When the business icon died in a fire last week, questions abounded. The answers seem rooted in a Covid-period spiral, where he turned to drugs and shunned old friends.
“I am going to be blunt,” she wrote in the letter, the content of which was shared with Forbes. “I need to tell you that I don’t think you are well and in your right mind. I think you are taking too many drugs that cause you to disassociate.”
Patrick Byrne, the former head of Overstock, had always been outspoken. Did an affair with a Russian agent push him too far?
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/14/a-tycoons-deep-state-conspiracy-dive
Byrne told me that he immediately wondered if Butina was a “red sparrow”—a reference to the 2013 novel that was turned into a film starring Jennifer Lawrence, in which a former ballerina becomes a spy for the Russian government, seducing and killing her targets. Before their lunch, Byrne said, he crafted sharp weapons from two coat hangers, which he stashed under the bed and under the sofa, and made a mental note to keep a close watch over his food and drink.
The long read: A drone sighting caused the airport to close for two days in 2018, but despite a lengthy police investigation, no culprit was ever found. So what exactly did people see in the Sussex sky?
via the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/01/the-mystery-of-the-gatwick-drone
A few years ago, a T-shirt became popular among Britain’s drone flyers. “Before you ask”, it says. “It’s a drone. Yes, it was expensive. Yes, it has a camera. About 25 minutes. Over a mile away. No, you can’t fly it.” Since the Gatwick incident, the men told me, people who see them flying drones are often more hostile than before. I heard several drone flyers repeat some variation of a new saying: “Gatwick drone? There’s more evidence for the Loch Ness monster.”
A government-commissioned report provides the most definitive explanation yet for “Havana syndrome,” which struck scores of American employees, first in Cuba and then in China, Russia and other countries.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/business/economy/havana-syndrome-microwave-attack.html
“My government looked the other way when they knew I and my family were injured,” he said. “This report is just the beginning and when the American people know the full extent of this administration’s cover-up of the radiofrequency attacks in China in particular they will be outraged.”
How a state that was never in doubt became a “national embarrassment” and a symbol of the Republican Party’s fealty to Donald Trump.
via POLITICO: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/24/michigan-election-trump-voter-fraud-democracy-440475
That November 4 missive James retweeted from his campaign adviser—“Stop making up numbers, stalling the process and cheating the system”—has since been deleted. But there is no denying the advent of a pattern. Republicans in Michigan and across America have spent the past three weeks promoting baseless allegations of corruption at the ballot box, the rabid responses to which they use as justification to continue to question the fundamental integrity of our elections. It’s a vicious new playbook—one designed to stroke egos and rationalize defeats, but with unintended consequences that could spell the unraveling of America’s democratic experiment.
Link: https://www.filfre.net/2020/12/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-part-2-colonization/
In 2008, Firaxis Games — a company founded by Sid Meier, Brian Reynolds, and Jeff Briggs — announced a new version of Colonization, which once again chose to present Native Americans as dim-witted primitives and to completely ignore the historical reality of slavery. Even before its release, Ben Fritz, a gaming blogger for Variety, loudly attacked it for having committed the vaguely defined, all-purpose crime of being “offensive.” Fritz’s blog post is neither well-argued nor well-written — “I literally exclaimed ‘holy sh*t’ out loud when I was reading an email this morning,” goes its unpromising beginning — so I won’t bother to quote more from it here. But it was a harbinger of the controversy to come, which came to dominate the critical discussion around the new Colonization to the point that its qualities as a mere game were all but ignored. Firaxis published the following terse missive in a fruitless attempt to defuse the situation:
In one Southern California city, flying drones with artificial intelligence are aiding investigations while presenting new civil rights questions.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/technology/police-drones.html
When the man left the car, carrying a gun and a bag of heroin, a nearby police car had trouble following as he sprinted across the street and ducked behind a wall. But as he threw the gun into a dumpster and hid the bag of heroin, the drone, hovering above him, caught everything on camera. When he slipped through the back door of a strip mall, exited through the front door and ran down the sidewalk, it caught that, too.
