isn't vague. He refills the syringe, lets another round drain into him, and another. I don't know how much. It seems like a lot. I wonder what it will be like to be with a drunk Richard. I imagine his sister, the beautiful lookout place. It doesn't happen. Within five minutes he folds, like a shot animal folds, over himself, folded, eyes open, his body deflated, the tube hanging out, dignity depleted.

"Richard?" I say. "Richard?" I shove his shoulder and nothing happens. He is dead. He is on my watch and he is dead. I hear gurgling. Breathing. He's on my watch and he is not dead.

My watch?

The breathing is going in his mouth and out his nose. I am studying his face to make sure air is moving. In his mouth. Out his nose. This didn't used to be his mouth or his nose. He can smell with that nose. He can chew food with a dead man's jaw and teeth. There is no denying how fantastic that is.

I don't know where to go. I don't know one foggy mountaintop from another. I can't wake him up.

I have his address in my GPS. I hit "previous destination." When we get to his house, I drag him out of the car, exactly the way you drag a drunk out of a car, one arm over my shoulder, little steps. I kick the etched bear on the storm door to open it.

"Hello? Hello?" I deposit him in his mom's recliner, wait for someone to come home, or for him to wake up.

One day I ask Rodriguez how he picked Richard over the other candidates he had for his epic heroic story. "I had developed a relationship with Richard, so I knew the kind of person he is," he tells me. "This is an individual that I can trust as someone that can really care for this gift. Keep in mind, someone had to die for him to receive this face. So there's a certain sense of responsibility and burden that I need to make sure that this is not going to be wasted. This has to be a responsible person that will share the precious gift and take this gift and make something with it, and of it."

"A lot of responsibility," I say.

"A lot," he says.

I ask him if he thinks people can get overly invested in the happily-ever-after in his line of work.

"Of course," he says. "Of course."

A recent article by Rodriguez in the medical journal The Lancet features before-and-after pictures of Richard. Side by side, the change is stunning, from a man with a mangled swirl of a face to regular guy. The more I look at the picture of Richard's disfigured face, the more I wish I knew it. His eyes are bigger, rounder, provide a wider window. His eyebrows are all mixed up, one curved sharply, the other a gentle swoop, thick scars in between. His lower face is cartoonish, like a drawing of an old guy who took his dentures out. There is so much to find in this face, so many avenues of inquiry.

Patient selection, Rodriguez writes in The Lancet, is the key to success when it comes to face transplantation. "Patient selection by a thorough screening process...serves as the best safeguard against ethical challenges," he writes. "Rigorous preoperative psychiatric and psychological selection of patients deemed to be stable, motivated, and compliant by a multidisciplinary team is a crucial determinant of a safe and rapid recovery."

The article looks back at all twenty-eight face transplants that have occurred and represents Rodriguez's full circle from doubt to certainty. Three people have died from complications. Everyone else is said to be doing great.

NYU hospital issued a press release when the article was published, extolling Rodriguez's call for a "moral imperative" to offer face transplants, the "Mount Everest" of medical-surgical treatments.

And yet while the debate about the ethics of face transplantation has shifted dramatically since the early days of harsh warnings against the procedure, researchers in a recent academic survey of the "successful" transplants note a distinct paucity of data on the psychological outcomes for these patients, who, they point out, often suffer from PTSD, alcohol abuse, and opiate dependence as a result of the trauma leading to their initial disfigurement.

Another journal article, in Anthropology Today, considered the topic under the heading "Ethical slippage and quiet death," with Richard's picture occupying an entire page.

I try to tell Richard's mom about the Wild Turkey, but this is a difficult conversation, and I'm not sure it's the right thing to do. She's in her recliner, and she has a migraine hangover. The medicine leaves her woozy. Eddie is over there feeding Slim Jims to Mark and Raven. Richard is in his room.

"Richard isn't supposed to smoke," I start.

"Oh, I know," she says. "And you know, sometimes he drinks until he passes out."

I'm relieved, but not.

She talks about God. She talks about Rodriguez. Everything comes back to Rodriguez: "My godsend." That's a lot of pressure on a savior. I wonder what exactly happened back in 1997 when Richard shot himself in the face. In an e-book version of the story, Richard says he was blindingly drunk, had come home and become verbally abusive with his mom, who sent him to his room to sleep it off. That part appears to be true, according to a police report filed in the Henry County Sheriff's Office. But the rest of the story—that a shotgun happened to be tilted in a gun case and, upon coming out of his room, Richard was asked by his mom to straighten it, causing it to fire accidentally—appears to be apocryphal. According to the report: "Mrs. Norris was standing in the doorway of Richard's bedroom; fussing at Richard about him wanting to go out again. Richard took a shotgun from his gun cabinet and told Mrs. Norris that he would just shoot himself. When Richard racked a shell into the shotgun's chamber, the gun fired.... There was what appeared to be human flesh, bone, and teeth on all four walls in Richard's bedroom." Mrs. Norris told police, "Richard's face exploded."

It would take fifteen years to fix what had gone wrong that night—or at least to try to.

"The really weird thing is, me and Richard's girlfriend found Dr. Rodriguez at the same time," his mom tells me. She pulls her blankets up. I'm sitting on the couch with Raven. Richard has joined us, is seated in the other recliner.

"Girlfriend?" I ask. Richard had a girlfriend before the transplant?

"She was looking online for doctors to help Richard same time I was," his mom says. "She found him same time as I did."

"Wait, who is this?"

"His girlfriend," she says. "Me and her could not get along."

"Girlfriend?" I say, looking over at Richard.

"An old one," he says. "Old, old. She was going to college to be a nurse."

I need a time-out. What year are we in? The accident happened in 1997. The new face didn't come until 2012.

"You had a girlfriend when you were disfigured?" I ask Richard.

"I lived with her," he says. "For two years."

"When you were disfigured?"

"Yeah."

"But I thought you were a hermit," I say. What about the foggy mountaintop? The covered mirrors and the black mask?

"This was during the whole stage of my disfigurement when I was working for race teams," Richard says. "When I was at the racetrack, it was like nobody didn't care. They didn't care what I looked like. Only thing they cared about was how good I could set that race car up."

"You had a job? And a girlfriend? And an apartment? You were living a whole life?"

"Yeah."

So why did he need a new face? Why had he endured the complications involved in freeing him from disfigurement? The thirty-six-hour operation, a 50 percent chance of dying on the table, a life of anti-rejection medications. No sunburn. No falling. Watch out for yellow. Two rejections so far.

"I didn't like the girl," his mom says. "She tried to cut me out of everything."

There was a fight. At their apartment. Richard was convalescing after a surgery, and his mom came by. "She wouldn't let me in to see Richard," she says. "So I went through her. And she told me, get out of her house, the doctor said nobody could see Richard. I said, 'I ain't just nobody, I'm his mother. I'm gonna see him.' I whopped her. And I had her on the floor. I just told her, I said, 'You don't take my son away from me. Nobody takes my son.' And she said, 'I'm gonna call the law.' I said, 'Well, just call the law.' "

"I got rid of her," Richard says.

