Drone Realism

You can’t tell a story about drones without additionally telling a surveillance story.

Fresh Hell

Who Loves the Sun? Ah, the sun. Spherical majesty, chariot of Helios, sister to the moon. It warms the faces of children, coaxes buds from the earth, and makes golden gods of the jogger, the beachgoer, the unbridled nudist. But what has it done for us lately? The lambent plasmoid at the center of our solar system’s days of freeloading may soon be over: the European Union is looking into the prospect of blocking out the sun and re-engineering the atmosphere as a remarkably short-sighted solution to global warming and climate change. Sure, why ask us to change our lifestyles when you can simply alter the incandescent gas that blights us? Look, the end of the world is coming; at this point, it’s just a question of settling on the dystopia of choice. Will apes be our masters, will our flesh become food for albino morlocks, or are we looking at a Mad Max scenario, roving the desert in search of some sanctuary from our Immortan overlords? Choose and perish.   Truant Lies Horny Mormons have thrown the Salt Lake City legal infrastructure into chaos once again: a federal judge in Utah ruled that Skyridge High School did not violate a family’s religious freedom by relaxing attendance for a week at the end of the school year—sanctioned hooky that the family’s teen son used to have sex with his girlfriend in the parking lot, in flagrant disregard of their deeply held Latter-day Saints beliefs. This is the kind of frivolous lawsuit one expects for SLC, where it is illegal to throw rocks, modify the weather, or “cause a catastrophe.” Yeah, keep the catastrophes in godless Kansas City and stay off the grass, out of the parking lot, and stop trying to rob the Great Salt Lake of its buoyancy.   I’m with Cupid It’s not love that is in the air but hazardous smoke from Canadian wildfires, just one of many disappointments afflicting the dating life of miscreants this week: In Indiana, a mugger took $100 from a woman at gunpoint, forced her to add him on Facebook, and began sending her flirtatious messages like, “Damn, you was too pretty to rob,” before a SWAT team arrested the lovelorn desperado. A new book by former Trump staffer Miles Taylor dishes the unwelcome if grimly unsurprising fantasies the ex-president shared about his daughter Ivanka. Youtube creator Colleen Ballinger has denied allegations that she groomed her fans over the course of five years—through song, while accompanying herself on ukulele. Now that the routine public spectacle of public apology has gone twee, one can only anticipate that scandal-ridden politicians will make their mea culpas on theremin, juiced-up sports stars on melodica, influencers outed for backing unsavory causes on keytar.   Slum As You Are France has razed 275 slums in their territory of Mazotte off the coast of Africa since the beginning of the year and the interior minister has promised to “break the record for deportations” after expelling twenty-five thousand migrants from the islands in 2022. Condemned by human rights groups, the terror the state has exerted on its poor as part of its “Wuambushu” initiative to combat crime and immigration is surely not the only answer to economic jeopardy. Just look at Australia, where top financiers are pinning their hopes on the upcoming Taylor Swift tour to breathe new life into its flagging economy. Travel costs and spending (including luxurious VIP bundles) are apparently just what down under needs to put shrimps back on the barbie, the vegemite back on the toast, and keep the knives knives.     Unaware-Wolf Wild horses couldn’t drag me away, but they seem fine with being airlifted, as a helicopter in central Italy kindly rescued a horse stuck in a hole by tethering ropes around it and levitating it to safety. And if this news story sounds sedate, you haven’t heard of the scandalized baker in Dorset who was sacked after his three-hundred-year-old establishment was lambasted for making holey bread and won more than £15,000 after complaining to a court that baking is an art, not a science, and sometimes a hole is the mark of quality. And finally, the peaceful community of Piqua, Ohio, has been riven by controversy after the city asked one Mary Simmons to take town the ten-foot werewolf statue she left up after Halloween and has been dressing seasonally—including in red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July—ever since. “I’m not asking for a lot,” says Simmons, “just let me have my werewolf.” Hopefully, this defiant lycanthrope will survive the jackbooted thugs of Ohio, though, on the other hand, werewolves are nothing to take lightly. Even a man who is pure at heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf-man when the wolfsbane blooms and the moon is full and bright.

Canceling Equity

Who's afraid of promoting "equity" in public health?

The President is Arrested

Trump's shock troops gather in Miami, to see and be seen.

It’s Pat

How Pat Lynch remade the NYPD in his image.

