“A 24-year-old raped by armed men in her home just feet from her mother. A 19-year-old abducted and raped by four men over three days. A 28-year-old women’s rights activist, seized by men on the doorstep of her home and then raped while being held for hours in an abandoned house. They are among 11 young Masalit women interviewed by Reuters who said they were sexually assaulted amid the war in Sudan by members of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), an Arab-dominated paramilitary group, and allied Arab militiamen. The assaults, they said, took place during weeks of attacks earlier this year in El Geneina, capital of Sudan’s West Darfur region. Nine of the women described being raped by multiple men. All 11 said they were assaulted at gunpoint. Another three people said they witnessed women being raped. Reuters earlier detailed the carnage that erupted in El Geneina from late April to mid-June, when the RSF and its allies targeted the Masalit, a darker-skinned ethnic-African tribe that comprised a majority of the city before they were largely driven out. Survivors described civilians slaughtered at home, in the streets and in a river valley – picked off by snipers, mowed down with automatic weapons, hacked with swords, burned alive in their houses. In early November, the RSF and Arab militia fighters waged another wave of ethnically targeted attacks in the city, Reuters recently reported. Among the survivors of the earlier attacks: a 15-year-old girl who described seeing her parents killed and enduring an hours-long ordeal in which five RSF fighters raped her and a friend – then shot the friend dead.” (Maggie Michael/Reuters)
“Henry Kissinger was exiting through the bar of the St. Regis Hotel flanked by an entourage, like a minor celebrity or a royal, with a bodyguard, a handler, and what looked to be viziers. He was keynoting a $2,500-a-plate fundraiser for the McCain Institute, which had barred media and withheld the location, but I had figured out where it was being held, put on a tie, and brought a notebook. ‘Are you a stalker? Are you really a stalker?’ asked his consigliere, Lyndsay Howard. Was I? My friends and family seemed to think so. I was only fixated on Henry Kissinger because so much of Washington and Wall Street, and so many world leaders, still were. I had been increasingly fascinated with him since I stood outside his 100th-birthday party at the New York Public Library in June. It had been closed to the press, its glitzy festivities a tightly held secret. But I went anyway and saw two members of President Biden’s Cabinet and a coterie of politicos and Fortune 500 A-listers walking in. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary and an old friend of Kissinger, had fallen off the guest list and was almost turned away by a bouncer, before he phoned a friend inside to let him in. For his toast, Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, had asked ChatGPT to write a poem about Kissinger, who was born in 1923, and the century in which he lived in — in the verse of the King James Bible. Samantha Power, the Biden administration’s voice of human rights, delivered her own toast for him there, too. Ever since, I thought that tracking Kissinger’s movements was key to understanding his power, and by extension the dark underbelly of the American empire.” (Jonathan Guyer)
“In 1959, within the vast boreal forest of northern Finland, local workers extracting sand encountered an assemblage of stone artefacts, which they diligently reported to the authorities in Helsinki. Some 30 years later, Tuija Laurén (née Wallenius) undertook excavations revealing archaeological features that would become the source of some confusion within Finnish archaeology. Could this site, with evidence for as many as 40 burials from the fifth millennium BC located only 80km below the Arctic Circle, constitute the largest Stone Age cemetery in Finland? … Large Mesolithic and Neolithic hunter-gatherer-fisher cemeteries in the forests of northern Europe—including the prominent sites of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in north-west Russia, Zvejnieki in Latvia and Skateholm in Sweden —were first recognised in the 1950s and 1960s and they continue to captivate archaeologists’ attention.” (Cambridge University Press)
“What happened Thursday was the new normal in Congress. There’s no such thing as a House backbencher anymore as individual members find ways to force votes and even topple a speaker. It fits into a broader trend of Republican members showing more willingness to buck leadership across the board, from tanking once-routine committee votes to rejecting their conference’s chosen nominees for leadership positions. The resolutions are another easy way for them to push back against what they see as an overly top-down House. But while the shift has empowered members to exert more influence over day-to-day operations, some members are worried that it’s sowing disorder. ‘It’s a disaster,’ Rep. John Duarte, R-Calif. told Semafor. ‘It’s being abused.’” (Kadia Goba/Semafor)