"Then we moved up here in 2005, away from everybody," his mom says.

Which is right about the time they found Rodriguez.

"We don't like it here," his mom says.

"It's the most boringest place on earth," Richard says.

Being famous is better. One of Japan's top fifty miracles. And he was willing to go through with getting a new face. And there was all that salvation his mom needed. And the wounded warriors needed him. And humanity needed him. And having a new face is better than some old disfigured one. You can't argue with that.

Richard wishes Rodriguez had stayed in Baltimore. He doesn't like New York. But wherever in the world Rodriguez needs him, he'll be there. And yes, as to smoking, he shouldn't. And yes, the incident in the car? "Uh-huh," he says. There's a certain amount of self-medication, he says. "But that's just self-medication." We're at NYU again, and he's not exactly sure what today's event is. Some kind of fund-raiser, he thinks. We're in the waiting room. He looks great in his suit. "I'm sure they'll be very nice people," he says. He likes people. He likes visiting patients. People come to talk to Rodriguez, or the team back in Baltimore, and Richard joins them. They want face transplants. They want to know what it's like. He tells them what it's like. He knows exactly how they feel. It's something positive he can do with his life. A face. "This is what I am," he tells me. "There is nothing more important than a face."

He brings up Hallam, the guy with the hand. "He couldn't take it, so he had to cut it off," he says. "So now they say, 'Is the face transplant going to have that identity crisis, too?' Well, if he does, we're screwed."

A woman with curly dark hair peeks into the waiting room. "We're ready!" she says. We head down the hall. Richard takes two steps into the conference room, and the people burst into spontaneous applause.

"Hi, Richard!"

"Hello, Richard!"

Rodriguez sits at the head of the table. Pretty little cookies are laid out. "This institute was made possible by these incredible people," he says to Richard.

"It's our pleasure, Richard."

"God bless you."

"You're very brave."

"You're a real ambassador."

Richard thanks them on behalf of all the people in the future who might be helped. "A drop of hope can create an entire ocean," he says. "A little speck of faith can create a world. You give that speck of faith to them."

"He never really thought about himself in all of this," Rodriguez says. "He's always thought about helping the wounded warriors and the other people, and providing hope. He's a remarkable man."

"And they can do research on me as well," Richard says.

And that about wraps it up?

A woman has a question. She has wide shoulders, blond hair.

"What about your family?" she says. "Do they have therapeutic resources available to them to support you?"

"Actually, the support I get mainly is from therapists," Richard says. "They send me home with homework, give me exercises to practice, to help with my speech, my swallowing, you know. Physical therapy helps a whole lot, played a huge role in my recovery."

The woman tries again.

"Emotionally, did you feel you got the support you needed?"

"Emotionally I can get lab work done no matter where I am, if I'm home, if I'm in Baltimore. If I'm here, I get it done here. That way the lab work is always current."

I want to jump in here. I want to tell the woman with the questions about Wild Turkey, the poverty line, lab rats and wiener dogs, illness and violence.

Rodriguez jumps in. "The answer is yes and no," he says. "This is a new field. Every transplant has to be well thought out. One thing that you can appreciate with Richard is there was not a step missed in this rehearsal and this practice. And now Richard is our ambassador, and he can help us."

"You are one of the greatest people I've ever met," one in the crowd says to Richard.

"Terrific. So handsome."

"Thank you," Richard says, reaching for Rodriguez. "It comes from his hands. His hands."

Richard calls me shortly before he heads to New Orleans to meet Melanie, the new girlfriend. I wish him well. I feel nervous for him, want her to be real. For all his guile, he's a trusting soul. And he needs a girlfriend or some companion to assist him through life. If there's a future for him, it is almost assuredly off the foggy mountaintop. But under whose watch? Who will drive him around? He's a science experiment. He's a lab rat. He's not a normal sort of boyfriend.

Richard and his girlfriend, Melanie, connected online after she saw a TV report on the surgery.

One day Melanie appears on my Skype screen. She's real. She's lovely. Richard is sitting next to her, waving to me. He wipes constant drool with the help of a towel. She just came home from work and put a pot roast in the oven. Richard folded the laundry. She wants to care for him. She finds a well of kindness in him. She's been burned so many times. She says nothing about his medical-rock-star status, nothing about the drool. "Why does anyone fall in love?" she says with a shrug, when I ask about the relationship. She's the first person I meet who talks about Richard as just a regular person. He's not: a miracle. He's not: a medical circus act. He's not: an ambassador of anything. He's a guy with barely a tick of a functioning immune system, thanks to the inexorable march forward of technology and a worldwide race for surgical glory. But for now, at least, she doesn't need to have that conversation. I get the sense she would have liked Richard with his old face just the same.

In short order she introduces Richard to her kids, her mom; everybody likes everybody. She meets Richard's mom by phone, and so far so good. One day she notices maybe a rash? "What is that?" she asks Richard. "I don't think it's anything," he says. He doesn't want it to be anything. He's finally with her, and he wants to stay. "I'm worried," she says. "It's getting worse." She takes a picture of the rash, insists that Richard send it to the doctors in Baltimore keeping track of his medical care.

"Get here," they say. "Next plane out."

If it's acute rejection and they can't reverse it, he dies.

He's hospitalized for two weeks, pumped full of stuff to get the rejection under control, then sent back to the foggy mountaintop to recover.

"Come back," Melanie tells him. "Please come back. We'll eat crawfish. You'll wear your sunscreen. I'll keep you safe."

[MIKA27]

The Orthodox Hit Squad

Under Jewish law, a woman who wants out of her marriage can't just call 1-800-DIVORCE. The man has to initiate. And sometimes he needs a little. persuasion. Maybe a visit from henchmen with cattle prods. Or the old Taser-to-the-balls trick. After a few hours of this kind of torture, the stubborn husband will sign pretty much anything. One powerful rabbi (yes, a rabbi!) has allegedly employed this system for decades, operating with total impunity—until now

You're a young Israeli man named Meir Bryskman. It's a cool October night in 2010, and you've just stepped off a bus in downtown Lakewood, New Jersey. Pulling your dark overcoat across your chest, you walk northeast in the direction of the Metedeconk River. The sidewalks are empty, but you've made this journey before and have no reason to be nervous. Lakewood—at various points a railroad town, an iron town, and a resort town for claustrophobic New Yorkers—is these days known for its dense population of Orthodox Jews, who cluster there to be close to Beth Medrash Govoha, one of the largest yeshivas in the world. As a typist for Hebrew texts, that's why you're there, too. To be among your people.

Shortly before midnight, you arrive at the rambling brick home of David Wax, a prominent local rabbi who's hired you to do some work. You're greeted warmly and shown upstairs to a second-story bedroom, expecting to spend the next few hours poring over Talmudic scripture.

