The two victims suffering from critical and serious injuries from the shooting are expected to make full recoveries, Houston officials said Monday evening.
The Houston Police Department would not confirm the identity of the suspect, citing the on-going investigation. Several news organizations, though, have identified the shooter as Nathan DeSai.
Officials did confirm the suspect had two weapons in his possession during the shooting, both of which were purchased legally: a .45 semi-automatic handgun and a Thompson submachine gun, commonly known as a “Tommy Gun.” They added that the suspect had several other weapons at his residence.
Police said the suspect wore “military-style apparel,” but could not confirm if the uniform had a particular affiliation, as previous unconfirmed reports stated he wore a Nazi-style uniform. Police, though, did confirm that Nazi emblems were found on his person and at his residence.
The suspect’s motive has not yet been determined. He is believed to have acted alone.
Multiple news organizations identified the alleged shooter as Nathan DeSai. The Houston Chronicle reports that a .45 pistol was used in the shooting. Investigators, the newspaper added, also found a long gun and ammunition in the shooter’s car.
DeSai’s father, in an interview with the local ABC affiliate, said his son had been having business troubles.
KPRC, the local TV station, cited two unnamed law-enforcement sources as saying the shooter wore a Nazi uniform during this morning’s shooting. That claim has not been independently verified.
Some witnesses have described the gunman firing dozens of shots at cars passing through a condo complex, which is near the affluent West University Place community. Several cars with bullet holes and shattered windows were at a parking lot near the condo complex.
Eduardo Andrade, 42, was driving his Audi A3 this morning on his way to LA Fitness when he found himself thrust into the middle of an active shooter scene.
"As I was driving by Law Street I suddenly hard a big explosion," said Andrade. "I covered myself, accelerated and tried to get out of there. I did not know if someone was following me or trying to shoot me."
Two bullets struck his vehicle, one came through the windshield and the other the front-passenger window.
"One bullet hit here and the other here," he said, while pointing at the holes. "I felt the hot air."
The father of two who works in the oil and gas industry was on his way to exercise at his gym at about 6:25 a.m. when the shooting happened.
"It's so random, think of it, if I was driving a little faster or a little slower, the bullet would have had a different trajectory," he said.
At a news conference Monday, Martha Montalvo, the Houston police chief, said, in all, nine people were injured: Three of them were treated on the scene and released; six were taken to area hospitals. One person suffered critical injuries, Montalvo said; another had serious injuries. The identities of those shot have not been released.
Montalvo said the suspect was a lawyer, “and there were some issues concerning his law firm.” He lived in the neighborhood, she said, but did not provide further details. The suspect was shot and killed by police, Montalvo said.
The Houston Police Department says the suspect who opened fire near a shopping center early Monday is dead . The location of the shooting is active, but contained, it added.
The motive for the shooting isn’t clear. More information on the shooting will be provided at a news conference later Monday.
Richard Mann, the executive assistant chief of the Houston Fire Department’s Emergency Response Command, told reporters the suspect had been “neutralized.” He did not elaborate whether that meant the suspect was injured or killed by officers responding to the shooting.
Mann also said six people were taken to hospital after the shooting. Their status is not known.
January 6 was practice. Donald Trump’s GOP is much better positioned to subvert the next election.
Technically, the next attempt to overthrow a national election may not qualify as a coup. It will rely on subversion more than violence, although each will have its place. If the plot succeeds, the ballots cast by American voters will not decide the presidency in 2024. Thousands of votes will be thrown away, or millions, to produce the required effect. The winner will be declared the loser. The loser will be certified president-elect.
The prospect of this democratic collapse is not remote. People with the motive to make it happen are manufacturing the means. Given the opportunity, they will act. They are acting already.
Who or what will safeguard our constitutional order is not apparent today. It is not even apparent who will try. Democrats, big and small D, are not behaving as if they believe the threat is real. Some of them, including President Joe Biden, have taken passing rhetorical notice, but their attention wanders. They are making a grievous mistake.
As we peer around the corner of the pandemic, let’s talk about what we want to do—and not do—with the rest of our lives.
