Three years ago, college football was rocked by a domestic violence scandal that ended with Ohio State firing assistant coach Zach Smith and suspending head coach Urban Meyer. Both men have since reinvented their images and careers. But what about Courtne
via Defector: https://defector.com/courtneys-story/
“‘Oh my God, please tell the truth,’” she recalled saying as Meyer spoke. “I was on my hands and knees, going, ‘Please tell the truth, Urban, please.’”
A chaotic night at a Big Bend ranch captured the nation’s attention: first as an alleged ambush, then as a fear-mongering hoax.
via Texas Monthly: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/who-shot-walker-daugherty/
In the days to come, the story of the “border ambush” that followed would reverberate outward from the Circle Dug, taken up by blogs and national media, then by politicians and late-night talk show hosts, all certain that they knew the real story of what happened that night.
Robbed, stabbed, beaten, underpaid, and overworked. They have had enough.
via The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/22667600/delivery-workers-seamless-uber-relay-new-york-electric-bikes-apps
The man stopped at another locked bike and began again with the buzz saw, threatening the workers whenever they got close. “That thing will cut your face off,” Lopez recalled. The bike freed, the thief started to pedal away.
Last year in Nova Scotia, after 3-year-old Dylan Ehler vanished, online sleuths descended on Facebook groups to help find him. Then they lost their way.
via WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/search-missing-boy-dylan-ehler-nova-scotia/
The vitriol spilled over into real life. People started standing outside their Bible Hill home glowering and taking photos, or following them in their cars. Someone at the area hospital looked up health records for Ashley, Lily, and Dylan, a privacy breach. When Jason and Ashley put up a memorial for Dylan in Bible Hill’s Holy Well Park—a blanket laden with teddy bears, a toy fishing rod, the boy’s first-ever pair of rain boots hanging from the tree overhead—locals tore it apart and dug a hole beneath it, looking for bones.
Rebecca Raffle came to Indianapolis from Los Angeles with a story about building a cannabis empire. It was too good to be true.
via Indianapolis Monthly: https://www.indianapolismonthly.com/longform/half-baked
The offer came fast—too fast—and Hunt became skeptical: “She made a lot of big promises and a lot of large declarations.” To her, Raffle’s description of the company sounded more like multilevel marketing. “I was like, ‘Oh God, is she going to give me a box of CBD Avon and I’m going to have to go door to door?’”
Why efforts to curb the cruelty of military force may have backfired.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/did-making-the-rules-of-war-better-make-the-world-worse
In Arkin’s view, the covid-19 pandemic brought the 9/11 era to an end: two decades of misdirected resources bookended by displays of official incompetence. Arkin argues that the time is overdue to pull back—to close some of our overseas bases and bring home many of the troops. Biden’s decision on Afghanistan can be seen as an attempt to temper some of America’s commitments. What lies ahead, as the chaos engulfing Afghanistan suggests, may not be that peaceful era of political freedom and pluralism which Moyn thinks our militarism blocked, and indeed Moyn’s singular focus on American power may come to seem strikingly insular. We’ve spent decades fighting asymmetrical wars, but now there’s a symmetrical one looming. The United States has never faced an adversary of China’s power: China’s G.D.P. is, by some measures, greater than ours, its active-duty military is larger than ours, and its weapon systems are rapidly expanding. China appears determined to challenge the status quo, not just the territorial one but the scaffolding of international laws that govern much of the world’s diplomatic and economic relations. If two forever wars are finally coming to an end, a new Cold War may await. ♦
As rioting and looting swept the country, Indians in the suburb of Phoenix set up roadblocks to police their streets. Dozens of Black people passing through wound up dead.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/world/africa/South-Africa-Phoenix-riots-deaths.html
Nationwide, more than 340 people died in the mayhem, many in stampedes or circumstances that remain unclear. But government officials have been alarmed by a dynamic that, they say, dangerously undermines the social order: dozens of vigilante killings by ordinary citizens.
In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/the-other-afghan-women
Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”
More than 70 years after World War II, we’re still learning about facets of the Holocaust.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/opinion/holocaust-jews-forest.html
Peter Duffy, author of the 2003 book “The Bielski Brothers,” lamented the lack of a unified collection of these testimonies in a conversation with me recently. “There’s this sense that we’ve done enough on this history. People say, ‘Oh, another Holocaust book, or another memorial,’” he told me. But Mr. Duffy believes that when it comes to what transpired in these forests, “we’ve barely scratched the surface of the story that is there, and probably most of it is lost.” The history is so elusive, in fact, that scholars at The Polish Center for Holocaust Research have called these less-understood stories of Jews who escaped their ghettos and attempted to hide “the margins of the Holocaust.”