But no sooner have you crossed the bedroom's threshold than you catch a fist that breaks your nose. Then you feel yourself lifted from behind by two sets of big hands and driven down into the floor. Lesson learned. You lie still.

You're flat on your stomach now, blindfolded, hands cuffed behind your back, ankles tied together. As far as you can tell, there are three men—the two attackers, whose gruff voices you don't recognize, and Wax, whom you know from his nasal honk. You hear the door being shut and footsteps retreating down the hall, and for a moment it seems the worst is over. Then the door is opening again, and you feel heavy wire being wrapped around your arms. Your hands go tingly and then numb.

Before dawn breaks over Lakewood, you'll be subjected to a carnival of torture techniques. You'll be presented with a body bag—"for you to get used to the size." You'll be presented with acid and feel it burn your skin. You'll be told your next stop is the Poconos, where you'll be eaten alive by rats. You'll be told not to move, unless you want a stream of piss on your forehead.

And you'll be told that all the torment—all the crippling embarrassment—will halt only if you agree to sign what's known as a get: a document releasing your wife from marriage. The choice is simple, your captors say: "A divorce or a funeral."

In Orthodox tradition, a man and his wife enter wedlock by signing their names to the ketubah, the traditional prenuptial agreement, both knowing that only the man, the head of the household, is allowed to terminate the relationship. A husband's refusal to do so creates an agunah out of his powerless wife—she becomes, literally, a "chained" woman.

Bryskman's wife claimed to be just that. A few months earlier, she and her husband had found themselves embroiled in particularly acrimonious separation proceedings in an Israeli rabbinical court. She moved out of the house they shared, took the kids with her, and forbade her husband from seeing them. She claimed he was an unfit father. She insisted upon a divorce. He wouldn't agree.

On the advice of his rabbis, Bryskman flew from Israel to America, where he had some family—only to find on this night in Lakewood that his marital problems, far from being left behind in Israel, had followed him across the Atlantic.

Peeking through a gap in the blindfold, he caught a glimpse of Wax in a cartoonishly large white cowboy hat. "Do you like my hat?" Wax asked before delivering a few kicks to the ribs. Bryskman raised his head, revealing a spreading pool of blood.

"You ruined my carpet!" Wax squealed. Adequately terrified, Bryskman agreed to his tormentor's terms. He would grant the get—anything to save his life. Line by line, he was led through the process:

...Hereby I do release thee and send away and put thee aside that thou mayest have permission and control over thyself to go to be married to any man whom thou desirest and no man shall hinder you in my name...

At 3 A.M., Wax hustled Bryskman downstairs and into a waiting taxi. He ordered the driver to take them both toward Brooklyn. On the way, he phoned Bryskman's father, Zalman, in Israel. Wax said he had a team on the ground there; as proof, he named a fast-food spot where Zalman had recently dined. If Zalman didn't wire $100,000 to the family of Bryskman's wife, Wax would have both Bryskman and Zalman murdered. "For you, there's a special gift," he told Zalman. "It's called a bullet...in your head."

Bryskman was deposited, bloody and aching, at the doorstep of his cousin's apartment in central Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Wax turned back for Lakewood, apparently untroubled by the possibility that Bryskman might rat him out. After all, ultra-Orthodox Jews consider it blasphemous to involve secular authorities in a dispute that should be rightly settled in the community. But at this point Bryskman no longer cared.

Later that same day, lying in a bed at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, he told his story to several law-enforcement officials. A search warrant was issued; Wax was arrested; his Lakewood house was tossed. Upstairs, investigators found a large white cowboy hat and an invoice from Step on Me Carpet & Flooring for a $1,311.10 emergency carpet installation.

Wax, prosecutors would later allege, was part of a criminal syndicate "engaged in the business of kidnapping and torturing people, beating them up, tying them up, shocking them with Tasers and stun guns until they got what they wanted"—a group of hit men that had allegedly been abducting and assaulting recalcitrant husbands across the tristate area for decades, to the tune of one forced get every year.

In May, David Wax pleaded guilty to his role in the kidnapping of Meir Bryskman. But he told the court that he had done the hit on behalf of someone else, a man purported to be the mastermind of the forced-get ring, a man known as the Prodfather: a 69-year-old gray-bearded, frazzle-haired father of eight—and grandfather of forty-four—named Rabbi Mendel Epstein.

Rope was among the gentler torture devices.

In the secular world, we enter relationships voluntarily, and we exit them the same way. Our entire modern romantic outlook is predicated on this fact. We choose our mate, and if we **** up—or if they **** up, or if it just doesn't work—we can wave good-bye. There are no rabbinical courts or ancient laws holding us back.

As Rabbi Epstein writes in his 1989 book, A Woman's Guide to the Get Process, outside of Orthodox circles "people often divorce casually, for mere incompatibility, immaturity or absorption with their careers or lusts. But this is not true in the religious world. In over 30 years of counseling, I have never met a frum"—pious—"couple that divorced due to incompatibility alone. When frum people divorce, it is because one spouse is abusive and the healthy one feels endangered, physically and emotionally."

For at least three decades, Epstein has been the most feared divorce lawyer in the so-called black-hat community of New York and New Jersey—a loose collection of Hasidic sects and Orthodox congregations that spills across Brooklyn and low-lying Lakewood and the rural reaches of Kiryas Joel, up near Poughkeepsie. And yet he's never gone to law school; he's not licensed to practice law in New York State or New Jersey or anywhere else.

He is a to'ein—an advocate in the three-man rabbinical court known as a beit din, or "house of justice." In Orthodox society, which can be so insular it employs its own unofficial police force, the beit din is both small-claims court and counseling service. Have trouble collecting an outstanding debt from your tightfisted neighbor? Visit a beit din. Need advice on how to bury your mother? See the beit din. Want out of a marriage? Sign a get at your local beit din for ratification.

The hitch comes when a husband refuses to participate in the process. Suddenly his wife, who may have been pressed into an arranged marriage and now has a handful of screaming kids on her hands and very little money of her own—to say nothing of education or the means to make a living, which in ultra-Orthodox circles, where men are always the breadwinners, is pretty much out of the question, anyway—is officially an agunah, chained to a marriage that is functionally dead.

Situations like this are Epstein's specialty. His reputation was founded on extricating trapped women from marriage; by his own count, he has personally supervised 2,000 divorce cases. Success, Epstein has bragged, is merely a matter of finding "the right buttons to push to aggravate the husband so that he wants out of his self-imposed predicament." Depending on how much you're willing to spend, those buttons might include harassment (in his book, Epstein recalls once following a husband into a dance club and remaining there until that meshuggener, pink-faced and utterly ashamed, put pen to paper) or, perhaps, alternate measures. To his enemies, he's a menace and a bully. To his admirers, though, he's a hero—a liberator.

