In this episode of Dystopia Now, we talked to journalist Eoin Higgins about his book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left” which examines how Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk have used their wealth to shape media narratives, especially through journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
The Washington Post reports: Abigail Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University, studies extraordinary altruism — people who jump in to rescue strangers in emergencies or donate a kidney to someone they don’t know. Marsh spoke with Cristina Quinn, host of The Washington Post’s podcast “Try This,” about what her work has uncovered, and what brain science reveals about people who habitually engage in selfless acts. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You often…
SciTechDaily reports: The human brain is not limited to recognizing speech from other people. Researchers at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have found that specific parts of the auditory cortex react strongly to the vocalizations of chimpanzees. These primates are our closest relatives both in evolutionary terms and in the acoustic qualities of their calls. The study, published in the journal eLife, points to the presence of specialized subregions in the human brain that are particularly responsive to the sounds…
Michelle Goldberg writes: In the imagination of some on the right, Good quickly came to stand in for all the grating Resistance moms they’d like to see crushed. Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet” — she’s the winner of a prestigious poetry award — “with pronouns in her bio.” The conservative radio host Erick Erickson described her as an “AWFUL,” or “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.” It’s entirely possible that had Good lived, the Trump administration might…
MPR News reports: Renee Macklin Good’s wife, Becca Good, said that the 37-year-old poet and mother of three was made of sunshine. “She literally sparkled,” Becca Good said in a statement. “I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time.” But behind that light was a well of deep values that Macklin Good lived by, including a conviction that every person — regardless of “where you come from or…
The transformation of ICE into a type of national police force, backed, in some cases, by soldiers from the National Guard, has been covered as immigration story—but these forces are reshaping democracy for all of us. This shift was evident even before the shootings in Minneapolis and Portland this week.
G. Elliott Morris writes: On Wednesday morning, Jan. 7, an agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old mother, Renee Nicole Good, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Video footage of the incident went viral and prompted mass protests around the country on Wednesday and Thursday night, from San Diego to Houston to Philadelphia. The Minnesota Timberwolves, a basketball team, held a moment of silence for Good during Thursday3night’s game. Over the past year, protests against ICE have become…
The New York Times reports: The European Union, overcoming deep dissension among its members, gave the green light to a sweeping trade pact with four South American countries on Friday that would create one of the largest free-trade zones in the world, connecting markets with more than 700 million people. The agreement offers a stark contrast to the amped-up aggression on display this week from the Trump administration. As Europe worked to extend an era of economic collaboration, the United…
Borzou Daragahi writes: I and others have written Iranian protests lacking organization and leadership mostly fail to amount to significant political shifts. But Iran’s waves of street actions can nevertheless push change. The 2009 uprising likely convinced Khamenei to stop fiddling brazenly with election results. The “woman, life, freedom” marches ushered unmistakable cultural changes and the abandonment of the enforcement of dress codes on women. But except for those in 2009, Iran’s protests have not offered any possible roadmap to…
Alex Reisner writes: On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books. In fact, when prompted strategically by researchers, Claude delivered the near-complete text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Great Gatsby, 1984, and Frankenstein, in addition…
Adam Serwer writes: There’s a lot we don’t know about the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed yesterday by federal immigration agents deployed to Minnesota. But in the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, one thing became immediately clear: The Trump administration was lying about what happened. Shortly after news began circulating about the shooting, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement on X that “rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these…
NYT: An analysis of footage from three camera angles shows that the motorist was driving away from — not toward — a federal officer when he opened fire. The Washington Post reports: Thousands of people in Minneapolis gathered for a candlelight vigil Wednesday evening to mourn and protest the killing of Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in the city hours earlier as she appeared to try to drive away in her vehicle…
Jan-Werner Müller writes: When a bleary-eyed Trump explained the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro this past Saturday, he invoked the Monroe doctrine: while the US president sounded like he was reading about it for the first time, historians of course recognized the idea of Washington as a kind of guardian of the western hemisphere. Together with the national security strategy published in December, the move on Venezuela can be understood as advancing a vision for carving up the world into what…
The Wall Street Journal reports: President Trump and his advisers are planning a sweeping initiative to dominate the Venezuelan oil industry for years to come, and the president has told aides he believes his efforts could help lower oil prices to his favored level of $50 a barrel, according to people familiar with the matter. A plan under consideration envisions the U.S. exerting some control over Venezuela’s state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, including acquiring and marketing…