“There is no such thing as a perfect victim, but a million ways to be an imperfect one. She was drinking. Her skirt was too short. She went willingly back to the footballer’s mansion, or up to Harvey Weinstein’s hotel suite, so what did she think was going to happen? Maybe she was a teenage runaway, or a sex worker; he was a good boy, or a much-loved celebrity. There is a long list of reasons rapists get away with it, but it all too often starts with a jury’s refusal to listen to a woman they have already decided for some stubborn reason not to like. Remember that, as we come to the distressing picture now emerging of alleged multiple rapes and sexual assaults by Hamas fighters amid the atrocities of 7 October. This week, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, finally called for what he described as ‘numerous accounts of sexual violence during the abhorrent acts of terror by Hamas’ to be ‘vigorously investigated.’” (Gaby Hinsliff/The Guardian)
“The now-he’s-in, now-he’s-out drama of the past couple of weeks at OpenAI, arguably the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, feels almost like an episode of the satirical TV show Silicon Valley. To recap: on November 17, Sam Altman, the widely admired CEO and public face of OpenAI, was suddenly removed in a surprise coup by the company’s board, which suggested, in a statement accompanying Altman’s ouster, that he had been “less than candid” with them (without saying what this lack of candor involved). A few days later, Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s largest investors, announced that Altman and Greg Brockman—the former president of OpenAI, who quit when Altman was fired—were joining the company to run a new AI research unit. Meanwhile, OpenAI employees started circulating a letter in which they threatened to quit unless Altman was given his job back; within three days, it had more than seven hundred signatures. Days after he was fired, Altman was reinstated, and the three board members who ousted him—as well as an interim CEO who had replaced him for less than seventy-two hours—were gone.” (Matthew Ingram/CJR)
“The war that has been raging in Sudan for the past seven months continues to exact a huge humanitarian toll on civilians, without any signs of an imminent ceasefire. Fighting remains concentrated around the capital, Khartoum, and the Darfur region in the west, which has also seen atrocities including ethnically motivated mass killing, rape, and displacement. In the latest round of talks between warring parties in Jeddah, the two main belligerents, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), committed to facilitating humanitarian access, but were unable to reach a much-needed ceasefire agreement. Meanwhile, the RSF has advanced in Darfur, raising questions about the future of Sudan as a unified entity. This coincided with a surge in violence in the capital of West Darfur, Al-Geneina, against the ethnically African Masalit tribe committed by the RSF. Just recently, early November 2023, hundreds of civilians were killed by the RSF and its allies. The group enjoys support among the Arab tribes of Darfur, and its precursor, the Janjaweed militia, was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of some African tribes in the Darfurian war that started in 2003.” (Mat Nashed)
“What kind of movement(s) have been galvanized in America since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel? Who is showing up in the streets and what are they saying? Why is the debate so polarized that many people of good will are staying on the sidelines? And what is the polarization doing to public opinion—is it changing anything? Let’s start with the data. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), an academic network that has been collecting and parsing news reports about political protest activity in the United States starting in January 2017, since October 7 there have been more than two thousand solidarity rallies, vigils, and marches focused on supporting either Palestine or Israel. Jay Ulfelder, a Harvard-based researcher who helps run the consortium, compared the scale of activity to the May-June 2022 surge in abortion rights protests surrounding the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. He also said it was less intense than the post-George Floyd uprising on 2020, when CCC logged more than 400 events per day.” (Micah Sifry/The Connector)
