Former FBI Director James Comey has a book deal.

Flatiron Books told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Comey is writing a book about leadership and decision making that will draw upon his career in government. Comey will write about experiences that made him the FBI’s best-known and most controversial FBI head in recent times, from his handling of the bureau’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server to allegations of ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Trump fired Comey in May and soon after told NBC News that he was angered by the FBI’s investigation into “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia,” which he called a fake story. Comey has since testified before Congress that Trump asked him to end an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn and kept memos about his meetings with the president.

According to Flatiron, Comey will cite “examples from some of the highest-stakes situations in the past two decades of American government” and “share yet-unheard anecdotes from his long and distinguished career.”

The book is currently untitled and scheduled for next spring.

“Throughout his career, James Comey has had to face one difficult decision after another as he has served the leaders of our country,” Flatiron Publisher and President Bob Miller said in a statement. “His book promises to take us inside those extraordinary moments in our history, showing us how these leaders have behaved under pressure. By doing so, Director Comey will give us unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in leadership itself.”

Comey was represented by Matt Latimer and Keith Urbahn of Javelin. Financial terms were not disclosed, but several publishers bid for the book and three officials with knowledge of the negotiations said the auction topped $2 million. The officials asked not to be identified because were not authorized to discuss the book.

Comey was appointed as FBI director by President Barack Obama in 2013. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed his successor, Christopher Wray, a former high-ranking official in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department who oversaw investigations into corporate fraud.
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Spoiler alert- U.S. cable channel HBO says it’s been hacked and its programming has been targeted.

The network is behind the hit fantasy show ‘Game of Thrones’ And there’s potentially some bad news for its fans.

Entertainment Weekly claims the theft includes the script of an unaired episode, but no need to go into a social media blackout just yet.

That’s NOT been confirmed by HBO.

They declined to comment on any specific content stolen in the hack, but acknowledged that some of their programming had been taken.

Entertainment Weekly reports that hackers stoke 1.5 terabytes of data.

They also allege unbroadcast episodes of ‘Ballers’ and ‘Room 104’ have been posted online, along with a script or treatment for next week’s Game of Thrones episode.

Reuters also received an email Sunday from a person claiming to have stolen data, including Game of Thrones.

The hit show is in its seventh season and is set to wrap up next year.

This is the latest plot twist for a show renowned for keeping its fans guessing.

 
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Among the many issues that made the Russian doping scandal so difficult to detect, then fix, was that track and field’s own leaders were mixed up in the corruption.

To prevent repeats, the International Association of Athletics Federations, or IAAF, created the Athletics Integrity Unit, an independent operation that will oversee track’s effort to combat doping and other areas of corruption.

The idea of independent oversight is considered central to the anti-doping effort. The International Olympic Committee and several winter sports are moving toward emulating what track and cycling have done. The basic idea is that the people running the sports shouldn’t be deciding who plays and who gets punished, as well.

“If it’s successful, it could be a structure that others could follow, and a structure that could be put into place internationally,” said David Howman, the former director general of the World Anti-Doping Agency, who now chairs the AIU. “These governing bodies don’t like having internal views of their own when it comes to problems in their sport. It doesn’t look good. It’s the wrong perception. They need to have something more distant.”

Former IAAF president Lamine Diack is under investigation by French prosecutors for corruption related to cover-ups of Russian doping. Other IAAF members have been sanctioned for their possible roles in the cover-ups, and the new president, Sebastian Coe, spearheaded the charge for the independent integrity unit, which was among the many changes he’s put in place to remake the federation’s culture.

Russian scandal

The integrity unit will not, however, make calls regarding the ongoing Russian scandal. Those cases erupted before the new structure was in place. An IAAF-appointed task force, headed by Rune Andersen, is overseeing Russia’s quest to come off suspension.

On Monday, Andersen said Russia still has far to go to be reinstated. Meanwhile, the IAAF has approved 19 Russian athletes to compete as neutrals at the world championships, which begin Friday.

Howman’s hope is that the new integrity unit prevents repeats, and not only in the area of anti-doping.

“My view is that there are so many things going on out there that challenge the integrity of sport,” he said. “Bidding problems. Gambling problems. Anti-doping problems. If you have an overall structure, you can monitor this so we can do this properly.”
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Just in the unlikely case that the world of athletics did not know what they will be missing once Usain Bolt walks away in less than two weeks, the Jamaican superstar’s final eve-of-race news conference rammed home the message on Tuesday.

