Despite the hurdles, territory seized by Azerbaijan from Armenia in last year’s war is being transformed with breathtaking speed.
In Baku, on the gleaming Caspian Sea waterfront, the government has built a “war trophies park” of burned Armenian tanks, captured artillery and Armenian soldiers’ helmets hanging on chains. Life-size figures of Armenian soldiers have huge noses, fearsome eyebrows and bad teeth.
Jovenel Moïse’s family deserves justice for his horrific killing. So do all of the Haitian families who suffered during his rule.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-assassination-of-haitis-president
There are close to a hundred gangs active in Haiti. According to Pierre Espérance, the executive director of the Haitian National Human Rights Defense Network, they control more than half of the country. Turf wars, murders, rapes, and kidnappings have recently led to the displacement of more than eighteen thousand people. Seeking refuge, some sleep in public parks and squares while others crowd into churches and gymnasiums, even as coronavirus cases have remained on the rise. During Moïse’s time in office, gangs carried out thirteen massacres in poor opposition neighborhoods. The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the Haitian Observatory for Crimes Against Humanity studied three and defined them as crimes against humanity.
Late last spring, a strange, beguiling novel began arriving, in installments, in the mail. Who had written it?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/on-the-trail-of-a-mysterious-pseudonymous-author
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.”
Bacalar is poised to become one of the country’s great tourist destinations—if its ecosystem can survive.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/how-a-mexican-lagoon-lost-its-colors
It’s hard to build a booming tourist economy atop an ecological attraction without destroying it. Some of the colonies of microbes in the lagoon are more than nine thousand years old, but they can survive only as long as the water is pure. Luisa Falcón, a microbial ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, has studied oligotrophic microbes all over the world. Swimming in the lagoon, she told me, is like going back in time four billion years—“back to the Archean,” she said. “It’s amazing how primitive these sites are.”
America should pay attention to what has gone awfully wrong in the Lone Star State.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/opinion/texas-democrats-voting-rights.html
Pretty soon, Texans will openly carry loaded firearms into grocery stores, gas stations and even airports. Women will effectively be unable to get a legal abortion. And schoolchildren won’t learn, at least not legally, the unvarnished story about discrimination or racism. And a bunch of Texas legislators are hanging around Washington, D.C., trying to derail draconian restrictions on voting rights in their home state.
Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users’ high engagement levels with right-wing media sources.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.html
“Facebook would love full transparency if there was a guarantee of positive stories and outcomes,” Mr. Boland said. “But when transparency creates uncomfortable moments, their reaction is often to shut down the transparency.”
The company doubled its sales last year by leaning into America’s culture war. It’s also trying to distance itself from some of its new customers.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/magazine/black-rifle-coffee-company.html
“The Black Rifle guys are not the evil that everybody makes them out to be,” says J.J. MacNab, the extremism researcher, “but they’ve closed their eyes to some of the evil that takes their humor seriously.” Still, Black Rifle professes to be eager to put some of its fiercest and trolliest culture-war fights behind it. “What I figured out the last couple of years is that being really political, in the sense of backing an individual politician or any individual party, is really [expletive] detrimental,” Hafer told me. “And it’s detrimental to the company. And it’s detrimental, ultimately, to my mission.”
For weeks, the northern city of Kunduz has suffered daily street battles. Times journalists were there to document a cat-and-mouse war for control.
The Afghan way of war in 2021 comes down to this: a watermelon vendor on a sweltering city street, a government Humvee at the front line just 30 feet away, and Taliban fighters lurking unseen on the other side of the road
Strangers made his small-town portraits famous in the art world. Decades later, his heirs want control of the estate.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/who-owns-mike-disfarmers-photographs
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.
Months after Rupert Murdoch got a Covid-19 vaccine dose, one of his network’s stars, Tucker Carlson, called a Biden vaccination proposal “the greatest scandal in my lifetime.”
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/business/media/vaccines-fox-news-hosts.html
Opposition to vaccines was once relegated to the fringes of American politics, and the rhetoric on Fox News has coincided with efforts by right-wing extremists to bash vaccination efforts.
Since I first read Kristen Roupenian’s viral story, I’ve wondered: How did she know about me?
via Slate Magazine: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/cat-person-kristen-roupenian-viral-story-about-me.html
What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger. Meanwhile, I’m alone with my memories of what really happened—just like any death leaves you burdened with the responsibility of holding onto the parts of a person that only you knew.
It was clear that Muslim journalists could no longer be objective, impartial observers. We were moving targets in Modi’s India.
via The Baffler: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-scream-ali
The emotions I had repressed that day, and for long after, resurface three years later, in therapy. I am overwhelmed by raging helplessness and fear. I also feel shame. In choosing journalism, in abiding by its conventions of self-effacement and objectivity, I feel I have somehow betrayed my identity, my community. The space of therapy allows me, for the first time, to grieve: for myself and my people, for the hatred we now face every day in India. A sense of profound loss suffuses my senses, my heart is heavy. That night, I stay up crying. When sleep comes, it comes with nightmares. I see myself accosted, thrashed by a Hindu mob. The nightmare doesn’t end with the night. Days since then have been engulfed in a miasma of fear and grief.