“Russia offered a peace deal in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality in talks last April, an offer that Ukraine rejected on the grounds that Moscow could not be trusted to uphold the deal, according to Davyd Arakhamiia, a Ukrainian politician who led Kyiv’s delegation to the negotiations. ‘They really hoped almost to the last moment that they would force us to sign such an agreement so that we would take neutrality,’ Arakhamiia said in a recent interview. ‘It was the most important thing for them. They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to — as Finland once did — neutrality and committed that we would not join NATO.’ The wide-ranging interview belies the Biden administration’s claim that talks were ‘not about NATO’ and that Ukraine’s relationship to the bloc was a ‘non-issue.’ It also adds nuance to the debate around former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s alleged role in scuttling the negotiations. According to Arakhamiia, Johnson met with officials in Kyiv and ‘said that we would not sign anything with [the Russians] at all, and let's just fight.’ However, the Ukrainian official denied that his team was on the verge of signing a deal — a decision he says could only have come from a direct meeting between the presidents of Ukraine and Russia — and insisted that Johnson’s comments were meant as advice, not a command.Another reason for rejecting Russia’s proposal, per Arakhamiia, was that such a move would require an amendment to Ukraine’s constitution, which stipulates that the country intends to join NATO. Ukrainian officials have also previously cited Russian atrocities in Bucha as a key motive for pulling out of talks.” (Connor Echols/Responsible Statecraft)
“(W)e’re going to talk today about the economy and how, despite the fact that it’s doing quite well, Americans are feeling pretty badly about it. So this is a puzzle we’ve spent some time on the show already thinking about … At the time, the economy was still really emerging from the pandemic. Inflation was really high. And the thinking at the time was this is a temporary thing. Americans feel badly about the economy, but it will pass. Two years later, here we are. The economy is actually doing better, but people feel bad still. So help us understand what’s going on here.” (The Daily)
“Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson and contributor Julie Roginsky have written a letter to Lachlan Murdoch, asking the newly crowned heir to the Murdoch empire if he will release them from the NDA agreements they signed years ago during sexual harassment settlements with the network. ‘You have the opportunity to finally move the network forward by showing the world that you and Fox have nothing to fear from anything we might say, because you truly believe that the culture inside the network that led to our lawsuits has actually changed,’ Carlson and Roginsky wrote the Fox Corporation boss more than a month ago, according to a copy of the letter provided to me. The two have long asked for Fox to release them from their NDAs, but renewed their request because of the recent Murdoch succession. I'm told, however, that Lachlan Murdoch has not responded to their letter — and given that Fox has not budged on this for so long, it's hard to see that changing now. ‘For many years, we have been asking executives and board members at Fox to release us from our NDAs — and for many years we have been met with silence,’ Carlson and Roginski acknowledged in a statement to me.” (Oliver Darcy/Reliable Sources)
“At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company’s board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck. Nadella has an easygoing demeanor, but he was so flabbergasted that for a moment he didn’t know what to say. He’d worked closely with Altman for more than four years and had grown to admire and trust him. Moreover, their collaboration had just led to Microsoft’s biggest rollout in a decade: a fleet of cutting-edge A.I. assistants that had been built on top of OpenAI’s technology and integrated into Microsoft’s core productivity programs, such as Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint. These assistants—essentially specialized and more powerful versions of OpenAI’s heralded ChatGPT—were known as the Office Copilots. Unbeknownst to Nadella, however, relations between Altman and OpenAI’s board had become troubled.” (Charles Duhigg/TNY)
“PHILOSOPHY DREW ME IN by offering something highly unique and valuable to a Black teenage girl from an immigrant working-class family in 1990s Philadelphia. Among the logical puzzles, the formal linguistic analysis of abstract metaphysical concepts, and the thought experiments about possible worlds, the concrete limitations of the actual world hardly seemed real. Where worldly obstacles of privilege and prejudice made themselves nonetheless felt, I could console myself with the logical certainty that these were irrational, unjustified, and perhaps, therefore, impermanent.
