Astrophysicist Sarafina Nance always dreamed of going to space. She talks about STEM for girls, advocating for her own health and her upcoming participation in a Mars simulation.

Fully unmoored from legal reasoning, the justice’s voting rights ruling is cynical and un-American.

Among other things, we might simply not agree

This kind of elite’s wealth derives not from their salary - this is what separates them from even extremely prosperous members of the professional-managerial class, like doctors and lawyers - but from their ownership of assets. Those assets vary depending on where in the country we’re talking about; they could be a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina. Even the less prosperous parts of the United States generate enough surplus to produce a class of wealthy people. Depending on the political culture and institutions of a locality or region, this elite class might wield more or less political power. In some places, they have an effective stranglehold over what gets done; in others, they’re important but not all-powerful. Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. In the aggregate, through their political donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the United States.

When a sample of nearly 1,500 female Ivy League students was asked whether they would date a Trump supporter, only 6 percent said yes (after excluding the small minority of the sample who support him). So finds a survey of 20,000 university students that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) conducted in 2020. While people are free to discriminate however they wish in dating, this attitude bleeds into problematic spheres such as hiring and social toleration. This reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism, a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional “safety” of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups. In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants. As Millennials take power, this generational earthquake is set to shake the foundations of the cultural elite to its core, leading to pervasive discrimination against, and censorship of, conservative views.

In the wake of Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat, many QAnon followers have hatched a plan: run for school board or local office, spread the gospel of Q, but don’t call it QAnon.