Lorenza Mazzetti’s Kingdom for Children

The writer-director rejected the bourgeois adult world.

Fresh Hell

Everybody’s Got Something to Hide And thanks to a yearlong investigation, we know that that includes the global network of monkey-torturing sociopaths recently unmasked by the BBC. Several arrests have been made and many more placed under investigation after horrifying made-to-order videos featuring the brutalization, and sometimes death, of long-tailed macaques have come to light, along with details of their manufacture and how the devious aficionados who patronize them connected over Telegram, all under the auspices of a mysterious ringleader alluded to in the story as “Mr. Ape.” It’s a little hard to swallow that in the same week that brought us the Titan submersible tragedy, a two-year-old’s shooting of his mother in Ohio, and the unconscionable banning of Pride flags on public buildings in one Michigan city, there are still more gems of glittering blight and depravity to pluck out of the news cycle’s jeweled skull, but monkey saw and man did. Our simian brethren weren’t put here for the abuse of shockaholics in Virginia, but to be curious, outkart Mario, and occasionally kidnap Fay Wray. Somewhere Dr. Zaius is taking notes.   Vanderbilt to Spill Starbucks workers at more than 150 stores have announced that they are striking after the company banned Pride decorations, but more grave institutional injustices are brewing down south in Tennessee. Vanderbilt University Medical Center turned over transgender patient records to the state’s attorney general, who used civil investigative demand to bypass judges and probable cause, for what they say is an inquiry into potential medical billing fraud on the part of providers, not patients. This comes as scarce comfort to families whose children have sought treatment at VUMC amid a political climate that saw the Volunteer State attempt to ban gender-affirming care for minors over the objections of the DOJ and had a state law limiting drag show performances declared unconstitutional earlier this month. But the hero we need isn’t from Washington, but right out of the Smoky Mountains: it is Dolly Parton, who has repeatedly spoken out against the North Carolina “bathroom bill,” and championed LGTBQ+ causes, saying (in a voice like a sassy velvet painting): “I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are.”    If It Roblox Like a Duck A series of phishing scams hitting crypto sites like Orbiter Finance has netted some $73 million in NFTs and tokens, locking down their Discord servers and using drainers inadvertently opened by users who receive airdrops and . . . oh my gosh, all this jargon, when did the chyrons on these sites turn into Gravity’s Rainbow? Anyway, the culprits? Almost entirely high-school students who are spending their ill-gotten gains on the online game platform Roblox, buying top-dollar skins for their avatars. The identity and methodology of the scammers were unearthed by security researcher Plum, and substantiated by one called Fantasy, who exposed one saboteur known as Pink, because now that money is theoretical and crime is virtual, regular names are just one more boomer vestige of the old world. And before you think of Prince, his name really was Prince. And Madonna really was the mother of god.   Stuck in the Middle with You Saudi Arabia has outdone the United States’s hijacking of Pride by disseminating vile and homophobic lies that President Biden has declared America “the nation of the gays” and is imposing homosexuality on Iraqi schools. The “journalist” spearheading the disinformation campaign is Hussain al-Ghawi, who helped brand slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi as an enemy of the state, but his source is good old-fashioned American conservative media, which originated many of the fabulations now seeing second life as propaganda. Elsewhere, a raid on the occupied Palestinian town of Turmus Ayya by Israeli settlers left one dead and ten wounded while cars, houses, and fields were blasted by both mob and military forces. The attack comes after an escalation in Hamas violence, as gunmen killed four at a settlement-side gas station on Tuesday. “Things are just repeating themselves,” said an Israeli activist. If history is a rerun, let’s keep this kind of overfamiliar turpitude out of the real world and back on ABC’s TGIF where it belongs.   Ace of Bass Well, this is nice. A Wisconsin diver has introduced the New York Post to his friend, the smallmouth bass he calls Elvis, whom he meets up with every summer to swim and recognizes by a distinctive facial scar the affectionate fish likely sustained from a fisherman. Let the trans-species harmony between this brave freshwater resident and this cheesehead remind us what can be done when you shrug off the hooks in your craw and makes eyes through the scrum. 

Miracle

And yet Harrison survived. More than that, after three days, he woke up.

Comey As You Are

James Comey’s will to power has nowhere to flourish but in his mind.

