Category: You Should See This
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What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath – The New York Times
What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath
“Just because I don’t care about you doesn’t mean I want to cause you more pain,” says Patric Gagne, author of a new memoir about her sociopathy.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/25/magazine/patric-gagne-interview.html
Are you able to describe how you’ve built a sense of morality? Just because I don’t care about someone else’s pain, so to speak, doesn’t mean I want to cause more of it. I enjoy living in this society. I understand that there are rules. I choose to follow those rules because I understand the benefits of this world, this house where I get to live, this relationship I get to have. That is different from people who follow the rules because they have to, they should, they want to be a good person. None of those apply to me. I want to live in a world where things function properly. If I create messes, my life will become messy. I think people are uncomfortable with the idea of, You don’t really care? What does it matter? What does it matter why I choose to help the woman cross the street? Why does it matter why I choose to pick up a wallet and hand it to the person in as opposed to keeping it? It’s not because I’m a good person. It’s not because I would feel shame or guilt. But why does that matter?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/25/magazine/patric-gagne-interview.html
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An American Education: Notes from UATX – The New Inquiry
An American Education: Notes from UATX
revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the countr…
via The New Inquiry: https://thenewinquiry.com/an-american-education-notes-from-uatx/
In the ensuing Q&A, however, at least one person in the audience evinced disappointment. This student asked Bari Weiss why a school that promised “constructive debate” had failed to invite any speakers who were left-of-center. Weiss had difficulty with that one. Perhaps because it so plainly pointed to what most attendees knew but blithely kept unspoken. UATX quite clearly embraces some “truths” over others, and the discussions it fosters are like those that might take place at the Hoover Institution or a rightwing message board. There was only the most superficial range to the opinions and ideas held. Almost all the speakers droned smugly on about the same points. DEI is ruining higher education. Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies are worthless. “Gender ideology” is destroying America’s social and moral fabric. IQ is the best measure of merit. These positions have as their end the maintenance—the naturalization—of existing race and class hierarchies. Inviting speakers from the left would pose an obstacle to that naturalization.
https://thenewinquiry.com/an-american-education-notes-from-uatx/?src=longreads
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Tucker Carlson Promised an Unedited Putin. The Result Was Boring | The New Yorker
Tucker Carlson Promised an Unedited Putin. The Result Was Boring
In an interview that lasted more than two hours, the Russian President aired well-trod grievances and gave a lecture full of spurious history meant to justify his war in Ukraine.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/tucker-carlson-promised-an-unedited-putin-the-result-was-boring
Carlson didn’t interrupt or challenge Putin on the many—too many to count—occasions when Putin told falsehoods about the history of Ukraine, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the relationship between Russia and nato, probably his conversations with former U.S. leaders, and, perhaps most egregiously of all, the Russian Army’s withdrawal from the suburbs of Kyiv after a month of invasion in 2022. Putin claimed that this was a gesture of good will aimed at achieving a speedy negotiated peace; in fact, it was a military defeat. This would also have been a good moment for Carlson to ask Putin about the well-documented war crimes Russian soldiers allegedly committed during that month of occupation. He passed up this opportunity.
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Tom Stevenson · Rubble from Bone: Israel’s War
Tom Stevenson · Rubble from Bone: Israel’s War
Israeli tactics have little in common with standard counterinsurgency doctrine or rules of engagement. The war on Gaza…
via London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/tom-stevenson/rubble-from-bone
What strategic bombing does to a city is to produce, by military means, something similar to the massive urban destruction of last year’s earthquakes in Turkey and Syria: mangled pipes and wires, the ganglia of shorn rebars and masonry, homes cut in half, exposing their foundations like uprooted trees. Somehow there seems to be more debris than the total mass of the original buildings. Who could ever clear all this away, and where would it go? How would diggers sort the rubble from the bone?
