“A 2,200-year-old ornate tomb in eastern China may belong to the ruler of the Chu state, one of the seven powerful kingdoms that vied for supremacy during China's formative Warring States period, an expert told Live Science. The tomb is the largest and most complex ever found from the Chu state and would shed more light on the conditions of the time, according to officials with China's National Cultural Heritage Administration (NCHA) who were quoted by the official state news agency Xinhua. Archaeologists have spent the past four years excavating the tomb at Wuwangdun, which is located near the city of Huainan in China's Anhui province. According to Xinhua, archaeologists have unearthed more than 1,000 cultural relics at the site — including lacquered artifacts, bronze ritual vessels and musical instruments — as well as a central coffin inscribed with more than 1,000 written characters … Qin was ultimately the victor among the seven Warring States that followed China's royal Zhou dynasty — Qin, Han, Wei, Zhao, Qi, Chu and Yan — and its subsequent unification of the country is officially regarded as the beginning of modern China … The identity of the person buried in the tomb may not be a complete mystery, however; since the Xinhua report was published, an expert has told Live Science that the tomb is probably that of the king of the feudal Chu state. Margarete Prüch, an archaeologist and art historian at Heidelberg University in Germany who wasn't involved in the excavations, said she had recently returned from a trip to Korea where she'd discussed the tomb with academics there. In 202 B.C. the Chu territories had come under the rule of the Han dynasty, the successors to the Qin dynasty; and in 194 B.C. another Han vassal state, Yan, had seized control of the northern part of Korea. So Chinese tombs from this time are very significant in Korea. Prüch told Live Science she'd been told the tomb was probably that of the Chu king Kaolie, who ruled from 262 to 238 B.C.” (Tom Metcalfe/LiveScience Archaeology)
“The Sahel region has witnessed six successful coups since 2020: in Gabon (August 2023); Mali (2020, 2021), Burkina Faso (Jan. 2022, Sept. 2022), Guinea (2021), and Niger (July 2023). In each case, economic stagnation, violent attacks, and distrust in civilian leaders were cited as primary reasons for the military’s intervention. Anti-French sentiments also played a unifying role across these incidents … Decades of support and intervention from the former colonial power yielded little result in economic or political advancement nor in curbing extremist violence in these regions; the issues were further exacerbated post-COVID-19 as France wrestled with its own financial and security struggles, paving the way for new geopolitical partnerships. Unlike the United States and France, which often attach political and moral stipulations to their military aid, Russia has adopted a strategy of non-interference in domestic affairs, providing food, security and weapons without the familiar Western preconditions. Similarly, China, the region’s largest foreign investor, offers fast cash and promises of infrastructure in exchange for future resource rights – a tempting proposition for unstable regimes looking to centralize power. Russia has strategically capitalized on failed peacekeeping missions and military withdrawals by Western powers, stepping in to offer diplomatic support, security assistance, and anti-terror aid to countries like Mali and Burkina Faso, and now, Niger. These new alliances and access to resources have proven particularly useful as Russia faces scrutiny for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.” (Aja Melville/Defense One)
“On Thursday morning, a divided New York State Court of Appeals overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for sex crimes and ordered a new trial. The 4–3 ruling turned largely on the original judge’s decision to let into court evidence of alleged crimes other than the ones for which jurors had been asked to assess Weinstein’s guilt or innocence. The court had permitted women to testify about allegations of sexual assault that were separate from the three for which he was charged. It had also ruled that Weinstein, should he testify, could be questioned about his wider history of alleged misconduct. Harvey Weinstein has been accused by more than a hundred women of various forms of sexual harassment and assault, with many of their stories reported in The New Yorker, and detailed in my subsequent book and podcast, ‘Catch and Kill.’ Thursday’s news was greeted with anguish by activists and by Weinstein’s alleged victims. ‘This is an on-going failure of the justice system—and the courts—to take survivors seriously and to protect our interests,’ Ambra Gutierrez, one of Weinstein’s early accusers, said, in a statement. But Thursday’s ruling was, to many legal spectators, unsurprising. The idea that juries should consider only the crimes charged in a given case, and that evidence of other bad acts should be excluded, is a foundational principle of criminal law, designed to protect defendants from the unfair presumption of guilt. In New York, the precept is embodied in the Molineux rule, named for a 1901 case in which an appeals court overturned a verdict that found a chemist named Roland Molineux guilty of murder by cyanide poisoning. The appeals court held that the trial court’s admission of allegations related to an earlier, unrelated killing had invited jurors to consider the defendant’s general propensity for crime, rather than the facts at hand. This principle of fairness is simple. The intricacies of how it should be implemented are, as Thursday’s decision underscores, complicated.” (Ronan Farrow/TNY)
“Throughout his luxurious catch-me-if-you can career, from the 1970s when transmogrified-serpent mob fixer Roy Cohn was schooling him in the dark arts of legal manipulation, to the last year traveling by limo and private jet from law office to law office and courtroom to courtroom, Trump has spent countless hours of his life conferring with lawyers, being deposed, scowling at conference tables in corporate backrooms where settlements get hammered out - all venues in which he can scream and pound the table with his ham-fists, glower and drift off to focus on his phone. As trial scribes have pointed out, Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom in Manhattan is probably the first legal venue in which he has had to shut up and behave. Shortly before Trump was elected president, USA Today cataloged an astounding number of legal skirmishes - 4,095 to be exact - he was involved in over the prior three decades. It is not unusual for big corporations to face litigation, it’s the cost of doing business. But the thousands of pre-2016 cases involving Trump’s personal life, brand and corporate entities are orders of magnitude above average. Trump was constantly in court fighting over unpaid taxes — every year from the 1980s onward. He faced off against rivals in court over branding issues. He was always suing or being sued by contractors (his habit of not paying the last invoice was problematic), in addition to bankruptcies and other disputes large and small.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“The most potent source of support for Donald Trump’s campaign, by far, is nostalgia for his first term. Trump may have relentlessly rattled the cage of democratic norms, but the restraints largely held. The economy coasted as the recovery from the Great Recession reached its apex of low unemployment and low inflation. The inflation surge of 2021–22 soured the voters on Joe Biden’s presidency, and — having decided Trump is not to blame for the chaos of 2020 — they want 2019 back. The trouble with this hope is not only that a repeat performance is not assured, but that Trump is deliberately setting out to not repeat it. The Wall Street Journal reports Trump’s campaign is planning to weaken or end the Federal Reserve’s autonomy. The plans range from ousting Fed chairman Jerome Powell to giving the president a direct hand in setting interest rates and other Fed policy … The reason the Federal Reserve has autonomy is that there is sometimes a tension between the economy’s short-term and long-term performance. Most famously, Richard Nixon’s Fed chairman Arthur Burns prioritized a hot economy that would help Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, which economists blamed for contributing to inflation later in that decade. That tension routinely popped up during Trump’s first term. Despite having chosen Powell for the position, Trump turned against him, as he did many of his appointees, because Powell did not treat Trump’s immediate political needs with sufficient (which, to Trump, means absolute) attention.” (Jonathan Chait/NYMag)
“A strong and howling night wind penetrates the cracked windshield. An uncomfortable, clinging coolness embraces your entire body like a damp sheet. The vehicle’s side-impact airbag never opened. You are now awake, though not fully, and trying to say something but only guttural sounds slurp forth. You find yourself in the precarious position of being upside down in the driver’s seat of a crashed car, suspended by only a lap and shoulder belt. Both are dampened with your juices. Bleeding, though not profusely, from a head wound hidden beneath the hair line. An overwhelming sense of sadness echoes through everything, particularly the wind. You are nauseous, but you cannot help but marvel at the dark beauty of the spiderwebbed pattern of impact points on the windshield. The car, you come to find, is resting upon its roof. A rollover crash it is called. On an undivided rural road with no barriers. And everything is broken glass — in your jacket, in your hair. The smell of burning rubber and transmission fluid fills the car. Still, No pain — yet — though. Are you in shock? Concussed?” (The Abandoned)
