Category: You Should See This

Bourgoin was a lover of cinema, and the walls of his apartment were lined with an immense collection of VHS cassettes. Among these was a hand-labelled series of recorded newscasts, showing all manner of accidents and natural disasters. He kept a trove of photographs of cadavers in various states of mutilation, which he liked to show around, and also delighted in telling the story of his mother’s first husband, a German who had been decapitated by the Nazis. “He was a charming young man,” a friend from that period told me, “who had an extreme attraction to the macabre.”

Instead of selling normal tickets to the party — which featured a performance by the Russian punk-protest group Pussy Riot — Friends With Benefits required attendees to scan their crypto wallets at the door. If you owned at least five $FWB — the group’s membership tokens, which cost about $140 apiece as of party time — you got in. Bringing a plus-one required having 75 $FWB, or about $10,000. (There was a way to skip the line altogether: win an auction for the party’s official NFT, although that ended up selling for more than $50,000, making it a poor choice for the budget-conscious raver.)

“I didn’t recognize Kenosha,” Alvin D. Owens told me, recalling the scene at the Civic Center that night. More to the point, he said, “I didn’t recognize Kenoshans.” Owens, a 53-year-old local barber and prominent figure in Kenosha’s Black community, had helped plan the city’s first Kneel for Nine in June. When the crowd marched on the public-safety building after the Blake shooting, he rushed to the scene and tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to engage in a similar kneeling protest. Later outside the museum, he watched, dumbfounded, as a white woman handed out gasoline bombs fashioned out of aluminum foil.

Sixteen months before last November’s presidential election, a researcher at Facebook described an alarming development. She was getting content about the conspiracy theory QAnon within a week of opening an experimental account, she wrote in an internal report.

Mr. Döpfner, who once described himself “a mixture of aesthete and carpet salesman,” is an enthusiastic deal-maker who stands 6-foot-7. Under his leadership, Axel Springer has had elaborate holiday parties, including a disco night in 2018 that included 10 D.J.s, 512 disco balls and a joint performance by the Village People and company board members. His dance moves at one party left an impression on the company’s slacks-wearing partners at Politico. He also owns one of Germany’s leading collection of female nude paintings.