Anand Patwardhan spent decades tracking the rise of Hindu nationalism. And now, under an increasingly repressive government, he holds his screenings in secret.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/magazine/india-documentary-anand-patwardhan.html
Over four hours, “Reason” documents how the world’s largest democracy has plunged into a majoritarian abyss since the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., came to power in 2014, and Narendra Modi was voted in as the prime minister. With testimonies from witnesses to mob lynchings, stories of college students driven to suicide by intense right-wing ostracism and interviews with Hindu nationalists willing to defend the frequent murders of journalists and activists, Patwardhan contradicts the narrative that the B.J.P. routinely projects to the country’s 900 million voters: a story where, under Modi, India is at last starting to fulfill its potential, more than 70 years after independence. A week before the parliamentary elections last year, 16 clips from “Reason” were anonymously posted on YouTube. Watching them I grew afraid, not just for the fate of the film at the hands of the Censor Board but also for Patwardhan.
The iron-fisted tactics used against Georgia and Ukraine seem to have fallen out of favor, replaced by a more subtle blend of soft power and an implicit military threat.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/world/europe/nagorno-karabakh-putin-armenia-azerbaijan.html
“What else is to be done?” Mr. Mikaelyan asked, after taking another look at the blown-out hotel room door, the TV ripped off the wall, the trails of blood still stuck to the third floor. “The European Union is doing nothing. The Americans are doing nothing.”
Since Friday’s killing, the question increasingly being asked in Washington and the Middle East is about motive.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-assassination-of-a-scientist-will-have-no-impact-on-irans-nuclear-program
On Friday, the Muslim holy day, he was reportedly travelling with his wife, in a black Nissan sedan, from Tehran to visit his in-laws in Absard, a town famed for its apple and cherry orchards, about forty-five miles away. Highways around the capital are notoriously clogged, but travel restrictions imposed during the covid-19 crisis have meant far less traffic. As Fakhrizadeh’s car neared a roundabout, a blue pickup truck parked near an electricity transmitter opened fire on the car and then exploded, cutting off local power, including to a nearby clinic; roadside cameras were disabled. One account claimed that a dozen gunmen—one group jumped out of a parked S.U.V. and another arrived on motorcycles, while snipers were hidden nearby—opened fire. A separate account, by Fars, the nation’s semi-official news agency, reported that all the fire came from the pickup truck, which was remote-controlled. Fars claimed that there were no human assailants at the scene; the whole operation took three minutes, the agency said. Both accounts said that Fakhrizadeh, hit multiple times, fell out of his car and bled out on the ground. The Iranian media released photos of the bullet-riddled car and the blood stream. By the time a rescue helicopter got Fakhrizadeh to Tehran, he was dead.
Biden wants to reinstate the nuclear deal, but first he must confront the new Middle East.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/29/opinion/iran-biden-nuclear-scientist.html
In effect, Trump forced Israel and the key Sunni Arab states to become less reliant on the United States and to think about how they must cooperate among themselves over new threats — like Iran — rather than fighting over old causes — like Palestine. This may enable America to secure its interests in the region with much less blood and treasure of its own. It could be Trump’s most significant foreign policy achievement.
Mexico is set to shatter another murder record, but that grim reality is nowhere to be seen on the TikTok videos that go viral by showcasing drug cartel culture.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/world/americas/mexico-drugs-cartel-tiktok.html
But while some videos are still made to strike terror, others are created to show young men in rural Mexico the potential benefits of joining the drug trade: endless cash, expensive cars, beautiful women, exotic pets.
The President is being forced to give up his attempt to overturn the election. But he will continue his efforts to build an alternative reality around himself.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/07/the-cost-of-trumps-assault-on-the-press-and-the-truth
But Trump knew precisely what he was doing, and he never let up. During a meeting at Trump Tower, Leslie Stahl, of CBS News, asked why he kept attacking the press. “You know why I do it?” he said. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so that, when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.
Link: https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money
No one quite knows how much COBOL is out there, but estimates suggest there are as many as 240 billion lines of the code quietly powering many of the most crucial parts of our everyday lives. “The second most valuable asset in the United States — after oil — is the 240 billion lines of COBOL,” says Philip Teplitzky, who’s slung COBOL for decades for banks across the U.S.