As such, Epstein has scarcely tried to hide what he does. In Orthodox circles, his work isn't just an open secret—it's barely a secret at all. "For a long time," says Monty Weinstein, a New York therapist who frequently counsels Orthodox clients, "it was always his name that came up. He was beating guys up, he was giving them bloody noses, he was using cattle prods. He had a gang of thugs, and he had a van, and he'd scoop you right off the street."

Bell-shaped and wizened, with protuberant blue eyes and a wide forehead, Epstein speaks in a gravelly New York accent, punctuating his observations with blasts of Yiddish. He's fond of quoting Maimonides ("A woman is not a prisoner who should be forced to live with the man she hates") and the Jewish sages of yore: "Ein adam dor im nachash bekefifa achas—you can't live with a snake."

An ultra-Orthodox woman named Henny Kupferstein recently told me the story of her arranged marriage, at the age of 18, to a man she soon came to think of as a controlling monster. "I was taught that the only reason that you're in this world is to serve your husband," says Kupferstein, who has round cheeks the shade of burnished apples and beautiful long brown hair—her own, she points out, after years of shaving her head and wearing a wig, as married frum women must. "It never occurred to me that there was a way out," she went on. "I was going to get married as a teenager and have babies every year, and I would be a grandmother at 39. It would be fabulous. What wasn't fabulous was that my life didn't go that way. My marriage was a trauma that lasted for fourteen years."

Eventually, Kupferstein left her husband. But her husband denied her the get, and at the age of 32, Kupferstein was adrift, "cut off from everyone and anyone. Little kids would cross the street to get away from me. I was an outcast."

Kupferstein turned to Epstein, who received the desperate woman in the living room of his Brooklyn home. The light was dim, and the tables were piled high with papers. The walls were lined with portraits of community leaders and photographs of Epstein shaking hands with various Orthodox dignitaries.

Kupferstein was led to a chair. Almost immediately, she felt comfortable—she was in the presence of someone who understood.

Epstein, Kupferstein says, "seemed to have this inside understanding of women's emotions—he validated you when you explained why the marriage was breaking down. He nodded. And that nodding was enough to encourage you—to make you believe your thoughts were legit, which is far more than you get from other men in your community. Here's a guy who wears a beard that gets it."

A few months later, with Epstein's help, Kupferstein was released from her marriage, without blood loss, through a series of hearings in the local beit din. Still, Kupferstein has no doubt that had things not gone her way in the beit din, Epstein would have suggested tactics "outside the normal channels," as Epstein himself has described his more aggressive methods. She would need only to have said the word.

Mier Breyskman's view might've looked something like this—if he hadn't been blindfolded.

Epstein first gained notoriety outside the black-hat world in the late 1990s, when several men, all in the midst of divorce and custody battles, went public with tales of back-alley assaults at the hands of masked madmen. One was shot in the ass. Another suffered facial burns. Each blamed his problems on Epstein and one of his colleagues, the revered Orthodox rabbi Martin Wolmark. For a certain kind of husband—the kind who believed in his heart that women were meant to be subservient and that the whole agunah issue was merely a matter of secular political correctness run awry—Epstein became a bogeyman. He was the malevolent spirit from Yiddish folktales, the dybbuk. You didn't want him darkening your doorstep.

And like a dybbuk, he seemed impossible to bring down by earthly means. Accusations bounced right off him. Part of the reason, of course, is that many in the community didn't want their star to'ein to be caught. He may have been rough, but he was also a crusader for women's rights. "I came to believe that Epstein was a sociopath at a very high level," Kupferstein told me. "He straddled both worlds: religious and criminal. He loves his own children, he loves his God, he's capable of love, but he's capable of criminal behavior at the same time. It's like Breaking Bad."

On August 14, 2013, a pair of prospective clients—a brother and sister I'll call Ben and Leah—show up at the doorstep of a home Epstein keeps in Lakewood. They find him inside, clad in his traditional uniform of black coat, white shirt, black pants. A few years earlier, Ben explains, he'd introduced his sister to one of his partners in the real estate business, a man we'll refer to as Moshe.

Ben liked Moshe, and Leah liked Moshe, and the match initially seemed blessed by God. But shortly after the marriage was consummated, cracks appeared in the facade. Moshe was having financial issues, which bothered the frum Leah; worse yet, he didn't want children. Leah decided on a divorce. But there was a snag: Ben and Moshe were still business partners, and Moshe had conveniently remembered that Ben owed him some money.

Now, they tell Epstein, Moshe is squirreled away in South America, refusing the get until this debt is repaid.

Even beyond the logistical challenges, there's still the question of money. Liberating an agunah isn't cheap. Ben and Leah will have to pay ten grand to the rabbinical court that would take their case, and an additional $50K to $60K to the "tough guys" required to extract the get.

A plan emerges: Moshe will be lured north to New Jersey under false pretenses and thrown into the back of a van. "Basically what we're going to be doing," Epstein says, "is kidnapping a guy for a couple of hours and beating him up and torturing him and then getting him to give the get."

Ben is skeptical. He knows his business partner—Moshe isn't the type of guy to simply back down.

"Wait a second here," Epstein says. "I guarantee you that if you're in the van, you'd give a get to your wife. You probably love your wife, but you'd give a get when they finish with you," he continues. "Hopefully there won't even be a mark on him."

"You can leave a mark," Ben laughs.

"No, no, no. We—"

"I know. I understand what you're saying."

"We prefer not to leave a mark. Because when they go to the police, the police look at the guy...;"

Luckily, Epstein has methods that don't cause any blood loss: "We take an electric cattle prod...;"

"Electric cattle prod," Leah repeats. "Okay."

"If it can get a bull that weighs five tons to move...; You put it in certain parts of his body and in one minute the guy will know."

Ben and Leah don't need to hear anything more: They hire Mendel Epstein on the spot.

Two months later, at 8 A.M. on October 9, a pair of dark minivans pull around the back of an aging warehouse in a waterfront tract of New Jersey, where Ben is waiting. He's already wired Epstein a $20K down payment—with the rest contingent on services rendered.

The team runs through the plan one last time: In a few minutes, Ben will go collect Moshe, who has flown up from South America believing he's being shown a new piece of property. Once inside the warehouse, Moshe will be jumped. Of paramount importance is to keep him away from the windows, so nobody outside sees anything suspicious.

While Ben watches, the men prepare their work clothes. Some wear black ski masks. Some have bandannas pulled over their faces in the manner of Wild West outlaws. One man is wearing a zombie mask, another a black Metallica T-shirt. A third has yanked a big trash bag over his torso—perhaps a blood-splatter prophylactic, in case this particular get requires leaving a mark after all.

Twenty minutes later, Ben exits the warehouse and walks out to his car. At 8:23 P.M., the eight men hear a sound at the door. Within seconds, they find themselves ambushed by an FBI Specialized Weapons and Tactics team. There is shouting, the squeak of thick-soled boots, the glare of rail-mounted tactical lights. The goons put their hands up.

