Category: Dark

Might we then consider ourselves a culture being actively poisoned, a poisoning to which we are enthusiastically consenting?

When the pre-program started, I was confined to the metal barricades of the press pen, so I talked to a man standing next to it. “I hate Democrats,” he told me. “They’re demons.” He went on, “I can’t say for sure Trump is a Christian. I don’t really care,” he said. “I’ve done some really bad things—violent things, armed robbery, thirty-year sentence, escaped, jumped parole, out on parole violation for fifteen years. I wasn’t doing anything except trying to be free.” He, like many rallygoers I’ve met since the summer, said Trump was not safe, because he had threatened to “drain the swamp” of “the F.B.I., the C.I.A.—really evil people.”

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal.

He paused to glance down at a page. (Apparently, Hulk Hogan speaks from paper notes.)

the biggest players, Russia and Iran, are working even harder at election influence than they did in 2016 or 2020. Yet the government’s warnings about foreign schemes are frequently undercut by the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to weaponize such intelligence

A central roadblock, the psychologist Keith Payne writes, is that people employ “flexible reasoning.” By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization. Once we’re in the maze, it can seem as though these people don’t have stable beliefs, or don’t believe things in the usual way

Brandy had often checked Englyn’s phone, looking for inappropriate photos or bad language; it never occurred to her to check the videos Instagram was recommending. After Englyn died, Toney and Brandy found a hidden note on her phone: “I show ppl what they want to see but behind the social media life nobody knows the real me and how much I struggle to make sure everyone’s good even though I’m not.”

She wanted to press charges, but his manager told her it would ruin his career. So she backed off. Yet for a time, she still loved him and wanted to be with him, and stayed in his orbit for many more years. Recounting the incident three decades later, she is still furious, still processing the stress of being involved with him.

“How many concussions? Daily. I was getting them daily,” said Sisemore, still stout at 73. “Now I’m starting to stumble a lot. I get lost. I can’t drive by myself anywhere. I used to love driving. Now I can’t go to the store and back without getting lost.”

The inside story of how Bob Iger undermined and outmaneuvered Bob Chapek, his chosen successor, and returned to power at Disney.

I spent my thirties writing a novel and paying the bills as low-paid part-time faculty at three different colleges. I could’ve studied law or learned to code. Instead, I manufactured sentences. Looking back, it baffles me that I had the wherewithal to commit to a project with no guaranteed financial value, as if I was under an enchantment. Working on that novel was like visiting a little town every day for four years, a place so dear and sweet. Then I sold it.

The Internet, however, created the sense that there was always more to know—and this was “an acid, corrosive to authority.” Now “every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor.”