RSL v Colorado Rapids
Low Moon Lake
Sugar House
Month: July 2021
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Week Thirty
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Real Salt Lake forward Bobby Wood (7) celebrates a first half goal as Real Salt Lake hosts the Colorado Rapids, MLS Soccer at Rio Tinto Stadium in Sandy on Saturday, July 24, 2021.
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The Chowchilla bus kidnapping: What happened all those years ago? – Vox
The ballad of the Chowchilla bus kidnapping
In 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver disappeared from a small California town. Forty-five years later, we revisit the story.
via Vox: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22570738/chowchilla-school-bus-kidnapping
“I’ve been a fortunate guy,” he said from his home near Yosemite. “I was in the Merchant Marines with German submarines trying to get me. I was in the Navy for almost 10 years with the Japs and Soviets trying to get me. I’ve been shot at and they missed. I’ve been shot at and they hit. I’ve been cut with knives. A guy hit me across the back of the head with a two-by-four, and I had to have a neck operation.
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A Controversial Tool Calls Out Thousands of Hackable Websites | WIRED
A Controversial Tool Calls Out Thousands of Hackable Websites
PunkSpider is back, and crawling hundreds of millions of sites for vulnerabilities.
via WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/punkspider-web-site-vulnerabilities/
At the Defcon hacker conference next week, Alejandro Caceres and Jason Hopper plan to release—or, rather, to upgrade and re-release after a years-long hiatus—a tool called PunkSpider. Essentially a search engine that constantly crawls the entire web, PunkSpider automatically identifies hackable vulnerabilities in websites, and then allows anyone to search those results to find sites susceptible to everything from defacement to data leaks.
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Trump Is Gone, but the Media’s Misinformation Challenge Is Still Here – The New York Times
Trump Is Gone, but the Media’s Misinformation Challenge Is Still Here (Published 2021)
Should news outlets contextualize false claims made by powerful people? Or ignore them completely? There is no consensus in the industry, but its thinking continues to evolve.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/27/us/politics/trump-false-claims-media.html
In American life, truth is now contested. And while this has profoundly affected the country’s politics, and so much else, it has raised unique challenges for one group in particular: journalists.
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The Post-Dirtbag Left | The New Yorker
The Post-Dirtbag Left
For years, “Chapo Trap House” and other podcasts have paired anti-capitalist ideas with the rhetorical style of social media. Is a new form emerging?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/02/the-post-dirtbag-left
But, after Sanders’s loss, “Chapo” seemed to have nothing left to say. Instead of progressing through the five stages of grief, the co-hosts wallowed in denial—“It is still virtually tied,” Menaker said, after Biden’s decisive victory on Super Tuesday—before settling, apparently forever, in the second stage. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called this stage anger, but in “Chapo” ’s case it’s closer to nihilistic despair.
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In Nagorno-Karabakh, Land Mines, Bulldozers and Lingering Tensions – The New York Times
In Nagorno-Karabakh, Land Mines, Bulldozers and Lingering Tensions (Published 2021)
Despite the hurdles, territory seized by Azerbaijan from Armenia in last year’s war is being transformed with breathtaking speed.
In Baku, on the gleaming Caspian Sea waterfront, the government has built a “war trophies park” of burned Armenian tanks, captured artillery and Armenian soldiers’ helmets hanging on chains. Life-size figures of Armenian soldiers have huge noses, fearsome eyebrows and bad teeth.
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Week Twenty-Nine
Millcreek
His Eminence
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) His Eminence Archbishop Elpidophoros of America and Bishop Oscar A. Solis during a visit to the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, July 20, 2021. Deacon Lynn Johnson leads the tour.
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Week Twenty-Eight
I-70
Moab
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rim Village, a subdivision in Moab on Thursday, July 15, 2021. 
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Irrigation in Moab on Thursday, July 15, 2021.
Green River
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The Assassination of Haiti’s President
The Assassination of Haiti’s President
Jovenel Moïse’s family deserves justice for his horrific killing. So do all of the Haitian families who suffered during his rule.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-assassination-of-haitis-president
There are close to a hundred gangs active in Haiti. According to Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, they control more than half of the country. Turf wars, murders, rapes, and kidnappings have recently led to the displacement of more than eighteen thousand people. Seeking refuge, some sleep in public parks and squares while others crowd into churches and gymnasiums, even as coronavirus cases have remained on the rise. During Moïse’s time in office, gangs carried out thirteen massacres in poor opposition neighborhoods. The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the Haitian Observatory for Crimes Against Humanity studied three and defined them as crimes against humanity.
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On the Trail of a Mysterious, Pseudonymous Author
On the Trail of a Mysterious, Pseudonymous Author
Late last spring, a strange, beguiling novel began arriving, in installments, in the mail. Who had written it?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-the-trail-of-a-mysterious-pseudonymous-author
Inside the envelope was a small, stapled book—a pamphlet, really—titled “Foodie or The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi,” by a writer named Stokes Prickett. On the cover, there was a photograph of a burrito truck and a notice that read “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.”
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How a Mexican lagoon lost its colors
How a Mexican Lagoon Lost Its Colors
Bacalar is poised to become one of the country’s great tourist destinations—if its ecosystem can survive.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-a-mexican-lagoon-lost-its-colors
It’s hard to build a booming tourist economy atop an ecological attraction without destroying it. Some of the colonies of microbes in the lagoon are more than nine thousand years old, but they can survive only as long as the water is pure. Luisa Falcón, a microbial ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has studied oligotrophic microbes all over the world. Swimming in the lagoon, she told me, is like going back in time four billion years—“back to the Archean,” she said. “It’s amazing how primitive these sites are.”
