Suffering is an essential part of the story that we Argentines tell about ourselves.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-argentinas-world-cup-victory
My family is Argentinean. We screamed so hard in our Harlem apartment that later we found our tortoise upside down in her cage
The protests of recent weeks carry an echo, and a warning, from the Maoist era.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/how-dissent-grows-in-china
The woman in the picture is small and wears an oversized hood, and “she is shielding her face with the sign, kind of hiding behind the sign,” WhitePaper noted. Her image contrasts sharply with those in so many Chinese textbooks depicting Communist martyrs fearlessly fighting for the survival of the Party. “She certainly comes across as a bit timid,” he said. She has the posture of someone who wasn’t trying to be a hero, “yet she holds tightly the sign and the flowers.”
The cryptic game’s new interface welcomes newcomers but preserves the chaos.
via Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/12/dwarf-fortresss-graphical-upgrade-provides-a-new-way-into-a-wildly-wonky-game/
My first run ended in starvation and rock-bottom morale (“hissy fits” in common wiki language) because farming, butchering, and other procurements aren’t covered in the tutorial. I shut down my second run early after picking a sandy area with an aquifer as a starting zone, thinking it would make glasswork and irrigation easier and being quickly disappointed with this strategy. I was proud on my third run to have started brewing and dispensing drinks (essential to dwarves’ contentment), but I dug too close to a nearby river, and I abandoned that soggy fort as yet another lesson learned.
A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/cory-doctorow-wants-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do
You just give, like, the H.R. department a document called resume.doc. And when they print it the printer’s firmware is updated silently and undetectably: it scans all future documents for Social Security numbers, and credit-card numbers, and sends them to him. It opens a reverse shell to his computer, through the corporate firewall, and then it scans all the computers on your lan for known vulnerabilities and takes them over. It was just a little proof of concept; he never released it.
Braydon Bringhurst is the rare athlete who can blend explosive power with precision and control. But he’d need a lot more than that to ride his bike up this insanely technical downhill trail.
via Bicycling: https://www.bicycling.com/rides/a41821655/braydon-bringhurst-climbs-whole-enchilada-trail/
He had also crafted a signature style of riding he called “upduro.” He floated up trails most riders would only consider riding down. He did it without hopping, in one fluid motion, like water flowing uphill.
In gravel racing—the sport’s hottest category—the killing has exposed a lot of dirt.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/14/a-murder-roils-the-cycling-world
Then a rider waiting for the next race walked up, confirmed that I was a reporter, and angrily told me to leave. When I asked him who he was, he said, “My name is Fuck You, Bro.”
For decades, China has coveted its island neighbor. Is Xi Jinping ready to seize it?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/a-dangerous-game-over-taiwan
Wu, the foreign minister, told me that Tsai was trying to strike a balance between deterring the People’s Republic and exhausting the Taiwanese people by warning them too often. To some Taiwanese, though, her handling of the missile tests amounted to wishful thinking. “When something like this happens and there’s no response, the government looks like it doesn’t know what it’s doing,” Alexander Chieh-cheng Huang, a former Taiwanese foreign-service officer in the U.S., told me. “The attitude is ‘Don’t look up.’ ”
With its Chicana punk rockers and panels of untranslated Spanish, “Rockets” was unlike anything else — and, it turns out, just what the world of comics was craving.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/books/love-and-rockets-hernandez-bros.html
In 1981, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez were living in Oxnard, Calif., working as janitors to fund the trips they took down the 101 to see punk bands like Black Flag in Los Angeles, and their work on a comic book series they called “Love and Rockets.”
Many authors write about their lives. Over nearly fifty years, the Nobel laureate has discovered new ways to do it.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/annie-ernaux-turns-memory-into-art
The purpose of Ernaux’s writing, she believes, is not merely to record things that have happened but to “make things exist.” This is strong, but it is hardly the strongest thing she has to say about her work. “I am a medium,” she told me. “I feel that I’m someone who can transmit things.”
The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-vladimir-putin-would-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine
Even some of my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their televisions all day,” Bondarev, who had been stationed in Geneva, wrote. “It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves
Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden Administration has provided valuable intelligence and increasingly powerful weaponry—a risky choice that has paid off in the battle against Putin.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/inside-the-us-effort-to-arm-ukraine
Reznikov is certain that such deliveries are inevitable. “When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. himars, no. harm, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and atacms and F-16s.”
