“Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regime’s clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trump’s Maga movement. (Furber denies being ‘Q’.) In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences include childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories. So what connects these men’s southern African backgrounds with Maga today? Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thiel’s father worked was ‘known for conditions not far removed from indentured servitude’, writes Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin. ‘White managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.’ The mine’s black migrant workers lived in work camps. To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasn’t due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others weren’t. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thiel’s contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid ‘works’ and was ‘economically sound.’ His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid. The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society and becoming more violent in the 80s. Musk’s teenage recollections of seeing murders on trains may not be entirely factual, but do evoke the atmosphere of the era. He warned in 2023 about potential ‘genocide of white people in South Africa.’ Trump’s recent claim about ‘American girls being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage criminal aliens’ preyed on similar white fears.” (Simon Kuper/FT)
“Less than a year after Japan's X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission launched to space, the space telescope's first results are in — and they are stunning. The X-ray telescope, also known as XRISM, is operated by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with participation from the European Space Agency (ESA). Its first observations captured the structure, motion and temperature of material swirling around a supermassive black hole as well as the dynamics of supernova wreckage that marks the death of a massive star. ‘These new observations provide crucial information in understanding how black holes grow by capturing surrounding matter, and offer a new insight into the life and death of massive stars,’ ESA XRISM Project Scientist Matteo Guainazzi said in a statement. ‘They showcase the mission's exceptional capability in exploring the high-energy universe’ … XRISM allowed astronomers to track plasma as it circled the supermassive black hole at a distance of around 0.1 light-years away. This material gradually moved inwards to a distance of around 0.001 light-years (about the distance between the sun and Uranus) before falling into the black hole. Paying particular attention to the X-ray signature of iron atoms, the team was able to determine several structures around the black hole, including the accretion disk that gradually feeds it and a more distant doughnut-shaped ‘torus’ of gas and dust. Other instruments have observed these structures in radiowaves and in infrared light before, but the technique used by XRISM is the first capable of determining how plasma around a supermassive black hole is shaped and how it moves. The data could significantly assist scientists in understanding how supermassive black holes feed and grow by greedily consuming matter from their surroundings.” (Robert Lea/Space.com)
“A team of student volunteers on an archaeological dig in northern France has had a surprise communication from the past. Sifting through the remains of a Gaulish village on cliff-tops near Dieppe on Monday, they uncovered an earthenware pot containing a small glass flask. ‘It was the kind of vial that women used to wear round their necks containing smelling-salts,’ said team-leader Guillaume Blondel, who heads the archaeological service for the town of Eu. Inside the bottle was a message on paper, rolled up and tied with string. On Tuesday evening, Mr Blondel opened the paper – which read as follows: ‘P.J Féret, a native of Dieppe, member of various intellectual societies, carried out excavations here in January 1825. He continues his investigations in this vast area known as the Cité de Limes or Caesar’s Camp.’ Féret was a local notable, and municipal records confirm that he conducted a first dig at the site 200 years ago. ‘It was an absolutely magic moment,’ said Mr Blondel. ‘We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago… it was a total surprise. Sometimes you see these time capsules left behind by carpenters when they build houses. But it’s very rare in archaeology. Most archaeologists prefer to think that there won’t be anyone coming after them because they’ve done all the work!’” (Hugh Schofield/BBCNews)