It’s impossible to get every scoop. Even Adrian Wojnarowski loses a few to the voracious yet perplexing mind of Shams Charania. Sometimes the source you need to solidify the story doesn’t want to speak to you, or they don’t want to speak at all, or they speak to a different reporter at a more established publication. It happens. There’s still some dignity to be salvaged when your lunch is eaten, but when faced with this scenario, the current version of Deadspin pretended it was inevitable that their lunch, sitting there all perfectly prepared and served up on a silver platter, was doomed to be eaten all along. This past Sunday, Kevin Draper of the New York Times published a story on how last summer, during the NBA bubble season, ESPN broadcaster and reporter Rachel Nichols had been recorded talking shit about her coworker Maria Taylor. (Disclosure: Draper and I worked together at a previous version of Deadspin.) Draper obtained a 20-minute recording of a conversation between Nichols and Adam Mendelsohn, an adviser for LeBron James. In one of the two published snippets, Nichols reacted to learning that Taylor would be hosting the pregame and postgame coverage for the 2020 NBA Finals. Nichols believed it was an attempt by ESPN to compensate for recurring complaints of fewer career advancement opportunities for its black employees. It’s rare to hear ESPN talent as well as a person in LeBron’s camp speaking candidly. Mendelsohn, who helped James form the organization More Than A Vote to fight voter suppression and engage more black voters for the 2020 election, said at one point, “I don’t know. I’m exhausted. Between Me Too and Black Lives Matter, I got nothing left,” which made Nichols laugh. This was the level of unfiltered, honest conversation we were supposed to get from The Shop. (Mendelsohn has since apologized for saying he was exhausted by worldwide movements that keep him employed by LeBron.) The key part, the portion that likely caused ESPN to replace Nichols with Malika Andrews as NBA Finals sideline reporter on Tuesday, was this: “I wish Maria Taylor all the success in the world — she covers football, she covers basketball,” Nichols said in July 2020. “If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it. Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away.” New York Times Nichols was correct about ESPN’s shoddy record on diversity: That same month, Draper had published a story on the scarce executive-level opportunities for black employees at the company. The article included an anecdote about Taylor feeling dismissed on a conference call. Where Nichols drew the ire of her black colleagues, as Draper reported, was by thinking that diversity shouldn’t come at the expense of her own opportunities. She’s an ally who realizes how important these conversations are; just have them elsewhere. The possibility that Taylor, who has experience hosting pregame and postgame coverage, could have earned the job solely on merit didn’t seem to cross Nichols’s mind. Nichols spoke with Mendelsohn while she was following COVID-19 restrictions and working out of her room at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando. The leaked video had been uploaded to ESPN’s servers through the camera she was using for her broadcasting duties. The past year flattened the distinction between work and home for many people, but in her response to the Times, Nichols chose to present these facts in a more sinister way: “I was shaken that a fellow employee would do this, and that other employees, including some of those within the N.B.A. project, had no remorse about passing around a spy video of a female co-worker alone in her hotel room,” she said, adding, “I would in no way suggest that the way the comments came to light should grant a free pass on them being hurtful to other people.” New York Times From the information available, this framing is cynical and dubious. Coincidentally, last summer the current version of Deadspin took a similar tack, publishing a report with the headline “ESPN Creep Used ‘The Jump’ Video Feed To Secretly Record Rachel Nichols in Her Hotel Room — Video Got Sent to Us.” The article had a four-person byline: G/O Media editorial director Jim Rich, editor-in-chief Eric Barrow, and senior writers Carron J. Phillips and Julie DiCaro. At the time, they did not publish the video that got sent to them, but they did choose to immediately trash the tipster. The ethics of burning an anonymous source are widely debated. It’s not off the table if the source is deliberately giving false information, but that wasn’t the case here. Here’s an excerpt of the Deadspin article from July 15, 2020: Nichols (whose face never appears on camera) and the other party to the call discuss Nichols’ career, ESPN staff, and the World Wide Leader’s decision about who will host the network’s coverage of the NBA Finals. In light of privacy concerns and our being unable to view the entirety of the conversation recorded, we have chosen not to detail the conversation or post the video of the call. Sources have told Deadspin that the entire video of Nichols’ conversation was 30 minutes long. Deadspin received about four minutes of edited footage. It is also worth noting that the videos were sent to Deadspin as an attempt to discredit Nichols’ job status within ESPN, and with the public at large, with the anonymous source texting our reporter that the videos would “expose” Nichols as a “back-stabber” and a phony ally. Nothing in the videos Deadspin viewed show Nichols saying anything that could be construed as either a back-stabber or phony ally. Historically, casting successful women as conniving backstabbers has been a tried and true method of encouraging public condemnation of them. (See, e.g., Clinton, Hillary, and Warren, Elizabeth). You love to see the classics trotted out. Whatever their motivations, the “ESPN Creep” turned out to be broadly correct in how they framed those clips. Whether or not the tipster worked for ESPN, they reached out hoping someone would shine a light on a fully justifiable, obviously newsworthy story, and instead got smeared for it. At first, you could assume good faith and wonder if the four minutes of footage received by the current version of Deadspin had been different from the 20 minutes acquired by the Times. Maybe they weren’t sent the part where Nichols questioned Taylor’s capabilities. Except they fucking were! Any plausible deniability vanished on Monday when Phillips published a follow-up article with the headline “Rachel Nichols’ comments about Maria Taylor are latest example of how ESPN screws over its Black employees.” It’s unclear why this duty fell to him instead of Rich or Barrow, who as editorial leadership really should have been the ones to eat the most shit. If they weren’t going to answer for why they slapped together a story in 30 hours and showed no interest in what was originally a juicy tip, they should’ve at least prevented Phillips from admitting that he had the money quote in its entirety a year ago and did not publish it. In this week’s post, Phillips published the four minutes of video he had received, which included the crucial portion where Nichols talked shit about Taylor. He revealed that the current version of Deadspin had done a whopping one day of reporting before they decided there was nothing to see here, aside from an “ESPN Creep.” Here’s what Phillips wrote on July 5, 2021: That quote is from the Times story. But, it’s also part of the audio that I received. So while I had background on what I thought might be going on, I didn’t have any actual proof. But, let me be clear. Nichols names Taylor in the clip and was mad about her getting a hosting job that she wanted. In the clip, Nichols is “venting.” But while the information I was given by the “source” was some potential context to what was going on in the video, there was so much more that I didn’t have access to. I knew Nichols was being shady — I just didn’t know how shady it got, as I only had access to only a small portion of a longer conversation. After watching the same video that Phillips had almost a year ago, I am trying and failing to determine his distinction between background and actual proof. He and his editors watched this video, listened to Rachel Nichols talk shit about Maria Taylor—not publishing at all would have been an understandable decision, but they instead chose to rush a premise that turned out to be entirely incorrect even in the original context—and then a year later pretended they had known this all along, and would perhaps follow up. They didn’t. Draper got it all. This is not a case of getting beaten to the story by a reporter with better access. Rich and Barrow had a lead that any outlet would’ve killed for, and seemingly showed no interest in digging into it past a 24-hour window. How do they defend that? They haven’t so far, with the two editors maintaining radio silence and letting their writers twist in the wind. DiCaro and Jane McManus attempted their own postmortem on today’s episode of their podcast The Ladies’ Room, with Phillips as a guest. And the more background they provide on the reporting process of this story, the less it helps their case. Around the 10-minute mark, DiCaro reveals how her sources reacted to the original blog: Looking back on it, I wish that we had waited. I wish that we had maybe done a little more investigation, but I don’t know that that would have gotten us anywhere, because I chased this story. I don’t think I’ve said this publicly, but the day after that story aired, I got a bunch of phone calls from women at ESPN, and from women outside ESPN, who thought that we made Rachel Nichols look like a victim, and they disagreed that that was the case. So I tried to get people—we talk on background, we talk off the record—no one was willing to say anything. And you know, eventually you chase stories around, and at some point you have to let them go. And that was one I let go, and maybe I did that too soon. “Were we played? Did we get Manti Teo’d?” Phillips wrote on Monday. “I don’t know.” Ideally his editors at the current version of Deadspin could help him figure out the answer, or advise him not to openly ask such an insipid question. It would be their first competent action at the site. Disclosure: 19 editorial employees at Defector worked at a previous version of Deadspin. Samer Kalaf Managing editor of Defector.