Thousands of Ukrainian children have been transferred to Russia. “I didn’t want to go,” one girl told The New York Times from a foster home near Moscow.
“Our family is like a small Russia,” Ms. Druzhinina said in an interview. “Russia took in four territories, and the Druzhinin family took in four children.”
High-level defections! Tiger Woods and Jared Kushner! Lawsuits and blacklists! Is the new LIV league a way to reward players, or the vanity project of a despot, or something else?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/will-the-saudis-and-donald-trump-save-golf-or-wreck-it
To appeal to the Dubai-inclined, M.B.S. has lifted a ban on cinemas, courted music festivals, and reined in the religious police. A ski resort is in the works. Schenker and others predict that M.B.S. will legalize drinking in some form when he assumes the throne. The centerpiece of his plans is Neom, which he has described, privately, as Dubai but better. According to the Wall Street Journal, he envisioned sand that glows in the dark and an artificial moon; canals for swim-commuting have been mentioned. The project, which is expected to consume half a trillion dollars, is a money pit; according to Bloomberg, Neom’s C.E.O. displays a graphic that former employees called the “wall of shame,” showing department heads who failed to spend enough. But other developments, elsewhere on the Red Sea and around Riyadh, are farther along. Included in the plans is an amenity that the Saudis believe will draw wealthy Westerners: golf.
For an American, it can be easy to forget how much ideology is packed into the genre — until you watch a film from elsewhere, and see their cartoonish heroes and villains.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/magazine/russian-action-movies.html
Another is that “Granit” was just one artifact in a whole trove of content — memoirs, comic books, travel videos — that is variously referred to as the Wagner subculture, the Wagnerverse or the Wagner Extended Universe. Not unlike old American mercenary magazines, all of it puts a righteous and alluring face on going off to kill and die in unofficial operations aligned with Kremlin interests
After repelling Russia’s assault earlier this year, the city awakens to missile strikes.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/kyivs-peace-is-destroyed
the woman, whose name was Oleksandra, was laughing. “She said that Halloween is coming up and she’s already putting on her scary costume,” the medic said. Then he explained that pieces of shrapnel were still lodged in her head; they would have to be removed at the hospital.
For an unconventional former Marine colonel, Ukraine represents the morally just war that eluded him his entire career. But how much can he and his military start-up help?
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/world/europe/ukraine-war-americans.html
Though Mr. Milburn is not involved in the actual fighting, he is constantly risking his life. On a recent day in Soledar, he and his colleagues were nearly hit by Russian rockets. Minutes after that, as they were changing a flat tire that had been shredded by shrapnel, a fighter jet swooped down on them, shooting more rockets and sending them scurrying into the bushes.
Hundreds of decapitated goat carcasses have turned up in the river that runs through metro Atlanta. Are they evidence of animal sacrifice? Drug smuggling? Both?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-mystery-of-the-headless-goats-in-the-chattahoochee
Ulseth had boated it a hundred times before. “But, this time,” he told me recently, “I saw something white off on the side near the bridge.” He pulled the boat over to the bank. “There were eight or nine baby decapitated goats just floating in the water. The ladies flipped their shit.”
via Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-storykeeper-a-conversation-with-svetlana-alexievich/
I think that war is a measure of human horror. It is the biggest kind of horror that humanity can experience. For example, what’s happening in Ukraine today is an incredible force working upon us. In the first months when I started to write my book about Chornobyl, I realized that I was limited within this frame. People began to fear water, to fear sitting on the ground, to fear giving flowers as gifts. They feared everything, but primarily the earth. Death was all around. Death was no longer unfamiliar. Then I understood that all our previous knowledge about horror turned out to be weak, turned out to be from another life. We have already become caught in a transitional moment, a transition from one world to another, to the world of the future, this horrifying future where civilization and progress bring us war.
Ultima Online is celebrating its 25th anniversary! You know what that means, right? Story time!
via Medium: https://blog.cotten.io/that-time-we-burned-down-players-houses-in-ultima-online-7e556618c8f0
Create a straw dummy labeled “An Effigy of a Traitor” to place in the middle of the burning rubble.
Mentions in Twitter posts on the right have spiked during major political news events, and experts worry the overheated language will spread as the midterm elections draw near.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/us/politics/civil-war-social-media-trump.html
In August, a single tweet stating “I think civil war has just been declared” managed to reach over 17 million profiles despite coming from an account with under 14,000 followers, according to Cybara, an Israeli firm that monitors misinformation.