The Atrocity of American Gun Culture - After mass shootings like those in Uvalde and Buffalo, pro-gun officials say they don’t want to politicize tragedy. But the circumstances that allow for the mass murder of children are inherently political. - link
The Staff of Uvalde’s Local Paper Cover the Worst Day of Their Lives - The paper’s employees lost neighbors, acquaintances, and a daughter in a school shooting. Then they had to report the story. - link
What the End of Roe v. Wade Will Mean for the Next Generation of Obstetricians - An aspiring ob-gyn’s views on abortion might determine what training she seeks out, which specialities she pursues, and where she chooses to live. In a post-Roe world, that self-sorting process would grow even more intense. - link
Why a Weakened N.R.A. Still Gets What It Wants - Lawsuits and years of infighting have dramatically weakened the group, but the Republican Party has taken up its agenda on guns with no external pressure. - link
When Cars Kill - A boy’s death launches a movement to end pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in New York City and beyond. - link
Help, I can’t stop rewatching this 11-year-old corporate thriller nobody saw in theaters.
I think it was on my third or fourth viewing of Margin Call, the 2011 corporate thriller starring Zachary Quinto and Jeremy Irons, that I realized I finally understood Grateful Dead fans.
I was of course familiar with the Dead; I grew up across the river from Vermont. I thought they were just … fine. “Friend of the Devil” was a fun song. Cherry Garcia is an okay ice cream flavor. But why did a band so average-seeming, so unexceptional to me, inspire such a dedicated fanbase? Why would people follow them around, spending thousands of dollars producing and trading bootlegs of their favorite live sets?
I feel about Margin Call the way Deadheads feel about the Dead. Everyone thinks this movie is a fairly routine, not particularly notable drama. Most people don’t get the obsessive, fanatical love I have for it. This must be the Deadheads’ struggle: confusion and frustration that the whole world hasn’t fallen as rapturously in love with the art they love so much. Around the moment that Quinto takes out his headphones and realizes the bank where he works is in desperate, desperate trouble, it clicked for me.
Deadheads sometimes talk about the “X factor”: the indescribable aspect of a performance that elevates it to a higher level. There are certainly aspects of my love for Margin Call that are similarly difficult to put into words. At some level, either you find Jeremy Irons telling Quinto to “speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn’t brains that brought me here,” to be funny, or you don’t.
But to a large degree, my love for Margin Call boils down to it being the one film that, more than any other, seems to understand the modern workplace (or at least the office workplace), and the moral compromises involved in living and thriving in that world.
In case you aren’t already a diehard Marginalist: Margin Call chronicles a day in the life of an investment bank at the outset of the financial crisis of 2008. Conditions are rough from the start; the film begins with Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the head of risk management at the firm, getting booted in the latest round of layoffs. Before leaving the building, Dale tosses a flash drive to his protégé, the erstwhile rocket scientist Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). His last words, as the elevator closes, are “be careful.” It doesn’t take long for Sullivan to dive into Dale’s spreadsheet and realize that if the firm’s mortgage-backed investments fall in value by even a modest amount, it could bankrupt the company.
Sullivan freaks out and tells his boss, Will Emerson (a wonderfully sardonic Paul Bettany), who freaks out and tells his boss, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who grudgingly tells his much-younger boss Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), who finally calls in the firm’s CEO John Tuld for a 4 am meeting. Portrayed with remarkable charisma and menace by Jeremy Irons, Tuld decides how to deal with the toxic assets, which he describes as “the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.” His decision is astonishing, and his colleagues immediately realize what it means. The rest of the film chronicles their attempt to come to terms with it all.
This does not sound like the most riveting of material. And as I have learned the hard way, after forcing various friends and loved ones to watch it with me, Margin Call is not for everyone. It belongs to the micro-genre that the writer Max Read memorably labeled “halogencore”: It and peers like Michael Clayton, The Assistant, Shattered Glass, and Moneyball are thrillers set in offices, where the drama is fueled by white-collar misconduct or incompetence, and where the characters grow by learning something new about the bureaucracy to which they’ve given a portion of their lives.
