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The shuttering of Memorial, the country’s most prominent human rights organization, has saddened Russians who were personally touched by its work shining a light on the injustices of the Soviet past.
“The state does not like that the human rights center speaks about how it behaves,” he said during the proceedings.
In Enid, Okla., pandemic politics prompted a fundamental question: What does it mean to be an American? Whose version of the country will prevail?
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/26/us/oklahoma-masks.html
“The red shirts have assumed effective control of most of the public bodies in Enid,” Mr. Ezzell said this month. He estimated that those who cared enough about the mask mandate to show up at a public meeting to speak against it were a small minority of the city’s 50,000 population. But they had an outsize effect on the Council’s moderate members, because in this moment of defensiveness and threat, going against members of your own tribe is extremely difficult.
The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html
Yet what the hidden documents show is that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong.
China’s government has supported foreign YouTubers who put a positive spin on its policies, in its latest effort to shape how the world sees it.
Joshua Lam and Libby Lange, graduate student researchers at Yale University, analyzed a sample of nearly 290,000 tweets that mentioned Xinjiang in the first half of 2021. They found that six of the 10 most commonly shared YouTube videos in the tweets were from the pro-China influencers.
Afterward, on their shows, Laura Ingraham spread the false claim of antifa involvement, and Sean Hannity referred to the 2020 election as a “train wreck.”
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/business/media/fox-news-trump-jan-6-meadows.html
Ms. Ingraham’s text came in contrast with what she said on her Fox News program in the hours after the attack, when she promoted the false theory that members of antifa were involved.
A BBC investigation into Black Axe has unearthed new evidence of political infiltration, and a scamming and killing operation spanning the globe.
via BBC News: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-59614595
Within Nigeria, Black Axe is fighting a war of supremacy with rival “cults” – similar criminal gangs with names like the Eiye, the Buccaneers, the Pirates and the Maphites. Messages the BBC have translated from West African Pidgin show Axemen keeping track of how many rivals they have murdered, tallying up the figures like a football score in each region.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of “We,” was both the original writer of totalitarian terror and one of its original victims.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-russian-novel-that-foresaw-but-underestimated-totalitarianism
True literature can thrive only in places where literature is created not by obedient and reliable bureaucrats but by madmen, recluses, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. Where a writer must be reasonable, faithful like a Catholic, useful in the present moment, where he cannot flail at everyone as Jonathan Swift did or smile at everything as Anatole France does, there can be no literature that is cast in bronze—there can only be the sort printed on paper, the newsprint sort that’s read today and used to wrap bars of soap tomorrow.
The post-Trump era could’ve been a return to form for the conspiracy king; instead it’s been his undoing.
Link: https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvekb/the-latter-days-of-alex-jones-sandy-hook-lawsuit
As Jones faces what could be a sizable legal judgement and another bout of withering press when he testifies before Congress, he’s also working on something much weirder. Infowars is teaming up with a hypnotist named Jake Ducey to shill a bizarre new video series Jones is calling “Reset Wars.” On air, Jones has described the series as “the most important thing I’ve ever done,” and a new site set up for the project promises it will be “your road map to navigating the apocalypse.” In a black-and-white promo video, Jones rants about the enslavers of mankind, whom he accuses of “trying to turn us into robots,” before launching into a description of what sounds like a potted summary of the plot of The Matrix. It’s remarkably incoherent even by Jones’ standards; he references “transcending the third dimension” several times, but just how he proposes to help his audience do that isn’t quite clear.
A trove of unreleased documents reveals a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion that led to the fall of the Western-backed government.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/20/the-secret-history-of-the-us-diplomatic-failure-in-afghanistan
The debates and decisions in Washington, Kabul, and Doha that preceded the Islamic Republic’s fall took place largely in private. Hundreds of pages of meeting notes, transcripts, memoranda, e-mails, and documents, as well as extensive interviews with Afghan and American officials, present a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion from the very start.
An American strike cell alarmed its partners as it raced to defeat the enemy.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/12/us/civilian-deaths-war-isis.html
As bad strikes mounted, the four military officials said, Talon Anvil’s partners sounded the alarm. Pilots over Syria at times refused to drop bombs because Talon Anvil wanted to hit questionable targets in densely populated areas. Senior C.I.A. officers complained to Special Operations leaders about the disturbing pattern of strikes. Air Force teams doing intelligence work argued with Talon Anvil over a secure phone known as the red line. And even within Talon Anvil, some members at times refused to participate in strikes targeting people who did not seem to be in the fight.
In the months before his murder, President Jovenel Moïse took a number of steps to fight drug and arms smugglers. Some officials now fear he was killed for it.