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n03/tom-stevenson/rubble-from-bone
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Greg Abbott’s Anti-Migrant Standoff at the Border | The New Yorker
Greg Abbott’s Anti-Migrant Standoff at the Border
The governor of Texas has triggered a constitutional crisis about who controls entry from Mexico, and some supporters are there for the spectacle.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/greg-abbotts-standoff-at-eagle-pass
She returned to Colorado when she learned her house was being foreclosed on. But the news of the border convoy inspired her to make the fourteen-hour trip to Quemado, driving through the night, fuelled by European energy drinks. She was parked among a cluster of old friends. “That’s Soupmama—she was one of the cooks there at Hagerstown,” she said, pointing out a van with a “freedom isn’t free” decal on the back. “And his name’s Joe, and then Linda.” Onstage, a speaker was saying something about child trafficking across the border. But Boots had more obscure conspiracies on her mind: chemtrails, ancient giants
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/greg-abbotts-standoff-at-eagle-pass
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The Great Washington Meltdown of 2024 Has Begun | The New Yorker
The Great Washington Meltdown of 2024 Has Begun
In the Senate, the House, and the White House, leaders are weak—at a time when leading is needed.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-great-washington-meltdown-of-2024-has-begun
The Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, was even more blunt as he took the extraordinary step of publicly bashing the G.O.P. members who chose Trump over Ukraine this week. “Dear Republican Senators of America,” he wrote on social media on Thursday. “Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today. Shame on you.” Sometimes, the farther away you are, the clearer the view.
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Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer | U.S. | EL PAÍS English
Fentanyl, the portrait of a mass murderer
It’s the big threat. A cheap, white powder — 50 times more powerful than heroin — which kills more than 70,000 people each year in the United States and countless others across the rest of the Western Hemisphere. EL PAÍS, in a long-term investigation that spanned two continents and included interviews with anti-drug czars in the U.S. and China, visited the clandestine laboratories in Sinaloa, where fentanyl is manufactured. In the vicinity of these Mexican labs, addicts serve as guinea pigs for drug traffickers. This newspaper has gathered testimonies about how this lethal substance crosses the border to the north and spreads like a plague through the streets of the most powerful country in the world. The trafficking of fentanyl is part of a global network with one foot in China, which the White House has declared war on
via EL PAÍS English: https://english.elpais.com/usa/2024-01-14/fentanyl-the-portrait-of-a-mass-murderer.html
The bodyguard made a gesture to her from the passenger seat and she managed to crouch down as best she could in the back of the car. Then, a rain of bullets began: 36 shots welcomed her as mayor of Manzanillo, Mexico.
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The Search for a New and Better Internet | The New Yorker
Can the Internet Be Governed?
Amid worries about what Big Tech is doing to our privacy, politics, and psyches, many stakeholders—from activists to technocrats—are calling for a new rule book.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/can-the-internet-be-governed
The proposal, part of a bigger push for what Xi Jinping has called a more “sovereign” Internet, was supported by Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, among other countries. The E.U., the United States, and various technical bodies (including the I.E.T.F.) stood in opposition. The simmering divisions came to a head in 2022, during the election for the post of secretary-general of the I.T.U., which pitted Rashid Ismailov, a Russian official who had worked at Huawei, against Doreen Bogdan-Martin, a former U.S. Department of Commerce official. Bogdan-Martin won the election, and the threat of New I.P. appears to have receded, at least for now. But, for a moment, the Internet as we know it appeared to hang in the balance. An apparently arcane dispute over technology standards was really part of the clash between two very different visions of the economy, society, and the relationship between citizens and state in the digital era.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/can-the-internet-be-governed
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Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments | The New Yorker
Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments
Lucian Grainge, the chairman of UMG, has helped record labels rake in billions of dollars from streaming. Can he do the same with generative artificial intelligence?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/inside-the-music-industrys-high-stakes-ai-experiments
In October, Don Was told me about his session with Lyria. He prompted the model with the name of a famous artist, a legendary singer-songwriter he had worked with in the past, asking for a song about his first car. The DeepMind team suggested adding the command “produced by Don Was.” The A.I. generated four different fragments of songs about cars, all with lyrics, melodies, and orchestration, and sung in the A.I.-generated voice of the artist, which had been learned from YouTube videos. Was described the experience as “a combination of awe and terror simultaneously.” His first thought was “This is better than anything I could have done.” His second was “I could collaborate with myself on my very best day.” For that reason, he told himself, “the songwriters are going to like this more than anybody, as long as you can’t steal from them.” He imagines an A.I. that has been trained on an artist’s complete works, and which other songwriters could collaborate with, for a fee. The songwriter, he mused, “gets paid, and he can put his name on the song if he likes it, take it off if he doesn’t.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/inside-the-music-industrys-high-stakes-ai-experiments
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“Do I Have to Come Here Injured or Dead?” | The New Yorker
“Do I Have to Come Here Injured or Dead?”
