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For centuries, people have witnessed unexplained lights in the sky and thought that perhaps they might be ghosts or angels. However, it was in the summer of 1947 when a different explanation became popular. Following a widely reported incident over Mt. Rainier in Washington state, people began to believe that these unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are actually alien spacecraft prowling the Earth.

Over the past 70 years, more than ten thousand similar reports have been made.

Some accounts simply arose from nothing more than the fevered imaginations of UFO enthusiasts.

Trump White House trade advisor Peter Navarro was arrested at an airport Friday on a federal indictment charging him with two counts of contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

The House of Representatives in April voted to ask the U.S. Justice Department to criminally prosecute Navarro and Dan Scavino, another former Trump aide, for failing to comply with their subpoenas.

During the proceeding, he railed against prosecutors for alleging colluding with a “partisan Congress” and the White House of Democratic President Joe Biden.

In April 1999, I survived the Columbine shooting. At just 17 years old, I was forced to process the murder of my friends, the trauma of my community, and the unique attention the world paid to my experience. At the time, Columbine was considered a once-in-a-generation type of tragedy — one that few other people in our country would ever have to contend with. 

According to the organization Everytown for Gun Safety, the U.S. has experienced 274 mass shootings since 2009 alone. Thousands of survivors are now part of a club that nobody wants to join.

I think about how we vowed to “never forget” Columbine. How we would make sure the next generation would be safer. The opposite has happened.

In fact, history is NOT a "collection of facts about the past." History consists of making arguments about what happened in the past on the basis of what people recorded (in written documents, cultural artifacts, or oral traditions) at the time.

The problem is complicated for major events that produce "winners" and "losers," since we are more likely to have sources written by the "winners," designed to show why they were heroic in their victories.

There is no interpretation. There is no explanation of why the Mexicas lost.

A judge’s decision that the word “victim” generally could not be used in court to refer to the people shot by Kyle Rittenhouse after protests in Kenosha, Wis., last year drew widespread attention and outrage this week.

Mr. Rittenhouse, who has been charged with six criminal counts, including first-degree reckless homicide, first-degree intentional homicide and attempted first-degree intentional homicide in the deaths of two men and the wounding of another, is expected to argue that he fired his gun because he feared for his life.

The experts said the term “victim” can appear prejudicial in a court of law, heavily influencing a jury by presupposing which people have been wronged.

Who could not have noticed the media’s mistakes made over the last eight years, starting with showing Trump’s rallies live and free of real-time fact checking? Who could have missed that moment in early 2016 when Leslie Moonves, then CEO of CBS, said all of these things about a GOP primary race he likened to a circus with bomb-throwing? “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” And “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.” And “Donald’s place in this election is a good thing.” And “The money’s rolling in and this is fun.”

Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella, a former Republican congressional staffer who in the age of Trump left the GOP for the Democratic party, argued last summer in a Los Angeles Times column that CNN should be accurately informing citizens so they can make “meaningful choices” instead of trying to appease enemies of democracy. “The greatest disservice you can do is to place the liars on the same playing field as those who are committed to the truth,” he wrote.

We are on the verge of a crucial time, when federal prosecutors could make history by indicting Trump, and juries could make history by convicting him. Would CNN bring in Trump acolytes and FBI haters to whine about witch hunts and hoaxes and unfairness, even as the charges and witnesses and evidence are out there for the world to see

The Wasteland Theatre Company is not your average band of thespians. Dotted all across the world, they meet behind their keyboards to perform inside Fallout 76, a video game set in a post-nuclear apocalyptic America. The Fallout series is one of gaming’s most popular, famous for encouraging players to role-play survivors within the oddly beautiful ruins of alternate-history Earth

“Imagine a wandering theatre troupe in the 17th century going from town to town doing little performances,” says the company’s director, Northern_Harvest, who goes by his gamertag or just ‘North’, and works in communications in real life. “It’s not a new idea; we’re just doing it within the brand new medium of a video game.”

The company was formed almost by chance, when North befriended a group of players in the wasteland. As they adventured together, they noticed that the Fallout games are peppered with references to Shakespeare’s works.

“Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.”

a recent Piper Sandler survey found that, of 14,500 teens surveyed across 47 states, only 20 percent named Instagram their favorite social-media platform (TikTok came first, followed by Snapchat).

Simply being on Instagram is a very different thing from actively engaging with it. Participating means throwing pictures into a void, which is why it’s become kind of cringe. To do so earnestly suggests a blithe unawareness of your surroundings, like shouting into the phone in public.