FBI agents fan out across the room. In one corner, they discover an array of gear: feather quills and ink and paper to record the get, plus rope, a screwdriver, and most ominously, a clutch of surgical blades.

As these items are being bagged, additional agents are serving search warrants on the homes of Epstein and Wolmark and the other alleged members of the ring, in hopes of drumming up enough evidence to land the Prodfather in prison for life.

Unable to fathom the possibility that he'd be on the receiving end of a sting, much less one pulled off with such panache, Epstein had been fooled at every turn. There was never a Moshe, with his money-grubbing ways and interest in corporate real estate. There'd never been an agunah called Leah or a protective brother named Ben. There were only "Ben" and "Leah," undercover FBI agents working out of the bureau's Newark office.

In their many conversations with Epstein, both in person and on the phone, Ben and Leah were always careful to use a recorder. The resulting transcripts, detailed in court documents, have provided both the basis for this story and what Joseph Gribko, the assistant U.S. attorney on the case, has called "overwhelming evidence" against Epstein. On these tapes, Epstein describes not only what he will have done to Moshe but exactly how much he expects to be paid for it. It is the approach of someone who cannot imagine ever being arrested.

Six of the eight men present at the warehouse on October 9 have pleaded guilty to traveling in interstate commerce to commit extortion. Their statements to law enforcement, in conjunction with the tapes recorded by Ben and Leah, yield what the assistant U.S. attorney's office believes is a clear portrait of an organization akin to the Bloods, the Crips, or the Mafia.

In May of this year, a grand jury indicted Epstein and Wolmark on multiple counts of kidnapping. They each face the possibility of twenty-five years to life in a federal penitentiary. At 69 years old and in increasingly poor health—obese, pre-diabetic, and a survivor of open-heart surgery—Epstein cannot afford prison time. So he is determined to fight. He and Wolmark have pleaded not guilty.

In an e-mailed statement, Robert G. Stahl, Epstein's attorney, indicated that at least part of his strategy will be to depict Epstein himself as the abused party. "When all the facts and evidence come out, it will be apparent that the government is on the wrong side of a terrible social injustice," Stahl said. "By inserting itself into a complicated religious issue, the government has interfered with the complex religious tenets of an Orthodox Jewish marriage and divorce process. Rabbi Epstein has helped scores of abused women for some thirty years equal the playing field in a male-dominated religious world."

A jury trial is scheduled for early next year in New Jersey. In the meantime, Epstein is out on $1 million bail, provided mostly by his family.

These days Epstein's Brooklyn home is shuttered and locked, the windows of his old office boarded over with graffitied plywood. Despite dispensation from a judge allowing regular passage to a nearby shul, Epstein seems to remain sequestered with his wife and family. He rarely appears in public and has denied all requests to comment on his case.

In early May, I decided to drive down from New York to see him in New Jersey. The day was stormy, and along Lakewood's leafy back roads, rainwater coursed through the gutters. I parked at the end of a cul-de-sac near the town center and followed a cement walk to Epstein's front door.

The two-story house, with its clay-colored paint job and chipped black shutters, was falling into disrepair. Trash was scattered across the front yard; yellowing newspapers were piled on the porch. I knocked and then tried the bell, and got no response. I went back to my car to wait.

A few minutes later, there was a flicker of movement in an upstairs window, and Epstein appeared at the glass, his face moony and pale, his white hair protruding at odd angles. Only a fool would attempt to read minds, but it was impossible not to see the palpable sadness of a once powerful man brought low. The twilight of a self-modeled hero. All traces of him had been scrubbed out of a neighborhood where he had long exercised his will so audaciously. Now he was confined to a house with a garbage-strewn lawn. He wasn't even bothering to brush his own hair. As I watched, he drew the blinds shut.

MIKA: Reminds me of this GEM from ****** movie!

[MIKA27]

The Japanese Trailers For 'Guardians Of The Galaxy' Are So Awesome

http://youtu.be/DwwzQvFoVzE

I absolutely loved Guardians Of The Galaxy, and clearly audiences around the world are too. The film is just about to open in Japan, and I just love the awesome local trailers.

The three trailers, tweeted out by Guardians director James Gunn this morning, feature highlights on the characters of Rocket, Groot and Star Lord, and include amazing stock art as well as clips from the film.

[Mckucci]

Stumbled across this last night... Weather or not it'll actually happen, I thought it was pretty cool... Maybe a little creepy also? lol

[Mckucci]

Not sure why the video / link did not post above...

http://www.myjibo.com/

[MIKA27]

Not sure why the video / link did not post above...

http://www.myjibo.com/

Hi, welcome to the forum and also the thread!

Many thanks for posting, yes, I have seen this and whilst may seem a little creepy to some, this is just the beginning of the future technology we will all eventually have in our homes.

Many thanks for reading/posting and your contribution is very much appreciated.

[MIKA27]

Part Of An Asteroid Set To Skim Earth Fell And Made A Big Crater

An asteroid known as 2014 RC was due to skim past our planet over the weekend. But instead of passing by in the distance, it’s believed part of the rock fell to earth in Nicaragua creating a gigantic crater.

The BBC reports that a meteorite landed close to the Nicaraguan capital of Managua on Sunday, around the same time that the asteroid passed by. The impact is said to have “caused an explosion and earth tremor, leaving a crater 12m across and 5m deep near the city’s airport.” Experts tell the news organisation that the rock that fell to Earth likely came from the asteroid.

It’s no Chelyabinsk. But given that NASA previously explained that the asteroid would “safely pass very close to Earth”, then if the meteor is from the asteroid it didn’t quite do its sums perfectly.

[MIKA27]

Amazing Video Of A Man Holding A Glider While Flying On Another Glider

This photo and video of a daredevil from the Red Bull Skydiving team holding a glider while riding another glider makes me giddy with joy and excitement. First, because it’s simply amazing — one stunning, extremely difficult stunt that they executed perfectly.

The other reason is that it reminds me of a kid throwing a paper glider. Except this glider is the real thing.

The tail-grabbing action starts at 1:40.

[MIKA27]

How the Red Baron’s Knockoff Aircraft Became the First Great Warplane

World War I was shaped by the new vehicles developed during the four years of conflict. A century after the start of the war, we’re looking back at the most remarkable vehicles—the planes, cars, tanks, ships, and zeppelins—it helped bring about.

Though the Allies won the war and the glory, the Germans gave us one of the most famous airplanes of the Great War. The Fokker Dr.1 triplane, flown by one of history’s great fighter pilots, is among the most recognizable aircraft of the early twentieth century and it played a significant role in launching dogfighting as a new form of combat.

The Dr. 1 was a knockoff of a British Sopwith triplane, one of which crashed behind German lines and was studied extensively. The plane was fantastically successful; its most famous pilot was Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the “Red Baron,” who scored 19 of his final 21 kills in the Dr.1. He was shot down and killed in the plane in April, 1918.