Keldy Mabel Gonzáles Brebe de Zúniga was one of the first mothers separated from her children at the border by the Trump Administration. The cruelty she suffered in the United States was matched only by what she was forced to flee in Honduras.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/do-i-have-to-come-here-injured-or-dead
One morning, in November, 2011, two men on a white motorcycle parked in front of Keldy and Mino’s house and took photographs. They said they would be back later to evict them. Around this time, Keldy received a call from Luis Fernando. “I’m in the middle of something sensitive,” he told her. “If you don’t hear from me, it’s because I can’t talk.” In January, 2012, Luis Fernando and his wife were shot and killed while driving in their car. There was no time to mourn. Other family members were being threatened. “I’m asking the authorities to help me,” her brother Óscar said, according to a police report filed that June. “I don’t know what to do and my fear is that they’re going to kill me.”
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/do-i-have-to-come-here-injured-or-dead
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Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence | The New Yorker
Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/29/sofia-coppola-profile
When Coppola showed her father an early cut of the film, he advised her to give Louis XVI more lines. Like Eugenides, he was missing the male perspective. “I was, like, ‘Um, Dad, no,’ ” Coppola remembered, adding, “I honestly don’t care about anyone else’s point of view. Just hers.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/29/sofia-coppola-profile
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How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity | WIRED
How a 27-Year-Old Codebreaker Busted the Myth of Bitcoin’s Anonymity
Once, drug dealers and money launderers saw cryptocurrency as perfectly untraceable. Then a grad student named Sarah Meiklejohn proved them all wrong—and set the stage for a decade-long crackdown.
via WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/27-year-old-codebreaker-busted-myth-bitcoins-anonymity/
Meiklejohn’s hundreds of purchases, bets, and seemingly meaningless movements of money were not, in fact, signs of a psychotic break. Each was a tiny experiment, adding up to a study of a kind that had never been attempted before. After years of claims about Bitcoin’s anonymity—or lack thereof—made by its users, its developers, and even its creator, Meiklejohn was finally putting its privacy properties to the test.
https://www.wired.com/story/27-year-old-codebreaker-busted-myth-bitcoins-anonymity/
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The Ghost of January 6th Haunts 2024 | The New Yorker
The Ghost of January 6th Haunts 2024
The impending Biden-vs.-Trump rematch already has one dominant theme.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-ghost-of-january-6th-haunts-2024
To his original Big Lie about the “rigged election” in 2020, Trump has added ever more lies. He now calls January 6th “a beautiful day” and the nearly thirteen hundred defendants arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol martyrs and “hostages.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-ghost-of-january-6th-haunts-2024
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Gaza Is Starving | The New Yorker
Gaza Is Starving
The chief economist of the World Food Program explains how the scarcity of food may tip the territory into famine.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/gaza-is-starving
I’ve been doing this for the past two decades, and I’ve been to all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of crises. And, for me, this is unprecedented because of, one, the magnitude, the scale, the entire population of a particular place; second, the severity; and, third, the speed at which this is happening, at which this has unfolded, is unprecedented. In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this in terms of severity, in terms of scale, and then in terms of speed.
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100 Notable Books of 2023 – The New York Times
100 Notable Books of 2023
Here are the year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, chosen by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/21/books/notable-books.html
Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/21/books/notable-books.html
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The Overlooked Crisis in Congo: ‘We Live in War’ – The New York Times
The Overlooked Crisis in Congo: ‘We Live in War’
Six million have died, and more than six million are displaced after decades of fighting and the ensuing humanitarian crisis in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, drawing in neighbors, mercenaries and militias. An upcoming election is inflaming tempers.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/africa/democratic-republic-of-congo-elections.html
They joined 6.5 million people displaced by war in eastern Congo, where a conflict that has dragged on for nearly three decades, stoking a vast humanitarian crisis that by some estimates has claimed over six million lives, is now lurching into a volatile new phase.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/17/world/africa/democratic-republic-of-congo-elections.html
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The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump | The New Yorker
The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump
The story of 2023 wasn’t the search for another Republican leader—but the Party’s embrace of the one it already has.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2023-in-review/the-year-we-stopped-being-able-to-pretend-about-trump
In a Christmas Day social-media post, his message to his opponents was “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL,” followed by the incongruous but nonetheless perfectly Trumpy conclusion, “AGAIN, MERRY CHRISTMAS.”