Police respond to reports of an active shooter on the Ohio State University campus in Columbus, Ohio on November 28, 2016.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins / AP
At least 11 people were injured in an attack at the Ohio State University Monday morning.
Shortly before 10 a.m. local time, a suspect drove a vehicle into pedestrians, and then emerged from the car and started attacking them with a butcher knife. He was shot and killed by police. Eleven people sustained stab wounds, and at least one person is in critical condition.
Officials have identified the suspect as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a student at the university. The police officer who shot him is 28-year-old Alan Horujko.
The university initially reported there was an active shooter on campus, according to a tweet by school officials. Students were advised to shelter in place or “Run Hide Fight.” The lockdown was lifted about two hours later.
Classes were canceled for the rest of the day. Aerial footage broadcast on cable news showed multiple police cars and ambulance on campus. Many students had recently returned to campus after Thanksgiving break.
We’re live-blogging the news below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).
Police Identify Suspect in Attack, Officer Who Shot Him
Authorities identified the suspect in the attack Monday as Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a student at Ohio State University. No additional details about the suspect or his motive were given. Authorities also identified the officer who shot and killed Artan as 28-year-old Alan Horujko, who has served with the university’s police department since January 2015.
"We all owe a debt of gratitude," Monica Moll, the university's department of public safety director, said of Horujko during a news conference Monday. "He did a fabulous job today."
The Violent Attack at OSU, From a Student's Perspective
Though many Ohio State students first heard the reports of an attack through the university’s campus alert system, some students who were already on campus were close enough to see the events unfold.
Michael Cloonan, a second-year student, said he was in class when he heard gunshots.
“We were going over an example problem and we heard four gunshots,” Cloonan told The Lantern, the university’s student newspaper. “People at the window saw [a] man laying on the ground. We went upstairs to lab upstairs and locked the door. Police responded very quickly. Immediately. Twenty seconds. Maybe less. Really quick.”
Martin Schneider, a student, told the BBC he heard a car engine revving.
“I thought it was an accident initially until I saw the guy come out with a knife,” Schneider said of the vehicle’s driver.
Nicholas Flores, a third-year student, said he was in class when he heard the reports of an active shooter on campus. While the rest of his classmates went to the fourth floor of the building to barricade themselves, he went to the courtyard to help.
“Most of these people here are kids on campus,” Flores, a 27-year-old former marine, toldThe Columbus Dispatch. “Their parents send them here to be safe and be educated. It's sad.”
OSU Police Chief Says Suspect Used Butcher Knife in Attack
Students leave buildings surrounding Ohio State University’s Watts Hall, where police were called to respond to reports of a shooting on campus. (John Minchillo / AP)
Ohio State Police Chief Craig Stone said at a press conference Monday afternoon that the suspect in the attack used a butcher knife to attack pedestrians.
At about 9:52 a.m. local time, the suspect drove a vehicle into pedestrians on campus. “He exited the vehicle and used a butcher knife to start cutting pedestrians,” Stone said. “Our officer was on scene in less than a minute and ended the situation in less than a minute.”
That officer, Craig said, shot and killed the suspect. The officer was not injured.
Michael Drake, Ohio State’s president, said he will visit the injured victims at hospitals later this afternoon.
“We prepare for situations like this and always hope never to have one,” Drake told reporters at the press conference.
The AP and local media report that nine people were transported to hospitals with stab wounds and gunshot wounds. Eight people have non-life-threatening injuries, and one is in critical condition, according to local hospitals.
Local media reports the attack began when a car drove into Watts Hall, located on the school’s North Campus. Two people emerged from the vehicle, one with a knife and the other with a gun, according to witnesses.
The Columbus Dispatchreports one suspect has been killed by police.
Police are continuing to search campus for potential suspects. Police have surrounded a parking garage at West Lane Avenue and Tuttle Park Place on campus.
Heavy police presence at the Lane Avenue Garage. Officer on scene said the remaining shooter is believed to be inside. pic.twitter.com/YN9m2mFYUV
Molly Clarke, a student in the university’s MBA program, told CNN over the phone that she and her classmates are locked inside one of the buildings on campus. “It’s slightly terrifying,” Clarke said. She said several of her classmates who previously served in the military are guarding the door of their classroom.
At least seven people have been taken to the hospital, CNN reports. WBNS-TV, a network in Columbus, Ohio, reports the number of injured is at least eight, citing local fire officials.
Staffers from The Lantern, the school’s student newspaper, are tweeting photos from the scene. They report that ambulances, SWAT vans, and a bomb squad is on campus.
