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
The former president could still win fair and square if Biden lets these five problems spiral.
Are constitutionally committed Americans doing all they can to prevent a pro-Trump plot to pervert the 2024 election?
Maybe not.
But along with that question, here’s another: Are constitutionally committed Americans doing all they can to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 election fair and square?
The Biden administration’s numbers are slumping in the fall of 2021, opening the way for Republican gains in 2022 and the return of the twice-impeached ex-president as a presidential nominee. The schemes and machinations of the pro-Trump movement are part of the story. But if we’re heading toward a crisis of the republic, the mistakes and misfortunes of the anti-Trump coalition deserve a mention as well.
This has become a common refrain among the cautious—and it’s wrong.
For many fully vaccinated Americans, the Delta surge spoiled what should’ve been a glorious summer. Those who had cast their masks aside months ago were asked to dust them off. Many are still taking no chances. Some have even returned to all the same precautions they took before getting their shots, including avoiding the company of other fully vaccinated people.
Among this last group, a common refrain I’ve heard to justify their renewed vigilance is that “vaccinated people are just as likely to spread the coronavirus.”
This misunderstanding, born out of confusing statements from public-health authorities and misleading media headlines, is a shame. It is resulting in unnecessary fear among vaccinated people, all the while undermining the public’s understanding of the importance—and effectiveness—of getting vaccinated.
Justices love to proclaim their impartiality, all evidence to the contrary.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett is offended by those questioning the impartiality of the Supreme Court.
“This Court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” she announced at a recent event at the University of Louisville’s McConnell Center, named for Senator Mitch McConnell. “Judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”
For Barrett to insist on her nonpartisanship at a center named for the legislator whose procedural hardball was instrumental in securing her seat suggests that, although Barrett’s peers have praised her legal mind, her sense of irony leaves something to be desired. But then, it’s not much more absurd than her colleague Justice Brett Kavanaugh insisting on his impartiality days after vowing revenge against the left while under oath. Similarly, Justice Clarence Thomas recently warned against “destroying our institutions because they don’t give us what we want, when we want it,” complaining that “the media makes it sound as though you are just always going right to your personal preference.” Next month, Thomas will give a keynote address at a symposium celebrating his years on the Court at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, alongside McConnell.
A conversation with the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
For years now, artificial intelligence has been hailed as both a savior and a destroyer. The technology really can make our lives easier, letting us summon our phones with a “Hey, Siri” and (more importantly) assisting doctors on the operating table. But as any science-fiction reader knows, AI is not an unmitigated good: It can be prone to the same racial biases as humans are, and, as is the case with self-driving cars, it can be forced to make murky split-second decisions that determine who lives and who dies. Like it or not, AI is only going to become an even more omnipresent force: We’re in a “watershed moment” for the technology, says Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO.
Schmidt is a longtime fixture in a tech industry that seems to constantly be in a state of upheaval. He was the first software manager at Sun Microsystems, in the 1980s, and the CEO of the former software giant Novell in the ’90s. He joined Google as CEO in 2001, then was the company’s executive chairman from 2011 until 2017. Since leaving Google, Schmidt has made AI his focus: In 2018, he wrote in The Atlantic about the need to prepare for the AI boom, along with his co-authors Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, and the MIT dean Daniel Huttenlocher. The trio have followed up that story with The Age of AI, a book about how AI will transform how we experience the world, coming out in November.
Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way.
In 1947, Albert Einstein, writing in this magazine, proposed the creation of a single world government to protect humanity from the threat of the atomic bomb. His utopian idea did not take hold, quite obviously, but today, another visionary is building the simulacrum of a cosmocracy.
Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or a zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined.
To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.
While some Pfizer recipients can now get an extra shot, federal officials are still mum on what’s next for the at-risk individuals who got Moderna or J&J.
For some of us, booster shots have finally arrived. But they’ve charted quite a meandering course to get here. First, last month, President Joe Biden announced that most Americans would be able to nab third doses of mRNA vaccines eight months after their second shots. Then, last week the FDA narrowed the eligible population, before a CDC advisory committee suggested tightening the boundaries even further. Hours after that panel shared its recommendation, the agency’s director, Rochelle Walensky, reversed course and ballooned the guidance back out to more closely align with the FDA’s much broader guidelines—though she stopped short of urging the shots for everyone.