“AS LONG AS there have been studios in Hollywood, there have been Asian Americans involved in filmmaking. Only now are scholars starting to rewrite these histories, recovering those lost stories of silent and studio era Hollywood and putting them in conversation with contemporary discussions around representation. One of the most revolutionary studies to contribute to the new scholarship on Asian American film history is Denise Khor’s Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture Before World War II. Published in 2022, Khor’s book uncovers the entrepreneurial spirit of the first Japanese American immigrants who founded their own film production companies to combat the negative portrayal of Japanese Americans in film. Khor’s book takes readers beyond the histories of Hollywood that have focused on Asian American actors. On-screen, such actors were usually typecast as villains or relegated to minor roles. Yet these roles could catapult them to stardom, as in the case of Sessue Hayakawa. By 1915, after starring in Cecil B. DeMille’s film The Cheat, Hayakawa had emerged as a sex symbol and the personification of the ‘forbidden lover.’ Even though these roles paid, they offered few opportunities for real success. Even Hayakawa grew disgusted with being typecast and abandoned Hollywood in 1922. By 1928, as she left Hollywood for Europe, actress Anna May Wong lamented the position she and other Asian American actors faced: ‘I was so tired of the parts I had to play. Why is it that the screen Chinese is nearly always the villain of the piece, and so crude a villain—murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass. We are not like that.’ It would not be for several decades that Hollywood studios relented to offering Asian American actors more diverse roles, as with Samuel Fuller’s 1959 picture The Crimson Kimono, which featured actor James Shigeta as the hero of the film.” (Jonathan van Harmelen/LARB)
“Mark Laita can’t figure out how to turn his camera on. We’re on Zoom, and I can only hear his voice — one that has become so familiar through his billion-plus views-garnering YouTube channel Soft White Underbelly … Now, Laita’s subjects are a bit less polished. They’re drug dealers, pimps, 13-year-old prostitutes, gang members, klansmen, pedophiles and fentanyl addicts. In a small studio on Skid Row, in front of his signature yearbook photo-esque backdrop, Laita interviews OCD clowns, ex-Amish women, sex trafficking survivors and skinheads. Like a therapist, he asks them questions about their childhood, how they got in the position that they’re in, and what they’re gonna do next. There’s a stillness to these videos that serves as a compelling contrast to the chaotic nature of its subjects, humanizing those who have been shunned by society and making them a mirror to show viewers how the American system has failed us … Soft White Underbelly’s most famous characters are The Whittakers, an in-bred family residing in Odd, West Virginia who Laita has been visiting for three years now. He takes them on Wal-Mart shopping sprees, to go bowling, to the state fair and to get haircuts. He documents their living situation in a rural forest town where the only establishment is a single post office, and tries to improve their lives in any way he can (he’s currently crowdfunding to buy them a new house). It’s a compelling depiction of poverty and how poor familial choices can affect generations down the line. Most importantly, though, Laita communicates with them like normal humans and turns a family who may otherwise be seen as disgusting or shameful into lovable characters who are just trying to get through the day like everybody else. ‘It’s human kindness,’ he says. ‘I’m just being kind to these people because I don’t know how much kindness they see in their week or their year.’ Sometimes, though, that kindness can be taken advantage of. In a recent video, Laita flew to West Virginia after one of the Whittakers called him in tears, saying that her father died. He sent her hundreds of dollars for the ‘funeral,’ only to find out that it was all a lie to buy drugs.” (Ivan Guzman/PAPER)