These events have become part and parcel of every global championship and though Tuesday’s version in east London lacked the dancing girl razzmatazz of his Rio welcome last year, it scored heavily on nostalgia as every aspect of his stellar career was raked over anew.

As always, journalists and TV crews, around 400 of them, from every corner of the world packed every available space and strained their arms in desperation to get their question answered by the great man, who playfully castigated one half of the auditorium for not giving him an enthusiastic enough welcome.

Bolt is an old hand of course and rolled out all the familiar answers, but always with grace.

His proudest moment was winning the world junior title on home soil as a 15-year-old while his most satisfying performance was his 200 meters world record run in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where he poured all his concentration into getting the mark he had always wanted, having earlier danced over the line when winning the 100m.

He explained how his motivation to keep putting his body through such a punishing regime was renewed each year by resetting his goals – with one often created for him by a casually “disrespectful” remark from one of his opponents.

His target in London is clear — to sign off with a fourth 100m title and a fifth 4x100m relay gold — taking his world haul to 13 to add to his eight Olympic golds – and then head off to play football with his friends and have fun.

“I’m ready,” he said. “If I show up at a championships you know I’m fully confident and ready to go.

“I ran 9.95 in Monaco so it shows I’m going in the right direction. Going through the rounds always helps me and it’s then about who can keep their nerve. “It’s go time, so let’s go.”

The London Stadium, where he successfully defended his sprint double in the 2012 Olympics, will rise to acclaim him when he settles into his blocks for the last time on Saturday night.

Then, other than the relay a week later, he will be gone, leaving the sport without the man who has been its focal point for a decade.

Tuesday’s event included big screen “farewell and thanks” messages from the likes of actors Samuel L. Jackson and Idris Elba, former France footballer Thierry Henry, model Cara Delevingne and India cricket captain Virat Kohli, underlining his status as probably the world’s most famous and arguably most admired sportsman.

Bolt, who turns 31 later this month, looked moved by the images, saying: “It’s just brilliant that people in other disciplines respect what you do as they know the work you have to do.”

British TV had screened his “I am Bolt” film on Monday night, which opened a window on the rarely seen battles he has had to go through to overcome so many injuries and was a testament to his willingness to work himself back into shape year after year.

That is one thing he will not miss, and although he thrives on the pressure of the big race, he says he is looking forward to watching the next one from the sidelines. “Oh yeah, sitting down, talking about it, no pressure,” he said. “The next championship should be fun.

“It’s going to be hard, as track and field has been everything for me since I was 10 and it’s been a rush — but we’ll see where life takes me.”

He intends to stay close to athletics and is eyeing some sort of roving ambassadorial role, inspiring the world’s youth to get involved in a sport he says is on the up after reaching “rock bottom” with the Russian doping crisis of two years ago.

While fans and the sport’s administrators will miss Bolt enormously, those lamenting his departure most of all will probably be his chief sponsor Puma, the German sportswear manufacturer which has shod him and ridden his glory for a decade while the rest of the sport has largely been dominated by rivals Adidas and Nike.

Bolt’s parents were on hand on Tuesday to present him with his final pair of spikes — a combination of gold to mark his career highs and the purple of his school, William Knibb Memorial, where it all started after his cricket coach suggested he try out for the track team.

“I didn’t know I would be a world record holder growing up, I had no idea,” he said. “So all I’ll say now is, if you work hard, that anything is possible.”
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The Pennsylvania childhood home of author John Updike is nearing its transformation into a museum and literary center.

The future of the Shillington home had been uncertain until The John Updike Society purchased it in 2012. Since then, the society has worked to re-create the 1930’s vibe of the late Pulitzer Prize winner’s home, based on old photographs and Updike’s writings.

Updike spent the first 13 years of his life in the Shillington house, about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northwest of Philadelphia. The Reading Eagle reports Updike’s daughter is donating furniture from his childhood to the museum.

The Updike Society says restoration should be finished by the end of summer.

Updike won Pulitzers for the novels Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. He died in 2009 at age 76.
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The war in Syria destroyed more than its cities. It destroyed its soul, says American drummer and photographer Jason Hamacher, who has recorded a large collection of Syrian religious music in an effort to preserve it. Arman Tarjimanyan reports.
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Saudi Arabia has announced plans to build a “semi-autonomous” visa-free travel destination along its northwestern Red Sea coast.