Fear and Loathing on Melrose Place

In Jack Skelley’s LA, everything—even basic reality—is warped or subject to question.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1952–2023 

Art is long, life is short.

Daniel in the Lion’s Den

Daniel Ellsberg never let anyone off the hook easily—including himself.

Fresh Hell

The Fire Next Time and the Time After That Too Among its lesser known charms, Canada is the storied birthplace of a great many mystifying innovations and personages that have subsequently been exported to the United States: from Michael Bublé and peanut butter, to deadmau5 and the Wonderbra, to Justin Bieber and Hawaiian pizza. Last week, our nominal ally expelled the carcinogenic byproduct of hundreds of wildfires—a bonafide airborne toxic event—down south to bedevil much of the eastern seaboard. As cities like New York were enveloped in a noxious haze reminiscent of the de rigueur color correction for all Netflix films set in the Global South, words like unprecedented and apocalyptic and really bad were thrown around in newspapers and group chats. Some speculated this might become the “new normal,” a grisly update to the previous “new normal.” Frankly, it’s getting a bit difficult to keep track of and respond with the appropriate gravitas to all the updates, a ceaseless torrent of disasters made worse by our implacable hunger for electric Hummers and ribeye steaks and hand creams with notes of vetiver and bergamot. Last week, a toxic cloud reeking of cigars; this week, thousands of dead fish washing up on the Gulf coast of Texas. And next week? Will the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica collapse? Might a toxic algae bloom finally swallow Miami? Who’s to say. Perhaps if we all glue our hands to an impressionist painting in a nearby museum, our elected leaders will do something to slow the apocalypse to a more leisurely pace.   With a Little Help from My Neural Network Meanwhile, the great, fearsome machinery of capitalist society remains doggedly focused on expanding the possible applications for “artificial intelligence.” As we reported last week, a computer can now draft an obituary for your deceased grandmother, freeing up precious time to start new email threads about separate email threads commenced so as to schedule a Zoom meeting regarding the status of various projects as tracked by Monday.com but waylaid by a discussion of “insensitive language” in an all-staff memo generated by ChatGPT. Speaking of ChatGPT, doctors are now reportedly using it to infuse their bedside manner with a bit more compassion. In the cultural sphere—to the extent it can still be meaningfully distinguished from commerce—The Beatles have announced they’ll be getting a little help from artificial intelligence to release a final record, which will, of course, feature vocals from John Lennon, who has been dead for over forty years.    Some Don’t Like It Hot Civil rights may be eroding from sea to acidifying sea, but it’s important to keep abreast of lesser threats to human flourishing, lest they be allowed to get a foothold: case in point, the rise of “hot phobia,” which the New York Post has been covering since at least April, when a young woman was kicked out of a supermarket in Brazil because, well, she was too hot. “Truth is,” the twenty-one-year-old declared, “we go through it because we’re too hot, that’s all.” The dread aversion to attractive women has also manifested in the UK, where one hot mom reports that the other moms ignore her because, yes, she’s simply too hot. “The other moms don’t talk to me when I look nice,” she said, according to a story in the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun, which was then reprinted in the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post. “They just turn their noses up.” This menace must be investigated—panels must be convened, evidence examined, reports drafted, recommendations circulated, targets set, guidelines established, change made!   Carnal Knowledge While we’re on the subject of visual stimulation, pornography is again under attack. As Wired reports, courts in no fewer than five states have mandated the use of a faith-based, anti-porn app called Covenant Eyes for people on probation. The app—designed by a former NSA employee—helpfully monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an “accountability partner,” in many cases a probation officer, who then reviews possibly “concerning” material. As one might suspect, this is working just fine. No bugs, no violations of privacy, no undue contraction of basic human rights, nothing of that sort, no, no. That said, yes, a man in Indiana is back in prison for violating parole because his wife allegedly visited Pornhub.   Repo Man Woe be unto those who happened to donate their body to the Harvard Medical School between 2018 and 2022, during which time Cedric Lodge, an enterprising morgue employee, helped himself to heads, brains, skin, bones, and sundry other body parts, which he then sold to interested parties across this great nation. According to the indictment, his clients were not dispossessed of a sense of humor as they methodically went about their macabre business: one client, a Mr. Joshua Taylor, paid $200 for what, according to the memo line in Paypal, was “braiiiiiins.” Even in death, thou shalt not be spared the indignities of the market.

