En route to a crime scene down back roads in rural Ireland, Sergeant Jackie Noonan briefly flips down her car’s sun visor to check out the sky. “That is some incarnation of sun,” Noonan announces to her fellow officer Pronsius, and though it falls over a landscape where cows “sit down like shelves of rock in the middle of the fields,” she deems it “equatorial.”

     “You know where Guadalajara is, Pronsius?” 

     “Is it the far side of Belmullet?”

Technically, she concedes, it is. A little later when she asks him, “You ever been anywhere exotic, Pronsius?” he replies, “I been the far side of Belmullet.”

The latest Star War series on Disney+ is the darkest yet

Five stars for Hirokazu Kore-eda's funny, knotty caper – with a big heart

Brace yourselves, some of the season's biggest games are happening this weekend! Plenty for Kate, Jim and Andy to get stuck into on today's Preview Show, sponsored by Betway.

Liverpool have the straightforward task of dispatching 13-time winners Real Madrid in the Underdog Derby, while Huddersfield and Nottingham Forest are one game from the promised land. You can also now speak to a Diego Maradona hologram on an Argentinian plane bound for Qatar 2022... Yep.

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Once upon a time, Alex Berenson was a New York Times journalist covering major stories, from the Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina to the Bernie Madoff scandal. But over the last several years, he’s increasingly focused on a new pet project: owning the libs. In his Substack newsletter “Unreported Truths” he rails against Joe Biden, derides the pro-choice movement, and complains about inflation to his “tens of thousands of subscribers.”

One of Berenson’s favorite themes has been to downplay the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines—and it’s this work in particular that has made him a star. Before Twitter kicked him off the platform for spreading vaccine disinformation last year, he had hundreds of thousands of followers. Berenson’s Substack newsletters over the last month have mostly been more of the same: He rails against “woke media whoppers about Covid vaccines” and describes Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman as a “fat vaccinated cannabis activist.”

But earlier this week, Berenson took aim at a new target: the growing global outbreak of the monkeypox virus. In a post titled “Is It Monkeypox or Crystalpox?” Berenson writes that public health authorities have “almost got another epidemic on the go—the perfect way to distract the shiny-haired robots in the media from the complete failure of the mRNA vaccines.” He then goes on to argue that monkeypox is strictly a disease of gay men. “Are you a gay man who likes sex with lots of other gay men?” he wrote. “Maybe in a bathhouse? Maybe names optional? Maybe with a meth bump on the side? No? Are you sure?… Okay. Don’t worry about the monkeypox thing then.”

With those two points—a supposedly overblown illness plus some homophobia—Berenson did what anti-vaccine activists do best. He managed to build upon his previous talking points and pivot to the current news cycle, neatly weaving the latest headlines into a grand conspiracy theory with necessary villains and egregious profiteering.

There is seemingly no topic too far afield for these zealots to exploit. Recently, I’ve reported on anti-vaccine influencers’ embrace of pro-Kremlin ideology and their promotion of dangerous disinformation about the baby formula shortage. But the monkeypox outbreak offers especially fertile ground because it allows the purveyors of misinformation to recycle many of the same talking points that they developed for Covid. The addition of homophobic rhetoric is particularly toxic, as it’s likely to unite anti-LGBTQ extremists with Covid denialists. As Yale epidemiologist and AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves put it on Twitter earlier this week, this might be “that moment when homophobia meets far right pandemic politics.”

For many years now, every horrific gun massacre has ricocheted widely with a familiar theme of outrage and surrender. On Wednesday, the day after a heavily armed, suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, Washington Post columnist Brian Broome published one of the more powerful versions of that narrative I’ve ever read. “Nothing happened after innocent children were slaughtered the last time, or the time before that, and nothing is going to be done now,” he wrote, citing Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Parkland.

Broome’s column articulated the enduring shame of our nation’s political stalemate and pathetic inaction on gun policy. It was piercing and poignant—and, in my view, wrong.

It’s not just that we shouldn’t resign ourselves in perpetuity to such outrage, rightful as it is. This narrative has become part of the problem itself—in some cases possibly even fueling the escalating cycle of mass shootings. That’s because it validates the recurring violence, framing it as an indefinite feature of our reality.

And mass shooters pay heed. After nearly a decade of studying these attacks and how to prevent them through the work of behavioral threat assessment, I documented extensive case evidence for my book, Trigger Points. The research shows that many perpetrators are keenly aware of media and political narratives about their actions.

They hope the public will focus on sensational coverage of their rage-filled “manifestos,” their sinister photos uploaded to social media, their ghastly livestreams. They want notoriety, and they seek justification and credibility for their acts of violence. And in the message that America will never stop these mass shootings, they find such affirmation.

“We don’t know his motive yet, but authorities believe he acted alone”…“it was a lone gunman”…“the shooter acted alone…”

No, he didn’t.

A motive will probably be assigned to him. We have studied every mass shooting since 1982. And the “motives” are usually some combination of the following: He struggled with bullying. Or self-loathing and depression. Maybe he had an ax to grind with an authority figure. Maybe he hated a certain group of people.

But whatever we learn about the Uvalde shooter, or any future ones—because there will be more—don’t say they “acted alone,” which is largely media code for “this doesn’t appear to be Islamic terrorism.” No matter the particulars, these “lone” gunmen all have scores of accomplices. Here is a wholly incomplete list of those who bear direct responsibility in this slaughter of 19 children and two teachers, and the brutality visited on those still in the hospital, all the families, and the community and country at large:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott: A relentless cheerleader for gun extremism, last year he gleefully signed seven bills rolling back gun regulations—including abolishing licenses for handguns. In the aftermath of this shooting he blamed mental health issues, a go-to tactic to distract from the gun debate, despite having cut $211 million from the agency that provides state mental health services.