The Red Sea area will include diving attractions and a nature reserve – and there are suggestions that the kingdom’s strict rules on women’s veils and gender segregation could be waived in the tourist haven.

The resort area will be developed with seed capital from the country’s Public Investment Fund.

The fund said Monday the project will be built along 125 miles (200 kilometers) of coastline and is tailored toward global luxury travelers and those seeking wellness travel, a genre of tourism associated with personal well-being and health.

The Saudi Commission for Tourism did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for more details on the rules.
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Old inns along the Revolutionary War trails boast of George Washington sleeping there. But coin experts say they have found the first silver piece minted by the United States — one likely held by the most en vogue of Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton.

David McCarthy figured the silver coin had to be one-of-a-kind after spotting it in the auction catalog.

Its front features the all-seeing eye of God, surrounded by rays of light. The rays shoot out toward 13 stars — one for each of the colonies that had rebelled against Great Britain. A similar coin bore two words in Latin above the starburst: “Nova Constellatio,” or “new constellation” to describe the infant United States. But this silver piece bore no inscription at all. It was the first clue that the coin was something singular, said McCarthy, a senior researcher for the coin and collectibles firm Kagin’s.

He had a hunch it was the first coin ever minted by the U.S. government in 1783 — the prototype for a plan discussed by both Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that arguably shaped the course of the nation. McCarthy staked his company’s money to buy the coin for $1.18 million at the 2013 auction.

On display in Denver

After nearly four years of late nights sifting through the papers of the Founding Fathers and studying the beading on the coin’s edges, he is now making an exhaustive case that this silver piece is indeed the first American coin, the precursor of what ultimately would circulate a decade later as the U.S dollar.

The coin is on display this week at the World’s Fair of Money in Denver.

“You’ve used the progeny of this one coin in every transaction you’ve done in your life, whether it’s a bitcoin, a dollar or a euro,” McCarthy said.”

McCarthy published the details of his findings in the August issue of a coin dealer magazine, The Numismatist, as well as in a post on Medium. He vetted and refined his findings over the years with other top experts such as John Dannreuther, a rare coin dealer who found identifying marks on another coin that indicates that it had to have been struck days or even weeks later from the same steel dies.

“I’m 99.9999 percent certain this is the first U.S. coin,” Dannreuther said.

It was well-known among collectors that a first coin existed. Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who financed the American Revolution, recorded its existence in his diary on April 2, 1783.

Hamilton, Jefferson agreed

As first Superintendent of Finance of the United States, Morris wrote he received a delivery of “a Piece of Silver Coin being the first that has been struck as an American Coin.” Hamilton visited Morris a week later and the two corresponded on the “subject of the Coin.” The continental Congress was then presented with a fuller set of coins on April 22, which was then forwarded to Jefferson for his thoughts.

Both Hamilton and Jefferson — now popularly known as rivals from the musical “Hamilton” — embraced the idea that the U.S. currency should be in units of 10.

The coin purchased by McCarthy had a back with a wreath identifying it as a “500” quint, essentially the forerunner of the half-dollar. It had initially been found in 1860, about 15 years after the similar coin with the “new constellation” inscription. Because the new constellation coin was found earlier, experts labeled McCarthy’s coin as “Type 2.” Over the years, that label was mistakenly believed to refer to the coin being struck after the one with the inscription.

“You have this powerful word ‘2’ that implies something and it hijacked everyone’s ability to see what was right in front of them,” said McCarthy, 44.

Eureka moment

The day of the 2013 auction in Schaumburg, Illinois, McCarthy sat in his hotel room with his files and air conditioning cranked on high. He methodically convinced his boss, Donald Kagin, that the coin up for auction was the nation’s first. It was a nuanced case since other dealers claimed it was a forgery. But the initial explanation was that mints tended to add inscriptions to the steel dies used to make coins after having engraved the images.

So McCarthy bid on the silver coin — and then began the research needed to make his case ironclad. He searched through the National Archives for records, only to learn that the microfilm of original documents didn’t correspond to the actual files.

His eureka moment came in a New York hotel room while reviewing the original receipts for the steel dies used to make the coins. There had been a total of 10 dies made by a blacksmith, but the receipts showed that 12 dies had been engraved by two different artisans. This suggested that two of the dies had been recycled and refined after the first coin had been struck. He compared the beadings on the edges of the different coins, as well as a dent in the eye at the center of the inscripted “500” coin and its plain cousin. The evidence all pointed to him having uncovered the nation’s first coin.

