Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out.
“No one at McDonald’s or Taylor will explain why there’s a secret, undisclosed menu,” O’Sullivan wrote in one of the first, cryptic text messages I received from him earlier this year.
In less than nine months, an assassin on a motorbike fatally shot an Al Qaeda commander given refuge in Tehran, Iran’s chief nuclear scientist was machine-gunned on a country road, and two separate, mysterious explosions rocked a key Iranian nuclear facility in the desert, striking the heart of the country’s efforts to enrich uranium.
Dan Friesen and Jordan Holmes turned their Infowars-skewering podcast into a business. In the post-Trump era, they’re documenting Mr. Jones’s reckoning.
“We used to talk about his outbursts at the very beginning as being so fake, just like: ‘This is performative outrage. You’re yelling because you’re playing that character of Alex Jones, who’s supposed to be yelling,’” Mr. Holmes said. “And now whenever you listen to him freak out, you’re like: ‘This guy’s freaking out. This is somebody who is not in control.’”
A recent OAN segment said there were “serious doubts about who’s actually president,” and another blamed “anti-Trump extremists” for the Capitol attack.
He recalled seeing a photo of someone in the Capitol mob holding a flag emblazoned with the OAN logo. “I was like, OK, that’s not good,” Mr. Golingan said. “That’s what happens when people listen to us.”
Gates told reporters he had only just learned the “eye-opener” that the Taliban were attracting so many fighters because they paid more. Generals in Afghanistan said the Taliban were giving fighters $250 to $300 a month, while the Afghan Army was paying about $120. So Gates, employing the American way of throwing more money at a problem, got the recruits a raise to $240.
And this pathetic bidding war with the Taliban was eight years in.
This reminds me: I read that you and your mom have very different politics — she’s a Trump fan. How does she understand your political perspective? I honestly don’t know. There’s definitely some Fox News, OAN News talking points that get thrown around about Hollywood liberals. Here’s something funny that happened: I got an email from her husband, because we’re trying to find common ground. He sent me a video, and it was Michael Douglas talking about the corruption of our political process. He was like, “Is this something we can agree on?” And I’m like, “That video is from my group!” RepresentUs: Their singular mission is get big dirty money out of politics. They’re not a right- or left-wing group. It took him aback: He had sent me a video from my group. Then I tried to tell him: “I’m trying to explain to you: I don’t watch CNN. I don’t love Joe Biden. I’m not a fan of the D.N.C. I want money out of our politics. I want universal health care. I want fair wages.” They didn’t quite know what to make of that. I’m hoping that now that the orange turd is gone, things might settle down a little. But how would they describe my politics? They probably think I’m Karl Marx.
In 1974, John Patterson was abducted by the People’s Liberation Army of Mexico—a group no one had heard of before. The kidnappers wanted $500,000, and insisted that Patterson’s wife deliver the ransom.
“That young 31-year-old woman, she acted with no help, no one to hold her; her best friend was missing,” she said. “But she acted—I acted—completely honorably throughout that whole period. And I love her.”
Most — if not all — journalists likely share a commitment to a set of journalistic values, including a belief that those in power should be subject to oversight, that transparency is the right approach to important information, that facts are required to get to the truth, that the less powerful deserve a voice, and […]
Open mind: “I must confess that my first impulse was to resist these findings. After all, I’ve spent decades with the ideas described above as my lodestar, convinced that journalism serves the public good. And after all, investigative journalism is built on the idea of being society’s watchdog,” writes Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post‘s media columnist, in a piece about the API research. “However, given that trust in the news media has fallen from about 70 percent in the early 1970s to about 40 percent now, according to Gallup — it seems worth viewing this report with an open mind.”
Wil was right. It was a body. It – he – had plummeted 3,500ft, half-frozen, hitting the ground at 3.38pm. He was the man who fell from the sky. The stowaway.
On Sunday, at the rally, Joanie Shafer, a local photographer, highlighting the connections between Floyd and Wright, pointed out that Wright had called his mother on the phone when the officers pulled him over, and that Floyd had called out to his deceased mother as he himself was dying. The implication was that interactions with the police had become so fraught that grown men were enlisting the aid of their mothers, on earth or in the hereafter.
