Since one fateful session with an enthusiastically impressed Pharrell boosted her star, earthy pop maven Maggie Rogers has continued to rise. Earlier this year, she released the spunky “Fallingwater,” a collab with Rostam, and the multicolor celebration “Give a Little” — both expert tunes that helped the 24-year-old an upcoming SNL spot next month.
Her debut album, Heard It in a Past Life, is due out at the top of 2019; ahead of that, she’s sharing tracks you can expect to hear on it, including her breakout “Alaska” and the powerful “Light On.” That song got a video on Thursday (October 25) wherein she travels solo and learns a lot about herself.
The road-tripping clip was helmed by photographer Olivia Bee, whose washed sunsets and cold blues render Rogers in what’s long been her ideal visual environment. While delivering the song, Rogers stops for a roadside meal, dances on a lone stretch of road, and explores everything behind the wheel. Very American.
She also weeps sometimes, because that’s what happens. It’s not always dancing and beautiful sunsets. Sometimes it is though, and “Light On” is a nice reminder of the balance of the two. “Really proud of this one,” she wrote about the video on Instagram.
Get to know Rogers more via this MTV News clip, where Meredith Graves talked to her in all her sartorial resplendence — something also true for her new album cover — at Lollapalooza in 2017.
Working on a horror movie set can be stressful for a lot of reasons.
Intense scheduling may make the crew exhausted. Practical effects might result in actors becoming sick or getting injured. Not to mention, terrifying on-set ambiance has the capacity to leave everyone involved with nightmares.
Generally speaking, all of this will be chalked up to the expected hazards of working in horror. But, in the cases of some unluckier projects, the day-to-day risks can turn from the mundane to the otherworldly.
For decades, various scary movie staffs have alleged paranormal activity—and even a few ghost sightings—during production.
From mysterious claw markings to multiple homicides, here are the harrowing experiences of six horror film crews.
Note: Debunked claims (like those surrounding the Poltergeist trilogy) and on-set accidents (like the tragic helicopter crash of the Twilight Zone movie) have not been included.
1. Mysterious claw marks and falling lights on the set of Annabelle
Image: warner brothers pictures
Two major paranormal events hit the set of Annabelle.
First, during pre-production, director John R. Leonetti reported seeing and taking a picture of “three fingers drawn through the dust along the window… backlit by the moon.” (Notably, the demon of Annabelle has three fingers/talons.) Naturally, it spooked the director.
Second, producer Peter Safran can attest that, while mysterious markings may be easy to dismiss, sudden, unexplainable events—that mirror the horror of the film being made—are harder to write off. He recounted the following to The Hollywood Reporter:
“We shot in this amazing, old apartment building near Koreatown and we had some funky stuff go down… In particular, the first day that the demon was shooting in full makeup, we brought the demon up in the elevator. He walks out and walks around to the green room to where we’re holding the talent, and just as he walks under—a giant glass light fixture is being followed by the actor playing the handyman of the building—and all of a sudden the entire glass light fixture falls down on his head, the janitor‘s head. And in the script the demon kills the janitor in that hallway. It was totally freaky.”
Annabelle is available to rent or purchase with Prime Video.
2. A very selective fire on the set of The Exorcist
Image: Corbis via Getty Images
The Exorcist was notoriously wrought with challenges before, during, and after its release. (Fainting audience members, public denouncements by clergy, serious cast member injuries and reports of stalking are just a few of the horrors that plagued the production.)
But, only one incident rises to the level of truly otherworldly. During a celebratory 45th anniversary Q&A with star Ellen Burstyn, director William Friedkin recounted a fire that burned a large portion of the set of The Exorcist to the ground.
Two sets had been created on one sound stage—the main MacNeil house and Regan’s bedroom. (If you haven’t seen it, Regan is the young girl who, when possessed by a demon, famously projectile vomited green goo into cinematic history.)
The serious fire, believed to have been caused by a pigeon flying into a light box, destroyed the MacNeil home and put the production on hiatus for six weeks. However, despite the fire’s severity, it somehow managed to leave the nearby set of Regan’s bedroom entirely unharmed.
Friedkin believes this event to be the only part of his Exorcist experience related to “some kind of bad karma.”
The Exorcist is available to rent or purchase with Prime Video.
3. Inexplicably destroyed footage of The Omen
Image: Getty Images
Technically speaking, this paranormal activity occurred in the editing room (not on the set) of The Omen—but its effects on production were just as massive.
After spending an entire day of shooting the infamous birthmark scene for the 2006 remake, director John Moore claims nearly all of the resulting footage was inexplicably lost. An accident in the processing lab destroyed 13,500 feet of film, an unheard of loss on most film sets that Moore says had the baffled lab technicians “in tears.”