Equipped with a 110-horsepower engine, the 1,300-pound plane could reach an altitude of nearly 20,000 feet. Its top speed of 103 mph was slower than Allied aircraft, but its excellent rudder and elevator provided unparalleled maneuverability and made it one of the best dogfighters in the war. Two 7.92mm Spandau LMG 08/15 machine guns rounded out the plane’s armaments. It could only fly for about 80 minutes before being refueled, but was relatively cheap to manufacture (important for a Germany stunted by a British naval blockade).

Problematically, the Dr.1 was prone to wing failures—bad news for an airplane. Poor manufacturing and a design that put much more force on the top wing rather than the lower two meant the plane wasn’t destined for mass manufacturing. Just 320 Dr. 1 were made, and none of the originals survive. However, they are popular replica aircraft for collectors and historical museums. Budding and wannabe aviators can “fly” the Dr.1 in a flight simulator at the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

The Fokker Dr.1 emphasized the need for maneuverability in air-to-air combat, something that persists to this day in the development of the latest fighter jets, including the F-35 Lighting. It also marks the first plane famous for air-to-air combat—famous enough to end up in Peanuts along with the Red Baron, the arch-nemesis of Snoopy and his Sopwith Camel biplane.

[MIKA27]

A $7,300 Steampunk Coffee Maker That Looks Like a Gothic Church

As if suffering from a Frappuccino-induced hangover, the high-brow coffee world has become an exercise in minimal design: Blue Bottle Coffee sells its $5-a-pop cups in Apple-inspired retail stores. Some of our favorite new pour-over coffee makers are so pared down they’re nearly invisible. Even the very definition of pour-over and/or cold-brew coffee—an analog technique that uses either piping hot water or a steady cold drip to draw out complex flavors in coffee beans—is really about getting back to basics.

The team at South Korean design studio Dutch Lab, however, is going against the grain by releasing maximalist designs, each one more ornate than the last. Their latest is the Gothicism coffee maker: an intricate laser-cut shrine dedicated to the art of slow-drip cold brew. This thing is a $7,300 temple of laser-cut aluminum panels, brass needle valves, and borosilicate glass tubes that can brew three one-liter pots of cold brew at the same time.

The Dutch Lab line includes pieces inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris and Big Ben in London, but Gothicism, for all its spires and rose windows, wasn’t technically modeled off an existing building. Dutch Lab is enamored with the steampunk genre (“It represents the ongoing development of the present era we are all living in,” says Ines Heu of Dutch Lab) and says the coffee maker is a sci-fi nod to the Victorian era’s “Gothic ambiance.”

That said, it’s not steam powered. Because the cold brew process just needs gravity (and a lot of time), Gothicism is totally analog. Espresso aficionados might want to compare it to the Alpha Dominance Steampunk—another coffee-making beast that uses digital controls to achieve a consistently perfect brew—but the brewing experience is likely less suited for a bustling coffee shop than it is a museum.

Check out Gothicism and Dutch Lab’s lavish offerings, here.

[MIKA27]

5 Reasons Aaron Kosminski Might Not Have Been Jack the Ripper

The international press has been abuzz with news that Jack the Ripper may have been identified based on mitochondrial DNA. But there are a number of skeptics out there, and they have some very good reasons for doubting that the findings are going to stick:

1. It’s the freaking Daily Mail.

I get the fact that independent scholarship is expensive, and the people behind this study have to fund their own research expenses. But the Daily Mail isn’t a very credible venue for a scientific article, and if Edwards were serious about having his claims accepted he could have chosen among literally thousands of more credible publications all over the world. Why didn’t he? Maybe it’s because they didn’t offer him as much money (or any money at all), and he had expenses to meet; maybe it’s because most of them can’t compete with the Daily Mail’s circulation; or maybe, just maybe, it’s because they would have checked into his claims more extensively and found something that precluded them from publishing the findings. As of yet, we have no way of really knowing which. But there aren’t many groundbreaking discoveries that started off as an exclusive in the Daily Mail.

2. The claims haven’t been vetted.

I find it unlikely that Edwards and Louhelainen fabricated the results, but the “independent scholar checks mitochondrial DNA, finds something amazing” meme has already been explored, less promisingly, in the recent debate over the Paracas skulls. I’d feel better about this result if it were independently confirmed by affiliated scholars who had more to lose. There is a place for independent scholarship and a place for institutional scholarship, and this is one of those cases where some degree of serious collaboration will be necessary to confirm the findings.

3. The mtDNA has undeniably been contaminated.

The fact that Catherine Eddowes’ mitochondrial DNA was found on the shawl becomes a much less impressive fact when we learn that the shawl was passed down among maternal descendants in her family for generations, and any of them could have accidentally contributed the same mtDNA. If the mtDNA can be directly traced to a patch of blood found on the shawl, that’s one thing—but if it came from somewhere else, that’s another.

Finding Kosminski’s mtDNA in a semen stain on the shawl is much more impressive, and is much harder to explain. Contrary to Ripperologist Richard Cobb’s claim that the stain could be explained by Kosminski’s history with prostitutes in the area, the likelihood that Kosminski’s mtDNA just happened to end up on a shawl that had already been described as an artifact of the murder scene seems prohibitively remote to me. But there’s still another explanation as to how it might have gotten there…

4. Lots of people have the same mtDNA.

On average, 4% of the population shares your maternal haplogroup. Kosminski’s T1a1 haplogroup may have been uncommon in late 19th-century Britain, suggesting a lower percentage match, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that another person with the same maternal haplogroup committed the murder and left biological evidence on the shawl. The case that this is in fact Kosminski’s mtDNA would be strengthened considerably if Edwards were to track down maternal descendants of other Ripper suspects and verify that they do not share Kosminski’s haplogroup.

Cover of Puck magazine; September 21st, 1889. Barely a year after the first Jack the Ripper murder, police already had a rogue’s gallery of suspects.

5. Outside of the mtDNA, Kosminski is not one of the more plausible suspects.

Kosminski was a decent suspect but not, as Ripperologist Marilyn Bardsley points out, the best one:

“The only bit of evidence amassed against Kosminski was a reputedly positive identification by one of the eyewitnesses, mostly likely Joseph Lawende … Kosminski was small and slender of build, which does not fit Lawende’s description of the killer as medium build, nor did Lawende describe the person he saw as a foreigner. Nor did Kosminski possess any [documented] anatomical knowledge. Sugden in his research makes another important point: ‘Kosminski’s incarceration took place more than two years after the Miller Court murder. If Kosminski was the killer, therefore, we have to accept that after committing five or six murders in three months he quietly went to ground and remained inactive for another two years three months.’”