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Opinion | Why Texas Democrats Can’t Stop Voting Restrictions – The New York Times
Opinion | Texas Should Be a Warning to Democrats Everywhere (Published 2021)
America should pay attention to what has gone awfully wrong in the Lone Star State.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opinion/texas-democrats-voting-rights.html
Pretty soon, Texans will openly carry loaded firearms into grocery stores, gas stations and even airports. Women will effectively be unable to get a legal abortion. And schoolchildren won’t learn, at least not legally, the unvarnished story about discrimination or racism. And a bunch of Texas legislators are hanging around Washington, D.C., trying to derail draconian restrictions on voting rights in their home state.
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Here’s a Look Inside Facebook’s Data Wars – The New York Times
Inside Facebook’s Data Wars (Published 2021)
Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users’ high engagement levels with right-wing media sources.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.html
“Facebook would love full transparency if there was a guarantee of positive stories and outcomes,” Mr. Boland said. “But when transparency creates uncomfortable moments, their reaction is often to shut down the transparency.”
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Can the Black Rifle Coffee Company Become the Starbucks of the Right? – The New York Times
Can the Black Rifle Coffee Company Become the Starbucks of the Right? (Published 2021)
The company doubled its sales last year by leaning into America’s culture war. It’s also trying to distance itself from some of its new customers.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/magazine/black-rifle-coffee-company.html
“The Black Rifle guys are not the evil that everybody makes them out to be,” says J.J. MacNab, the extremism researcher, “but they’ve closed their eyes to some of the evil that takes their humor seriously.” Still, Black Rifle professes to be eager to put some of its fiercest and trolliest culture-war fights behind it. “What I figured out the last couple of years is that being really political, in the sense of backing an individual politician or any individual party, is really [expletive] detrimental,” Hafer told me. “And it’s detrimental to the company. And it’s detrimental, ultimately, to my mission.”
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Fear and Misery in an Afghan City Where Taliban Stalk the Streets – The New York Times
Selling Fruit Where the Taliban Stalk the Streets (Published 2021)
For weeks, the northern city of Kunduz has suffered daily street battles. Times journalists were there to document a cat-and-mouse war for control.
The Afghan way of war in 2021 comes down to this: a watermelon vendor on a sweltering city street, a government Humvee at the front line just 30 feet away, and Taliban fighters lurking unseen on the other side of the road
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Who Owns Mike Disfarmer’s Photographs? | The New Yorker
Who Owns Mike Disfarmer’s Photographs?
Strangers made his small-town portraits famous in the art world. Decades later, his heirs want control of the estate.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/who-owns-mike-disfarmers-photographs
Like many of Disfarmer’s relatives, Stewart had grown up poor, on a soybean-and-rice farm. As a teen-ager, he’d worn secondhand clothes and taped up old pairs of sneakers to save money for community college. “What really got to me was the thought of other people benefitting from our family, and the thought that they didn’t care,” he said. Disfarmer’s path to posthumous fame seemed to rely on a galling irony: art collectors had celebrated his portraits of modest Arkansans without sparing a thought for his modest Arkansan heirs.
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“Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian draws specific details from my life.
I’ve Always Suspected “Cat Person” Was Based on My Life. Now I Know It Was.
Since I first read Kristen Roupenian’s viral story, I’ve wondered: How did she know about me?
via Slate Magazine: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/cat-person-kristen-roupenian-viral-story-about-me.html
What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger. Meanwhile, I’m alone with my memories of what really happened—just like any death leaves you burdened with the responsibility of holding onto the parts of a person that only you knew.
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Fox News Hosts Smear Covid Vaccine, Despite Outbreaks Among Unvaccinated – The New York Times
Despite Outbreaks Among Unvaccinated, Fox News Hosts Smear Shots (Published 2021)
Months after Rupert Murdoch got a Covid-19 vaccine dose, one of his network’s stars, Tucker Carlson, called a Biden vaccination proposal “the greatest scandal in my lifetime.”
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/media/vaccines-fox-news-hosts.html
Opposition to vaccines was once relegated to the fringes of American politics, and the rhetoric on Fox News has coincided with efforts by right-wing extremists to bash vaccination efforts.
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The Scream | Mohammad Ali
The Scream | Mohammad Ali
It was clear that Muslim journalists could no longer be objective, impartial observers. We were moving targets in Modi’s India.
via The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-scream-ali
The emotions I had repressed that day, and for long after, resurface three years later, in therapy. I am overwhelmed by raging helplessness and fear. I also feel shame. In choosing journalism, in abiding by its conventions of self-effacement and objectivity, I feel I have somehow betrayed my identity, my community. The space of therapy allows me, for the first time, to grieve: for myself and my people, for the hatred we now face every day in India. A sense of profound loss suffuses my senses, my heart is heavy. That night, I stay up crying. When sleep comes, it comes with nightmares. I see myself accosted, thrashed by a Hindu mob. The nightmare doesn’t end with the night. Days since then have been engulfed in a miasma of fear and grief.
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Week Twenty-Seven
Sulphur Creek
Calf Creek
Walmart Field Guide
Josue
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) BYU swimmer Josue Dominguez will be the only male swimming for the Dominican Republic at the Olympics in Tokyo. Dominguez was photographed at BYU in Provo on Thursday, July 8, 2021.