“If Israel was responsible, it will carry profound implications for Hezbollah and its leadership. First, Israel is demonstrating that it can identify and target members of Hezbollah regardless of their location or position in the organisation. This is indicative (again) of a sophisticated Israeli intelligence apparatus, which despite its failures leading up to the 7 October Hamas massacres, can execute complex and audacious attacks. Second, Israel is responding asymmetrically to Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel. These rockets, while improving in accuracy, are generally indiscriminate in who they affect in Israel. Hezbollah has shown no distinction between civilians and military targets. Israel however, with these pager attacks, has shown that it can respond not only with aerial bombardment but in a more discriminate and imaginative way. Third, Israel (if it did conduct the attacks) is saying to Hezbollah’s leadership that it can and will reach out personally, and that it can remove entire layers of the Hezbollah chain of command instantly. Doing so will cause confusion in Hezbollah’s ranks and significantly degrade its ability to plan and coordinate large-scale attacks on Israel. Finally, the Israelis have demonstrated that they are inside Hezbollah’s communications networks and its supply chains. This will give every member of Hezbollah pause to reconsider whether to trust the communications and other equipment issued by the organisation. But more generally, the Israelis have shown they can intercept and tamper with supplies bound for Hezbollah. What else might they have tampered with?” (Mick Ryan/The Interpreter)
“Artillery shells sold by Indian arms makers have been diverted by European customers to Ukraine and New Delhi has not intervened to stop the trade despite protests from Moscow, according to 11 Indian and European government and defence industry officials, as well as a Reuters analysis of commercially available customs data. The transfer of munitions to support Ukraine's defence against Russia has occurred for more than a year, according to the sources and the customs data. Indian arms export regulations limit the use of weaponry to the declared purchaser, who risks future sales being terminated if unauthorised transfers occur … The Indian official said that Delhi was monitoring the situation. But, along with a defence industry executive with direct knowledge of the transfers, he said India had not taken any action to throttle the supply to Europe. Like most of the 20 people interviewed by Reuters, they spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. The Ukrainian, Italian, Spanish and Czech defence ministries did not respond to requests for comment. Delhi and Washington, Ukraine's main security backer, have recently strengthened defence and diplomatic cooperation against the backdrop of a rising China, which both regard as their main rival. India also has warm ties with Russia, its primary arms supplier for decades, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has refused to join the Western-led sanctions regime against Moscow. But Delhi, long the world's largest weapons importer, also sees the lengthy war in Europe as an opportunity to develop its nascent arms export sector, according to six Indian sources familiar with official thinking.” (Krishn Kaushik/Reuters)
“The muddy trail levels out and we stop to catch our breath. Which is good, because hiking with my eyes covered has been a pain in the ass. A voice says: ‘You can take your blindfold off now.’ I squint as I get my bearings. Then, after a bit more hiking and some bushwhacking, I finally see it. The prize. The thing no one is supposed to know the location of, at least for another few weeks. A golden treasure. I have to fight a lizard-brain instinct to reach for it. No. If all goes to plan, the treasure will soon belong to someone else—to the winner of a wild treasure hunt dreamed up by two of the guys leading me through this remote wilderness. One is a musician named Tom Bailey. The other is Jason Rohrer, the mastermind. Rohrer has designed some of the brainiest, highest-concept video games of the 21st century. Now there’s this: not a video game, but Rohrer’s first game set in the real world.Rohrer calls it Project Skydrop, and he’s been working on it, mostly in secret, since 2021. He is 46 years old and tall. Like NBA-power-forward tall. And skinny. His blond hair, which once hung down his back, is now cut short. Today, he’s in boots, cargo pants, black aviator glasses, and a bucket hat. (Think: Vietnam War chic, save for an extremely Gen X wallet chain.) His 21-year-old son is also here, similarly tall, hair youthfully flowing. He’d drawn the short straw and had to be my personal guide. As the hours drag on, he reminds the group that we’re losing sun and should really leave the hiding spot before dark. The treasure was paid for and made by Rohrer himself, cast from 10 troy ounces of 24k gold. It’s worth about $25,000, but added to that bounty is a yet-to-be-determined, potentially life-changing amount of bitcoin, depending on how many people participate in the hunt. What I’m allowed to tell you about the treasure’s location is that it’s somewhere in the northeastern United States and that I got here by first flying to Rohrer’s home in Dover, New Hampshire. Maybe I should add, at the risk of saying too much, that I was then driven (again, blindfolded) quite a ways away, possibly across state lines, to public land who knows where. A just-released YouTube trailer for Project Skydrop offers more specifics. ‘Perhaps there’s a feeling deep down inside of you,’ goes the Gandalfian narration. ‘A hunger. For mystery. For adventure. And most importantly, for treasure.” (Joseph Bien-Kahn/WIRED)