At the bleakest moment in the pandemic, when you felt your most stressed, most scared, least centered, you probably heard some variation of the phrase This is really hard. Maybe you read it; maybe your manager said it to you; maybe you said it to yourself. But that’s the truth: Our nearly two years of living through a pandemic have been hard. And like everything else in the United States, that difficulty has not been evenly distributed. It has been hardest for those on the front lines, those afraid of how customers will react to their requests to put on a mask, those out of work or in constant fear of the way COVID variants are whipping through their community. It has been hard, in different ways, for those attempting to work and supervise school from home, for those in complete isolation, for those terrified of being around other people. It is fucking hard, in so many intersecting and unfair ways.
An episode chock-full of emotional violence may have ended with real tragedy.
This article contains spoilers through the eighth episode of Succession Season 3.
What’s clear by now is that the Roys need to stay away from water. Every late-in-the-season tragedy and act of bloodshed, whether real or intangible, has been tied to the element that classically represents femininity, emotion, and intuition. These are not, of course, qualities that you’d associate with the Roys, and yet balance will have its way in the end.
Tonight’s episode, “Chiantishire,” named for the unfortunate moniker upper-class Brits give the region of Tuscany, ended with Kendall Roy (played by Jeremy Strong) lying facedown in an infinity pool in the Italian countryside. It was a climactic and devastating end to an episode chock-full of emotional violence, but also one that seems fated to be an installment on the upcoming podcast being made about the “curse of the Roys.” The news of that show, delivered casually by Kendall’s PR flack Comfrey (Dasha Nekrasova), added yet more anguish to Kendall’s buffet of psychological slights. First, his mother, Lady Caroline (Harriet Walter), made fun of his buzz cut. Then she asked him to back out of certain events at her wedding so his more powerful father could attend. Finally, Logan (Brian Cox) taunted Kendall over an uneaten dinner, refusing to agree to buy him out of Waystar Royco, and reminding him that his addictions had led to a young man’s death at the wedding of his sister, Shiv (Sarah Snook). “Whenever you fucked up, I cleaned up your shit,” Logan said. “And I’m a bad person? Fuck off, kiddo.”
To head off the next insurrection, we’ll need to practice envisioning the worst.
A year after the insurrection, I’m trying to imagine the death of American democracy. It’s somehow easier to picture the Earth blasted and bleached by global warming, or the human brain overtaken by the tyranny of artificial intelligence, than to foresee the end of our 250-year experiment in self-government.
The usual scenarios are unconvincing. The country is not going to split into two hostile sections and fight a war of secession. No dictator will send his secret police to round up dissidents in the dead of night. Analogies like these bring the comfort of at least being familiar. Nothing has aided Donald Trump more than Americans’ failure of imagination. It’s essential to picture an unprecedented future so that what may seem impossible doesn’t become inevitable.
Countries with low vaccination rates are suffering from more than just inequity.
In the public-health world, the rise of Omicron prompted a great, big “I told you so.” Since the new variant was detected in South Africa, advocacy groups, the WHO, and global-health experts have said the new variant was a predictable consequence of vaccine inequity. Rich countries are hoarding vaccine doses, they said, leaving much of the developing world under-vaccinated. But in reality, countries with low vaccination rates are suffering from more than just inequity.
South Africa, the country where the variant was first reported, did receive vaccines far too late, partly because wealthy countries did not donate enough doses and pharmaceutical companies refused to share their technology. At one point, South Africa had to export doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine that it had manufactured in-country in order to comply with a contract it had signed with the company. The COVID-19 vaccines must be kept cold, and because not everywhere in South Africa has reliable roads and refrigeration, the country has struggled to store and transport vaccine doses to far-flung areas.
The film’s lead is reprehensible and self-aggrandizing––and mesmerizing to watch.
Mikey Saber, the preening, confident chump who’s the ostensible hero of Sean Baker’s new film, Red Rocket, enters on-screen to a loud and familiar tune: “Bye Bye Bye,” by *NSync. The song is a piece of mainstream pop from yesteryear (it’s a shiver-inducing 21 years old), and its usage in this arty indie film seems laced with irony. Baker knows, though, that for all its non-subtlety, “Bye Bye Bye” is still as catchy as it was the day of its release, and he uses it to suggest the same of Mikey (played by Simon Rex): He’s his own kind of relic, rolling back into his hometown after a failed career in Los Angeles, but he’s still got a glint of charm to him.