Ambulances line Woodruff Avenue, street is blocked off between High and College pic.twitter.com/oQD7rhjP7y
U.S. national security depends upon our allies’ ability to trust us with intelligence. Mar-a-Lago was no place to keep top-secret documents.
French President Emmanuel Macron has to be wondering why former President Donald Trump retained, of all things, information about him. I certainly am; aren’t you? According to an inventory of what the FBI took from Mar-a-Lago during last week’s search and recovery of materials from Trump’s home, the French dossier, so to speak, stood out. Why Macron? Lest we forget, France is a friend and partner to the U.S., most notably in the unified response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
For now, we’re stuck with a maddening uncertainty about the true stakes of the matter: If Trump was holding on to personal information—perhaps mere tittle-tattle—about the leader of an allied nation, as well, reportedly, as top-secret intelligence about nuclear capabilities, then why? We swing between gossip and fear, the scurrilous and the deadly serious, The Real Housewives and The Walking Dead. We parse the judicial warrant, including an Espionage Act charge, for clues. The temptation to indulge in overheated speculation, particularly for some of Trump’s more partisan critics, is irresistible—but irresponsible, as The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols has warned.
Why are sacramental beads suddenly showing up next to AR-15s online?
Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or “rad trad”) Catholics. On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal.
Their social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (“God wills it”) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants.Influencers on platforms such as Instagram share posts referencing “everyday carry” and “gat check” (gat is slang for “firearm”) that include soldiers’ “battle beads,” handguns, and assault rifles. One artist posts illustrations of his favorite Catholic saints, clergy, and influencers toting AR-15-style rifles labeled SANCTUM ROSARIUM alongside violently homophobic screeds that are celebrated by social-media accounts with thousands of followers.
Last spring, my boyfriend sublet a spare room in his apartment to an aspiring model. The roommate was young and made us feel old, but he was always game for a bottle of wine in the living room, and he seemed to like us, even though he sometimes suggested that we were boring or not that hot.
One night, he and my boyfriend started bickering about which Lorde album is better, the first one or the second one. This kind of argument can be entertaining if the participants are making funny or interesting points, but they weren’t, and they wouldn’t drop it. The roommate was getting louder and louder; my boyfriend was repeating himself. It was Friday; I was tired. I snapped and said, loudly, “This conversation is dumb, and I don’t want to keep having it.” I knew it was rude, but I thought it was expedient, eldest-sibling rude. So I was sort of shocked when the roommate got up without a word, went into his room, slammed the door, and never spoke to me again.
Young Americans face a dire economy—and steep odds against political change.
“Frustrating” was one word a young progressive activist named Annie Wu Henry used to describe today’s Democratic establishment.
In her mind, Wu told me in an interview, Democrats are falling short in terms of addressing the country’s affordability crisis, eliminating student debt, protecting the rights of immigrants and LGBTQ Americans, and ensuring access to abortion. Worse, she said, they seem to have no viable strategy for accomplishing what they promise, let alone what the country needs. “We tell them our ideas, and they tell us their plans,” Wu said, talking about the strategic differences she sees between the left and the right. “While we can be very upset that the Court overturned Roe, nobody should be surprised. The right has been talking about this for decades, as well as telling us how they are going to do it.”
Stick shifts are dying. When they go, something bigger than driving will be lost.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am operating my car, not just driving it. That’s why I’ve driven stick shifts for the past 20 years.
That streak may soon be over. When it comes time to replace my current car, I probably won’t be able to get another like it. In 2000, more than 15 percent of new and used cars sold by the auto retailer CarMax came with stick shifts; by 2020, that figure had dropped to 2.4 percent. Among the hundreds of new car models for sale in the United States this year, only about 30 can be purchased with a manual transmission. Electric cars, which now account for more than 5 percent of car sales, don’t even have gearboxes. There are rumors that Mercedes-Benz plans to retire manuals entirely by the end of next year, all around the world, in a decision driven partly by electrification; Volkswagen is said to be dropping its own by 2030, and other brands are sure to follow. Stick shifts have long been a niche market in the U.S. Soon they’ll be extinct.
What did the state of Alabama do to Joe Nathan James in the three hours before his execution?
