Friday 10th May 2024

Photos: Deadly Flooding in Southern Brazil

For more than a week now, torrential rainfall in Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul has swollen rivers, triggered landslides, and caused widespread flooding. More than 90 deaths have been blamed on the flooding, with another 130 people listed as missing. Rescue efforts continue across the state and in the hard-hit city of Porto Alegre. The intense rains have abated for the moment, but flooding rivers continue to rise downstream, forcing thousands to seek shelter and assistance. A view of the flooded Mario Quintana Cultural Center, in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, on May 5, 2024. #


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The Cases Against Trump: A Guide

Fraud. Hush money. Election subversion. Mar-a-Lago documents. One place to keep track of the presidential candidate’s legal troubles.Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or a major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.


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It’s Not a Rap Beef. It’s a Cultural Reckoning.

Scapegoating is one of humankind’s primal rituals, dating back to the Book of Leviticus, in which God commanded the prophet Aaron to lay hands on a goat, confess the sins of his tribe, and then send the animal into the desert. Throughout centuries and across cultures, the historian René Girard once argued, warring factions have settled disputes by agreeing upon a figure to collectively blame—a resolution that is ugly and unfair but, more than anything, cathartic.Perhaps this tradition helps explain what’s been so satisfying about watching two of the 21st century’s most important musicians, Drake and Kendrick Lamar, try to destroy each other. The rap feud that has engulfed public attention in recent weeks has been litigated in breathtaking, twisty-turny songs packed with very 2020s references—to Ozempic, disinformation, AI, Taylor Swift, and elite pedophile rings. These two superstars have leveled accusations so nasty that cancellation, today’s standard punishment for celebrity wrongdoing, hardly seems sufficient. Thus far, the consensus is that Lamar has “won” the war—but in that case, Drake’s defeat is really what’s significant. We’re witnessing the modern implementation of an ancient rite, the desecration of an individual for the moral cleansing of the masses.


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Watch Apple Trash-Compact Human Culture

Here is a nonexhaustive list of objects Apple recently pulverized with a menacing hydraulic crusher: a trumpet, a piano, a turntable, a sculpted bust, lots and lots of paint, video-game controllers.These are all shown being demolished in the company’s new iPad commercial, a minute-long spot titled “Crush!” The items are arranged on a platform beneath a slowly descending enormous metal block, then trash-compactored out of existence in a violent symphony of crunching. Once the destruction is complete, the press lifts back up to reveal that the items have been replaced by a slender, shimmering iPad.


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Steve Albini Was Proof You Can Change

To a certain kind of listener, it sometimes felt like he was the last honest musician in the industry.Nearly 20 years ago, my high-school calculus teacher introduced me to a book that would, although I didn’t realize it at the time, permanently reframe the way I thought about music. Written by the journalist Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life was a study of the 1980s independent-music landscape—of bands that had unconsciously responded to the commercialism found on MTV and mainstream rock radio by going underground, and by getting very weird. The book introduced me to groups such as Black Flag, Dinosaur Jr., and the Replacements, the last of which had beer-drunk songwriting and electric punk-rock hooks that soon made it my favorite band. These groups never became traditionally successful, Azzerad explained, but their careers represented a romantic and uncompromising approach to making music, which could too easily become cheapened by external forces.


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The Tight Line Trump Has a Judge Walking

A conversation with David A. Graham about the bizarre nature of the former president’s criminal trialThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.


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Who Really Has Brain Worms?

Earlier today, The New York Times broke some startling news about a presidential candidate. According to a 2012 deposition, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once suffered from, in his own words, “a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” The vague yet alarming description could apply to any number of parasitic ailments, among them angiostrongyliasis, baylisascariasis, toxocariasis, strongyloidiasis, and trichinosis. But some experts immediately suspected a condition called neurocysticercosis (NCC), in which the larvae of the pork tapeworm Taenia solium post up in the brain.The condition might sound terrifying—and, to some observers, darkly hilarious. Literal brain worms! But it does not actually involve any brain-munching, or even your standard-issue worm. The brain-invading culprit is instead a tapeworm (a kind of helminth) that typically makes its home in pigs. As far as parasitic infections go, this is “the most common one in the brain,” Laila Woc-Colburn, an infectious-disease physician at Emory University, told me. And globally, it’s one of the most common causes of epilepsy in adults.


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What You Need to Know About Making a Good Impression

We evolved to form snap judgments about who’s friend and who’s foe, but we need to be more evolved now.

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What Happened When I Cloned My Own Voice

Recently my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, introduced me to the most sophisticated voice-cloning software available. It had already been used to clone President Joe Biden’s voice to create a fake robocall discouraging people from voting in the New Hampshire primary. I signed up and fed it a few hours of me speaking on various podcasts, and waited for the Hanna Rosin clone to be born. The way it works is you type a sentence into a box. For example, Please give me your Social Security number, or Jojo Siwa has such great fashion!, and then your manufactured voice, created from samples of your actual voice, says the sentence back to you. You can make yourself say anything, and shift the intensity of the intonation until it sounds uncannily like you.

Warzel visited the small company that made the software, and what he found was a familiar Silicon Valley story. The people at this company are dreamers, inspired by the Babel fish, a fictional translation device, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They imagine a world where people can speak to one another across languages and still sound like themselves. Warzel spoke to them about the less dreamy possibilities of voice cloning software: scams, misinformation, and election interference. And he came away with the impression that they were aware of the dangers. But once the technology is out, nobody can quite predict every variety of world-altering chaos, particularly in a year when over half the world’s population will undergo an election.


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Trump Flaunts His Corruption

The former president’s shakedown of oil executives may not have been illegal, but it is undeniably scandalous.

One of the few ways in which Donald Trump has improved American politics is in making explicit what was once veiled in implication or euphemism. During the 2016 election, for example, he said what everyone knew but no politicians would acknowledge: That wealthy donors bought access and fealty with their contributions.


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