While You Were Offline: Bill Gates Drinks Water That Used to Be Poop

For all our optimism and excitement, the first full week of 2015 has looked a lot like 2014, with terrorist attacks inside and outside the US reminding us that fear is making an early bid for "Omnipresent, Soul-Crushing Feeling of the Year" yet again. (On the NAACP bombing, this is a good read, and on the Charlie Hebdo murders, this is worth reading; otherwise, we're not sure we need to add anything more to what you already know about both stories.) Outside of those dual horrors, however, other things did in fact happen over the last seven days on the Internet. Here's what you might have missed while you were struggling to get back to work after the holidays.

What Happened: Really, we're not sure what that headline leaves to the imagination. Oh, alright: In his secret identity as billionaire philanthropist, the Microsoft founder visited a factory that burns human waste to produce water and electricity and he sampled the output.
Where It Blew Up: Blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: Gates wrote about his visit to the Omniprocessor, a facility that turns crap into ... well, not gold, but something better: water and electricity, which is more useful in certain parts of the world. As part of the blog post, he included a video that saw him sampling the water produced by the processor (see above).

Needless to say, the Internet loved seeing this. Bill Gates drinking poo? How could they resist?
The Takeaway: Our love for seeing celebrities do disgusting things—even if, as in this case, it's not actually disgusting at all—is strong. Nonetheless, if this is what it takes to draw attention to worthy causes, then we should at least be glad that it's not as obnoxious as the Ice Bucket Challenge became. Hey, maybe we can get more celebrities necking down feces in the name of positivity!

What Happened: In an attempt to promote her upcoming album Rebel Heart, the former Queen of Pop released doctored images of Nelson Mandela, Bob Marley, and Martin Luther King, Jr. covered in black straps in the same manner that she is on the Rebel Heart cover. People got upset.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: Madonna's planned comeback has gotten off to a rocky start. Few seem to believe that the 56-year-old has her finger on the pulse of popular culture in the way that she used to, and given her unfortunate response to leaked Rebel Heart demos showing up online—she called it "artistic rape," and likened it to terrorism—she certainly seemed to be out of step with the way the entertainment world works these days. All of which made her appropriation of the likenesses of some famous political leaders as part of a social media promotion for the new album just a little bit problematic. To wit:

Images similar to the King one followed for Mandela and Marley. Soon enough, the story wasn't that Madonna was standing strong with inspirational figures, but that she was creating a "social media firestorm" and sparking outrage with the images. She quickly offered a quasi-apology on Facebook (albeit one that actually said "I didn't do it/My fans did/And I just re posted those photos"), but few were convinced.

Her argument that she was "admiring and acknowledging there [sic] Rebel Hearts" rings a little false when you consider that latter icons who got wrapped up in similar images included one of the Angry Birds. Appropriation of important political movements for pop music promotion? That's so rebellious. (You'll be unsurprised to know that Madge also hashtagged her comments about Charlie Hebdo with "#rebelheart" as well.)
The Takeaway: If Madonna wants to convince people that she’s still relevant and edgy, maybe the best thing she could do would be to get off social media as quickly as possible.

What Happened: An author launched a crowdfunding campaign to be able to afford to live while writing her next book; the Internet turned on her.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: A Young Adult author named Stacey Jay decided that she was going to try and use Kickstarter to fund the writing of a sequel to one of her previous books, asking for $10,500 as living expenses for the period she'd be working on it. Fans didn't like that, with Twitter comments including "if it were just the editor and the cover, i'd be like, yeah that makes sense but asking us to pay your bills is ridiculous," and "This author has privileges many other authors do not have, and is asking for even more. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth."

Three days into the campaign, Jay closed it. She explained why in a post on her blog, writing "I wasn't being greedy, I was trying to be practical, while giving people a chance to green light a story many seemed excited about. Instead I made people upset, which is the last thing I wanted to do. I sincerely went into this wanting to share more of a story I love with readers I love. Instead, this has turned into an incredibly painful learning experience."

Response to the closure, and to the complaints people had against the Kickstarter, came quickly, and other authors rushed to support Jay. "One could argue that she ventured too much information in being honest about, ohhh, needing to eat and pay those pesky bills, but truth is, the Kickstarter would have paid her to write and publish the book. Paying for those things, yes, means some of that money is going to find its way into her own personal ecosystem. Because it needs to," wrote Chuck Wendig. "What, she and her family should starve while she writes the book?" YA author Marni Bates noted the fallout was "where a number of authors became offended at the expectation that they were supposed to work for free," adding that "art should be valued, because authors and artists also need to pay their rent. I'm pretty sure we can all agree on that."

Well, maybe not everyone; Thursday evening, Jay posted a series of tweets implying that her home address had been shared without her permission, writing that she was "scared [and] incredibly anxious and I'm not even at my home right now."
The Takeaway: Think about this for a second: we live in a world where Kickstarter campaigns to make potato salad can become The Next Big Thing, but an author asking for a relatively minor amount provokes such backlash that she pulls the whole campaign and then gets threatened. File under "Priorities, Need to Re-Examine."

What Happened: Even though the zeitgeist-grabbing podcast investigation into the murder of Hae Min Lee finished before the holidays, a series of interviews with those who didn't appear on the show has ensured that people are still talking about it.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs, media think pieces
What Really Happened: Sarah Koenig might have hung up her podcasting headphones in December, but the response to the 12-episode Serial podcast continued in the new year, most explosively in a couple of interviews that appeared on The Intercept, with Jay Wilds, the reclusive friend of Adnan Syed, the man convinced of the murder, breaking his silence for the first time (parts one, two and three) and Kevin Urick, the prosecutor at the Syed's trial, doing the same thing. Both were critical of Serial and Koenig's reporting, with Urick pushing back at Koenig's attempts to discredit the evidence of the original trial, and also denying that she had made multiple attempts at contacting him. (For their part, the Serial producers deny Urick's version of events.)
The Takeaway: On the plus side, even as she's being attacked for her reporting, Sarah Koenig can at least take some comfort in having created something that touched a nerve in so many people that we're still talking about it weeks later. On the minus side, here's hoping that all this attention actually does something to re-open the real case the series was about, and doesn't just end in Internet wars for the sake of Internet wars.

What Happened: The actor behind Marvel’s star-spangled hero helped Betty White up some stairs at the People's Choice Awards, and the world loved him for it.
Where It Blew Up: Twitter, blogs
What Really Happened: When Betty White won the People’s Choice award for Favorite TV Icon, she needed some help getting up on stage to accept. Thankfully, the man who is Captain America was right by her side. Literally.

Within hours, his kindness was declared the "Cutest Moment" of the evening, with Evans being a "real-life superhero" and going "Full Captain America." Twitter was equally smitten:

The Takeaway: Let's be honest, is this a victory for Chris Evans or a failure for everyone else? Not to take anything away from his good manners, but wouldn't we all like to think that we'd help Betty to the stage in the unlikely happenstance that we'd been in his position? Come on, people.