There is a video of Prince that I can’t stop watching. It’s just over an hour long, shot in grainy black-and-white. It looks like a surveillance tape. This is Prince in 1982, before 1999, before Purple Rain and Sign “O” the Times, before there were stadiums packed with people demanding something from him. Three months earlier, he opened for the Rolling Stones, wearing thigh-high boots and bikini briefs, and got chased off stage by an audience throwing garbage. Now he’s playing in suburban New Jersey for a crowd of college kids who don’t know how to process what they’re witnessing. It’s one of the most miraculous things I’ve ever seen. 

The show starts in pulsing darkness, with an a capella gospel track. Above the choir we hear Prince clearly, his always startling baritone rolling up to a keening falsetto. “You’ve got to love your brother if you want to free your soul,” he sings. These are the last religious words that will be sung that night, but they’re a reminder that Prince is an artist who knows, like Madonna and Al Green and Marvin Gaye, that all the sexiest music is at least a little bit about God. Then the drums kick in. Prince’s strobe-lit silhouette flashes out of the darkness. His body looks enormous, which it was not. I’m reminded, strangely, that Prince was born epileptic, and that as a child he informed his mother—correctly, it turned out—that he wasn’t going to have seizures anymore. He’d been cured by an angel, he said. 

It feels like there’s something private about what he’s doing up there, like we’re not supposed to be seeing this, like it’s a sin. The camera can’t contain him. He vanishes a few times, leaving an empty black square. When the camera pulls back, we realize he’s dropped to the floor, seeking an angle of even greater intimacy with his guitar. Over the course of the hour he seems to draw inward, choosing to ignore the teenagers shuffling clumsily around him. At several points, I think, he forgets the audience is there. But then he remembers, looks up, shoots his arms to the ceiling and poses for a beat before retreating again into his body, that place where he spins and jumps and grinds and, unasked, gives freely of himself. 

—Charlie Lee

Kate, Vish and Jim prepare England’s masterplan for how we can guarantee Nations League success: bring Jack Grealish on as a sub… after three minutes. You’re welcome.

It’s a big weekend of action for England’s neighbours too, as Wales end their week-long hangover with a Belgian battle, while Andy Robertson prepares to man-mark Matthew McConaughey at Soccer Aid. Well, alright!

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This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

The first week after Staff Sgt. Alleria Stanley reported to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, she says, three separate people approached her to offer advice: For her own safety, she should avoid certain areas near base.

“‘Don’t go down these roads.’”

“‘Don’t go here.’”

“‘They’ll kill you,’” Stanley says she was warned by fellow servicemembers who thought she might be at risk—because she is transgender.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Climate policy is being dragged into the culture wars with misinformation and junk science being spread across the internet by a relatively small group of individuals and groups, according to a study. The research, released on Thursday, shows that the climate emergency—and the measures needed to deal with it—are in some cases being conflated with divisive issues such as critical race theory, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion access, and anti-vaccine campaigns.

The study, published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Climate Action Against Disinformation coalition, found that although outright denials of the facts of the climate crisis were less common, opponents were now likely to focus on “delay, distraction, and misinformation” to hinder the rapid action required.

“Our analysis has shown that climate disinformation has become more complex, evolving from outright denial into identifiable ‘discourses of delay’ to exploit the gap between buy-in and action,” said Jennie King, head of climate disinformation at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

The most prominent anti-climate content came from a handful of influential pundits.

The report looked at social media posts over the past 18 months and particularly around the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow last year. It found that the urgent need for wide-ranging mitigation and adaptation strategies were continually downplayed or condemned as unfeasible, overly expensive, disruptive or hypocritical. And it identified a number of specific “discourses of delay,” including:

The catfish, it turns out, is one hell of a taster. And I don’t mean that they are good-tasting, as in, fried, battered, and served on a baguette. (I’ll leave that distinction up to you.) I mean, catfish are really good at tasting. As science journalist Ed Yong explains in his new book, An Immense World, these fish are basically swimming tongues: Their smooth, slimy bodies are covered in taste buds, giving them the ability to sample the flavor of anything they touch. “If you lick one of them,” he writes, “you’ll both simultaneously taste each other.” Or, as one physiologist told Yong, “If I were a catfish, I’d love to jump into a vat of chocolate. You could taste it with your butt.”

