Category: Dark
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Overreach by Owen Matthews | Goodreads
Dmitry Bukov: It’s like a theatre… today’s Russian does what is expected of him. Sometimes he applauds, sometimes he wolf-whistles. But he is not required to actually believe. Everyone knows that the man on the stage is not Prince Hamlet but Laurence Olivier. Nobody believes that what is happening on the stage is actually true. Do you think anyone believes what is being said on TV talk shows? But [after the invasion] the theatre is coming more like a circus. The people are not stupid. They watch and laugh nervously and see how low the actors will go.
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How “Battle Royale” Took Over Video Games | The New Yorker
How “Battle Royale” Took Over Video Games
With a simple, ingenious formula, a Japanese novel has inspired some of the most successful games in history.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-battle-royale-took-over-video-games
In the mid-nineteen-nineties, Koushun Takami was dozing on his futon on the island of Shikoku, Japan, when he was visited by an apparition: a maniacal schoolteacher addressing a group of students. “All right, class, listen up,” Takami heard the teacher say. “Today, I’m going to have you all kill each other.” Takami was in his twenties, and he had recently quit his job as a reporter for a local newspaper to become a novelist. As a literature student at Osaka University, he had started and abandoned several horror-infused detective stories. But the well had long since run dry; he had left his job with neither a plan nor a plot in mind. The visitation wasn’t a haunting; it was an epiphany.
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How Eric Adams Started Mentoring a Con Man | The New Yorker
How Eric Adams Started Mentoring a Con Man
The mayor’s friends and allies have puzzled over his relationship with Lamor Whitehead, a fraudster Brooklyn church leader.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/how-eric-adams-started-mentoring-a-con-man
Bruan, who was already negotiating Abdullah’s surrender with the N.Y.P.D., believes that Whitehead’s intrusion alarmed the authorities, prompting officers to pounce on Abdullah, guns drawn, outside a Legal Aid office downtown, where he had gone to meet with Bruan before surrendering. After Abdullah was taken away, Whitehead got into an argument with Bruan. “Stay away from my client,” she told him, to which Whitehead had responded, “What did you say, you dumb bitch?”
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‘A Wild Card’: Son of Uganda’s President Jostles to Succeed His Father – The New York Times
‘A Wild Card’: Son of Uganda’s President Jostles to Succeed His Father
Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba has been positioning himself as Uganda’s next leader. But his provocative tweets have unnerved Ugandans and put his father in a bind.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/11/world/africa/uganda-president-son-muhoozi.html
He has boasted that he could capture the capital of neighboring Kenya in two weeks. He has offered a dowry of 100 cows to marry Italy’s new female prime minister. And he has claimed that the majority of “non-white” people around the world supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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The Enduring Metal Genius of Metallica | The New Yorker
The Enduring Metal Genius of Metallica
On the road with the band in its forty-first year.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/the-enduring-metal-genius-of-metallica
For Metallica, the idea was never to seduce an audience, but to push it away. The fans who stuck around—who perhaps understood this as a kind of love—became devoted, and received devotion in return.