The company they built is wildly successful. But her Washington wisdom didn’t hold up, and neither did their close working relationship.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/08/business/mark-zuckerberg-sheryl-sandberg-facebook.html
The indictments made it clear just how large a part Facebook had played, both in spreading misinformation about election fraud to fuel anger among the Jan. 6 protesters, and in aiding the extremist militia’s communication ahead of the riots. For months, Facebook would be a footnote to a day that challenged the heart of American democracy. And Ms. Sandberg’s words attempting to place the blame elsewhere would continue to haunt her.
I needed to make portraits that were heartbreaking. I needed to be great, worthy of the Western canon, of Dad.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/12/duplex
If I could resurrect the hungry ghost of Diane Arbus, I would show her the duplex photos hanging on my wall, three thousand miles away from Stockton. I’d tell Diane all about the tile Dad has laid with his bare hands, the foundation he cemented in grout for our sparkling new lives, how no one in our family will touch that tile with their bare feet. How we’ll never feel that morning coldness jolting our tired bodies into waking life.
Noted local criminal Mark McCloskey played host to a barbecue/political rally on Sunday afternoon, drawing tens of admirers to the sweltering parking lot of a closed outlet mall in St. Louis County to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the time he pulled a gun on a crowd of people who otherwise would never have noticed or cared he existed.
Young Afghans defied the Taliban and signed on to reconstruction efforts, only to learn that U.S. and NATO forces would be abruptly withdrawn.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-people-were-leaving-behind-in-afghanistan
“There’s little reflection on failures and America’s role in these failures,” Akbar said. “That’s frustrating to watch. We are being left with a huge mess. We are being told to deal with it mostly on our own. Of course, it’s our responsibility. It’s our country. But it’s not a mess we created on our own.”
“To have someone say you deserve a knife to your throat, that you should be executed, that they are going to eff up your family, shakes you,” a former city clerk said.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/threats-against-election-officials-are-a-threat-to-democracy
Since the election, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, who has served as the city clerk of Madison, Wisconsin, for fifteen years, has struggled with the decision of whether to stay in her job. “I’ve had to figure out if the stress of doing this work is worth trying to make voting accessible for all eligible voters in my community, or if I should be pursuing a career where I’m not receiving any death threats,” she told me
After he killed two people in Kenosha, opportunists turned his case into a polarizing spectacle.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/05/kyle-rittenhouse-american-vigilante
According to a theory of social psychology called the “weapons effect,” the mere sight of a gun inspires aggression. In 1967, the psychologists Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage wrote, “In essence, the gun helps pull the trigger.” Their methodology had flaws, but later studies verified their premise. In one U.K. study, people were more inclined to assault a police officer who was visibly armed with a Taser. Brad Bushman, an Ohio State researcher who served on President Barack Obama’s committee on gun violence, told me, “We’ve found that it really doesn’t matter if a good guy or a bad guy is carrying the gun—it creates the bias to interpret things in a hostile way.” Citizens who openly carry firearms “think that they are making the situation safer, but they are making it much more dangerous.”
The far-right extremist group helped mount an insurrection. Then it began to splinter
via Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/proud-boys-far-right-group-1183966/
Guest appearances on Rogan’s podcast were instrumental to the Proud Boys’ growth, says Juliet Jeske, a student at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism who has been following McInnes since 2016, and has watched and archived all 407 episodes of his show. On it, McInnes frequently bragged about how many new followers he’d acquired with each Rogan appearance, Jeske says. Though episodes featuring McInnes were deleted from Rogan’s catalog when his show moved to Spotify, Rogan has previously defended his decision to have McInnes on, saying, “I had him on before he was even a Proud Boy. I didn’t even know what the fuck the Proud Boys was” (this despite McInnes having referred to the Proud Boys as a “gang” on a Rogan podcast appearance). In a later interview, Rogan called McInnes “mostly fun.” (Rogan did not return a request for comment.)
How did Beebo Russell — a goofy, God-fearing baggage handler — steal a passenger plane from the Seattle-Tacoma airport and end up alone in a cockpit, with no plan to come down?
via Rolling Stone: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/beebo-russell-seattle-plane-theft-true-story-1187023/
Looping back toward the southern Sound, Russell broke in with an alarming request: “Hey, pilot guy,” he said. “Can this thing do a backflip, ya think?” It was just before 8:30 p.m.; the sky was turning twilight. Russell was coming up with a plan. And it didn’t involve a landing. “Think I’m gonna try to do a barrel roll,” he said, “and if that goes good, then I’ll just nose down and call it a night.”