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
I don’t disagree: being able to offload repetitive tasks to a program is one of the best things about knowing how to code. However, sometimes problems can’t be solved by automation. If you’re willing to embrace the grind you’ll look like a magician.
Pocahontas may seem like a strange vehicle for discussing our gay villains. But Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.
Disney’s attitudes toward colonization and queer coding are, it turns out, inextricably linked. By using a queer-coded villain, the corporation entirely elides white responsibility in retelling a historical tragedy, letting the cowboy-type colonizers off the hook for any wrongdoing and, instead, reframing them as the heroes of the story. In Pocahontas, Disney pulls off the magic trick of telling a story about colonization and genocide where the only thing that’s actually punished is the “wrong” kind of masculinity.
I love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.
So the biggest threat to Substack is unlikely to be the Twitter-centric political battles among some of its writers. The real threat is competing platforms with a different model. The most technically powerful of those is probably Ghost, which allows writers to send and charge for newsletters, with monthly fees starting at $9. While Substack is backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ghost has Wikipedia vibes: It is open-source software developed by a nonprofit.
The speaker was silenced after less than a minute, but this exposure to a small dose of public criticism incensed Savage. After the meeting, he fired off an email to Grayson and trust administrators demanding, “WHO PERMITTED THE LAST SPEAKER TO ATTACK ME? HOW DID SHE GET ON THE LIST OF ‘APPROVED SPEAKERS’?” Fraser responded that public comments at board meetings are not pre-screened. “[W]e are required under the First Amendment not to censor people however offensive their comments might be,” she wrote. Savage snapped, “Yes, I am aware of the ‘law’. Do not appreciate your lecture. Not what I asked. How did this hateful person get to be chosen?…Did she indicate she wanted to verbally abuse my good name?” Fraser emailed Grayson and Benioff that she would appreciate their assistance “in helping Dr Weiner understand how public meetings work.”
Krasnik voted to be “free of L.G.B.T.” two years ago to satisfy conservative voters. Now, the mayor regrets the move, which has led to censure from other European countries and put funding at risk.
But that changed early last year when Bartosz Staszewski, an L.G.B.T. activist from Warsaw began visiting towns that had vowed to banish “L.G.B.T. ideology.” Mr. Staszewski, a documentary filmmaker, took with him an official-looking yellow sign on which was written in four languages: “L.G.B.T.-FREE ZONE.” He put the fake sign next to each town’s real sign, taking photographs that he posted on social media.
A special team led by a high-level manager says Rupert Murdoch’s paper must evolve to survive. But a rivalry between editor and publisher stands in the way.
As the team was completing a report on its findings last summer, Mr. Murray found himself staring down a newsroom revolt. Soon after the killing of George Floyd, staff members created a private Slack channel called “Newsroomies,” where they discussed how The Journal, in their view, was behind on major stories of the day, including the social justice movement growing in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death. Participants also complained that The Journal’s digital presence was not robust enough, and that its conservative opinion department had published essays that did not meet standards applied to the reporting staff. The tensions and challenges are similar to what leaders of other news organizations, including The Times, have heard from their staffs.
In sharp contrast to Antonijević, the director of Quo Vadis, Aida?, Jasmila Žbanić, has come out forcefully against this tendency to speak of “our” genocide against “yours.” Speaking for the necessity to remember all genocides equally, she denounced pitting a Serbian and Bosnian film against each other. In a recent interview, Žbanić said, “As for Jasenovac, genocide was committed there, and that is the greatest tragedy of our peoples. In terms of horror, Jasenovac cannot be compared to anything, and not one, but 50 films should be made about it.” She then connected the two tragedies thus: “The fact that Srebrenica happened after Jasenovac shows how much violence and crime are something that has not been overcome in this area.”
In an Instagram story posted this past Thursday, Hanks is seen walking on the beach. “You don’t know what’s gonna hit you. You’re not ready,” he says with a cackle, thrusting the front of his T-shirt, bearing the white-boy summer logo, toward the camera. Though I presumed Hanks was referring to a forthcoming white-boy summer “movie,” which he has said he was filming, the story made me uneasy. Hanks’s muscular frame, his shirt logo’s typeface, his laugh—all of these struck me as more forbidding than they might have initially seemed. Perhaps, in the end, we weren’t nearly as ready for white-boy summer as we might have wanted to be.
Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.
“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”