My father, Ted Berrigan, is primarily known for his poetry, especially his book The Sonnets, which reimagined the traditional sonnet from a perspective steeped in the art of assemblage circa the early sixties. He was also an editor, a publisher, and a prose writer—specifically one who worked in the forms of journals and reviews. While his later journals were often written with the expectation of publication—meaning the journal-as-form could be assigned by a magazine editor—his sixties journals are much more internal. In these journals, he’s writing to document his daily life and his consciousness while figuring out how to live, and how to live as a poet, so to speak. These excerpts from his journals were originally published in Michael Friedman’s lovingly edited Shiny magazine in 2000. They were selected by the poet and editor Larry Fagin, who invited me to come to Columbia University’s library, where my father’s journals from the early sixties are archived, and work with him on the selection process. We were looking, as I think of it now, for moments of loud or quiet breakthrough—details, incidents, and points of recognition that contributed to his ongoing formation as a person and poet.

“The Chicago Report,” which narrates a weekend trip from Iowa City to Chicago to attend a reading by Kenneth Koch and Anne Sexton put on by Poetry magazine, was written in 1968 in the form of a letter to Ron Padgett, a close friend and fellow poet. It was later published in an issue ofThe World, the Poetry Project’s mimeographed magazine, as well as in Nice To See You, an homage book put together by friends after my father’s death in 1983. It may be recognizable as an affable, freewheeling, and at times incendiary piece of first-person satire, filtering the voice of “Ted Berrigan” through the voice of Ted as known by Ron, or vice versa. My father was a working-class Korean War veteran who didn’t feel comfortable in high-class literary circles but did engage them at times, with amusement and a kind of gentle predilection for disruption. 

—Anselm Berrigan

A New York appellate court dealt Donald Trump another blow Thursday when it ruled that the former president and his daughter must sit for sworn depositions in the New York’s civil fraud investigation into the family business. New York State Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed Donald and Ivanka Trump back in December, but Trumps’ attorneys argued that the they shouldn’t have to because, they said, James’ whole investigation was baseless and politically motivated. Arthur Engoron, the lower court judge handling the case, disagreed, writing in his decision that there was actually “copious evidence” that the Trumps might have committed fraud and no evidence that James’ probe was motivated by an improper political bias. 

In Thursday’s ruling, four appellate judges from the New York Supreme Court’s First Department agreed with Engoron’s assessment, writing that the Trumps presented no evidence of politically motivated persecution or selective prosecution.

During oral arguments back in February, the Trumps’ attorneys seemed far more focused on appealing to public perception than on convincing Engoron. At one point, Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s personal attorney in the case, complained that James refused to go after Trump’s 2016 presidential rival.

“Are you going to go after Hillary Clinton for what she’s doing to my client, that she spied at Trump Tower in your state?” Habba demanded to know. “Are you going to look into her business dealings?”

In his own public statements, Trump has complained that James, who is Black, is one of several “radical, vicious, racist prosecutors” investigating him. In court, Habba claimed the investigation was about “viewpoint discrimination,” but the appellate judges were thoroughly unconvinced. To successfully make the argument that you are being illegally singled out for investigation, you have to show that someone else is not being investigated for a similar offense when they should be, and the judicial panel concluded—arguments about Hillary Clinton aside—that the Trumps “have not identified any similarly implicated corporation that was not investigated or any executives of such a corporation who were not deposed.”

The beats are almost always the same. 

A shooter enters a crowded space with a loaded gun, usually one modified to kill dozens of people in seconds—and usually one that they obtained legally. They open fire and murder innocents. Earlier this month it was 10 patrons at a Buffalo supermarket; this week it was 19 children and two of their teachers in Texas. As the news spreads, well-intentioned people flood Twitter with reminders not to share unverified information about the shooting in its early moments. Some people share it anyway. If the shooter has proclaimed their motivations on paper, more well-intentioned people vociferously demand that others don’t share the document. Some people share it anyway. 

Within a few hours of the shooting, large swaths of the public demand a policy solution—gun control. Others claim to be upset about how the tragedy is being too quickly politicized. If there is footage of the carnage, the videos ping around tech companies’ platforms endlessly, despite their commitments to the contrary.  The location of the tragedy inspires a hashtag: #[place name] strong. The Onion republishes the same article it always publishes, about how this all keeps happening. People vow to handle this at voting booths at the next election. But eventually, they seem to forget, and almost nothing changes. 

In the 15 years that I have been old enough to pay attention to the news, this is the only story arc I have known. With mass shootings, but also, it feels, with almost every other issue that has become a point of political contention, from police brutality to LGBTQ discrimination to whatever the culture war du jour is. The problems differ, but the pattern is the same: public outrage and political will swell, wane, and then little changes. The doomcycle repeats itself. 

When police killed another Black man, George Floyd, in the summer of 2020, protestors flooded the streets. Politicians vowed to enact major policy change. But two years later, those police reform demands have faded. When another lawmaker, this time in Texas, proposed a bill that would criminalize medical care for transgender kids, businesses and advocacy groups criticized the policy—yet it has moved forward unabated. And when school districts in 26 states (and counting) banned books about racial justice and gender identity, parents and students voiced their opposition at school board meetings across the county, only to be drowned out by board members and other parents.