april 2016

The goldfish were the first to vanish. Every so often, a few would go missing overnight from the office’s tiny outdoor pond. But goldfish were cheap, so no one in the building—an environmental nonprofit in the bustling, sweaty center of Colombo, Sri Lanka—bothered investigating.

Then the dragon koi began to disappear. Lustrous and ethereal, each of these whiskered Japanese carp cost around 10,000 Sri Lankan rupees, or $65. In a fit of extravagance, the building’s landlord had bought 10. Soon, he had seven. Then three.

Panicked, the landlord installed four security cameras to catch the thief. The pond rested at the end of a narrow driveway surrounded by tall concrete walls, so whoever was swiping the carp had either a key or the superhuman ability to bound up nearby roofs and drop in undetected. The landlord couldn’t imagine what kind of person would steal a fish, but he was eager to find out.

Donald Trump isn’t particularly nice to anyone. His standard demeanor and language in disagreement or debate resemble the union of a road-rage incident and a bad game of the dozens. Even in agreement, he’s not a person for whom respect—of others or of the office he holds—is necessarily a guiding light. He does not run out of venom for opponents, and rarely has a word of unqualified praise for people who haven’t praised him first.

But if one pattern in his remarks about other people has crystallized in the past few months, it’s that the president employs a particular species of dismissive language when he’s talking about black women. After spending a good chunk of his first year in office attacking black men, his sophomore year has involved high-profile verbal attacks against high-profile black women. And, as evidenced by his recent remarks on the death of the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, his need to subordinate black women, even without enmity, is a primary drive.

Gerta Keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”

Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.

I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster.

You’re at a party and you see someone cute across the room. They glance at you, maybe even smile for a second, then carry on with their conversation. You feel the room shrink, your heart rate quicken, your face go red: You’re crushing on this stranger, hard. But then the sensible part of your brain tells you to forget it: That person’s way, way out of your league.

Wait a second, you counter: Do dating “leagues” even exist?

At this point, Elizabeth Bruch, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan, crashes in to your thought process (and this news article). Yep, she says. Leagues do seem to exist. But you’re not alone in trying to escape yours: “Three-quarters, or more, of people are dating aspirationally,” she says. And according to a new study, users of online-dating sites spend most of their time trying to contact people “out of their league.”

China has reportedly begun deploying flocks of drones disguised as birds to surveil its citizens. The drones have wings that flap so realistically they’re difficult to distinguish from actual birds. In fact, animals on the ground often can’t make the distinction, and even real birds in the sky sometimes fly alongside the drones. The robotic birds can mimic 90 percent of the movements of their biological counterparts, and they’re also very quiet, which helps them avoid detection.

The operation’s codename is “Dove”—but there’s reason to doubt whether these machines come in peace. Yang Wenqing, a member of the team behind Dove, said the technology has “some unique advantages to meet the demand for drones in the military and civilian sectors” and “good potential for large-scale use in the future.”

Earlier this month, Facebook announced it had detected and shut down more than 30 Russia-linked fake pages created as part of a campaign to influence the U.S. midterm elections. In case there was any doubt, Russia’s effort to influence American politics continues.

The Russian government has one overriding objective with regard to the United States: to weaken America so that it loses its will and ability to counter Russian objectives, including establishing a sphere of influence in eastern Europe. To that end, the Kremlin actively exploits and deepens political, cultural, economic, racial, and other societal rifts in America. If Americans are fighting one another, they are less likely to notice, much less press, the government to block Russian action in places like Ukraine, Georgia, or Syria.

Omarosa Manigault-Newman has provided recordings on which nervous aides discuss how to cover for something hideous they believe Donald Trump has uttered.

And we hardly need question whether the N word is the one at issue. What would that hideous utterance have been if not the word currently treated as the most taboo in the English language? In an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob and Laura Petrie are chilled that their son Richie had used a “bad word,” which the script must leave unspoken given the public standards of the era. It is clear, however, that the word was fuck. In 2018, the word those aides are so worried about is just as clearly nigger.

But the question is whether this is truly big news.

BERLIN—What happens when you do a prime-time interview with a far-right leader—but don’t ask them anything about refugees?

German television viewers found out Sunday night when the broadcaster ZDF ran a major interview with Alexander Gauland, a co-leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which capitalized on anti-refugee sentiment to earn its first-ever seats in the German Parliament last fall. Ahead of the interview, ZDF’s Twitter feed teased the interview as dealing with “climate change, retirement, digitalization—and without refugees.”

The resulting 19-minute interview, in which Gauland struggles to answer basic questions about his party’s positions on such issues, has been lauded by opponents of the AfD as masterful. Supporters of the AfD and Gauland himself panned it as biased. The ZDF journalist Thomas Walde, who conducted the interview, repeatedly pushed Gauland to clarify or explain statements made by his fellow party members—and asked more than once about proposed policy “alternatives” from a party that counts the word alternative as part of its name.

Scientists decoded the genome of rice in 2002. They completed the soybean genome in 2008. They mapped the maize genome in 2009. But only now has the long-awaited wheat genome been fully sequenced. That delay says nothing about wheat’s importance. It is arguably the most critical crop in the world. It’s grown on more land than anything else. It provides humanity with a fifth of our calories. But it also has one of the most complex genomes known to science.

For a start, wheat’s genome is monstrously big. While the genome of Arabidopsis—the first plant to be sequenced—contains 135 million DNA letters, and the human genome contains 3 billion, bread wheat has 16 billion. Just one of wheat’s chromosomes—3B—is bigger than the entire soybean genome.

This article is from the archive of our partner .

Cherlene, a country music album from linked to FX's animated spy show Archer, is now for sale, and fans have been pleasantly surprised at the solid musicality of the songs.

Archer — now under the name Archer Vice — has taken a wacky plot turn this fifth season largely because creator Adam Reed grew "bored" with the same old spying storylines. The gang now works as failing cocaine dealers rather than spies, but the characters and their interactions largely remain the same. That is, except for Cheryl, who for underdeveloped-but-who-really-cares reasoning has decided to become a country music star and change her name to Cherlene. As part of that transformation, the Archer brass commissioned Kevn Kinney, the singer for the Southern rock band Drivin N Cryin, to make a real album of country songs, now available for download.