Holiday Reading
Long reads for a holiday weekend ...
“The 50-year-old cold case of D.B. Cooper may have seen a new development after an amateur sleuth claims to have found the parachute used by the infamous, yet still unidentified plane hijacker. YouTuber Dan Gryder said that he found a modified device matching the one used in the 1971 hijacking on a property in North Carolina, and has handed it over to the FBI. Gryder, who has been looking into the case ‘off and on’ for almost 20 years, said in a video series about his investigation that the rig was ‘literally one in a billion.’ ‘This is the rig he used... we just solved it,’ he says. D. B. Cooper, also known as Dan Cooper, hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 on November 24 1971. During the flight, Cooper told a flight attendant he had a bomb, demanding $200,000 in ransom and four parachutes upon landing in Seattle. However soon after taking off again with the intention of heading to Mexico, Cooper opened the aircraft’s door and parachuted into the night over southwestern Washington. His true identity and whereabouts remain a mystery to this day.” (Mike Bedigan/The Independent)
“Do you know what time it is? I try not to answer that when I wake up in the dark, hoping it is dawn but suspecting it’s not yet 3 a.m. I’m not alone with my insomnia. Everyone I meet these days is peering into the dark from under a blanket. Last night, I was up again, the hour of the wolf, scribbling into a notebook. This morning, I peered at my little scratches on paper. What leering goblins haunted my late fall slumber? anatical morality police: a teeny-tiny man, Opus Dei Catholic lobbyist Leonard Leo, empowered and corrupted absolutely with rich man’s pelf, in league with the white male broligarchy*, having bought the judiciary now promising to seize the means of cultural production – universities, media, and entertainment. Russell Vought, another small, very angry man, religious fanatic, principal architect of Project 2025, now assigned the job of remaking the entire federal workforce into a purity-tested army of MAGAbots. Modern-day Emperor Elon, worth a staggering $350 billion, exposing his doughy white midriff in a leap of joy celebrating the re-ascendance of a dictator-worshipping white man to the pinnacle of world power, now positioned to manipulate geopolitics. What else? In the dark, I thought about how the trap is set. We are all sticky with the glue of digital surveillance. The system that these men control has been in the making since the dawn of the digital age. It’s fed by the gadgets every man, woman, and child on the planet carries or hopes to soon. Fanatical religious maniacs, borderless kleptocrats with allegiance only to the bank, and the broligarchy are the lords and beneficiaries of unchecked commercial data harvesting.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“The shoplifter, David Andino, clambered down that escalator, hurtling past shoppers heading up. Andino scooped what he could into a laundry bag, seeking out the brands he knew he could easily sell. Aveeno lotion, Cetaphil cleanser, CeraVe moisturizer. Sensodyne toothpaste, Crest White Strips. Ninety seconds. He raced back up the escalator, past the guard, and back onto Greenwich Street and into the nearby Chambers Street subway station. He boarded an uptown train, and the doors closed behind him. Success. Tomorrow, he would be back again. It was 2022. Day after day, he stole from that Target store. The police arrived, too late. As he stole more and more, day after day, Andino became a one-man crime wave in the Police Department’s First Precinct in Lower Manhattan. Eventually, officers changed tactics. They started lying in wait for Andino outside his favorite Target. Watching.”(Michael Wilson/NYT)
“Donald Trump’s angry threat to impose 25 percent tariffs on all U.S. imports from Mexico—delivered Monday via the cautious diplomatic language of a Truth Social rant—is widely being depicted as a bluff. Trump declared that once in the White House, he will impose the tariffs unless Mexico stops migrants and fentanyl from ‘pouring’ into the United States. Seen as a feint, the tactic could theoretically get Mexico to halt the migrant flow, allowing Trump to pull back on tariffs later while boasting that on the border, he has already bent Mexico to his will. But amid all this parsing of Trump’s intentions, a crucial fact about his new move is getting lost: At the center of it is a lie. This lie is hiding in plain sight: It’s the underlying suggestion that Mexico is not doing anything to stop migrants from coming and that Trump’s threat of tariffs is needed to change that. Here we’re getting an early glimpse of how he will deceive voters about some of his most potentially destructive designs, on tariffs and immigration alike.All this is laid bare by the sharp response to Trump’s threat that new Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum issued Tuesday. Her statement is getting attention for its barbed claim that American guns trafficked to Mexico are fueling crime and violence there among gangs supplying U.S. markets with drugs. ‘Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours,’ Sheinbaum noted acidly, suggesting that the two countries’ interrelated national challenges underscore the need for cross-border cooperation rather than Trumpian confrontation. That’s a harsh indictment of Trump’s whole worldview.” (Greg Sargent/TNR)