Baker has always told small-scale stories set on the margins of America—2015’s Tangerinewas a bittersweet Christmas tale about trans sex workers, and 2017’s The Florida Project was about “hidden homeless” families living in a motel. Both of those films were empathetic works about people enduring incredibly challenging circumstances—Baker, who often casts first-time actors in his work, is a master of displaying unvarnished truth on-screen. Red Rocket is far more sour than sweet, but that’s part of the point; Mikey is a reprehensible fellow, but he’s clawed his way through life by sheer force of will, and as such, the camera simply can’t look away.
Too many people still have no protection against the coronavirus.
No one knows exactly what endemic COVID will look like, but whatever it looks like, this—gestures at the current situation—ain’t it. COVID is not yet endemic. There is little doubt that the coronavirus will get there eventually, when almost everyone has been vaccinated or infected or both, but right now we are still living through a messy and potentially volatile transition period. Cases are ticking up again. A new variant is afoot. The challenge ahead is figuring out how to manage the transition to endemicity, however long it takes.
COVID is not yet endemic because too many people still lack any immunity from either vaccination or infection, here in the United States and globally. Europe is a cautionary tale in this regard: Countries such as Germany and Austria that have slightly better vaccination coverage than the U.S.—68 percent and 66 percent, respectively, compared with 60 percent here—are nevertheless seeing their cases and hospitalizations soar in yet another wave. Even with most people vaccinated, there isn’t enough immunity to blunt big and fast surges of Delta. Just 15 percent of the population without immunity is still a huge absolute number in a country with millions of people, says Lloyd Chapman, an infectious-disease modeler at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Chapman and his colleagues have estimated the number of unvaccinated and unexposed people who could still be hospitalized for COVID in Europe based on each country’s age structure. (He is planning to do a similar analysis for the U.S.) “The main headline point would be that,” he says, “there’s still a long way to go.” And that was before Omicron. The new variant could be even better at evading previous immunity than Delta, and its spread might push endemicity further off into the future.
The GOP’s leaders are attempting to destroy the foundations of American democracy.
In October of 1860, The Atlantic’s first editor, James Russell Lowell, wrote of Abraham Lincoln that he “had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.” Lowell, in his endorsement, was mainly concerned not with Lincoln’s personal qualities but with the redemptive possibilities of his new party. The Republicans, Lowell wrote, “know that true policy is gradual in its advances, that it is conditional and not absolute, that it must deal with facts and not with sentiments.”
There is insufficient space in any one issue of this magazine to trace the Republican Party’s decomposition from Lincoln’s day to ours. It is enough to say that its most recent, and most catastrophic, turn—toward authoritarianism, nativism, and conspiracism—threatens the republic that it was founded to save.
I studied more than 100 dual-income couples and found a few things in common among the ones who managed to create partnerships that felt truly equal.
Although the number of dual-career couples isrising, equal partnerships have not necessarily become the norm. Despite much talk about splitting housework, there is a surprising lack of guidance on how exactly to address the deeper challenges that these couples face, such as when and where to relocate, how to split parenting responsibilities, or how to honor both partners’ ambitions. I have spent the past five years studying more than 100 working couples around the world to learn how they combine two careers and a relationship. Most of the couples I interviewed aspired to split their responsibilities at home and at work equally, but few managed to really do so. For many, resentment and guilt festered, and equality became a mirage.
Like it or not, the way we work has already evolved.
In 2019, Steven Spielbergcalled for a ban on Oscar eligibility for streaming films, claiming that “movie theaters need to be around forever” and that audiences had to be given “the motion picture theatrical experience” for a movie to be a movie. Spielberg’s fury was about not only the threat that streaming posed to the in-person viewing experience but the ways in which the streaming giant Netflix reported theatrical grosses and budgets, despite these not being the ways in which one evaluates whether a movie is good or not. Netflix held firm, saying that it stood for “everyone, everywhere [enjoying] releases at the same time,” and for “giving filmmakers more ways to share art.” Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing on the wall: Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home.
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