Movies like that, much like all mid-budget dramas meant for adults and not featuring superheroes, are hard to get made these days. But they scratch a very particular itch. They thrive on specificity, on the norms and jargon of a particular institution. Margin Call’s dialogue (“the standard VAR model,” “go block by block,” “we’re fill or kill at 65”) approaches the spy cant of John Le Carré in its density. But writer-director J.C. Chandor assumes the viewer is smart and a quick learner, and can grasp what they need to grasp. Like the Grateful Dead, he’s here for the superfans first and foremost.
Chandor’s script is obsessed with the moral implications of white-collar work, and specifically how workers cope with and adapt to those implications. Some become self-loathing, even self-pitying, like the Spacey and Tucci characters; the latter waxes nostalgic about his prior career as a structural engineer, building bridges that helped actual people, rather than shuffling numbers around. Some come up with grandiose self-rationalizations for why what they’re doing either doesn’t matter (“It’s just money,” Irons’s character says, “it’s made up”) or is somehow helping the middle class (“If people want to live like this, in their cars and the big fucking houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary,” Bettany admonishes a younger colleague).
This, to me, is the main attraction of Margin Call. It’s a movie that takes work — office work, people sitting at desks typing stuff into laptops — seriously, as an activity with moral significance. And what sets it apart from other films, even some other halogencore films, is that the moral questions it asks are about the work itself, not some extreme violation outside that work’s code of ethics. Shattered Glass is about a reporter making up stories out of whole cloth; Michael Clayton is about a corporation hiring hitmen to murder potential whistleblowers as part of a coverup.
The choice that CEO John Tuld (Irons) makes in the middle of Margin Call, by contrast, is not a crime. When someone raises the prospects of “the feds” stopping the move, executive Ramesh Shah (Aasif Mandvi), implied to be a lawyer, pushes back: “They can slow you down. They can’t stop you.” This is a choice they can make in the course of doing business. It’s just part of being a banker. And it will hurt many, many people.
Margin Call is suffused with small moments showing how this ethos corrupts the people who embrace it. At one point, Peter Sullivan (Quinto) and his younger colleague Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley) are at a strip club, looking for Eric Dale (Tucci). Bregman immediately starts speculating about how much the dancers make in a night. Will Emerson (Bettany) tells Sullivan and Bregman that he made $2.5 million in a year, but it wasn’t that great, because “you learn to spend what’s in your pocket.” Sam Rogers (Spacey) clearly thinks of himself as the man in the room with a real conscience, but it never occurs to him that the firm’s actions might destroy the career of his son at another bank. The firm comes before his own child.
These men (and apart from an underutilized Demi Moore, they’re all men) have seen themselves warped, in ways large and small, by their work, by work for which they are paid obscene amounts and which they have no intention of ever stopping.
Toward the end of the film, Rogers is giving a pep talk to a room of traders, “People are going to say some very nasty things about what we do here today, and about what you’ve dedicated a portion of your lives to,” he tells them. “But have faith that in the bigger picture, our skills have not been wasted. We have accomplished much, and our talents have been used for the greater good.” This is a man doing something he knows is wrong, and not just that but wielding his power to make dozens of other people do something he knows is wrong. The brilliance of the movie is its illustration of why he, and so many like him, make that choice, again and again and again.
Margin Call is available to stream on Netflix and Hulu. For more recommendations from the world of culture, check out the One Good Thing archives.
Joel Kim Booster and Bowen Yang star in this sun-splashed love letter to queer spaces, gay male friendship, and the Meat Rack.
If you ask a gay man from New York City about Fire Island, chances are he will have at least two stories. One will be about the best night of their lives. The other one will be about the worst. There’s also a very strong possibility that both those nights are one and the same. Those memories probably involve friends, handsome strangers, the beach, a sunrise, a hot tub, being sassed by the high school girls working at the Pines Pantry grocery store on their summer break, squealing laughter, and maybe some parts that they don’t totally remember.
That’s the magic of Fire Island and places like it (Provincetown, Rehoboth Beach, Palm Springs, etc.) For decades, these queer enclaves in the United Stares have allowed LGBTQ people to let their guard down, and live their most enjoyable lives — sex, love, friendship, and everything in between — without worrying about acceptability.
