Tag: longform

The boss warned his captives, “It’s going to cost me about ten dinars”—seven dollars—“to kill you.” This was the price of a muslin sheet that the guards used to wrap corpses before burying them in the desert.

The boss was one of the most notorious human traffickers in Africa. He was known universally by his first name: Kidane.

More than half the Marines in the battery had eventually received diagnoses of traumatic brain injuries, according to a briefing prepared for Marine Corps headquarters. The report warned that the experience in Syria showed that firing a high number of rounds, day after day, could incapacitate crews “faster than combat replacements can be trained to replace them.”

In an era of darkness and blood, it is nearly impossible to remember that, from Moscow to Jerusalem, there was once

Nine days ago, the idea that an obscure 2020 election denier from Shreveport, Louisiana, with less than five thousand dollars in his household’s bank accounts, a literalist’s belief in the presence of dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark, and a dubious past as an advocate of “conversion” therapy for gay teens could single-handedly shape the fate of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance to key allies at war was even more preposterous than the notion that America might soon reëlect its four-times-indicted former President.

A service economy emerged of people who were willing to perform these attacks for a fee or a cut of the takings. On Telegram, one group offered brickings, robberies, and kidnappings for a few hundred to thousands of dollars. Name the state, and they would see if they had people there. When the heists were digital-only, Searchers found juicy targets by rummaging through emails before bringing in a Holder to take over their phone number. Searchers now hunted for victims and then provided their details to new roles in these organizations: the Bricker. The Fighter. The Gunman.

These days, Conway reckons, humanity mines, drains, and blasts more stuff out of the ground each year than it did in total during the roughly three hundred millennia between the birth of the species and the start of the Korean War. This comes with immense consequences, both ecological and social, even if we don’t attend to them

But the man on the other end spoke in a way that was instantly familiar. Linares had come to know that pitched, menacing tone from years of run-ins with every kind of Mexican gangster.

“This is Commander Eagle,” the voice said. “I’m from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.”

Watching the video last summer, I couldn’t help recalling, given Aldean’s association with a mass shooting, that one thing that was tried in a small town in recent American history was the massacre that killed nineteen children in Uvalde, Texas, last year; that law enforcement in that small town waited in the halls for an hour without confronting the shooter; that the small town’s only pediatrician later testified to Congress about identifying the dead by the cartoons on their clothes because their bodies were too damaged. Considered in this light, “Try That in a Small Town” becomes an allegory about posturing over perceived threats to national integrity while ignoring the lived reality of a horror too disturbing to mediate.