Tag: longform

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

Their most vulgar invectives are often aimed at women, particularly those seen as enemies of Mr. Trump. In one video, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley’s face is pasted on the body of a nearly naked woman, who kicks a man with the face of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in the groin. Another depicts Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife, as a porn star. Women with ties to Mr. DeSantis are often shown with red knees, suggesting they have performed a sex act.

I was surprised by her willingness to be so candid with a stranger. It seemed that part of her decision to speak with me had to do with timing—this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of her brother’s crimes. In the past, she had worried that anything she said publicly might bring more pain to the families of the students Kip had shot, but now that a quarter century had passed she hoped this was less likely. I also sensed that her decision to tell her story was driven in large part by a desire to help her brother. He remains in prison, but they are still in close contact. “The thing you heard a few minutes ago”—a beep on the phone line—“was him trying to call,” she said.

JUST WHEN THE people of San Francisco thought they’d seen every video—the sidewalk drug runners, the Louis Vuitton mob heisters, the men selling stolen laptops, the smash-and-grabbers snatching a camera from a Prius in traffic, the porch pirates porch pirates porch pirates into infinity, all indexed in the “Lawless San Francisco” section of the great internet video store—yes, just then: Stig Strombeck took out his cell phone camera on April 5 and hit Record.

Russian artist Nadya Tolokonnikova, co-founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, was arrested in absentia in Moscow yesterday, November 21, on the charge of “insulting the religious feelings of believers.” Tolokonnikova, who currently lives outside of Russia, faces an immediate two-month detention if she returns to her home country.

Dalio’s inquisitions, in Copeland’s telling, could get overtly cruel. He once berated a top deputy—a woman so impassive and glacial she was nicknamed the Ice Queen—until she broke down into what Copeland describes as “animalistic sobbing.” (The woman did not respond to The New Yorker’s request for comment.) The subsequent training video, titled “Pain + Reflection = Progress,” became required viewing for job candidates

Several Active Clubs, which experts say form a dangerous bedrock for far-right activity and recruitment, joined the second annual tournament alongside extremist groups like Patriot Front and the Hammerskins. Active Clubs are a network of white nationalist mixed martial arts crews inspired by the Rise Above Movement, a now-defunct militant streetfighting group whose neo-Nazi cofounder Robert Rundo is currently in jail awaiting trial on federal rioting charges. They focus on training their members in combat skills in order to prepare them to fight against their purported enemies.

I eat my meat-only Chipotle bowl alone.