Category: You Should See This

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

Infinite Self Anthony Veasna So died unexpectedly last winter, before his debut book was released. Everyone remembers him differently.

In the six decades since the dam was built, the living memory of Glen Canyon has mostly been lost. Relatively few people visited the canyon when it could still be run by raft, and all but a handful of them are now dead. In the meantime, the place has acquired an almost mythical status. It was a kind of Eden, more spectacular than the Grand Canyon and, at the same time, more peaceful. It was a fairy-tale maze of side canyons, and side canyons with their own side canyons, each one offering a different marvel. Edward Abbey, who was one of several writers and artists to float through Glen Canyon shortly before its inundation, called the closing of the dam’s gates a “crime.” To grasp the nature of this crime, he wrote, “imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible.”

“I’ve been a fortunate guy,” he said from his home near Yosemite. “I was in the Merchant Marines with German submarines trying to get me. I was in the Navy for almost 10 years with the Japs and Soviets trying to get me. I’ve been shot at and they missed. I’ve been shot at and they hit. I’ve been cut with knives. A guy hit me across the back of the head with a two-by-four, and I had to have a neck operation.

At the Defcon hacker conference next week, Alejandro Caceres and Jason Hopper plan to release—or, rather, to upgrade and re-release after a years-long hiatus—a tool called PunkSpider. Essentially a search engine that constantly crawls the entire web, PunkSpider automatically identifies hackable vulnerabilities in websites, and then allows anyone to search those results to find sites susceptible to everything from defacement to data leaks.

But, after Sanders’s loss, “Chapo” seemed to have nothing left to say. Instead of progressing through the five stages of grief, the co-hosts wallowed in denial—“It is still virtually tied,” Menaker said, after Biden’s decisive victory on Super Tuesday—before settling, apparently forever, in the second stage. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called this stage anger, but in “Chapo” ’s case it’s closer to nihilistic despair.

Inside the envelope was a small, stapled book—a pamphlet, really—titled “Foodie or The Capitalist Monsoon that is Mississippi,” by a writer named Stokes Prickett. On the cover, there was a photograph of a burrito truck and a notice that read “Advance Promotional Copy: Do Not Read.”

Like many of Disfarmer’s relatives, Stewart had grown up poor, on a soybean-and-rice farm. As a teen-ager, he’d worn secondhand clothes and taped up old pairs of sneakers to save money for community college. “What really got to me was the thought of other people benefitting from our family, and the thought that they didn’t care,” he said. Disfarmer’s path to posthumous fame seemed to rely on a galling irony: art collectors had celebrated his portraits of modest Arkansans without sparing a thought for his modest Arkansan heirs.