Errant Telenovelas

Telenovelas are the Mexican arbiters of life and death.

Brains on Drugs

How consuming drugs to expand one’s consciousness went from an intellectual pastime to an emblem of social decay.

Archival Frictions

Painting a fuller picture of lesbian experience.

Fresh Hell

Deepest Gondolances In a week that saw Canadian wildfires turn the air a sprightly yellow and ensconce the New York metropolitan area in a malevolent mist, closing businesses and blighting eyes, color seems in revolt worldwide: on Sunday, a Venice canal turned fluorescent green. Algae blooms and ecoterrorism were both briefly considered as the culprits in the sliming of the Veneto capital—and look, it’s not like the waters of Venice are exactly a model of septic health in the best of times—but it seems that the harmless dye fluorescein, widely used by forensic pathologists, is behind the chartreuse menace under the Rialto Bridge. What nobody knows is why. Is it a protest against the tourism traffic that has worn down the city’s natural beauty to a nub? Guerilla marketing for the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie? Did Nickelodeon dump two tons of its excess slime off the side of a gondola? All that seems certain is that the water, like the air, can no longer be depended on to retain its color for the convenience of idle mankind; if Venice wants to be green, let it be green. Yellow sky at night, sailor’s delight. Green water in morning, gondoliers nonconforming.    Patient Zero Here is a rhyme that comes with a riddle: What’s round at the ends, hi in the middle? Whatever it is, it seems to be host to a unique strain of Covid and, the hunt is underway in Ohio for the carrier of the mutated virus, which is unlike anything scientists have seen since the beginning of the pandemic. The patient is believed to be the most long-lasting sufferer of Covid and poses a danger should the disease take on new attributes and prove contagious. Authorities have narrowed down the likely commute of the unknown plague vector and speculated that they may be a student at The Ohio State University, but beyond that, the author of our future annihilation remains anonymous. Hopefully, whatever horrifying new Alpha or Omicron derivation is incubating in the Buckeye State will likely make it in time for next Christmas. “You there, boy! What variant is this?”    Let It Bey Archaeologists working on behalf of a Dutch museum have been banned from excavations at the Saqqara necropolis in Egypt due to their controversial exhibitions, which portray Miles Davis, Nas, and Beyoncé as ancient Egyptians like Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and King Tutankhamen. The Egyptian authorities allege that the museum is falsifying history by allowing speculative renditions of Nubian and Egyptian antiquity to influence scientific accuracy and is part of the wider question of race in the ancient world, which continues to be controversial, but the museum’s exhibit—which also features costumes worn by Sun Ra and songs by Erykah Badu and Nina Simone—only aimed to present the attendant motifs “as symbols of resistance, empowerment, and spiritual healing,” according to the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. It’s hard to imagine that Sun Ra wouldn’t approve of this mayhem, having once uttered prophetically, “I’m not real. I’m just like you.”   Police On My Back A report by the Department of Homeland Security has deemed protesters demonstrating against the construction of the massive “Cop City” facility in Atlanta “a violent far-left occupation,” copying language from a right-wing troll and provocateur who regularly targets activists in his screeds and fallacious news stories. Smeared as “militants,” one of the protestors against the $90 million mock city has already been killed by police and five more have been arrested. Domestic terrorism charges have been leveled at twenty-three of the activists in Georgia so far, and a bail fund for jailed protesters has been charged with money laundering, to the outrage of civil liberties groups, one of which has characterized the use of laws designed to battle hate crimes as “a political cudgel.” None of this bodes well for the rule of law in Atlanta, but at least the cops will soon have their own city-state, because they can stay there and entertain tourists making the pilgrimage to America’s heartland to see Cop City.   Grimace Tidings Grinning pangender nonthreatening spokesthing Grimace is celebrating their birthday at McDonald’s starting June 12—making the cretinous purple fuzz-mound a Gemini—and celebrants of the sordid nativity will have the opportunity to purchase pool floats and enormous purple shakes. The restaurant chain’s ad copy speculates on the ambiguous provenance of Grimace, suggesting that they may be a taste bud, which is a failure of internal communication, as the dollop of nightmarish aplomb was introduced in the 1970s as a ravenous shake-beast that dwelt in an unhappy valley that encroached on McDonaldland’s peaceable kingdom. Meanwhile, in the real world, more than six hundred tiny pigs were rounded up in Florida after escaping from a sanctuary, a seven-pound cheese wheel was rolled down the hill and over the flailing bodies of British extreme sports enthusiasts as part of a nearly two-hundred-year-old tradition, and a Connecticut bear broke into a bakery and ate sixty cupcakes and a coconut cake. It was, in short, another week filled with food, and none of it edible by human standards. You may look at it, you may run from it, you may advertise it, but you must not taste.

