Category: Dark

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.”

Kennedy’s family members have been nearly unanimous in opposing his campaign. Last fall, four of his siblings released a statement calling his run “perilous for our country.”

But just a short time later the video had been taken down, edited and reuploaded. Comparing the two videos frame-by-frame, Bellingcat noticed that, in the newer version of the video, more structures seen in the background had been blurred out compared to the original. For instance, towards the start of the video first uploaded a green house with a red roof is visible for a brief second. However in the second video that was uploaded this house was entirely blurred out.

A group of older guys followed them. Because they were “tall and strong-looking,” one of Lord’s friends said, he thought they might be football players. Many of them were dressed as gangsters, in fedoras and suits with pocket squares. They taunted the younger kids as they left, singing “Na, na, na, na, hey, hey, hey, goodbye.” One witness described them as “skipping.”

How the hip-hop star’s beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy turned a beach house in Malibu, designed by the Japanese master Tadao Ando, into a ruin.

“We have people stealing all over the world.” A digital sleuth named Bryan Hance has spent the past four years obsessively uncovering a bicycle-theft pipeline of astonishing scale.

Does President Daniel Noboa’s campaign against drug gangs imperil the democracy he claims to defend?

My curiosity about this sudden ubiquity helps explain how I came to meet Nick, 33, a handsome white guy, comprehensively tattooed, dressed in a workwear jacket and nice jeans. Nick looks like somebody you’d meet in an expensive coffee shop. It’s a look that doesn’t suggest, to most eyes, somebody who at times injected himself daily with steroids. Somebody who used to deal them and even “cooked” them in his kitchen. Somebody who once injected himself, Pulp Fiction–style, straight in the chest.

A year after OceanGate’s sub imploded, thousands of leaked documents and interviews with ex-employees reveal how the company’s CEO cut corners, ignored warnings, and lied in his fatal quest to reach the Titanic.

As I write this, it still seems insane, unimaginable, that these are sentences about a once and possibly future American President. But they are real, if unfortunately so familiar by now that Trump often benefits from our failure to be shocked all over again. Just two days before Putin’s attack on his neighbor, Trump called him a strategic “genius.” On the campaign trail, Trump frequently speaks about his great relationships with the world’s current crop of autocrats and tyrants, praising Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un for their strength, while ranting about the weakness of the West