Category: Dark

The residents of Grand Marais have had a lot to discuss in recent years. A suspicious fire that destroyed the historic Lutsen Lodge. The suicide of their neighbor Mark Pavelich, a star on the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team that defeated the Soviet Union. Plans for the 40 acres near town owned by convicted sex offender Warren Jeff’s fundamentalist clan. All those events stirred plenty of talk.

But nothing has captivated local conversation quite like what happened between Larry Scully and Levi Axtell in March 2023. A shocking act of violence attracted international attention and split the town over questions of truth and justice. Grand Marais is still trying to piece itself back together.

The legalizations of vices can be followed by gleeful oversaturation, and that period of chaos and moral myopia may obscure what is good about letting people openly engage in something that was previously hidden

“A misdemeanor is a misdemeanor, a theft is a theft. You can’t pick and choose what you want to enforce.” The impounded evidence included an illegal fixed-blade knife, found in the right front pocket of a young man who had arrived on a Razor scooter. Later, at the operation’s debriefing, Probart told the squad, “Only one guy with a weapon this time.”

“Their main aim is to traumatize you,” says Anna, a young woman groomed and victimized by 764, one of the most notorious groups under the com umbrella. “They want to make you suffer. And for you to take your own life. They really are very sadistic people.”

But within the context of Isaacson’s nine books, Musk is not an anomaly. In method and thesis, it is perfectly in line with a career built on promoting elite interests under the guise of biographical neutrality and insipid humanism. This time, though, his “genius” subject is idiotic enough to throw the bullshit at the heart of the project into stark relief. Musk is not just the natural successor to Isaacson’s genius canon; he may be its necessary conclusion.

Unlike VAT fraud with mobile phones, no empty vans were required. The carbon market rendered even the pretense of real-world trade unnecessary because its product was an absence, an unemitted ton of gas. All someone needed to exploit the system was a good internet connection that allowed them to make trade after trade among the entities in their carousel. As one scammer told me, “It was easier than sending an email.”

They realized they could track world leaders through Locomotive, too. After acquiring a data set on Russia, the team realized they could track phones in the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s entourage. The phones moved everywhere that Putin did. They concluded the devices in question did not actually belong to Putin himself; Russian state security and counterintelligence were better than that. Instead, they believed the devices belonged to the drivers, the security personnel, the political aides, and other support staff around the Russian president; those people’s phones were trackable in the advertising data. As a result, PlanetRisk knew where Putin was going and who was in his entourage.

“Soon after the printing press emerged in the 15th century, the scriptoriums for copying manuscripts in monasteries rapidly began shutting down,” said Mr. Fidler, now 81 and living in retirement in Santa Fe, N.M. “I’m not very optimistic about the survival of the majority of newspapers in the United States.”