“In an era of mass extinction, climate change, and, obviously, pandemic risk, there had always been a question in my mind of, Is this work of service to our society in a moment of multiple, overlapping crises?”

An Immense World is full of delightful and fascinating animal profiles like this. While you may know Yong from his Pulitzer Prize–winning Covid writing for the Atlantic, the book takes him back to the kind of science reporting he did so often before the pandemic, as a self-described “nerdy outsider who writes about quirky nature stuff.” Much of the book, which comes out June 21, focuses on animals’ ability to perceive the world—through smell, taste, sight, touch, sound, surface vibrations, echoes, magnetic fields, and more—from ants to elephants to Yong’s own corgi, Typo. I learned, for instance, that zebras may have evolved to be striped not to ward off lions or hyenas, as I’d heard before, but disease-carrying flies! And that the blue and yellow coloring of a reef fish may stand out to us, but to predators, their colors act as camouflage, blending in with the water and corals. And that some scientists theorize that migratory birds may be able to see the Earth’s magnetic field using magnetoreceptors in their eyes.

But the book isn’t just a gift to science nerds and animal lovers (your girl is guilty on both counts). It’s also a call-to-action, a plea to, as Yong puts it, “preserve the dark” and “save the quiet.” In the final chapter, Yong asks the reader to consider the harms of sensory pollution—an environmental problem that, unlike so many others we face today, can be “immediately and effectively addressed.” Turn off the lights, and we instantly reduce light pollution. Stop the honking, whirling, and beeping—and with it, goes the noise. (We effectively accomplished this in early 2020, Yong notes, when pandemic lockdowns meant the world was much quieter and darker.)

Much like how nature needed a reprieve from us humans, An Immense World was an essential reset for Yong himself. At the end of 2020, when Yong announced via Twitter he was going on book leave, he wrote, “This year has been the most professionally meaningful of my life, but it has also shredded me.” He needed a break.

When I called him last month, Yong told me that this book (his second, after the 2016 bestseller I Contain Multitudes) felt like a “salve for the soul” to write. “I’m feeling pretty burnt out now,” he said. “But I think I would be catastrophically so if I hadn’t taken a break and existed in this much happier, more joyful headspace for a while.” He hopes that the same feeling extends to readers, especially now, after more than two brutal years of Covid. “We could all use a little bit more joy right now,” he said.

A democracy is only as strong as its ability to recognize what threatens it. If a nation cannot comprehend the danger it faces, it is not in a position to adopt measures to protect itself. On Thursday night—in prime time!—the House committee investigating the January 6 riot tried to sound the alarm. But the fact that the committee needed to highlight the obvious—that the constitutional order was jeopardized by a president who schemed to overturn a free and fair election and who incited an insurrectionist attack on the US government—was itself a warning that this threat has not been fully or adequately addressed. 

Opening the first of a series of hearings, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee chair, delivered passionate remarks that noted the assault on the US Capitol placed two centuries of constitutional democracy at risk and that it was part of “sprawling, multi-step conspiracy” orchestrated by Donald Trump to negate the election and overthrow the government to retain power illegally. Thompson asked his audience to try not to view this hearing as a political endeavor. The committee, he said, “will remind you of the reality that happened that day.” And that is the committee’s challenge: to counter Trump’s Big Lie and defend not just constitutional government but reality itself. 

Thompson did that with the first piece of evidence the committee presented. It was a clip from a deposition of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who told the committee’s investigators that he had three post-election conversations with Trump in which he said the election was not stolen and that this assertion was “bullshit.” In her opening statement, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the ranking Republican on the committee, showed testimony from Ivanka Trump in which she said she had accepted Barr’s conclusion that there was no significant election fraud. That is, according to the president’s daughter, Trump was defying reality—either lying about the election or delusional, perhaps both. 

