Saturday, February 10, 2024

Finding What's Left of the Mason-Dixon Line (Newser Deep Dive)

Newser Newsletter
February 10, 2024
 
 
To many Americans, the Mason-Dixon Line serves as a cultural dividing point between the North and South. But its storied past has both physical and symbolic meaning in the US, and Popular Mechanics' Ashley Stimpson takes a look at both in a fascinating stroll through its history. Keep reading
 
"There has never been a worse time to be a UFO skeptic," writes Nicholson Baker at Intelligencer. He ticks off some of the factors in recent years: front-page stories in the New York Times, the congressional testimony of a purported whistleblower who asserts the US has retrieved UFOs and "biologics," a claim of a weird ocean-bottom discovery by a Harvard astrophysicist. Keep reading
 
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The $3,500 Apple Vision Pro hit stores last Friday, and despite hearing nothing but rave reviews from those who had gotten an early look ("I would say my experience was religious," director James Cameron told him), Nick Bilton had zero interest in giving the VR headset a try, or even reading about what was coming. "I just kept scrolling, like I do when I see anything about Harry and Meghan," he writes for Vanity Fair, and he told Apple CEO Tim Cook that very thing, to his face. Keep reading
 
Did Mark Meadows turn rat on Donald Trump? The former president himself has said he isn't sure whether his former chief of staff might have done so, and the Trump camp in general is "sharply divided" on the question, writes Robert Draper in a (very) lengthy profile of the 64-year-old Meadows in the New York Times Magazine. Keep reading
 
There is the "Hollywood version" of sex trafficking, write Christopher Johnston and Erin Quinlan at Cosmopolitan—one in which a girl is abducted off the streets and sold into a brutal underworld. But "a more insidious scenario often goes unrecognized: the one where the 'unmarked van' presents as a legitimate romantic relationship and the victim climbs in willingly, unknowingly." Keep reading
 
"To spend much time in [Jeremie] Heitz's world is to encounter something like the normalization, even the banalization, of premature death," writes Simon Akam in the Guardian. Hyperbole, you might think. Keep reading
 
In some respects, the story isn't so unusual: The Los Angeles Times tells the tale of a 40-year-old man sitting in a maximum-security prison in Mexico, accused of becoming a ruthless associate of the Sinaloa drug cartel. In another way, the story is a strange one to fathom: The suspect is a former Mennonite farmer, Franz Kauenhofen, who once abided by his community's pacifist ways in southern Mexico. Keep reading
 
From the Archives
The BBC recounts a harrowing chapter in relations between North Korea and Japan, a stretch from 1977 through the early 1980s when North Korean agents abducted Japanese citizens to help train their spies. North Korea has since admitted to this and apologized, though critics say the North has not acknowledged the full scope of its strategy. Keep reading
 
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