This much is undisputed: In 1994, Joe Nathan James Jr. murdered Faith Hall, a mother of two he had formerly dated; in 1999, he was sentenced to death in Jefferson County, Alabama; and he was executed on July 28, 2022. Whether James ought to have been killed was and is, by contrast, deeply disputed—Hall’s family pleaded that their mercy should spare him, and the state government acted against their wishes. Also disputed is the matter of how, exactly, the Alabama Department of Corrections took James’s life. Or it was in my mind, at least, until I saw what they had done to him, engraved in his skin.
A little over a week ago, James’s body lay on a bloody shroud draped over an exam table in an Alabama morgue scarcely large enough to accommodate the three men studying the corpse. He had been dead for several days, but there was still time to discover what exactly had happened to him during the roughly three-hour period it took to—in the Department of Corrections’ telling—establish access to a vein so an execution team could deliver the lethal injection of drugs that would kill him. Despite the long delay and an unnaturally short execution, the Department of Corrections had assured media witnesses gathered to observe James’s death that “nothing out of the ordinary” had happened in the course of killing the 50-year-old. It was suspicion of that claim that led to this private autopsy.
Human actions have turned a usually beneficial fungus into a bringer of death.
Deep in the loamy soil of forests around the world, there exists a fungus called the honey mushroom that makes its living on death. A parasite that preys on weak trees, it sucks its victims dry of nutrients, then feasts on their postmortem flesh. Orchards and vineyards have fallen to it; gardeners, farmers, and foresters spend their days fruitlessly fighting the pesticide-resistant scourge. Although the bulk of the fungus’s mass is underground, its devastation is visible to anyone who’s flown over the gray, balding patches of woodland where the pathogen has felled its hosts.
The honey mushroom is also an exemplar of the extreme forms that life can take. Thousands of years ago, one honey-fungus species, Armillaria ostoyae (also known as Armillaria solidipes), birthed a spore that settled in what we now think of as Oregon, started to spread, and never stopped. “It was just extremely, extremely successful at growing,” says Adriana Romero Olivares, a mycologist at New Mexico State University. “And so it got extremely, extremely large.” Today, that individual fungus inhabits roughly 2,400 acres of earth. Nicknamed Humongous Fungus, it is one of the planet’s largest known organisms, and the biggest ever recorded by area on land.
This is what happens when you debase free expression in the name of free expression.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in June 1989, just months after issuing a fatwa ordering the murder of Salman Rushdie and all others involved in the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. Fatwas cannot be rescinded posthumously, which is why ever since then, this fatwa has hung in the air like a putrid smell, inhaled deeply for inspiration by devout followers of Khomeini and his successors. On Friday, a man stabbed Rushdie in upstate New York. The suspect is 24, from New Jersey, and reportedly an admirer of Iranian theocratic rule. “The news is not good,” Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, said in a statement. Rushdie took a hit to the liver and will likely lose an eye. By Saturday night, Rushdie was reportedly off his respirator and talking.
The text message came a little before 5 p.m. It was August 26, 2021. Eleven days earlier, the Taliban had overthrown the Afghan government. My friend—a German writer and academic—had been trying to help my family flee the country. Now she told me she had gotten my two younger sisters and me on the list for a flight to Frankfurt, a last-minute evacuation negotiated by the German government and a nonprofit group.
“What about my mom?” I asked. She didn’t reply for a moment. “I was not able to get her on this flight,” she answered. Please, I begged her: “My brothers are gone and my father is living with his second wife. She just has us, no one else, for God’s sake please do something.”
But there was nothing she could do. “These are the names that they offered me,” she wrote. “I know it’s a terrible choice.”
A new memoir on the unfinished sexual revolution explores the difficulty of enacting one’s political beliefs in intimate spaces.
When the activist and writer EllenWillis published “Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution” in 1982, the preposition in her title underscored an uncomfortable truth: The sexual revolution had come and (mostly) gone and left women largely unsatisfied. On the one hand, the ’60s and ’70s had ushered in real, tangible gains. Contraception and abortion had been legalized; the stigmas surrounding casual and extramarital sex had lessened. For women, there weren’t as many punishments for daring to have sex as there had been before. Still, the rewards hadn’t entirely materialized, either. Willis is chiefly remembered today for defining the concept of pro-sex feminism, refusing to condemn pornography—as many feminists did—and espousing the radical idea that “sexual love in its most passionate sense is as basic to happiness as food is to life.” But the new “liberated” sexuality, Willis noted in the early ’80s, was “often depressingly shallow, exploitative, and joyless.” True sexual liberation, she argued, would involve “not only the abolition of restrictions, but the positive presence of social and psychological conditions that foster satisfying sexual relations. And from that standpoint, this culture is still deeply repressive.”
