Extra, Extra
The Discord Accord: “At 11:30 PM on Tuesday, September 9, Rakshya Bam stepped down from an army jeep outside military headquarters in a pitch-dark, locked-down Kathmandu. The 26-year-old hadn’t slept in more than a day. Her eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, the whites threaded with thin lines of fatigue. A wave of youth-led protests had rocked Nepal, born on Discord servers, TikTok feeds, and encrypted messaging apps. In just a few days, Bam had seen friends gunned down, watched parliament buildings smolder, and witnessed the collapse of the Nepalese government. Prime minister K. P. Sharma Oli had resigned, and the army had stepped in to try to restore order. Now, Bam was one of 10 young activists who had been summoned to an unprecedented meeting.” Wired: The Inside Story of How Gen Z Toppled Nepal’s Leader and Chose a New One on Discord.
+ Fit for a King: “Their efforts are grounded in a controversial theory of social progress: That a select group of elites are exactly the right people to move the country forward, a position Buskirk argues is not in defiance of MAGA’s populism. Putting industry leaders in positions of power is a hallmark of Trump’s presidency — from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to tech titan Elon Musk — and Buskirk says the MAGA movement has energized a new generation of stewards for the country.” WaPo (Gift Article): The secretive donor circle that lifted JD Vance is now re-writing MAGA’s future.
+ Leak Detector: “Until last week, Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi was the Israeli army’s top lawyer. Now she is behind bars and at the center of a scandal rocking the country after a bizarre sequence of events that included her abrupt resignation, a brief disappearance and a frantic search that led authorities to find her on a Tel Aviv beach.” NPR: Israel rocked by scandal as top military lawyer is thrown into jail. “The soap opera-worthy saga was touched off last week by Tomer-Yerushalmi’s explosive admission that she approved the leak of a surveillance video at the center of a politically divisive investigation into allegations of severe abuse against a Palestinian at a notorious Israeli military prison.”
+ Drug War: “The murder of Mexico’s most vocal anti-crime mayor shows that, despite President Claudia Sheinbaum’s crackdown on drug cartels, the battle is just beginning.” NYT: Bold Assassinations Are ‘Reality Check’ in Mexico’s Cartel Fight.
+ Parasite Killing Host? “The web archive Common Crawl has been quietly funneling paywalled articles to AI companies—and lying to publishers about it.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Nonprofit Doing the AI Industry’s Dirty Work.
+ We Have a Problem: For Halloween, a group of Arizona high school teachers wore bloody shirts with the message “problem solved.” Of course, the Turning Point crowd outed these teachers as anti-Charlie Kirk radicals who should be made famous and fired. Soon, the teachers were receiving death threats. But here’s the thing. The teachers wore the shirts to make a joke about how hard some of their math problems are to solve. How do we know that? Well, for one thing, they explained as much. For another thing, they wore the same outfits last year.