Essay generation is neither theoretical nor futuristic at this point. In May, a student in New Zealand confessed to using AI to write their papers, justifying it as a tool like Grammarly or spell-check: ​​“I have the knowledge, I have the lived experience, I’m a good student, I go to all the tutorials and I go to all the lectures and I read everything we have to read but I kind of felt I was being penalised because I don’t write eloquently and I didn’t feel that was right,” they told a student paper in Christchurch. They don’t feel like they’re cheating, because the student guidelines at their university state only that you’re not allowed to get somebody else to do your work for you. GPT-3 isn’t “somebody else”—it’s a program.

The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up

“You can no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly amazing.”

Over the next five years, the CHIPS Act will direct an estimated $67 billion, or roughly a quarter of its total funding, toward accelerating the growth of zero-carbon industries and conducting climate-relevant research, according to an analysis from RMI, a nonpartisan energy think tank based in Colorado.

That means that the CHIPS Act is one of the largest climate bills ever passed by Congress. It exceeds the total amount of money that the government spent on renewable-energy tax credits from 2005 to 2019

And it’s more than half the size of the climate spending in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. That’s all the more remarkable because the CHIPS Act was passed by large bipartisan majorities, with 41 Republicans and nearly all Democrats supporting it in the House and the Senate.

In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.”

“I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”

The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face

Years before he impressed critics with his first novel, “Green on Blue” (2015), written from the perspective of an Afghan boy, Ackerman was already, in his words, “telling stories and inhabiting the minds of others.” He explains that much of his work as a special-operations officer involved trying to grasp what his adversaries were thinking, to better anticipate how they might act

“Look, I really believe in stories, I believe in art, I believe that this is how we express our humanity,” he says. “You can’t understand a society without understanding the stories they tell about themselves, and how these stories are constantly changing.”

his, in essence, is the subject of “Halcyon,” in which a scientific breakthrough allows Robert Ableson, a World War II hero and renowned lawyer, to come back from the dead. Yet the 21st-century America he returns to feels like a different place, riven by debates over everything from Civil War monuments to workplace misconduct.

people aren’t trying to sell busyness as a virtue anymore, not even to themselves. A new generation has grown to adulthood that’s never known capitalism as a functioning economic system. My generation, X, was the first postwar cohort to be downwardly mobile, but millennials were the first to know it going in.

Our country’s oligarchs forgot to maintain the crucial Horatio Alger fiction that anyone can get ahead with hard work — or maybe they just dropped it, figuring we no longer had any choice.

Through the internet, we could peer enviously at our neighbors in civilized countries, who get monthlong vacations, don’t have to devote decades to paying for their college degrees, and aren’t terrified of going broke if they get sick. To young people, America seems less like a country than an inescapable web of scams, and “hard work” less like a virtue than a propaganda slogan, inane as “Just say no.”

Almost all of Trump’s supporters want to cast their gaze elsewhere—on some other issue, on some other hearing, on some other controversy. They’ll do anything to keep from having to confront the reality of what happened on January 6. What you’re very unlikely to see, except in the rarest of cases, is genuine self-reflection or soul-searching, regret or remorse, feelings of embarrassment and shame.

Trump supporters have spent much of the past half dozen years defending their man; their political and cultural identity has become fused with his. Some of them may have started out as lukewarm allies, but over time their support became less qualified and more enthusiastic. The unusual intensity of the Trump years increased their bond to him.

He was the captain of Team Red. In their minds, loyalty demanded they stick with him, acting as his shield one day, his sword the next.

even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.

The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university,

So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods

Some behavioral interventions do seem to lead to positive changes, such as automatically enrolling children in school free lunch programs or simplifying mortgage information for aspiring homeowners. (Whether one might call such interventions “nudges,” however, is debatable.)

it’s not clear we need to appeal to psychology studies to make some common-sense changes, especially since the scientific rigor of these studies is shaky at best.

Nudges are related to a larger area of research on “priming,” which tests how behavior changes in response to what we think about or even see without noticing

Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau. The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.

even now, as their stories are being dramatized in a movie and shown in theaters across the country, there is a campaign in Oklahoma — this time with legislation — to deter the history from being taught in schools.

The Osage had these events seared in their memories. Yet most Americans had excised even the bureau’s sanitized account from their consciences. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred during the same period, the Osage Reign of Terror was generally not taught in schools, even in Oklahoma

Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”

That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption

“We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”

Misinformation or even disinformation in search results was already a problem before generative AI. Back in 2017, The Outline noted that a snippet once confidently asserted that Barack Obama was the king of America.

This is what experts have worried about since ChatGPT first launched: false information confidently presented as fact, without any indication that it could be totally wrong. The problem is “the way things are presented to the user, which is Here’s the answer,” Chirag Shah, a professor of information and computer science at the University of Washington, told me. “You don’t need to follow the sources. We’re just going to give you the snippet that would answer your question. But what if that snippet is taken out of context?”

Responding to the notion that Google is incentivized to prevent users from navigating away, he added that “we have no desire to keep people on Google.