Haiti may now provide the largest route for drugs destined for the United States, but no one knows for sure because the country has become so difficult to police. American law enforcement is unable to run a wiretapping program in the country, or even fully collaborate with its Haitian counterparts, because corruption in the police and judiciary runs so deep, U.S. officials say.
Against all predictions, the Taliban took the Afghan capital in a matter of hours. This is the story of why and what came after, by a reporter and photographer who witnessed it all.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/magazine/fall-of-kabul-afghanistan.html
After flying for more than an hour, the three presidential helicopters arrived at the Uzbekistan border and landed; confusion ensued at the Termez airport as they were surrounded by soldiers — the Uzbek government had apparently not been informed of their arrival. Eventually, the president, his wife, Mohib and several aides were taken to the governor’s guesthouse, but the rest of the 50 or so people on board spent a miserable night out in the open by the helicopters, relieving themselves on the tarmac. The next day, a charter flight arrived and took them all to Abu Dhabi.
At an awards ceremony in Oslo, Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitri A. Muratov of Russia called for peace, democratic renewal and support for a free press.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/world/europe/nobel-prize-journalism-ceremony.html
“These American companies controlling our global information ecosystem are biased against facts, biased against journalists,” she said. “They are — by design — dividing us and radicalizing us.”
How Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya came to challenge her country’s dictatorship.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/the-accidental-revolutionary-leading-belaruss-uprising
Lukashenka seems to have settled in for the long haul. With the possibility of open protests cut off, Tsikhanouskaya said that it was impossible to predict how long he could hold on: “It could last a long time—many months.” But she maintained that his administration was mortally wounded, its legitimacy beyond repair. “The regime has cracked, and the crack is widening. Processes are going on inside the regime that we cannot see.” With the opposition shut out of the homeland, the decisive blow might come from within. “The regime is trapped by its own actions—there’s no one left to blame,” she said. “Someone inside the inner circle may decide that the time has come.” ♦
In the second season of “How To With John Wilson,” the documentary filmmaker shows off his penchant for mutating the mundane into the vivid and extraordinary.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/magazine/how-to-john-wilson.html
Holding the camera himself, he says, “changes the energy of the room.” Part of Wilson’s charm is that he almost never lets this energy provoke a cringe, except at his own expense. That reversal is the point of astonishment in “How To Cover Furniture,” a rumination on how we try to protect things from harm. At its climax, an interior designer answers Wilson’s questions with a friendly evisceration of his whole vibe: His camera, she says, is a protective mechanism, which he uses to connect with people from behind a barrier. She looks into its lens and offers advice that feels both kind and situationally hostile: “I would love for you, sometimes in your life, in your head, to be like, ‘I should put the camera down in this situation. I should just be John.’”
January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
via The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/
Trump has reconquered his party by setting its base on fire. Tens of millions of Americans perceive their world through black clouds of his smoke. His deepest source of strength is the bitter grievance of Republican voters that they lost the White House, and are losing their country, to alien forces with no legitimate claim to power. This is not some transient or loosely committed population. Trump has built the first American mass political movement in the past century that is ready to fight by any means necessary, including bloodshed, for its cause.
Could tinkering with photosynthesis prevent a global food crisis?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/creating-a-better-leaf
“All of our food, directly or indirectly, comes from the process of photosynthesis,” Long told me. “And we know that even our very best crops are only achieving a fraction of photosynthesis’s theoretical efficiency. So, if we can work out how to improve photosynthesis, we can boost yields. We won’t have to go on destroying yet more land for crops—we can try to produce more on the land we’re already using.”
Powerful associates of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, are making and selling captagon, an illegal amphetamine, creating a new narcostate on the Mediterranean.
“The idea of going to the Syrian government to ask about cooperation is just absurd,” said Joel Rayburn, the U.S. special envoy for Syria during the Trump administration. “It is literally the Syrian government that is exporting the drugs. It is not like they are looking the other way while drug cartels do their thing. They are the drug cartel.”
In Penny Lane’s new documentary, the best-selling instrumental artist of all time unwittingly helps to explain why so many people dislike his music.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/listening-to-kenny-g-is-an-ironic-masterpiece
In the studio, Kenny G displays his own relentless adjustments of his own playing; he plays his soprano sax, and then has the recording engineer demonstrate the way it will sound on the record, after multiple “reverbs” are added to it—and this, the saxophonist says, is “what it really sounds like.” And, he adds, “When I give it my stamp of approval, I sit back and go, ‘That’s fuckin’ beautiful.’ I just say it.”