Like science fiction, philosophy was fun, wild, and creative, rebelling against any tyranny of what is over our license to imagine what might be. The union of imagination and reason promised to reveal new truths that might remain hidden were we to restrict scholarly inquiry to the actual and not explore the conceptual terrain of the as yet merely possible. Constantly to ask, ‘But what if things were otherwise?’ seemed to be philosophy’s main business. Contemporary academic philosophy largely self-identifies with a Socratic tradition of rigorous challenge to received wisdom and the status quo. Ask the right question, apply the right logical test, wield the right objection like a scalpel, and—if all goes well—then down tumble our ill-founded assumptions, sophistical fallacies, and logical inconsistencies. But something seems to happen on the way between the abstract notion of philosophy as the love of wisdom and actual philosophical practice.” (Vanessa Mills/LARB)
“Saint Jack is not an ironic title. Flowers, improbably, is full of grace. When the gangsters arrive to shut down his bordello, he offers himself up at the front door to give his employees time to escape. The gangsters tattoo obscenities on his arms and deposit him in a ditch. Back at the brothel, which is now destroyed, he has a drink and a laugh and then goes straight to a tattoo parlor to get his new ink covered up. The tattooist asks him what he wants. Jack scans the room’s posters for two seconds before asking the man to garland his arms. What’s remarkable about Jack isn’t that he accepts his fate but that he accepts it immediately, without pitying himself or weighing his options. I was reminded of wu wei, the Taoist ideal of effortless action, which is something like a flow state that encompasses all one’s activity and not merely a discrete task like writing a movie review or playing a tennis match. Jack’s wu wei gets thrown into dramatic relief in the final act, when, for the first time, he agonizes over a decision.” (Liam Shewin-Murray/The Paris Review)
“Stupid. Divisive. Fugly. The Hummer shouldn’t have sold in numbers, but it did. Might Elon Musk pull off a similar trick with the stainless steel Cybertruck? Forty-six months after the official unveiling—when design chief Franz von Holzhausen famously shattered the prototype’s Armor Glass with the spirited throw of a metal ball—yesterday’s Cybertruck Delivery Event confirmed that Tesla’s Texan Gigafactory is finally now slowly spitting out Cybertrucks. With an estimated 2 million preorders from self-styled ‘reservationists,’ this Blade Runner–inspired electric pickup could make the world’s most wealthy man even more unfeasibly rich. If half of those $100 refundable deposits stack up, that’s revenue of more than $65 billion, based on a newly inflated $61,000 price tag—up $21,000 from what was promised four years ago. ‘Just 15 percent of those preorders would equal the annual unit sales of Toyota,’ says Boston University Questrom School of Business professor Tim Simcoe. ‘But Tesla faces the challenges of scaling up production and achieving a sufficient flow of paying customers.’ On Tesla’s March 1 Investor Day, Musk said demand for the Cybertruck was ‘so far off the hook, you can’t even see the hook.’ But landing even 15 percent of the reservationists seems optimistic because the vehicle is running late and isn’t global—Cybertruck won’t be for sale outside of the US, Canada, and Mexico for some time, and doesn’t appear to meet safety regulations in the European Union and Australia anyway.” (Carlton Reid/WIRED)
“There have been scores of books published on the man over the years, but it is still Seymour Hersh’s 1983 The Price of Power that future biographers will have to top. Hersh gave us the defining portrait of Kissinger as a preening paranoid, tacking between ruthlessness and sycophancy to advance his career. Small in his vanities and shabby in his motives, Kissinger, in Hersh’s hands, is nonetheless Shakespearean because the pettiness gets played out on a world stage, with epic consequences. Kissinger has many devotees, and many of his obituaries will no doubt urge balance. Transgressions, they’ll say, need to be weighed against accomplishments: détente and subsequent arms treaties with the Soviet Union, opening up Communist China, and his shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East. It’s at this moment that the consequences of many of Kissinger’s policies will be redefined as ‘controversies’ and consigned to opinion rather than to fact. In the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency, with the world convulsed by new wars of conquest, Kissinger’s ‘sober’ statesmanship is, several commentators have recently claimed, needed more than ever. Expect color commentary, colleagues and acquaintances who will reminisce that he had a wry sense of humor and a fondness for intrigue, good food, and high-cheeked women. We’ll be reminded that he dated Jill St. John and Marlo Thomas, was friends with Shirley MacLaine, and was affectionately known as Super K, Henry of Arabia, and the Playboy of the West Wing. Kissinger was brilliant and had a temper. He was vulnerable, which made him vicious, and his relationship with Richard Nixon was, as the journalist Evan Thomas put it, ‘deeply weird.’ They were the original frenemies, with Kissinger flattering Nixon to his face and bitching about him behind his back. ‘The meatball mind,’ he called his boss as soon as the phone was back on the hook, a ‘drunk.’ ‘Nixonger,’ Isaiah Berlin called the duo.” (Greg Grandin/The Nation)
“If, as Senator Marco Rubio said last year, ‘GOP voters are working-class Americans, and they are changing the party,”’the House Education and the Workforce Committee never got the memo. Start with the committee’s name, which, whenever Republicans regain the majority, they insist on changing from ‘House Education and Labor.’ The mere word “labor” (which can mean ‘labor union’ but more commonly distinguishes workers from capital, or stockholders) is intrinsically offensive to the GOP. How can a party that collapses onto a fainting couch when it hears ‘labor’ pretend to represent working people?” (Timothy Noah/TNR)