No one encompasses that soulless supersizing of pop culture as clearly as Kaws.
via Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/674324/kaws-is-terrible-but-thankfully-forgettable/
Once the bastion of visual dissent for underrepresented voices who co-opted the language of branding and advertising, street art (which blends contemporary art strategies with the visual thrill of graffiti) has for the last decade become fully associated with real estate interests, merchandising, and gentrification.
“Peace Pipe” – New song & video out now!BRONX VI is OUT NOW: https://thebronx.lnk.to/bronxviDirected by: Craig StecykShot and Edited by: Jarrod AnthoneeSite:…
via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNz1TroooYg
The Texas abortion law is the latest example of a harrowing trend.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/opinion/texas-abortion.html
But perhaps the most shocking thing about S.B. 8 is the power it gives abortion opponents — or simple opportunists — over their fellow citizens. The law is written so that they, not the police or prosecutors, get to enforce it, and potentially profit off it. Under S.B. 8, any private citizen can sue others for “conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.”
John Pierce has been a combative advocate for those accused of participating in the Jan. 6 attack, but he’s missed court appearances for a week.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/nyregion/capitol-riots.html
“I’m like Gerard Butler in ‘300,’” Mr. Pierce said in an interview before dropping out of sight, comparing himself to the action star who played a Spartan king. “I’m in the hot gates at Thermopylae, holding the pass against the million-man Persian army.”
The U.S. has extricated its military from a two-decade-long conflict, but the country, and tens of thousands of Afghan allies, have been abandoned to the Taliban.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/bidens-chaotic-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-is-complete
A high-school teacher at an American school in Taiwan tried to fly out seven young leaders and their families. Working with others, the teacher was able to get three of the seven families out. “Only three weeks ago they were holding a conference practicing their conflict resolution and negotiation skills,” the teacher, who asked not to be named, told me. “They were the future of what was possible for Afghanistan.”
For many who served in Afghanistan, the flawed evacuation efforts have brought feelings of shame and betrayal.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-veterans-struggling-to-save-afghan-allies
“Do you understand what it’s like to have people send you messages saying, ‘You promised me you’d get me out,’ ‘I’m being hunted,’ ‘You can’t get me out,’ ‘Why are you betraying me?,’ ‘You left me behind’?” Zeller said. “Imagine now it’s someone you served with and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Tolo came to prominence with hard-hitting news, raucous reality shows and lurid Turkish soap operas. Now there are ominous signs that a violent media clampdown is underway.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/world/asia/afghanistan-tolo-taliban.html
But journalists and human rights advocates say there are ominous signs that a violent media clampdown is underway. Taliban fighters hunted a journalist from Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, who had already left the country, shooting dead a member of his family and seriously injuring another, according to the broadcaster.
Serbians and Albanians have clashed in the mountains and valleys of what is now Kosovo since the fourteenth century. In 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army of ethnic Albanian fighters openly fought Serbian police and faced retaliation from Serbian militar
via Columbia Journalism Review: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/in-kosovo-own-truth.php
Between 2013 and mid-2016, police received sixty-two reports of threats or attacks on journalists. In 2020, someone tried to light journalist Shumbin Kajtaji’s car on fire with gasoline, and four months later, someone shot six bullets into the same car on the same street in Mitrovica, just north of Pristina.
Soldiers were told that we were champions of the rights of mankind.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/american-purpose-after-the-fall-of-kabul
The next time that feeling comes around, remember what it wrought. 9/11 unified America. It overcame partisan divides, bound us together, and gave us the sense of common purpose so lacking in today’s poisonous politics. And nothing that we have done as a nation since has been so catastrophically destructive as what we did when we were enraptured by the warm glow of victimization and felt like we could do anything, together.
Last week, the Afghan filmmaker Sahraa Karimi hastily packed a few things, made it onto a flight, and watched from the airplane window as her city got smaller and smaller.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/as-told-to-the-flight-from-kabul
I was running, and in the middle of my running some people made fun of me, especially the men: “Oh, the director of Afghan film is running! She is afraid of the Taliban! Ha ha ha!” I was surprised. Some girls were just walking. I said to them, “Why are you walking? The Taliban is coming!” And they started running, too.