It is all, frankly, a bit confusing. Millions of Americans are now in a sort of immunological limbo, wondering which expert advice to heed, and how soon to reroll up their sleeve, as the guidance coming from up top shifts seemingly by the day. Boosters are, at this point, offering more whiplash than protection. I spoke with Walensky today at The Atlantic Festival to see if we could make sense of some of the current situation—her unconventional move to break from the advisory committee’s guidance, and the tough choices millions of Americans face as they navigate the months ahead.
Some of the plots to overturn the election happened in secret. But don’t forget the ones that unfolded in the open.
Last year, John Eastman, whom CNN describes as an attorney working with Donald Trump’s legal team, wrote a preposterous memo outlining how then–Vice President Mike Pence could overturn the 2020 election by fiat or, failing that, throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans could install Trump in office despite his loss to Joe Biden. The document, which was first reported by the Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, is a step-by-step plan to overthrow the government of the United States through a preposterous interpretation of legal procedure.
Pence apparently took the idea seriously—so seriously, in fact, that, according to Woodward and Costa, former Vice President Dan Quayle had to talk him out of it. Prior to November, the possibility of Trump attempting a coup was seen as the deranged fever dream of crazed liberals. But as it turns out, Trump and his advisers had devised explicit plans for reversing Trump’s loss. Republican leaders deliberately stoked election conspiracy theories they knew to be false, in order to lay a political pretext for invalidating the results. Now, more than 10 months after the election, the country knows of at least five ways in which Trump attempted to retain power despite his defeat.
A group called Counterweight assists people who feel that their bosses and co-workers are forcing them to endorse social-justice beliefs.
Helen Pluckrose is a former academic who became famous for pranking the academy. Three years ago Pluckrose, who previously researched medieval religious writing, joined with the scholars James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian to concoct some fake scientific studies on outlandish topics, such as rape culture among dogs. They loaded the papers with phrasing such as “because of my own situatedness as a human, rather than as a dog,” and submitted them to peer-reviewed journals. Seven of the papers were accepted for publication. The exercise had its critics, but to the hoaxers, the stunt suggested that journals in the humanities are so blinded by ideology that they’ll publish anything that confirms their worldview.
One of the ocean’s top predators has met its match.
Filipa Samarra could hear the pilot whales before she could see them. In 2015, out on the choppy waters off of southern Iceland, Samarra and her research team were eavesdropping on a group of killer whales. She listened as they pipped, squealed, and clicked when suddenly her ears were filled with high-pitched whistling. “Then the killer whales just went silent,” says Samarra, a biologist and the lead investigator of the Icelandic Orca Project. As the whistling grew stronger, a group of pilot whales came into view, and the killer whales seemed to turn and swim away.
“It’s quite unusual because the killer whale is this top predator,” says Anna Selbmann, a doctoral candidate at the University of Iceland who is supervised by Samarra. “It’s very unusual that they’re afraid of anything—or seemingly afraid.”
The controversial cult brand LuLaRoe sold a powerful idea: that mothers could succeed as entrepreneurs while spending meaningful time with their kids.
People who have heard of LuLaRoe have usually come across it for one of two reasons. Either someone they know has tried to sell them the company’s stretchy leggings and fit-and-flare dresses over Facebook, or they’ve seen some of the gleeful coverage of LuLaRoe’s very public disintegration as a brand: the lawsuits, the bankruptcies filed by its sellers, the boxes of apparently moldy clothing shipped to vendors that smelled, in one woman’s description, like a “dead fart.” (Leggings! Never not controversial!) Much of LuLaRich, a new four-part Amazon series exploring the company’s rise and fall, focuses on its alleged mismanagement and manipulative aspects, grouping it with some of the splashier docuseries of years past. No one at LuLaRoe seems to have found themselves getting the area above their groin branded, or poisoning an Oregon salad bar with salmonella. But in one scene, a former LuLaRoe vendor recalls a company meetup where everyone assembled was, like her, wearing brightly patterned leggings and a broad, be-lipsticked smile. “I remember looking around and being like, We all look the same,” she tells the camera. “I was like, Oh my God, I’m in a cult.”
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