Yet it’s rare that these stories, with decades and decades of history, actually become the inspiration for mainstream movies and get the financial backing that comes with it. Mainstream Hollywood has a history of reluctance when it comes to featuring stories from minorities, let alone queer men’s sexual and romantic fantasies. This isn’t to say that romances centering gay men haven’t been made, but they’re usually indie flicks.
More recently, family-friendly mainstream rom-coms like 2018’s Love Simon and 2021’s Single All the Way have been released, but Fire Island is the first of two high-profile comedies out in the next few months (Billy Eichner’s Bros will be released at the end of September) that promise not to shy away from gay men’s sex lives.
That’s why director Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island stands out. It’s premiering on Hulu on Friday, stars two Asian American queer men as its leads, and doesn’t include any tragedy or harangued coming out (usually the kind of gay stories Hollywood leans on). Written by and starring comedian Joel Kim Booster, the joyful rom-com captures the silliness, sweetness, sex, raunch, and love that one week with friends spent at the eponymous New York islet can bring.
It hits all the required notes for the genre, and even sneaks in some thoughtful commentary on gay male desire, and platonic friendships between gay men — there’s a pesky trope in movies and television to pair off the gay male characters romantically.
The film’s golden, sun-splashed cinematography will also likely induce FOMO if you haven’t already booked a vacation this summer. As a longtime practicing homosexual, I was a little worried about Fire Island’s debauchery — the Meat Rack (which, despite its name, does not involve an artisanal butcher), the underwear party at the Ice Palace, the back room at the underwear party (which is exactly how it sounds) — being buffed down in an effort to avoid offending the mainstream masses. After all, gay stories are exponentially easier to sell when gay men aren’t having enjoyable, hot sex in them.
But Ahn and Booster relieve those fears throughout the film, opening with Noah (Booster) irreverently quoting Jane Austen while sorting through the chaos of a one-night stand (Noah is not, for the record, in want of a wife). Later in the movie, there’s Ahn lighting and staging the aforementioned underwear party to look even sexier than it is in reality.
Booster himself has said that he doesn’t mind if straight audiences don’t get his jokes and references — anyone still curious about the Meat Rack after seeing the movie will have to visit in person.
Noah and his friends are mostly on a mission to find Mr. Right Now, but Booster’s script delves deeper. While the thematic intent of exploring sexual desire is typically tackled in a straightforward, easygoing way, Booster grapples with ideas of beauty and power, and recognizes why, for gay men especially, it’s such a fragile yearning.
For what’s billed as a fantastical romantic comedy about how magical Fire Island can be, Booster treads into some ambitious and uncomfortable emotional territory as he tells a story about how gay male culture privileges the looks and net worth of a specific type of man, and simultaneously how it tends to diminish men who don’t fit that mold. It’s vulnerable and honest, and the movie is wiser for it. Booster and Ahn understand that the world their characters live in isn’t always generous or kind. Their wistful film also shows that despite gay life’s cruelties, it doesn’t ever mean it’s lacking in love.
The biggest marketing move in selling Fire Island has been that it’s meant to be a subversive interpretation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, not unlike the way 1995’s Clueless retells Emma with popular, rich Beverly Hills kids. Usually, stacking any movie against Amy Heckerling’s witty, self-aware classic would be unfair, but Fire Island holds its own.
Noah, a nurse with an enviable shoulder-to-hip ratio, is the movie’s Lizzie Bennett, but much more cynical. He’s not looking for a husband, and he’s very much aware of the currency that his abs afford him. He’s making the mad dash — an expensive Uber and a ferry — to Fire Island with his “sisters” Howie (Bowen Yang), Luke (Matt Rogers), Keegan (Tomas Matos), and Max (Torian Miller). Noah’s chosen family are the Bennetts of Fire Island. They’re not exactly wealthy and they’re lodging with a lesbian named Erin (Margaret Cho), who has been exiled from Cherry Grove, the lesbian section of the isle. Due to Erin’s financial instability, it’s going to be their last Fire Island week together.
Noah and Howie, who is loosely Fire Island’s Jane Bennett, are best friends. They’re also both Asian American gay men, and with that they share many of the same experiences growing up. The stereotypes, the ideas of masculinity, the casual bigotry ingrained in gay male culture, may all be hard to fully feel if you haven’t grown up queer and Asian. That being said, Ahn and Booster translate this unspoken understanding with thoughtfulness, ensuring that you don’t have to fully comprehend their dynamic to easily empathize with it.