Cheney hammered this point further: Assorted Trump campaign officials, she said, concluded there was no evidence the election was stolen. A top campaign lawyer informed White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that the campaign had uncovered no significant voting wrongdoing. Meadows replied to him, “So there’s no there there.” (My recollection is that this conversation is not in Meadows’ recent book.) Barr also told Trump that the allegations that voting machines had been rigged against him was “complete nonsense” and “crazy stuff.” Yet that didn’t stop Trump. He kept repeating this accusation. He refused to acknowledge reality. 

Cheney also signaled the committee is determined to show that Trump engaged in a profound dereliction of duty on January 6.  She noted that half a dozen witnesses have told the committee that while the violent melee was under way aides and confidantes pressed Trump to take steps to end the riot—and he refused to do so. Worse, he became angry at advisers who asked him to intervene. Cheney also disclosed that in response to reports that the marauders were threatening to kill Vice President Mike Pence, Trump, according to one witness, said maybe Pence “deserves it.” And she said that during the course of the riot, Trump placed no call to any element of the US government to protect the Capitol. 

On January 6, 2021, Caroline Edwards was one of five officers forming the US Capitol Police’s first line of defense against hundreds of advancing rioters. As the frenzied crowd pressed forward into the metal bike racks dividing them from the cops, the 5-foot-4 Edwards was thrust to the ground, sustaining a traumatic brain injury when her head collided with the concrete. 

Edwards, the first officer to be hurt during the riot, was one of two live witnesses that the January 6 committee called to testify during Thursday night’s hearing. At one point, the officer watched video footage of the moment she was injured. 

Video shows the moment that Officer Caroline Edwards suffered injuries outside of the U.S. Capitol. Edwards was thrown to the ground. pic.twitter.com/uMx2uhnCNM

— Norah O'Donnell (@NorahODonnell) June 10, 2022

Even after suffering brain trauma, Edwards continued to beat back the mob with her fellow officers. During the fighting, Edwards testified, she was pepper sprayed beside officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes hours after the Capitol attack and died the next day. The Washington, DC, medical examiner concluded Sicknick died of natural causes but added that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.”

Look, who knows what the upshot of the January 6 Committee hearings will be. That Trump and his cronies tried to overthrow election results has been clear for more than a year to those who are paying attention.

But what if you haven’t been?

Well, the January 6 Committee has made a deft play to get your attention, and they’re doing it by deploying all the tricks of a limited-run HBO series or podcast. First, they use structure—a “seven-part plan” to overthrow a free and fair election, as Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told us, and they’re going to devote an episode to each part of that plan. Care to see which members of Congress begged for a presidential pardon for their role in the coup? Tune in to episode 4!

“While the violence was underway, President Trump failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol,” says Rep. Liz Cheney in her opening statement for the Jan. 6 hearing.

More: https://t.co/RSSQwb8trE pic.twitter.com/4pSthhzHt5

While rioters rampaged through the Capitol on January 6, President Donald Trump told staff with him that he approved of the attack, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) revealed on Thursday during the first hearing of the select congressional panel investigating the attack.

“As you will see in the hearings to come, President Trump believed his supporters at the Capitol, and I quote, ‘Were doing what they should be doing,'” Cheney, the vice chair of the panel, said in her opening statement at the hearing.

It was already known that after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol on January 6 it took Trump more than three hours to tell the attackers to leave, even as aides, his family members, and frightened members of Congress pressed him to try to call off the mob he had incited. But Cheney revealed new information that Trump had not only rejected those pleas but vocally sided with the mob.

“You will hear testimony that the president did not really want to put anything out, calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave,” Cheney said. “You will hear that Trump was yelling and angry at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more.”

When Trump learned that attackers were calling to “hang Mike Pence,” because the vice president had refused to comply with Trump’s illegal call for Pence to assert his power to block the certification of electoral votes, Trump said he agreed with the mob. “Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” Trump said, according to Cheney. “Mike Pence deserves it,”

How Steven Spielberg's film about a loveable alien stands up, forty years on