If the case against Kosminski is strengthened—by independent verification of the mtDNA testing and exclusion of the other suspects—then that obviously increases the possibility that some of the 1889-1891 ”non-canonical” murders sometimes attributed to Jack the Ripper may have in fact been committed by the original killer. It also exonerates a lot of people. And it functionally shuts down “Ripperology” as a field of inquiry, which to be honest may be for the best.

But the mystery of Jack the Ripper isn’t going to be solved by a series of ifs; we need a stronger case than one article can give us. And this is the kind of situation where the scrutiny of skeptics is especially valuable; you can’t really verify a theory, be it good or bad, if everybody completely accepts it at face value.

[MIKA27]

China: Shang or Zhou dynasty sword found in Jiangsu

A Chinese boy has made the discovery of a lifetime by stumbling across a 3,000-year-old bronze sword in a river in Jiangsu Province.

Eleven-year-old Yang Junxi says he touched the rusty weapon's tip while washing his hands in the Laozhoulin River, in Gaoyou County, the state news agency Xinhua reports. After pulling it out he took it home, where it quickly became a sensation for curious locals, before the family decided to send it to officials for examination. "Some people even offered high prices to buy the sword," Junxi's father Jinhai says. "But I felt it would be illegal to sell the relic."

Archaeologists have dated the 26cm (10in) weapon to either the Shang or Zhou dynasties - the dawn of Chinese civilisation - based on its material, size and shape. Lyu Zhiwei of the Gaoyou Cultural Relics Bureau says that while the sword appears to be of both decorative and practical use, its form suggests it was the status symbol of a civil official rather than a sword for fighting.

The authorities are now planning a major archaeological dig in the river, once part of a system of ancient waterways that developed into today's Grand Canal. Junxi and his father have been given a reward for handing in the relic.

[MIKA27]

YOU ONLY NEED TO SHARPEN THESE KNIVES ONCE EVERY 25 YEARS

The first thing you’ll notice when you see these Furtif Evercut Knives is their funky fractal handles and their mysterious dark shading.

And while they look like a killer set to put on display in your kitchen, they’ll also outperform just about any other set of knives you’ve ever used. Each full tang blade features a laser-bonded titanium-carbide surface designed to last 300 times longer than steel and 5 times longer than ceramic. Basically, you won’t have to sharpen them for 25 years. Not only will you have the most eye-catching set of slicers and dicers around, you’ll have a set that will stay in prime shape even with little attention.

[MIKA27]

DEEPFLIGHT SUBMARINE SUPER FALCON MARK II

For Your Eyes Only may not rank as one of the better Bond films, but it did feature a pretty cool submarine that attacked Agent 007 in the film. Now, the man who created that sub has come up with a new personal luxury submarine, and you don’t even have to be a supervillain to enjoy it (but it helps).

The Deepflight Submarine Super Falcon Mark II by Graham Hawkes is 17 feet long and seats two, with each person getting their own bubble-glass cockpit. Oh, and it goes for $1.7 million. The craft can dive up to 400 feet, and its wings on the side and stabilizers in the rear will keep you (or your very rich uncle) steady as you look for mini-Titanics.

[MIKA27]

Archaeologists Discover 1000-Year-Old Viking Fortress

It’s been 60 years since a viking settlement was discovered, leading historians to assume that we’d uncovered everything there is to uncover. But this weekend Danish and English archaeologists announced they have unearthed evidence of a new fortress that’s been sought after for years — and they used some pretty cool tech to do it.

The fortress sits about 60km south of Copenhagen, at a point where researchers had believed a fort might lie. But until archaeologists turned to new methods offered by archaeological geophysics, they found nothing. Thanks to help from University of York researcher named Helen Goodchild, the team was able to discover evidence of a huge, circular fortress with four openings, each enclosed by wooden gates that were eventually burned down — presumably during battle. You can see the archaeologists posing with the remains of the posts here:

So how did the team discover the site? According to Aarhus University, Goodchild used a technique called gradiometry, which involves taking measurements of the Earth’s magnetic field found in the soil at the site. By comparing variations from location to location, they were able to detect where humans had altered the Earth — and begin excavation, as professor Søren Sindbæk explained:

By measuring small variation in the earth’s magnetism we can identify old pits or features without destroying anything. In this way we achieved an amazingly detailed ‘ghost image‘ of the fortress in a few days. Then we knew exactly where we had to put in excavation trenches to get as much information as possible about the mysterious fortress.

Here’s what the imaging technique turned up, helping the team figure out exactly where to begin actually altering the land:

The ring itself was almost 500 feet wide, and inside, longhouses would have served as dwellings. It would have looked a lot like Trelleborg, another ringed fortress from the same period that sits 40 miles east of the new find:

The researchers are still waiting to get lab results back on an analysis of the burned gate posts for an accurate dating of the fortress, but they speculate that it may date back to King Harald Bluetooth — or the son who deposed him, Sweyn Forkbeard, who ruled at the turn of the first millennia. Forkbeard would go on to become the King of England after invading London in 1013.

According to The Telegraph, this fortress may have been the one used to actually launch Forkbeard’s final attack on England. We’ll know more soon, and have reached out to the team for more information on the tools used in the discovery.

[MIKA27]

These Alien Skyscrapers Will Rest On The Site Of An Old Uranium Plant In Brisbane

The Pritzker Prize-winning starchitect Zaha Hadid

just released images of her latest design — three matching towers for Brisbane’s waterfront — and they look nothing short of alien. Which feels oddly appropriate, since the skyscrapers are also supposed to sit on potentially radioactive land.

Hadid’s so-called Toowong development, a complex with 486 apartments and eight villas, is indeed planned to be built on contaminated land. The land’s former tenant, an affiliate of Australia’s ABC Radio network, vacated the land back in 2006 after concerns over radiation linked it to several cases of cancer. As the Brisbane Times reported in 2008, “The site housed a uranium processing plant between 1911 and 1916, which produced products used to paint luminous clocks, watches and instrument dials.” That would do it.

While some tests revealed that the levels of radiation are safe, people tend to shy away from uranium-drenched soil. University of Queensland associate professor Clive Warren told the Brisbane Times that the land was “blighted” back in 2010. “It’s going to be a long time before people are willing to live there I’d imagine.”

But who knows! Maybe Hadid’s mega stardom and eye-catching designs can woo some 500 would be tenants to move into the towers. They look like soda bottles with their caps stuck into the ground. Heck, maybe the smaller footprint means less exposure to the decaying uranium in the soil and, hence, less of a human risk.

But risks — and radical architecture — are Hadid’s thing. And if tests prove that the ground is safe, these towers would be one hell of a way to bring people back to the neighbourhood.

MIKA: Is that Rob heading to the new Czar HQ?

[MIKA27]

Make Sure To Watch This Short Till The Very End, Because It's Brilliant

This short animation for Channel 4 is brilliant in many ways. It shows an overly developed world inhabited by millions of cute little creatures, with cute little jobs, and cute little bars. All is fine till the final twist — so unexpected that it blew my mind.