Noah wants Howie to get laid, promising he won’t sleep with anyone until his best friend does. On the surface, it seems like a good intention. Noah just wants everyone to see Howie the way Noah sees him. But Noah’s need to make Howie feel wanted reflects his own insecurities, and his own implicit admission that Howie may not be considered traditionally attractive when it comes to very unforgiving gay male beauty standards.
Those insecurities take human form in Howie’s love interest, earnest pediatrician Charlie (James Scully), Noah’s Mr. Darcy-esque Will (Conrad Ricamora), and their friend group of muscled, white affluent gay men.
The clique has a beautiful house, but makes others feel uninvited. They’re unfriendly, but they’ll only talk behind your back. And though they say they’re coming over for dinner and how fun that will be, they’ll never show up and can’t be bothered to give an explanation why. Charlie’s friends don’t think Howie is good enough — a calculus of being handsome and successful — to be with Charlie.
There’s some pleasure in watching an acerbic writer like Booster flay the terminal shallowness of these mean Ken doll clones with names like “Braden” and their designer speedos. Being white, rich, and having fantastic pecs puts you at the apex of the gay social status hierarchy. Howie and Noah and the Fire Island Bennetts don’t measure highly on that scale, and it gnaws away at them.
The turmoil created by this white gay crew and the many like it raises the question of why people go to what appears to be Mean Girl Island in the first place. Why bother? Is the promise of a one-night stand really worth it?
Howie begins to question why Charlie would even be interested in him. Noah doesn’t see long-term potential in Charlie, either, even though Charlie and Will seem purer and kinder than the company they keep. The film spends a good amount of time showing us that Noah and Howie are both too smart and too kind to be sucked into this superficial world, but that isn’t the way desire works.
There are no rules, no reason, no logic, when it comes to wanting to be seen as beautiful by someone you think is beautiful too. Both Howie and Noah wrestle with that want, whether it’s putting up emotional walls and never letting anyone get close, or doing enough sit-ups in hopes that you bypass the crueler parts of the system. Altogether, it’s a vulnerable, honest perspective from Booster about the irrationality of gay male desire. It’s a perspective that mainstream Hollywood hasn’t always made room for, which is why Fire Island is being described as “groundbreaking.”
At the heart of Fire Island is the idea that queer friendship is its own kind of love. Being gay or queer is often tied to sexuality, but it’s also about living a life that doesn’t necessarily look like the ones prescribed to us. Friendship in queer life takes many forms, and each one is special in its own way. For LGBTQ people, friendship can be redemptive, nourishing, familial, brave, and loving in ways that are just as valuable as the kind of romantic love that Austen wrote about.
Fire Island itself is as much a love letter to our best friends, those soulmates who bring joy to our lives, as it is a reminder that these friendships can be fleeting and should be cherished. The love between friends in Fire Island, particularly Howie and Noah, is much more convincing and more compelling than the romantic love between the movie’s leads that we’re supposed to root for. Yang and Booster crackle when they’re together.
I think it’s because those types of friends see the beauty in us and want the best for us. Sometimes, they even want better for us than they want for themselves. They’re generous and kind when the world isn’t. And they allow us to be our truest selves. That’s a type of love too, one that I’d gladly see more movies about.
Can summer jobs and mental health care save lives?
Americans are once again looking for answers after the deaths of at least 19 children and two adults in last week’s mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Beyond questions around the police response and whether the massacre will lead to meaningful gun control, a big, fundamental concern looms: Why are guns such a problem in the United States, and what needs to happen for the situation to change?
Mass shootings are a distinctly American horror. What’s perhaps even more horrific is that, while each one is devastating, mass shootings cause only a small fraction of the gun deaths in America. The US has an unusually high rate of gun homicides among developed countries — for children 14 and under, almost eight times the rate of the next country in the ranking — and total gun deaths have only been increasing over recent years.
Legal restrictions on gun ownership, including mandatory waiting periods on handgun purchases and laws against children and youth carrying guns, could result in fewer deaths. But passing such legislation is a heavy political lift. In the absence of federal action, can anything move the needle on firearm deaths?