“On a Thursday afternoon in mid-November 2023, an elderly man was walking through Hamburg’s Ohlsdorf Cemetery, the world’s fourth-largest graveyard, to visit the burial place of his favorite soccer player when he noticed something very wrong. Someone had sprayed ‘Nazi Kapital’ (‘Nazi fortune’) on the Kuehne family’s tombstone, in red and black, while the cryptic term ‘M-Aktion’ was tagged on Alfred Kuehne’s tombstone. These weren’t just any family tombs: The Kuehne dynasty is industrial royalty in Germany. Klaus-Michael Kuehne, the only child of Alfred and Mercedes Kuehne, is the country’s wealthiest person, with a fortune estimated at $44 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The 87-year-old billionaire owes his fortune to Kuehne + Nagel, the world’s largest freight forwarder, founded by Kuehne’s grandfather and Friedrich Nagel in 1890. Kuehne has used his wealth to build up a global transportation empire. He is also the largest shareholder of the German airline Lufthansa, shipping behemoth Hapag-Lloyd, chemicals distributor Brenntag, Hamburg soccer club HSV, and the company that owns North America’s Greyhound bus lines. In 2023 alone, according to Bloomberg, he stood to pocket $4.5 billion in dividends from his empire. In the context of Germany’s discreet but clubby old money, where aristocratic and industrialist heirs mingle at hunting parties or go skiing in the Alps, Kuehne is a loner … The thing about Alfred is that he built part of the family business profiting from the Nazi regime’s persecution and genocide of European Jews. After Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, Alfred and his brother Werner, Klaus-Michael’s uncle, ousted their Jewish shareholder from Kuehne + Nagel. During World War II, Kuehne + Nagel, led by Alfred and Werner, transported looted Jewish property, primarily furniture, books, and art, from occupied Western Europe to Nazi Germany as part of the so-called ‘M-Aktion,’ an abbreviation of ‘Möbelaktion,’ which translates to ‘furniture operation.’ Over two years, between 1942 and 1944, almost 70,000 homes belonging to Jews in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg were systematically looted after their inhabitants had been deported by train to ghettos and death camps.” (David de Jong/VF)
“The era of the adopted Chinese baby officially ended on September 5th, when the Chinese foreign ministry announced the termination of the program. (A week later, the demographic fallout continued with a statement that the retirement age would be raised for the first time since the nineteen-fifties.) Since 1992, the country had sent about a hundred and sixty thousand children abroad, more than half of them to the United States. Nowadays, there aren’t enough babies to spare. ‘They are not placing children for adoption. They are just keeping them all, and people are not eager to have children,’ Mary House, of Children’s Hope International, which was one of the leading agencies for adoptions from China, said. In 1979, China enacted a repressive population-control regime, hoping that fewer births would boost per-capita income. It soon became the signature policy of the Chinese Communist Party, which devoted huge resources to enforcement. Family planning, as it was euphemistically called, morphed into a terrifying apparatus with an estimated eighty-three million full- and part-time personnel, more than the People’s Liberation Army. Violators of the birth quotas (which varied depending on region and family circumstances) were subject to exorbitant fines, sometimes equivalent to several years’ worth of income. If the violators didn’t pay, they could have their houses demolished and livestock confiscated. Heavily pregnant women were chased down, forced to have abortions, and often sterilized. Many died as a result of these procedures. Terrified families abandoned tens of thousands of babies, sometimes leaving them at markets and on busy roadsides, with tear-stained notes scrawled on scraps of paper. Orphanages filled up with babies, at times packed three to a crib. For a country obsessed with saving face, the decision to allow foreign adoption was an embarrassing admission of the Communist Party’s policy failures. As far as I know, no scholar has been privy to the deliberations inside Zhongnanhai, the secretive leadership compound in Beijing. But Melody Zhang, the associate director of Children’s Hope International, who worked closely with China’s Ministry of Civil Affairs on behalf of her adoption agency, believes that the decision grew out of genuine concern for the children.” (Barbara Demick/TNY)