Last year, a hacker gave Glenn Greenwald a trove of damning messages between Brazil’s leaders. Some suspected the Russians. The truth was far less boring.
via WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/brazil-hacker-bolsonaro-car-wash-leaks/
“Oh yeah, don’t worry about that. They’ll never catch me,” the source boasted. He said he was using multiple proxies that made it nearly impossible for anyone to find him, and he was never going to set foot on Brazilian soil again. The call was about four minutes long—Greenwald kept it short, but said he wanted to see the documents. “OK, I’m gonna just start uploading them to your phone,” the source said. He told Greenwald it would take between 12 to 15 hours to finish uploading.
We told you so.
via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3doI5Yx3Eus
When Trump won the 2016 election—while losing the popular vote—the New York Times seemed obsessed with running features about what Trump voters were feeling and thinking. These pieces treated them …
via Literary Hub: https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-on-not-meeting-nazis-halfway/
The implication is the usual one: we—urban multiethnic liberal-to-radical only-partly-Christian America—need to spend more time understanding MAGA America. The demands do not go the other way. Fox and Ted Cruz and the Federalist have not chastised their audiences, I feel pretty confident, with urgings to enter into discourse with, say, Black Lives Matter activists, rabbis, imams, abortion providers, undocumented valedictorians, or tenured lesbians. When only half the divide is being tasked with making the peace, there is no peace to be made, but there is a unilateral surrender on offer. We are told to consider this bipartisanship, but the very word means both sides abandon their partisanship, and Mitch McConnell and company have absolutely no interest in doing that
Strip clubs, board games, sugar babies, an office coup — and a whole lot of money
via The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/21571690/oomba-startup-work-environment-sex-lies-video-games-gameworks-exworks
I reviewed thousands of pages of documents and spoke with over 30 sources about Williams and Oomba, including investors, employees, and business partners. Most described him as narcissistic, a fast-talking salesman with a talent for separating people from their savings. He drank a lot of Red Bull and had a puerile sense of humor, asking an employee who brought her cat into work, “Can I pet your pussy?” again and again. Williams apparently didn’t like rules, couldn’t focus, and seemed unable to accept that he might ever be wrong. He could be volatile, swearing over text message (“if you don’t return my call by 5 PM you are fucking fired you fucking douche”) and chastising employees over the office PA system (“Come to my office now you dumb motherfucker”).
Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up. The V.C. firm Benchmark helped enable WeWork to make one wild mistake after another—hoping that its gamble would pay off before disaster struck.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/how-venture-capitalists-are-deforming-capitalism
However, as reports of WeWork’s oddities began appearing in the media, board members who once had been willing to publicly defend Neumann started declining interview requests. In early 2019, when the Wall Street Journal was poised to report that Neumann had been personally buying buildings and then leasing them to WeWork—a form of self-dealing that would have been grounds for censure at almost any other firm—company executives pleaded with board members to defend Neumann in the press. All of them refused. “They were embarrassed,” a WeWork executive recalled. “They were a Vichy board, and there was obviously this tension between, like, upholding good corporate governance and frankly just saying, ‘I don’t give a fuck, because my investment is getting better every day, and so it doesn’t really matter what Adam does as long as I can get my money out at some point.’ ”
The Kolyma Highway in the Russian Far East once delivered tens of thousands of prisoners to the work camps of Stalin’s gulag. The ruins of that cruel era are still visible today.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/22/world/europe/russia-stalin-gulag-kolyma-magadan.html
More than a million prisoners traveled the road, both ordinary convicts and people convicted of political crimes. They included some of Russia’s finest minds — victims of Stalin’s Great Terror like Sergei Korolev, a rocket scientist who survived the ordeal and in 1961 helped put the first man in space. Or Varlam Shalamov, a poet who, after 15 years in the Kolyma camps, concluded, “There are dogs and bears that behave more intelligently and morally than human beings.” His experiences, recorded in his book “Kolyma Tales,” convinced him that “a man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger and beatings.”