There is growing evidence that non-gun-control measures — including interventions to support at-risk youth and programs to improve access to mental health care — can and have been very effective, says Jennifer Doleac, associate professor of economics at Texas A&M University and the director of the Justice Tech Lab.
In a 2018 article in the Regulatory Review, Doleac described a number of these potential alternative solutions, such as summer job programs for at-risk teens, criminal justice reform, or changes to Medicaid. With meaningful and sweeping congressional action hardly a sure thing, should policymakers turn to these alternative ideas?
I spoke with Doleac on Zoom last week about her work, new evidence from the past few years, and what she sees as the best policy interventions to reduce gun fatalities in the US. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.
After the Texas shooting, I think we all want to know what the US can do to prevent future shootings. Gun control regulations are one of the first things that come to mind. But you’ve talked about how this is already such a politicized issue, with huge amounts of money and attention and resources being spent on both sides, and it can be unclear which regulations just reduce gun ownership or actually reduce shooting fatalities. Where do you see things now?
So the best research evidence we have suggests that gun control — restricting people’s ability to carry concealed weapons, requiring background checks — does reduce suicides and homicides at least some amount.
But economists or social scientists like myself look for natural experiments to try to understand what the effect of a policy is on some outcome. And gun laws are not great natural experiments. It’s hard to argue that they’re random, right? They’re the focus of so much political pressure and so much attention from the public that they’re not going to sneak through a legislature or community unnoticed.
So it’s very likely that changes in gun laws are correlated with changes in other things, like preferences, sentiment, or other local priorities that themselves could lead to changes in gun violence. Combined with how difficult meaningful gun reform is to pass, I think our attention and time and energy could be better spent on alternatives that could bring us the same goal but perhaps be easier to achieve.
Let’s move on to the other programs and policy interventions you’ve talked about. I’d like to hear whether your thoughts have evolved over the last four years.
You’d mentioned the summer job programs for teens, and there being some data that this reduces mortality from gun homicide and suicide, especially for young men. And also the cognitive behavioral therapy for at-risk young men seems like it falls into a similar category. I’d like to hear a bit about those.
When policymakers and practitioners ask me what they can do, what’s a reliable way to reduce crime in general and violent crime in particular, summer jobs are always the first thing I bring up.
There’s so much evidence from several studies now, and it really is the gold standard. We always love to see the randomized controlled trials, which are hard to run in a lot of these contexts, but we have them with summer jobs, and so we just have really great evidence that we should be pouring money into these programs and fully funding them in the cities where they’re not yet fully funded.
With cognitive behavioral therapy, I think our understanding of it has evolved, and it’s clear it’s not necessarily super easy to scale. As programs get bigger, you might have to hire people who are slightly less motivated [to do the work], and so figuring out how to scale some of these really effective programs, as is common in a lot of settings, is a challenge.
There’s a recent study that just came out from researchers at the University of Chicago Crime Lab looking at the effects of a program focused on youth at very high risk of violent crime. They’ve been doing this incredible randomized controlled trial that I believe combines cognitive behavioral therapy with jobs, I think, and just general outreach and violence interruption. They just released preliminary results on that, and it seems like things are moving in the right direction, but not quite statistically significant. It signals just what a hard problem this is.
There’s also the juvenile curfew study by Patrick Kline at UC Berkeley, where Washington, DC, instituted an evening curfew for youth under 17 with the goal of reducing violent crime, and voluntarily reported crime measures made it look like it was working. And then you published a study that featured a new way of more objectively recording gunfire using audio sensors [and] found the opposite effect — that 911 calls and reported crime went down but recorded gunfire went up.
We use data from Washington, DC, where the juvenile curfew changes time a couple of times a year, so we’re able to use that as a natural experiment. The basic intuition here is you’re encouraging a lot of kids to go home instead of hanging out on the streets with their friends, and you are giving the police a reason to go and check in with whatever kids are still out and maybe keep them from getting into trouble.
On the flip side, you’re removing lots of young people from the streets who might be very well-behaved but could be potential witnesses, and we know just having lots of people around deters crime. It also switches what the police are doing, where now they’re focused on enforcing this curfew rather than whatever they were doing instead, which might have been more useful.