“March 25 was a frantic day in Westminster, following startling revelations of a Chinese hack into British democratic institutions. The same day, Scottish National Party MP Stewart McDonald secured an intriguing parliamentary debate on the United Kingdom’s approach to Taiwan. Crucially, the language of the debate and in particular the framing of Taiwan employed by Minister of State for the Indo-Pacific Anne-Marie Trevelyan underscored a change in the British approach to Taiwan that has run parallel to growing British concerns about China’s international conduct. This increasingly nuanced approach to Taiwan in British foreign policy becomes clear in comparing Trevelyan’s statement to similar ministerial statements made in analogous House of Commons debates in 2017 and 2022. Indeed, where Taiwan was once seen merely as an economic opportunity, and a crucial market for Scottish whisky, it is now increasingly framed as a crucial security issue with its defense vital to Britain’s economic security. This marks a substantive shift in British foreign policy.” (Max Dixon/The Diplomat)
“John Clement’s movement toward critical mass began in 2022. Released from federal lockup in Los Angeles after a probation violation, Clement got into a job training program, and he subsequently enrolled at Long Beach City College with hopes of becoming a personal trainer. He had a vision of a better life. He also was in danger of becoming homeless. Clement couldn’t afford an apartment in the Long Beach area, where studios routinely cost more than $1,500, and a sober-living arrangement was ending. A former addict, he was trying to turn his life around, but without enough income to afford a place to live, his odds would become dramatically longer. And all of that made Clement, 47, a prime candidate for a pilot program that carried a lofty title, the Realization Project, and an incredibly specific goal: keeping people like him afloat while tracking them into jobs that pay enough to live an actual life. That is: preventing homelessness before it starts. ‘That was amazing,’ said Clement, who is now studying for a degree in kinesiology with the goal of opening a strength and conditioning business. ‘The support that I got, the ways they helped me—I get emotional talking about it.’ The project threw Clement a lifeline when he needed one. Over the course of an academic year at Long Beach City College, it provided him with a short-term living arrangement in group housing, then a $700 monthly stipend to help cover rent. It gave Clement access to things like a laptop and Wi-Fi, basic necessities for both college and job searches, and emotional and career counseling. Today, Clement works multiple jobs in addition to attending classes, and as the house manager in a sober-living facility he pays no rent. ‘This was a new process for me, to have people looking out for me and cheering me on,’ he said. ‘I never got that from my own family.’” (Mark Kreidler/TAP)
“Cosmo Jarvis has had some trouble shaking John Blackthorne off. The British actor developed a true kinship with his Shōgun character over an extensive 11-month-long shoot, almost as if he were experiencing the FX limited series’ epic, dangerous adventures himself. When all was said and done, and it was time to go home, Jarvis felt ‘kind of sad,’ as he softly puts it in our wide-ranging conversation about the finale and overall series (all of which is now streaming on Hulu). His melancholy tone suggests that feeling hasn’t quite faded yet, more than a year later.Adapted from the 1975 James Clavell novel, Shōgun delivered an immersive, deeply moving saga for viewers too. The show begins with Jarvis’s Blackthorne, a headstrong English sailor traveling to Japan circa 1600, left shipwrecked and fighting for survival. Hoping to disrupt the country’s exclusive trade agreement with the Portuguese, he is instead pulled in unexpected directions by the brilliant and cunning Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada), one of a handful of lords angling for control in a massive power vacuum, who takes Blackthorne in as an asset in his vague, grand plan for the future of Japan. Over the course of the series, Blackthorne travels the country with Toranaga and his army, part captive and part samurai in training. Along the way, he falls hard for his translator, the Catholic convert Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai), and comes to understand the nuances and complexities of Japanese culture in his mission to simply stay alive.” (David Canfield/VF)
“Steven Spielberg‘s next project will not be a movie, with the Oscar-winning director joining the Biden campaign to provide strategy for August’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. Reps for Spielberg had no comment on the news, first reported by Puck. The filmmaker has long supported President Biden, and Spielberg’s friend and former DreamWorks business partner Jeffrey Katzenberg is now a chair of the Biden campaign. In the past several months, Spielberg has attended multiple strategy sessions, offering his insights on how best to tell the President’s story and highlight Biden’s second term vision at this summer’s convention as he gears up for a November rematch with former President Donald Trump.” (THR)