“Mahmoud is a cheeky teenager who beams the biggest of smiles even though he lost his front teeth in the rough and tumble of kids’ play. He is a Sudanese orphan abandoned twice, and displaced twice in his country’s grievous war - one of nearly five million Sudanese children who have lost almost everything as they are pushed from one place to the next in what is now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Nowhere else on Earth are so many children on the run, so many people living with such acute hunger. Famine has already been declared in one area - many others subsist on the brink of starvation not knowing where their next meal will come from. ‘It’s an invisible crisis,’ emphasises the UN’s new humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher. ‘Twenty-five million Sudanese, more than half the country, need help now,’ he adds.In a time of all too many unprecedented crises, where devastating wars in places like Gaza and Ukraine dominate the world’s aid and attention, Mr Fletcher chose Sudan for his first field mission to highlight its plight.” (Lyse Ducet/BBC)
“MSNBC is facing a staggering ratings collapse in the wake of the 2024 election, with the network’s audience shrinking by nearly half as Fox News became the only cable news outlet to show post-election growth. According to Nielsen data, MSNBC’s total viewership has dropped by 47 percent post-election, and its critical 25-54 demographic plummeted to just 63,000 during primetime—a sharp contrast to its pre-election numbers. The losses are particularly stark compared to rival network Fox News, which solidified its dominance as the most-watched cable news network during and after the election. While MSNBC pulled in 644,000 viewers in primetime, Fox News soared to 3.2 million, an 86 percent year-over-year increase in total viewers. In the coveted 25-54 demographic, Fox saw a 147 percent surge, averaging 476,000 viewers. In total-day ratings, MSNBC’s struggles continued, drawing 497,000 viewers and only 49,000 in the 25-54 demo, as shows like Morning Joe recorded some of their lowest numbers in years. The network’s flagship morning program saw a 37 percent drop in viewership after co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski met with President-elect Donald Trump.” (David Gilmour/Mediaite)
“More than any drug since crack, the stories of fentanyl’s spread through the United States brush up against the edge of myth. It is a substance so concentrated that tiny amounts are said to be enough to get vast populations high: a saltshaker’s worth supplies a whole neighborhood; two truckloads keep a country of three hundred and thirty million stocked for a year. In the eighties, stories of the crack trade sometimes followed the historic maps of Black migration. The Chambers brothers, for instance, reportedly employed family members from the Arkansas Delta to conduct distribution operations in high-rise housing projects in Detroit, in conditions that we might now call human trafficking. Such stories were easily exploited by politicians interested in racial demonization, similar to the ways in which fentanyl trafficking is now used to stigmatize migrants crossing the Rio Grande. Like many accounts of illegal activity, these stories, which tend to be sourced from law enforcement, are memorable in a tabloid-noir way, and probably directionally true, but also hard to verify. In the case of fentanyl, they have had a particular resonance for U.S. politicians, who are seeking to make sense of the country’s political turmoil, which might seem out of step with its broadly stable and prosperous society. The fentanyl epidemic suggests that maybe things aren’t really so good here—that instability, violence, and suffering are just below the surface, even though unemployment is under four per cent. It isn’t just Republicans, or cable-news hosts, who have made this an emphasis. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a talented young moderate Democratic congresswoman from rural Washington State, has said that forty per cent of infants delivered in one of the largest hospitals in her district are born to at least one parent who is addicted to fentanyl. There were times, this summer, on the Presidential campaign trail when it seemed to me that 2024 was going to be a fentanyl election. The drug is generally understood to constitute a third wave of the opioid epidemic, the first being misuse of prescriptions like OxyContin and the second being heroin addiction. But fentanyl’s distinguishing feature for public health is its lethality—the rate of people killed from overdoses in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2008 and is nearly seven times what it was in the early eighties. In politics, this helps explain the intensity and durability of immigration as an issue for Trump, whose most recent pitch on the topic was less about jobs and more about drugs and violence.” (Benjamin Wallace-Wells/NYer)
“Steve Bannon got out of prison exactly a week before Election Day. He was released before dawn and immediately headed to a remote studio to tape War Room, his podcast and streaming show, so as to waste no time getting back to his audience, the MAGA faithful. He had been in prison for almost four months for defying a subpoena related to the Jan. 6 insurrection; he had much to say. In the immediate aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, I found myself thinking of Bannon, and how validated he must feel. It’s hard to tell from exit polling what the whole story is behind Donald Trump’s win—we won’t have better data for months—but signs point to a substantial shift rightward among Latino and Black men, scrambling Democrats’ ideas of who was reliably in their voting bloc. Most of the entire country shifted right, in fact. Perhaps it pointed to a new kind of Republican coalition.” (Slate/Molly Olmstead)