And so you’ve got all this stuff happening and it’s unclear what the net effect would be, and it is a kind of policy that’s really tough to study the effects of because when you have fewer people around, crime is less likely to be noticed. In that paper, we had data from ShotSpotter, which measured gunshots. That allowed us a more objective measure of what crime was going on, and so we’re able to say that when the curfew was in effect, we actually saw gunfire go up rather than down, which is in line with it being counterproductive.
You also mentioned Medicaid coverage in early childhood, and Medicaid being required to cover mental health benefits, both being things where there’s data to show that access to Medicaid-covered mental health care reduces deaths.
The evidence on health care has definitely been booming — this has been a really hot research area. Expanding access to health care, including through Medicaid, reduces crime, particularly violent crime. The mechanisms are likely access to mental health care and substance abuse treatment. Since a lot of these programs do both, it’s hard to disentangle which one is really the driver, but they’re obviously related.
There’s an amazing paper by Elisa Jácome from a couple of years ago where she looks at what happens to kids when they’re kicked off of Medicaid at age 19, and she finds that with the kids that get kicked off, you can see it in the graph — suddenly they’re much more likely to be arrested and go to prison. The effect is entirely driven by kids that were getting mental health care and medication for various mental illnesses through Medicaid. So really simple changes, like increasing access for kids that were getting this kind of treatment, could be extremely effective.
There’s a neat study by researchers at Notre Dame, looking at a program that was a really light-touch intervention. Anyone whose screening when they came into jail scored high enough for history of mental illness had outreach workers call them after they were released and try to connect them with a local health care service, basically just make an appointment for them. Just with that, they saw recidivism drop substantially.
Are there any other programs or approaches to reducing gun deaths that have come up more recently that you think are promising?
There’s more and more evidence that air pollution increases violent crime in particular — not just changing your brain development when you’re a child, which is what we think of with lead exposure, but just day-to-day changes in pollution. There have been studies where you’ve got neighborhoods on either side of a highway, and if the wind is blowing the car exhaust fumes from the highway over into this neighborhood, then violent crime goes up over here. And the next day, if it blows the other way, the violent crime goes up over there.
So one possible concern is that some of these proposals might also be politically or financially costly. Health care is a pretty fraught and partisan issue right now. Which proposals do you think would get the most broad support and are realistic to implement soon?
For the health care question in particular, I think expanding Medicaid has become a big political issue, and is linked to Obamacare in unhelpful, political ways. But it feels like there’s an opportunity to talk about expanding health care in other ways, like the low-touch intervention that connected people with local health care services.
And even in the gun control conversation, a lot of times it’s the right that brings up that mental illness is the problem, right? So I feel like there must be some common ground there, if we take away the labels of what the programs are called.
Coming back to the Texas mass shooting. These major public incidents are the tip of the iceberg for total gun-related deaths, right? There are also huge numbers of other gun homicides associated with violent crime, and gun suicides, all of which are rising. How do you think about that in terms of policy interventions and which measures would be effective? Because for measuring effectiveness, mass shootings have a very small sample size.
That’s a great question. The bottom line is we don’t really know. There are far more mass shootings than we want there to be, obviously, but not enough to have good empirical evidence on what changes the number or severity or deaths of those sorts of shootings. And I think the official definition for various government agencies is any incident that had at least four victims in it, which it turns out is much more likely to be just normal “street crime.” I think we just don’t know yet if the kinds of interventions we’ve been talking about would be effective for these big, seemingly random public incidents.
I’ve become really interested in the extent to which crime experts and terrorism experts should be talking more. It feels like there’s enough overlap with what we would think of as terrorist incidents, even if they don’t think it fully fits in that bucket — and perhaps enough overlap with what makes a normal crime, even though we don’t think it quite fits in that bucket, either — that we should both be at the table. Clearly neither group has all the answers, and maybe it requires a bit more creative thinking and pulling from both sets of expertise.
We don’t have solutions yet. So it’s time to start thinking outside the box.