On the videos, someone with an American accent is heard yelling in English over a megaphone, “DEA operation. Everybody stand down. DEA operation. Everybody back up, stand down.” Sources told the Miami Herald that the assailants, one of whom spoke in English with an American accent, were not with the DEA. “These were mercenaries,” a high-ranking Haitian government official said. Biden Administration officials denied DEA involvement.

The resort town Ketchum is facing a cascading housing crisis caused by a rush of new residents during the Covid-19 pandemic, growing demand for workers during the economic boom that has followed, and a shortage of affordable homes that was years in the making.

The contractor taking care of thousands of migrant children had no experience in child care, said the federal workers.

Haitian President Jovenel Moise was shot dead by unidentified attackers in his private residence overnight in a "barbaric act", the government said on Wednesday, stirring fears of escalating turmoil in the impoverished Caribbean nation.

Private equity firm that's snatching up houses has now also bought a collectibles grading giant.

Gettr, the new social media site aimed at conservatives, went live on July 4 and is already a security mess.

THE JAIL IN LETCHER COUNTY, KENTUCKY, is tucked away at the back of the courthouse in downtown Whitesburg, invisible to pedestrians except for an open-air concrete structure on the roof where prisoners are allowed to exercise. Its size—fifty-four beds stacked inside a space the size of a three- or four-bedroom house—reflects the size of the rural Appalachian county it serves. Its population, however, far exceeds its official capacity: on any given day, there may be more than a hundred people inside. “When I got to the Letcher County Jail,” says Emily Estep, a recent detainee, “they didn’t have any cells open, so they put me in a closet. Like a locked-in closet. It didn’t have a toilet in it. It was so cold, I was froze to death. . . . They came and got me like if I needed to go to the bathroom or whatever, but it was just very inhumane.” Local news reports corroborate her account. In July 2020, a woman detainee was found dead inside the Letcher County Jail; the cause of her death—whether from Covid-19, a drug overdose, neglect, or something else—was never announced. Municipalities in this former coal mining area of eastern Kentucky have built or expanded at least half a dozen jails like Letcher County’s in the last twenty years. The reason is the drug war. Beginning in 2001, law enforcement agencies in the region poured millions of dollars into fighting one class of drugs in particular: prescription pain killers. This event is now known as the “opioid epidemic,” and every year it attracts a great deal of coverage and commentary in books, articles, documentaries, and even TV shows. These accounts all tell the same basic story, with the same characters. On one side are the villains: Purdue Pharma and other large pharmaceutical companies, drug sales representatives, “pill mill” pain specialists, and street dealers. On the other side are the heroes: primary care physicians, parents, civic and faith leaders, scientists, and law enforcement officials. The accounts nearly always frame the epidemic as a static battle of good vs. evil, the chain of events comprising it as a linear, causal path of injury and response. Big Pharma targeted places like central Appalachia because they were poor and deindustrialized, and opioids became rampant there for those very same reasons. In response to the influx, civilian heroes banded together to fight back against the villains, using their tools of community action and litigation. While well-intentioned, this narrative is incorrect. Communities in central Appalachia did not band together to fight Big Pharma; many of them were in fact torn apart by the punitive response to the epidemic, which came at a crucial moment in political and economic history. Community activists targeted their own neighbors for punishment and labeled them public enemies, creating a social atmosphere in which recovery was nearly impossible. Thousands of people were disappeared into cages, some never to emerge again; if and when they did get out, they were often still addicted, or marked with felonies, and thus cycled back into what one public defender described to me as the “felony trap.” The result has been an epidemic not suppressed but inflamed.