‘Really, really good’ research

Jeff Garrett, president of the American Numismatic Association, called the research “really, really good.”

In terms of the coin’s possible value, Garrett said the closest comparison was a 1794 silver dollar that sold for more than $10 million four years ago. But the allure of coins isn’t just their rarity or metal content but the history that comes embedded to them as they pass through the ages.

“People always ask, how could a coin be worth a $1 million or $5 million?” Garrett said. “I always say it’s because of the stories.”
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Angelina Jolie responded to growing backlash over the casting process for her latest film, saying she was “upset” that an improvised scene during auditions had been misconstrued as taking real money away from impoverished children.

In a Vanity Fair interview published last week about her film “First They Killed My Father,” Jolie described a game played by the casting directors with the young Cambodian children auditioning for the lead role of Loung Ung.

Jolie, a special envoy for the United Nations refugee agency, told Vanity Fair she looked for her lead star in orphanages, circuses and slum schools.

Jolie defends casting process

In the casting, a child was placed in front of money on a table, asked to think of what they needed it for and to snatch it away. Jolie would then pretend to catch them, and the child would have to lie about why they stole the money.

“I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario,” Jolie, who directed the film, said in a statement on Sunday.

“The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened.”

Users on social media slammed Jolie’s casting game as cruel and exploiting impoverished children. Vanity Fair reporter Evgenia Peretz called the casting game “disturbing in its realism” in the profile, while Kayla Cobb at pop culture website Decider.com compared the game to a psychological thriller.

“Everyone should know better than to literally dangle money in front of impoverished children … no movie is worth psychologically traumatizing multiple children,” Cobb wrote.

Movie set during Khmer Rouge regime

“First They Killed My Father” is about the 1970s Khmer Rouge regime under which more than 1 million people died. It is due to be released globally and on Netflix in September.

Jolie said the young girl who won the part, Srey Moch, was chosen after “she became overwhelmed with emotion” when forced to give the money back, saying she needed the money to pay for her grandfather’s funeral.

“The children were not tricked or entrapped, as some have suggested,” Rithy Panh, a Cambodian producer on the film, said in a statement. “They understood very well that this was acting, and make believe.”

 
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Sam Shepard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, Oscar-nominated actor and celebrated author whose plays chronicled the explosive fault lines of family and masculinity in the American West, has died. He was 73.

Family spokesman Chris Boneau said Monday that Shepard died Thursday at his home in Kentucky from complications related to Lou Gehrig’s disease, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The taciturn Shepard, who grew up on a California ranch, was a man of few words who nevertheless produced 44 plays and numerous books, memoirs and short stories. He was one of the most influential playwrights of his generation: a plain-spoken poet of the modern frontier, both lyrical and rugged.

In his 1971 one-act “Cowboy Mouth, which he wrote with his then-girlfriend, musician and poet Patti Smith, one character says, “People want a street angel. They want a saint but with a cowboy mouth” — a role the tall and handsome Shepard fulfilled for many.

“I was writing basically for actors,” Shepard told The Associated Press in a 2011 interview. “And actors immediately seemed to have a handle on it, on the rhythm of it, the sound of it, the characters. I started to understand there was this possibility of conversation between actors and that’s how it all started.”

Shepard’s Western drawl and laconic presence made him a reluctant movie star, too. He appeared in dozens of films — many of them Westerns — including Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven,” “Steel Magnolias,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and 2012’s Mud.” He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance as pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s “The Right Stuff.” Among his most recent roles was the Florida Keys patriarch of the Netflix series “Bloodline.”

But Shepard was best remembered for his influential plays and his prominent role in the Off-Off-Broadway movement. His 1979 play “Buried Child” won the Pulitzer for drama. Two other plays — “True West,” about two warring brothers, and “Fool for Love,” about a man who fears he’s turning into his father — were nominated for the Pulitzers as well. All are frequently revived.

“I always felt like playwriting was the thread through all of it,” Shepard said in 2011. “Theater really when you think about it contains everything. It can contain film. Film can’t contain theater. Music. Dance. Painting. Acting. It’s the whole deal. And it’s the most ancient. It goes back to the Druids. It was way pre-Christ. It’s the form that I feel most at home in, because of that, because of its ability to usurp everything.”