Anjum Moudgil bags rifle 3-position silver - Indian men’s rifle 3-position team also takes silver
Eng vs NZ first Test | Potts strikes again in New Zealand second innings - England were eventually dismissed for 141 in reply to New Zealand’s 132
Nations League | Portugal, Spain share spoils, Haaland scores against Serbia - A goal by Portugal’s Ricardo Horta cancelled out the opener by Spain’s Alvaro Morata in a 1-1 draw in the Nations League
Malinga to be Sri Lanka's bowling strategy coach against Australia - Former Sri Lankan pacer Lasith Malinga held the same role of bowling strategy coach when the national team toured Australia in February
Gundappa Vishwanath’s Wrist Assured review: Square-cutting to fame and glory - The stylish Gundappa Vishwanath reminisces on his long innings in Indian cricket
Ensure govt. announcements are implemented: CM -
Recreation during vacation: children hurl stones on running trains - RPF undertakes awareness programme called ‘Operation Dosti’
Take steps to stop targeted killings in J&K, Cong. tells Centre - Bhupesh Baghel says BJP-RSS leaders had time to watch Kashmir Files, but are silent now
Stalin providing good governance, says Alagiri - ‘He is following in Karunanidhi’s footsteps’
Andhra Pradesh: land resurvey going on at a brisk pace in Srikakulam district - It will be completed in 158 out of 1,400 villages in a few weeks, says District Collector
Ukraine war: Zelensky says Russia controls a fifth of Ukrainian territory - Russian forces are intensifying attacks on the city of Severodonetsk in the eastern Donbas region.
The Russian soldiers refusing to fight in Ukraine - Because of their experiences on the front line, some troops are seeking legal advice to avoid being redeployed.
Ukraine war: Russia achieving success in Donbas, says Ministry of Defence - On the war’s 100th day, UK Defence Intelligence says Russia has the initiative in the country’s east.
Ukraine war: Kyiv’s emergence from the shadow of war - As the threat of Russia’s invasion loomed, Kyiv refused to cower. But then it was forced to adapt.
Real Madrid ask for answers into ‘unfortunate events’ at Champions League final - Real Madrid have asked for answers into the “series of unfortunate events” at the Champions League final against Liverpool in Paris.
What the simple mathematical abilities of animals can tell us about ourselves - Ars chats with UCL’s Brian Butterworth about his new book Can Fish Count?. - link
Rocket Report: India wants its own SpaceX, Firefly targets July for Alpha launch - “We will have our own SpaceX in the next two years.” - link
Sony’s latest State of Play: Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI, new PC ports - More big teases of PlayStation VR2, though the headset doesn’t have a release date. - link
June 21 is expected start date of COVID vaccination for kids under 5 - FDA will review the vaccines June 15, but then the CDC needs to sign off. - link
HP releases its $1,099 Linux laptop for developers - HP Dev One is the first non-System76 computer offered with Pop!_OS. - link
Vulvasore
(I am so, so sorry)
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A marine, an army grunt, and an airman are having a beer and the army grunt is telling this story about how one time he found a scorpion in his tent. Marine asks “what’d you do?”, and the grunt says he crushed it with his boot and flung it out the flap. The marine laughs and says “what a sissy”. The grunt askes “well what would you do then?” Marine replies “when a scorpion gets in my tent I usually cut off it’s tail while it’s still alive, keep it as a pet for a few days, might prank my senior officer with it, then eventually I cook it and eat it”. The grunt feels a little embarrassed, then shifts focus to the airman and asks “what would you do?” The airman says “I’d call the front desk and ask them why there’s a tent in my room”
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I made a commitment to myself to avoid high maintenance women
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Anyway, who wants to buy 12 lions?
submitted by /u/MrDagon007
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“Sir, you’re only allowed one seat, can you please sit up?” The man groans, but stays where he is. The usher becoming impatient with the man says “Sir, if you don’t get up, I will need to get my manager involved” Again the man just groans, which infuriates the usher as he marches off to get the manager. In a few moments he returns with the manager and they both repeatedly attempt to move him, but with no success. It was at this point that the manager calls the police. Moments later, a police officer arrives and approaches the man, “alright buddy, what’s your name?” “Sam” the man moans. “And where ya from Sam?” With pain in his voice Sam replied “the balcony”
submitted by /u/Wanan1
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