Month: May 2022

According to a lawsuit filed by eight East L.A. deputies and the A.C.L.U., the Banditos gang “controls the East Los Angeles station like inmates running a prison yard.” Leaders, known as “shot-callers,” determined deputies’ hours, promotions, even days off. On patrol, they operated in the gray areas of law enforcement. Gonzalez said that they perpetuated “the code of silence, the culture of the ghetto gunslinger.” She added, “What makes East L.A. so unique is it’s embedded within the Hispanic machismo culture and the Hispanic street gangs.”

While Tubbs manned a police scanner in their getaway van, the rest of the team trudged through the night toward the plant, dressed in dark clothing and communicating with two-way radios. According to a court filing by the prosecution, Dibee drilled holes in the facility’s walls, filled the hollows with a mixture of glycerin soap, diesel and gasoline — the group called this “vegan Jell-O” — and set timed igniters. After the plant was in flames, and before going their separate ways, everyone threw their clothes in a hole and doused them in acid.

Watching Kai Lenny surf at Pe‘ahi, a big-wave spot off the north coast of Maui, is slightly heart-stopping. You may have seen it on video, but that doesn’t prepare you for the velocity, the impossible confidence, of a hard braking turn at the top of an enormous wave, often right in the luminous turquoise window of a lip about to pitch—for that abrupt turn back toward the bottom, as if he wanted the weightless drop of the downcarve more than he wanted to make it out in one piece. When I first saw it, from the back of a Jet Ski, in February, I yelped involuntarily. These things aren’t done, or at least they weren’t.

Mr. Kwon dismissed concerns with a taunt: “I don’t debate the poor.”

This was part of a nationwide trend. In 2020, firearm sales went up an estimated sixty-five per cent. Demand was so intense that Farzad had trouble keeping guns stocked in his store. Many people who came in had never purchased a gun before. “I had a doctor in here, he had never held a firearm in his hand, ever,” Farzad said. “I said, ‘Why do you want a gun?’ He said, ‘Well, my co-workers told me that I need a gun—we’re going to have a civil war.’ ” Farzad sold the doctor a shotgun. He taught him how to hold it.

when I discovered crypto for the first time, it was, like, ‘Oh, that guy lost, like, five hundred thousand on Tuesday,’ ” he said. “Crypto scams are like discovering fentanyl when you’ve been used to Oxy. It’s a hundred times more powerful, and way worse. And there were just not that many people talking about it.

Originalists argue that it’s not their fault that the drafters may have been slaveholders, or uniformly male, or white, or without any knowledge of contemporary technology or a more inclusive notion of humanity. Them’s the breaks; mere accidents of history

The works, collectively titled Mother of Creation, are a matryoshka doll of nightmares, a sort of telescoping abyss of bad things contained in worse things, opening to reveal even worse things. Start with NFTs (already, fuck this) — multiply by Beeple (please quit while you’re ahead, or already slightly behind) — add Madonna (if you are not following Madonna on TikTok, you have no idea how weird it’s gotten, but be warned you cannot actually unsee the horrors contained therein) — and then, then have a nest of centipedes crawl out of her vagina. Also the centipedes are little robots. Also, Madonna is reading the poetry of Rumi in voice-over.

The canvases quickly piled up. When the piles overwhelmed his space, he moved paintings into the director’s studio—or he moved, to work in someone else’s space. In 2015, he noted, “There must be over a thousand works of mine in both Hong Kong and Zhongshan combined.” He knew that painting had become a compulsion. “Is there something wrong with working as much as I am?” he asked Shear. “Sometimes, I feel guilty. But I can’t stop.”

The survey partitioned respondents into seven “tribes” defined by shared beliefs and behavior. The group farthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” contained only eight per cent of the population, and the group furthest to the right, “devoted conservatives,” contained only six per cent. Combined, however, these two political extremes were much more likely to share political content on social media than the less partisan groups. As Haidt emphasizes, these two groups are also the whitest and richest of those studied, meaning that Twitter’s increasingly heated wrangling is not just far from a considered democratic debate but has truly become a spectacle driven by a narrow and unrepresentative group of élites.

“I’ve always thought that, if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in,” Falwell said. The students cheered. Wahl felt sick. The pundits he’d grown up listening to said things like this, but, by now, something had shifted in him. “That’s when I realized—you’re not talking about Muslims like Christians talk about Muslims,” Wahl said. “You don’t love them. You’re talking about hurting them.” He thought of two Muslim friends he’d made that summer and wondered whether they assumed he felt the same way.

When the producers of the HBO series “Barry” asked Henry Winkler to audition for the role of Gene Cousineau, they assured him that he was on a short list. Winkler said he was willing, as long as the list didn’t include Dustin Hoffman. “Because he’s a movie star. He’d get it. If Dustin was on the list, I wasn’t going in. They said no. I said OK.”

After a month had gone by, Rachelle paid Julia back herself, but this didn’t assuage Julia’s suspicions. Who was this guy, supposedly rich but obviously strapped for cash, who was borrowing large sums of money and trying to get her mother to invest in Connecticut real estate? “Nelson Roth,” Julia said to me, when I was passing through town that fall, “is the fakest fucking name I’ve ever heard.”