Writer who announced Republican run for Senate in Ohio last week tells Fox News he now thinks Trump was ‘a good president’.

after about a week I wanted back in. I knew the place was still hopping, because friends would email me updates that drove me wild with the need to comment. The writer Naomi Wolf was permanently banned from Twitter for her imperious anti-vaxxing during my absence. It was as though Twitter had thrown a cloth over her parrot cage—the chattering suddenly stopped, and she was silent. But I had thrown a cloth over my own parrot cage, so I couldn't crow about it. Someone sent me news that the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had written about “leprechaun economics” and the Irish ambassador to America had taken the bait and complained. It was a cultural moment that (in my opinion) screamed out for Caitlin Flanagan, but where was she? I texted the editor of this magazine: “Paul Krugman's after me lucky charms!” The editor texted back, “I wish I knew what this meant.” I tried patching through to Old Media, sending the Times a letter to the editor in which I directed Krugman to W. B. Yeats’s Fairy and Folktales on the Irish Peasantry and its menacing description of leprechauns as “sluttish, slouching, jeering, mischievous phantoms,” suggesting that he should watch his back. Crickets from the Times. Did I even exist anymore?

Past medical reviews have estimated that the fungal infection—mucormycosis—has an overall fatality rate of around 50 percent. However, mortality rates vary by patients’ underlying condition and what part of the body the mucormycetes fungi invade. Infection can take hold in the gastrointestinal tract, skin breaks, lungs, and the blood. In India, the fungi appear to be mainly taking root in the nose and sinuses, where they can spread to facial bones, eyes, and even the brain. Once an infection is established, it can quickly become aggressive and lead to tissue death. If it spreads to the eye, many patients end up permanently losing vision and, in some cases, need to have their eye entirely removed to keep the infection from spreading. Mucormycetes are a ubiquitous group of molds, and they typically only strike immunocompromised patients, such as those with diabetes. The soil-lurking molds love acidic conditions, making patients with diabetic ketoacidosis—a complication in which the blood becomes acidic—particularly vulnerable.

The toe bone of a prehistoric deer carved with lines by Neanderthals 51,000 years ago is one of the oldest works of art ever found, according to a study released Monday. The discovery is further evidence that Neanderthals — Homo neanderthalensis — were able to express symbolism through art — which was once attributed only to our own species, Homo sapiens.

Richard Donner, the prolific Hollywood director and producer whose helming credits include some of the most iconic movies of the 1970s and ’80s including the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman, The Goonies and the Mel Gibson-Danny Glover buddy cop series Lethal Weapon, has died. He was 91. Donner died Monday, according to his wife, the producer Lauren Schuler Donner, and his business manager. No cause of death has been revealed. The Bronx-born Donner, a genial man with a booming voice, started his career directing for television, like his film credits a laundry list of staple shows including Route 66, The Rifleman, The Twilight Zone, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Gilligan’s Island, Perry Mason and The Wild Wild West. After his debut feature, the 1968 crime comedy Salt & Pepper starring Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, and 1969’s Lola with Charles Bronson and Susan George, Donner segued to films full time with 1976’s spooky The Omen.

By unanimous vote, Honduras' Sentencing Court found Roberto Castillo guilty as co-perpetrator of the murder of environmentalist Berta Caceres.