Samuel Shepard Rogers VII was born in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, in 1943. He grew up on an avocado ranch in Duarte, California. His father was an alcoholic schoolteacher and former Army pilot. Shepard would later write frequently of the damage done by drunks. He had his own struggles, too; long stretches of sobriety were interrupted by drunk driving arrests, in 2009 and 2015.

Shepard arrived in New York in 1963 with no connections, little money and vague aspirations to act, write or make music.

“I just dropped in out of nowhere,” he told the New Yorker in 2010. But Shepard quickly became part of the off-off-Broadway movement at downtown hangouts like Caffe Cino and La MaMa. “As far as I’m concerned, Broadway just does not exist,” Shepard told Playboy in 1970 — though many of his later plays would end up there.

His early plays — fiery, surreal verbal assaults — pushed American theater in an energized, frenzied direction that matched the times. A drummer himself, Shepard found his own rock ‘n roll rhythm. Seeking spontaneity, he initially refused to rewrite his drafts, a strategy he later dismissed as “just plain stupid.”

As Shepard grew as a playwright, he returned again and again to meditations on violence, masculinity and family. His collection “Seven Plays,” which includes many of his best plays, including “Buried Child” and “The Tooth of Crime,” was dedicated to his father.

“There’s some hidden, deeply rooted thing in the Anglo male American that has to do with inferiority, that has to do with not being a man, and always, continually having to act out some idea of manhood that invariably is violent,” he told The New York Times in 1984. “This sense of failure runs very deep — maybe it has to do with the frontier being systematically taken away, with the guilt of having gotten this country by wiping out a native race of people, with the whole Protestant work ethic. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s the source of a lot of intrigue for me.”

Shepard was married from 1969 to 1984 to actress O-Lan Jones, with whom he had son Jesse Mojo Shepard.

His connection to music was constant. He joined Bob Dylan on the 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975, and co-wrote the song “Brownsville Girl” with him. Shepard and Patti Smith were one-time lovers but lifetime friends.

“We’re just the same,” Smith once said. “When Sam and I are together, it’s like no particular time.”

Shepard’s movie career began in the late ’70s. While making the 1982 Frances Farmer biopic “Frances,” he met Jessica Lange and the two remained together for nearly 30 years. They had two children, Hannah Jane and Samuel Walker. They separated in 2009. Lange once said of Shepard: “No man I’ve ever met compares to Sam in terms of maleness.”

Shepard worked occasionally in movies (among other things, he wrote Wim Wenders’ 1984 Texas brothers drama “Paris, Texas”) but took acting gigs more frequently as he grew older. One movie, he said, could pay for 16 plays.

Besides his plays, Shepard wrote short stories and a full-length work of fiction, “The One Inside,” which came out earlier this year. “The One Inside” is a highly personal narrative about a man looking back on his life and taking in what has been lost, including control over his own body as the symptoms of ALS advance.

“Something in the body refuses to get up. Something in the lower back. He stares at the walls,” Shepard writes. “The appendages don’t seem connected to the motor — whatever that is — driving this thing. They won’t take direction _ won’t be dictated to — the arms, legs, feet, hands. Nothing moves. Nothing even wants to.”

Shepard’s longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf, LuAnn Walther, said Shepard’s language was “quite poetic, and very intimate, but also very direct and plainspoken.” She said that when people asked her what Shepard was really like, she would respond, “Just read the fiction.”

In Shepard’s 1982 book “Motel Chronicles,” he said that he felt like he never had a home. That feeling, he later, acknowledged, always remained.

“I basically live out of my truck,” Shepard said in 2011. “I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say. But it’s true.”
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Los Angeles reached an agreement Monday with international Olympic leaders that will open the way for the city to host the 2028 Summer Games, while ceding the 2024 Games to rival Paris, officials announced Monday.

The arrangement would make LA a three-time Olympic city, after hosting the 1932 and 1984 Games.

With the agreement, the city is taking “a major step toward bringing the Games back to our city for the first time in a generation,” Mayor Eric Garcetti said in a statement.

He called it a “historic day for Los Angeles, for the United States” and the Olympic movement.

The agreement follows a vote earlier this month by the International Olympic Committee to seek a deal to award the 2024 and 2028 Games.

aris is the only city left to host the 2024 Games.

The Los Angeles City Council and U.S. Olympic Committee board of directors will consider the agreement for approval in August. If approved, the IOC, LA and Paris may enter a three-part agreement, clearing the way for the IOC to simultaneously award the 2024 Games to Paris, and the 2028 Games to LA. The IOC vote is scheduled for September, in Lima, Peru.