“Egyptian archaeologists unearthed a sword earlier this month which was marked by ancient pharaoh Ramses II, Egypt's Ministry of Culture and Tourism said. The bronze sword with engravings of the cartouche of the Egyptian king was buried for more than 3,000 years in an ancient military fort known as Tell Al-Abqain, located in the Beheira Governorate in northeast Egypt, south of Alexandria, the Egyptian government said in a Sept. 6 news release. Known as Ramses the Great, the pharaoh ruled Egypt from 1279 B.C. to 1213 B.C. and is credited with expanding Egypt's reach as far as modern day Syria to the east and Sudan to the south. A Nineteenth Dynasty pharaoh, Ramses' influence and riches spread throughout Egypt as evidenced by archaeologists' recent finds detailing his long-lost empire. Archaeologists found a temple in 2017 dedicated to the pharaoh in the Badrashin area in Giza. Last year, 2,000 rams' heads were found at the temple of Ramses II, which Egyptologists said showed the endurance of his impact. Part of a statue of the great king — his head and chest — were found in the Temple of Kom Ombo during a project to protect the site from groundwater. Al-Abqain — where the sword was discovered in mud barracks — also housed soldiers and contained warehouses for weapons, food and supplies, said Dr. Ahmed Saeed El-Kharadly, who led a group of archaeologists excavating the area. Large pottery remnants containing fish and animal bones and crock pots used for cooking were found along with personal items such as ivory, agate jars, and red and blue beads. The fortress was situated to protect Egypt's northwestern border from attacks by Libyan tribes and Sea Peoples, the Egyptian government said.” (Cara Tabachnik/AOL via CBSNews)
“The evening is balmy on Little Island. Already, I’ve forgotten that there’s a highway just on the other side of the slope, beyond which programmers are riding scooters home from the Google offices and tourists are taking selfies with a globally migrating installation of rattan elephants meant to symbolize ‘coexistence.’ The carefully overgrown fauna, maximalist and faintly tropical, is still lush here in early September, and it’s been a long time since the Meatpacking District felt more like a neighborhood than a novelty. It’s an impression, I’m learning anew, that gets stranger with repetition. I’m standing in the same place I was last night when the authorities canceled the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s The Marriage of Figaro for a rainstorm that never quite materialized. The crowd then had exhibited all five stages of grief at the news: The Marriage of Figaro is sold out for the entirety of its nearly four-week run, and there is no rain date. Returning to the pier tonight, having been granted a reserved seat by the gracious staff, I have a vague sense of traumatic reenactment, that retracing my steps like this and expecting a different outcome might be a sign of my impending insanity. Behind me in line for the show, a professor from the NYU Stern School of Business is holding forth on the strategies his digital marketing class will have to leverage this term so that their mock businesses might maximize fake shareholder value; in front of me, two women are debating whether the headshot on a CEO’s bio page does, in fact, match another photo one of them has open on her phone, of a man on vacation in a rainforest. The skyline glimmers before us here on Barry Diller’s $260 million pleasure park, on stilts in the Hudson River, and one man wears a fedora with an ace of spades tucked into the ribbon. The opera’s three-and-a-half-hour running time has been cut to an Ozempic-thin ninety minutes, and the exquisite Italian libretto is being projected in internet-speak English subtitles accented with the occasional emoji. The show promises to be art in line with that great contemporary ideal: frictionlessness. Performances of Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, the play on which the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte based the opera, were banned in Louis XVI’s France and its author imprisoned. Lore has it that Joseph II, the Holy Roman emperor and a self-styled liberal reformer, permitted the opera adaptation on the condition that it omit the protagonist’s iconic speech, about how working for a living ought to earn Figaro a greater right to power than his master, the Count, who has done nothing of value with his life but be born noble.” (Helen Rouner/The Paris Review)