Category: You Should See This

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.”