Category: Dark

Last summer, a grainy photo appeared to show Marsalek in an upscale Moscow neighborhood, wearing a red Prada jacket and climbing into an S.U.V. “It actually does look like him,” Rami El Obeidi, the former Libyan spy chief, mused on Twitter. “Except, knowing him, he never wore Prada (unless Russia got the better side of him). He preferred Brioni, like I do.” ♦

But experts have shown in studies that simply consuming doom-filled images actually stops audiences from taking action. Far from inspiring viewers to leap off their couches and charge into the street, these videos retraumatize us and paralyze us in fear.

WHEN IT COMES to Nineties alt-rock bands, Live falls somewhere between Matchbox 20 and Creed on the cool meter. Even at the peak of their popularity, when they were packing arenas, critics had virtually no use for them. “Song after song depended on the same groove — soft verse, LOUD CHORUS,” read a typical concert review in a May 1995 issue of Rolling Stone. “But unlike, say, the Pixies’ blare, Live’s volume twiddling felt as predictable as a gag in a Jim Carrey movie.”

One award-winning investigative filmmaker told me she gets regular notes from her agent — documentary directors didn’t used to have agents — about what streamers are looking for, and they weren’t the kinds of films she was used to making. “I’m getting, ‘Did anybody murder your sister, and do you want to make a film about that?’” she said.

He begins by saying, in a sentence typed in bold in the official transcript, “We must end the merciless, relentless, senseless war on nature.” That war, he continues, “is putting our world at immediate risk of hurtling past the 1.5-degree temperature increase limit and now still moving towards a deadly 2.8 degrees.”

Harlow put her daughter Emma on the phone. “I’m scared they’re going to take my one history book away,” Emma said. “Our teacher has recently been teaching things that were supposed to come later in the year, closer to the A.P. exam, like slavery and, like, Native Americans.” She went on, “It felt like she’s rushing it towards us, like she’s scared it’s going to be taken away and she wants us to learn about it before they do. It’s, like, if these things don’t get taught, then we end up forgetting.” She added, “It’s kind of scary to think about.”

Just before noon, Lev, Harvard, and Devi sat in the tent, shoulder to shoulder, putting on their boots and getting ready to leave. Devi was next to Lev, sipping hot cocoa. Suddenly, she asked him to take her pulse. Then she said, “I’m going to die.”