“During recent excavations in the ancient city of Stratonikeia in the Turkish province of Muğla, archaeologists discovered a sewage system dating back 2,250 years, including a sewer under the theater large enough to walk in that has drained water effectively for over two millennia, according to HaberTürk. Professor Dr. Bilal Söğüt, the head of the Stratonikeia Ancient City Excavation Team, expressed his excitement over the find. ‘Water is still flowing away by itself even after 2,250 years. That's why we are incredibly happy,’ he stated, as reported by Haberler. The sewage system, notable for its advanced engineering, channels water from the theater toward a nearby stream. ‘All these sewage systems are connected to the streets and flowed towards the stream, discharging without causing any discomfort to the city,’ Söğüt said. ‘The discovery of the sewage system reveals the historical richness of the region and the lifestyle of ancient settlements,’ he added. In an interview with the Anadolu Agency, he stated that many structures have been uncovered in ongoing excavations, bringing history to life as important artifacts from the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods are revealed … Stratonikeia, known as the ‘City of Gladiators,’ has been included in the UNESCO Tentative List of World Heritage Sites since 2015. Professor Söğüt explained that Stratonikeia is a settlement of the indigenous peoples of Anatolia, the Carians and the Lycians.” (Jerusalem Post)
“What a time to be Cheryl Hines. The former Curb Your Enthusiasm actor has had a wildly eventful past few months: Her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., ran and subsequently shelved a presidential campaign, was credibly accused of sexually assaulting his children's former babysitter, to which his on-the-record response was a shrugging ‘I'm not a church boy,’ weathered a high-profile sexting scandal with political reporter Olivia Nuzzi, not to mention all kinds of disturbing stuff involving creatures of sea, air, and land (dead bears, decapitated whales, brain worms, angry emus, pet ravens, and a charred animal carcass of contentious origin), and now he’s been announced as Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Health and Human Services. For her part, Hines saw the final season of Curb air earlier this year, and she continues to be very enthusiastic about the plastic-free skincare and health line that she launched with her daughter in 2023. A political wife exhausted by the grueling demands of the campaign trail? Not here!In that same Times interview, Hines talked about improv, where she got her start acting, saying, ‘you have to commit 100 percent or it’s not funny or interesting.’ Far be it for us to put a percentage on her commitment to Kennedy’s political ambitions, but it would appear to be below that threshold.” (Case Wickman/VF)
“The bankruptcy of one of Europe’s most promising and high-valued climate tech companies is forcing a rethink of how best to compete with China in the EV supply chain — and whether trade barriers work. Sweden-based battery maker Northvolt was the great hope both for Europe’s clean tech manufacturing renaissance, and the bedrock of European automakers’ EV aspirations. It was also a high-profile rebuttal to the US Inflation Reduction Act, meant to show that Europe could compete with the US for investment while competing with China on battery technology. The company, Europe’s first home-grown EV battery maker, drew nearly $15 billion in investments, had more than $50 billion in battery orders on its books, and was working toward a $20 billion stock listing. Then things began to fall apart. Following a string of safety incidents, gaping production shortfalls, and missed delivery deadlines, the company was last week down to its final $30 million in cash — about a week’s worth of operating expenses — and nearly $6 billion in debt. Northvolt filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and co-founder and CEO Peter Carlsson, who previously oversaw Tesla’s supply chain, stepped down. Left holding the bag were backers like Volkswagen, which said on Monday that its €1.4 billion stake in Northvolt is now worth less than half of that, and Goldman Sachs, which will reportedly take a $900 million loss.” (Tim McDonnell/semafor)
“As Israel and Hezbollah agree to a ceasefire, I wanted to provide some strategic reflections based on my recent visit to the region. Over the period 3-7 November, I was part of a small group of national security and military experts that visited Israel. Our program there included field visits to IDF headquarters in the north and south of the country, a visit to the IDF ground forces combat training centre, a short mission into Gaza, as well as a visit to an IDF Air Force base in the south of the country. This is the third in my series of articles about the visit. You can read the first and second parts of my reflections about the visit here and here. As I have highlighted during the series, there is much that might be learned from Israel’s response to the awful events of 7 October 2023, when Hamas terrorists breached the border wall in southern Israel and massacred Israeli civilians and military personnel.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)