Category: You Should See This

To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. I have not only claimed these identities as my own when I had absolutely no right to do so—when doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures—but I have formed intimate relationships with loving, compassionate people who have trusted and cared for me when I have deserved neither trust nor caring.

Nowhere in her 1,234 words did Krug find space simply to say she was sorry.

John Sullivan uploaded videos in which he spoke directly to the camera, attempting to justify some of the more incongruous parts of his Capitol footage. “I have emotions, and those moments are crazy,” Sullivan said. In another video, he added, “I was not there to be a participant. I was there to record. But I also have to blend my fucking Black ass into that crowd.” Many of his followers didn’t seem to buy it. When he tweeted, “#TrumpSupporters are making a hit list to take me out,” someone responded, “Stop acting like the victim. . . . You were obviously more involved then what you are playing out.”

By the end of Trump’s Presidency, Guttentag’s Trackers had logged a thousand and fifty-eight changes to the immigration system. Early in the process, he gave me access to the Tracker, and I began to report on the human toll of the lesser-known policies, enlisting a team of postgraduate fellows from the Global Migration Project at Columbia’s Journalism School. In the past few years, we have spoken to two hundred people who bore the brunt of these changes, and found more than sixty cases of irreparable harm that resulted, including torture, sexual assault, and death.

In July, Fauci was asked whether he regretted originally advising against masks. He replied, astonishingly, “I don’t regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct… When it became clear that the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don’t know they’re infected, that made it very clear that we had to strongly recommend masks.” But that wasn’t true; Fauci knew about asymptomatic carriers at least three months before the CDC changed its guidelines. This was simple face-saving, an attempt to rewrite the record in his favor. Apparently, it worked.

nasa’s ultimate goal for the telescope was to work out a figure known as eta-Earth, or η⊕. This is the average number of rocky, roughly Earth-size planets that can be found orbiting an average sunlike star at a distance that might, conceivably, render them habitable. After spending two years analyzing the data from Kepler, researchers recently concluded that η⊕ has a value somewhere between .37 and .6. Since there are at least four billion sunlike stars in the Milky Way, this means that somewhere between 1.5 billion and 2.4 billion planets in our galaxy could, in theory, harbor life. No one knows what fraction of potentially habitable planets are, in fact, inhabited, but, even if the proportion is trivial, we’re still talking about millions—perhaps tens of millions—of planets in the galaxy that might be teeming with living things. At a public event a few years ago, Ellen Stofan, who at the time was nasa’s chief scientist and is now the director of the National Air and Space Museum, said that she believed “definitive evidence” of “life beyond earth” would be found sometime in the next two decades.

Late last week, a website called Faces of the Riot appeared online, showing nothing but a vast grid of more than 6,000 images of faces, each one tagged only with a string of characters associated with the Parler video in which it appeared. The site’s creator tells WIRED that he used simple open source machine learning and facial recognition software to detect, extract, and deduplicate every face from the 827 videos that were posted to Parler from inside and outside the Capitol building on January 6, the day when radicalized Trump supporters stormed the building in a riot that resulted in five people’s deaths. The creator of Faces of the Riot says his goal is to allow anyone to easily sort through the faces pulled from those videos to identify someone they may know or recognize who took part in the mob, or even to reference the collected faces against FBI wanted posters and send a tip to law enforcement if they spot someone.