[Habana Mike]

YOU ONLY NEED TO SHARPEN THESE KNIVES ONCE EVERY 25 YEARS

The first thing you’ll notice when you see these Furtif Evercut Knives is their funky fractal handles and their mysterious dark shading.

And while they look like a killer set to put on display in your kitchen, they’ll also outperform just about any other set of knives you’ve ever used. Each full tang blade features a laser-bonded titanium-carbide surface designed to last 300 times longer than steel and 5 times longer than ceramic. Basically, you won’t have to sharpen them for 25 years. Not only will you have the most eye-catching set of slicers and dicers around, you’ll have a set that will stay in prime shape even with little attention.

Beautiful knives. Shame each one costs the price of a good box of cigars!

Given their durability well worth it I say. Christmas present idea for sure....

[MIKA27]

iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus: Australian Price And Release Date

New phones from Apple landed this morning, and they’re coming straight to Australia. Here’s what you’ll pay and when you can get your mitts on one.

iPhone 6

It’s bigger, but not the biggest phone Apple is planning on selling in the new line-up.

The iPhone 6 is a 4.7-inch iPhone with 38 per cent more pixels on the screen compared to the iPhone 5s.

It’s running the new Apple A8 processor, complete with the new M8 motion co-processor as well.

From a straight spec comparison between chips, such as the Snapdragon 805 found in Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 4, the A8 may not seem like a big deal. The 805 is quad-core 2.7GHz SoC, but it’s important to remember that the A8 is a custom job, built and optimised specifically for Apple products and iOS, whereas Qualcomm creates stock chips for multiple smartphones.

So what’s the price?

Well, Apple will be selling the iPhone 6 in gold, silver and space grey. Prices start at $869 for the 16GB model, $999 for the 64GB model and $1129 for the 128GB model.

That 128GB model is a first for Apple, and it sees the company eliminate the 32GB tier altogether.

You’ll be able to buy it on Friday, 19 September in Australia, and you can pre-order it from Friday, 12 September.

iPhone 6 Plus

The iPhone 6 Plus is the big daddy of iPhones in 2014-15. It’s 5.5-inches in size and is also powered by the new A8 processor.

Both cameras have re-engineered sensors complete at 8-megapixels in size.

Naturally, the iPhone 6 Plus is more expensive than the iPhone 6.

The iPhone 6 plus is also sold in gold, silver and space grey, and will start at $999 for the 16GB model, going up to $1129 for the 64GB model and $1249 for the new 128GB model.

The larger phone will also go on sale on Friday, 19 September, with pre-orders opening this Friday.

[MIKA27]

How Apple's Jumbo iPhone 6 Plus Compares To Its Biggest Competition

Just like the rumours foretold, Apple’s iPhone 6 now comes with an extra-large 5.5-inch screen size. It’s Apple’s first foray into the big screen smartphone realm, which means there’s plenty of competition waiting to take it on. How’s the iPhone 6 Plus compare to the competition? Let’s find out.

First and foremost, that screen. Unlike the regular-size iPhone 6, which brings a smaller screen than any of its flagship competition, the iPhone 6 Plus hits the same 5.5-inch screen size as the sensibly sized OnePlus One and LG G3. Five-and-a-half inches of screen feels pretty danged big in the hand, though it’s not as big as the HTC One Max or the positively stonking Lumia 1520.

Apple’s upsized iPhone only musters 1920 x 1080 resolution and a pixel density of 401 PPI, on par with the “regular size” smartphones but outgunned by the G3 and the Galaxy Note 4, both of which have eye-throbbingly powerful screens. Apple’s Retina displays use different tech than the Android and Windows Phone competition, so the numbers don’t tell the whole story, but if screen real estate is your number one concern, Apple’s big phone is far from the biggest.

The other notable feature of the iPhone 6 Plus is storage: Like the junior-size iPhone 6, the Plus offers 16, 32, or an astounding 128GB of built-in space. Only the G3 and Note 4 can match that number using MicroSD cards. It’s personal preference as to whether you like your storage removable or built-in, but now you’ve got the option of choosing an extended-cab phone that won’t require you to keep track of MicroSD cards.

Other than that, the iPhone 6 Plus holds pretty much the same guts as its smaller sibling — a faster yet more efficient A8 processor and a seriously revamped M8 fitness tracker. On paper, the device’s battery looks limp compared to the power packs in the other big phones, particularly the 3400mAh space heater in the Lumia 1520, but Apple’s guts are all optimised to work together in ways that the off-the-shelf Snapdragon processors in other big screen phones can’t necessarily match, so a real-world battery test will tell that tale.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the iPhone 6 Plus is a bit of a bruiser, measuring in bigger and heavier than all but the hugest of the oversize phones. Numbers only give you part of the picture when it comes to a new smartphone — nothing beats hands-on experience — but for the power users who need the most out of their large-format phones, the spec sheet is a good starting point. How do you think the 6 Plus stacks up to the ample-portioned competition?

[MIKA27]

A New Graphene Sensor Will Let Us See Through Walls

Remember all those amazing things graphene can supposedly do? Well, the wonder material is starting to do them. A team of researchers from the University of Maryland recently developed a graphene-based sensor that lets people see through walls. Obviously, they want to make goggles with it.

The new sensor is remarkable for its ability to detect the terahertz radiation spectrum (aka T-rays) at room temperature. This unique part of the light spectrum can be tuned to see through surfaces — anything from concrete to human skin. Historically, scientists haven’t been able to make use of T-rays, although because the sensors needed to be kept at extremely low temperatures to work. But the Maryland team found a way to make a room temperature sensor with graphene.

Immediate applications of this technology will almost definitely involve the military. Just imagine how useful goggles that see through walls would be in a war zone. The sensors could also let us use T-rays instead of harmful X-rays for medical applications. The idea that consumers could get ahold of these sensors is dubious from a privacy perspective, not to mention graphene is still so wildly expensive. Useful! But wildly expensive.

[MIKA27]

Apple Watch's Walking Directions Buzz Your Wrist When It's Time To Turn

Apple Maps have always had turn-by-turn walking directions, provided you had your iPhone in your hand. Now its new Watch will not only provide high-quality maps right there on your arm, it will also give you an haptic nudge when you need to turn right.

Using the Watch (do we call it “The Watch?”), you’ll be able to summon directions and navigation using either the “taptic” touchscreen or Siri. You can zoom in to see the route, but that watch screen is still pretty small. So once your walking route is set, the Watch will know where you are, and vibrate when it’s time to turn — one kind of buzz for left, a different one for right.

One problem for people using their Watches to get around town: Apple’s Maps still don’t offer transit directions, instead they send you off to Google Maps. The best possible combination of any non-car directions would not only tell you to walk left or right but also direct you to a bus stop or train station when needed. So either Google Maps will need to incorporate the same haptic feedback for the Watch, or Apple needs to add some transit directions, stat. Also how about the same thing for biking directions?