Rumpel

We were coming for no one. We were coming for ourselves.

Fresh Hell

Babes in Oyland Life begins, language and memory dawn as the skull grows hard, and the digestion adapts to solids; the future is full of promise. But since disappointment, emotional scar tissue, and debt await you anyway, why not get the ball rolling and become traumatized by social media before you’ve learned to walk? The New York Times reports that screen names, social media profiles, and bulging spam folders are increasingly attached to newborns by their parents long before they have the cogency to operate them. One motivator is the mad rush to claim online IDs, lest you wind up like the father of Charlie Condoleon, who was infuriated to discover that Instagram handles were slim pickings for his toddler. “Someone’s got Charlie Condo,” he raged to the Times, “and it’s like some random dude!” The internet is, of course, random dude central, so nothing says childcare like making sure information traceable to your offspring is widely available in the digital realm from before they have even had an idea. Another child received their first email at three hours old. Welcome to the world; now prepare to consume and become dependent on what passes for reaffirmation now that love has been replaced by likes. The age you inherit is truly a matter of timing. Next time you’re in the birth canal, take the express lane.   WeShirk Determined to go global with decisions and investments so poor that Jared Leto has already played him on television, WeWork’s tragically credulous cofounder Adam Neumann may be taking his new residential real estate startup, Flow, to Saudi Arabia after being met with an understandable lack of interest from investors domestically. Neumann has wasted no time seeing eye to eye with the Saudi royals, seemingly undeterred by the oil-rich nation’s monarchs’ involvement in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and poor human rights records overall, calling the royal highness a “founder” and the country “a startup” because everything is just trendy tech-bro jargon to this guy. Amoral entrepreneurs in bed with foreign powers used to be the stuff supervillains were made of, but tools like Neumann are doomed to fail and born to hench, not so much an Oddjob as a Conjob.   The Boys in the Brand Daylight, the LGTBQ+ banking startup catering to the queer community, began promisingly with rainbow credit cards and free Grindr, but has rapidly escalated into a David Koresh-style cult of personality, with CEO Rob Curtis demanding absolute fealty from his employees even as he planned to expand into surrogacy (“The bank that made me pregnant!” he raved), enormously exaggerated Daylight’s finances, and regaled coworkers with tales of his youth recreationally imbibing GHB. Now facing meltdown and accusations of toxic behavior and predatory practices, Daylight’s real legacy may be in proving that the straight world does not have a monopoly on hellish workplaces or vainglorious overlords.   The Science of Creep Rafael Luque, one of the world’s most prolific scientists—so much so that he has published one paper for every thirty-seven hours this year—has been suspended without pay from the University of Córdoba in Spain after it was revealed that his more than seven-hundred studies, mostly on the subject of green chemistry, increasingly relied on artificial intelligence for “polish” that may amount to plagiarism. Luque also received funding from foreign institutions in Russia and Saudi Arabia looking to grow their research bonafides. The papers themselves are filled with torturous attempts to disguise the AI, unnecessary citations, and made-up scientific concepts that sound like the exposition from an episode of Star Trek. Luque denies the allegations and defends maybe cutting corners, since his industry relies on a “publish or perish” mentality that has seen him pump out formulae regarding “vegetative electron microscopy” like a Micro Machines guy does words.   The Bourne Mistaken Identity This week’s news cycle was punctured by cases of mistaken identity so unfortunate, they seem to have leaked from cinematic convenience not seen since Jeffrey Lebowski had his rug ruined. In Boston, a DOJ training exercise led to FBI cadets bursting into a hotel room and detaining the innocent tourists they mistook for actors; on the other side of the law, an Ohio man was arrested after he called a dumpster company and left a long voice message instructing them to murder his son because he thought he had the number of a hitman. Sadly, doomscroll regulars like Elon Musk, who removed the w in his company HQ’s logo on Thursday so it reads “Titter,” have proven to be exactly who we thought they were.

Thinking Like a Mountain

On Tom Comitta’s ecological fiction.