In embracing what amounted to the second-place prize and an 11-year wait, LA will receive a financial sweetener.

Under the terms of the deal, the IOC will advance funds to the Los Angeles organizing committee to recognize the extended planning period and to increase youth sports programs leading up to the Games. The IOC contribution could exceed $2 billion, according to LA officials. That figure takes into account the estimated value of existing sponsor agreements that would be renewed, as well as potential new marketing deals.

LA and Paris were the last two bids remaining after a tumultuous process that exposed the unwillingness of cities to bear the financial burden of hosting an event that has become synonymous with cost overruns.

LA was not even the first American entrant in the contest. Boston withdrew two years ago as public support for its bid collapsed over concerns about use of taxpayer cash. The U.S. bid switched from the east to the West Coast as LA entered the race.

But the same apprehensions that spooked politicians and the local population in Boston soon became evident in Europe where three cities pulled out.

Uncomfortably for IOC President Thomas Bach, whose much-vaunted Agenda 2020 reforms were designed to make hosting more streamlined and less costly after the lavish 2014 Sochi Games, the first withdrawal came from his homeland of Germany.

The lack of political unity for a bid in Hamburg was mirrored in Rome and Budapest as support for bids waned among local authorities and the population. It was clear they did not want to be saddled with skyrocketing bills for hosting the Olympics without reaping many of the economic benefits anticipated.

Just like in the depleted field for the 2022 Winter Games which saw Beijing defeat Almaty, the IOC was left with only two candidates again.

With two powerful cities left vying for 2024, Bach realized France or the U.S. could be deterred from going through another contest for 2028 if they lost. Bach floated the idea in December of making revisions to the bidding process to prevent it producing “too many losers,” building support that led to LA and Paris being able to figure out themselves how to share the 2024 and 2028 Games.

The dual award of the games relieves the IOC of having to test the global interest in hosting the Summer Olympics for several years until the 2032 Games are up for grabs.

Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson called the agreement a “win-win-win scenario.”

The opportunity to host the Games “is a golden occasion further strengthening Los Angeles — not just through bricks and mortar, but through new opportunities for our communities to watch, play and benefit from sport,” Wesson said.
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Online searches about suicide and suicide methods spiked in the weeks following the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, a show that dramatizes the suicide of a teenage girl, according to a U.S. study released Monday.

Google searches about suicide were 19 percent higher than average in the 19 days following the show’s release on March 31, translating into 900,000 to 1,500,000 more searches, researchers reported in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine. 

The study did not examine whether the actual number of suicides increased following the series’ release, but researchers said the internet search trend is troubling.

Google search volumes for things like “how to commit suicide,” “commit suicide” and “how to kill yourself” all decisively spiked during the 19-day window after the show’s release. A 2009 study suggested “suicide search trends are correlated with actual suicides,” according to a letter accompanying the study in JAMA.

Many mental health experts concluded that Netflix acted unethically by releasing the series. In it, a high school girl leaves behind 13 cassette tapes that explain the decision to take her own life. The series, which some argue glamorizes suicide, has been renewed for a second season.

The San Diego State University researcher who led the study, John Ayers, called on Netflix to reconsider the show and the effects it is having on its teenage-skewing audience.

“Psychiatrists have expressed grave concerns because the show ignores the World Health Organization’s validated media guidelines for preventing suicide,” Ayers told VOA in an email. “Tragically, it is unsurprising then that we find the show has increased suicidal thoughts.

“The show’s makers must swiftly change their course of action, including removing the show and postponing a second season. If not, subscribers should consider canceling their subscriptions so not to support programming that can cause premature death. I am no longer a subscriber.”

Currently, the most violent episodes are prefaced with warnings. Netflix has also created a website equipped with suicide hotlines for each of the countries in which it can be streamed. In a statement, Netflix defended 13 Reasons Why, saying that the show has spurred an important conversation.

“We always believed this show would increase discussions around this tough subject matter,” Netflix said. “This is an interesting quasi-experimental study that confirms this. We are looking forward to more research and taking everything we learn to heart as we prepare for season two.”

The study analyzed Google trends between March 31, 2017, and April 18. They halted their research on that date because former National Football League player Aaron Hernandez committed suicide on April 19, a development that might have skewed the data.

Researchers used the period between January and March 2017 as a control to determine the expected volume of suicide-related Google search queries.
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