The scene, which reveals a young boy to be the antichrist, had to be entirely reshot.
Seems like you can’t make a movie about Ed and Loraine Warren, IRL paranormal investigators, without getting a big serving of spooks during filming.
The Conjuring Universe is both a major asset and liability for Warner Brothers. On the one hand, the still growing franchise’s five films have already grossed over a billion and a half dollars. On the other hand, the people who make these movies seem to inevitably face terrifying stuff.
From unexplained bruising to an alleged water poltergeist, the CU has seen it all. But one story from the series’ most recent installment, The Nun, is of particular note. Director Corin Hardy claims to have seen not one, but two apparitions.
While filming a sequence in the narrow hallway of a real-life Romanian castle, Corin recounts stepping into a side room to allow a camera to pass. When he entered the dark space, he saw two men sitting at the back of the room. He assumed they were crew members.
Corin stayed in the room for one take and, upon completion, turned to speak with the men. But they were gone.
In a room with only one way in and one way out, Corin was understandably terrified.
5. The horrifying deaths surrounding Rosemary’s Baby
Image: Corbis via Getty Images
This Mia Farrow-starring classic undoubtedly champions the most terrifying occurrences of any film on this list—and may even take the cake for most misfortunate movie in history.
Numerous tragic deaths, including the murder of director Roman Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, by members of the Manson family, plagued the film’s cast and crew following its successful release.
One near death, however, may most closely tie these horrendous events to some kind of curse. Less than a year after the premiere of Rosemary’s Baby, producer William Castle was hospitalized with severe kidney stones. As a result, Castle experienced hallucinations of scenes from the film and was said to have at one point screamed, “Rosemary, for God’s sake, drop the knife!”
One could easily argue that it would make sense for a producer’s subconscious to bring up his jarring, recent work in a moment of distress. But something about this particular utterance screams paranormal possession.
Castle survived the ordeal, but, as Vanity Fair points out, he was never again part of a major hit.
6. The ghost of 1990’s rock on the set of The Exorcism of Emily Rose
Image: lakeshore entertainment / screen gems
The Exorcism of Emily Rose isn’t the greatest possession story ever told—it currently holds a 44% on Rotten Tomatoes—but, it may take home the trophy for funniest IRL haunting.
Star Jennifer Carpenter didn’t report a lot of abnormal activity on set, but she did have a spooky and recurring issue at home while on the project.
“Two or three times when I was going to sleep my radio came on by itself,” Carpenter told Dread Central. “The only time it scared me was once because it was really loud and it was Pearl Jam’s ‘Alive.’”
Love a ghost with taste.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose is available to rent or purchase with Prime Video.
NATO has launched its biggest military exercises since the end of the Cold War amid rising tensions between the transatlantic security alliance and Russia.
About 50,000 soldiers from 31 countries – comprised of NATO’s 29 member states plus Sweden and Finland – are taking part in a mock battle against an invading force in Norway beginning on Wednesday and scheduled to run until November 7.
Thousands of military vehicles, hundreds of aircraft and scores of ships will also be deployed as part of the manoeuvres, officially named Trident Juncture 18.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the drills would send a “clear message to our nations and to any potential adversary”.
“In recent years, Europe’s security environment has significantly deteriorated … NATO does not seek confrontation but we stand ready to defend all Allies against any threat,” Stoltenberg told reporters at a press conference on Wednesday.
Despite US President Donald Trump’s frequent criticism of fellow NATO members’ defence spending, which he has alleged is insufficient, Washington is contributing the biggest individual contingent of troops to Trident Juncture 18.
NATO guidelines declare member states should allocate a minimum of 2 percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for annual defence spending by 2024, but many of the organisation’s members do not currently adhere to this.
‘Everybody looking east’
Wednesday’s exercises kicked off just weeks after Russia staged its own largest ever military drills since the end of the decades-long Cold War, which concluded with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.
Last year, Russia also conducted war games alongside Belarus, close to the EU’s eastern border and NATO member states Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.
Russia ran large-scale military drills close to the EU’s eastern border last year [File: Sergei Grits/AP]
Against a backdrop of deepening distrust with Moscow, NATO has insisted its ongoing operation is not aimed at simulating a conflict with Russia, which shares a border with Norway.
Al Jazeera’s Alex Gatopoulos, reporting from Norway, said despite no one mentioning Russia “everybody is looking east”.
“We are talking about an exercise in collective security … we have had huge exercises run by Russia over the last two to three years and hundreds of thousands of troops integrating knowledge that they have learnt and picked up operationally from the conflict in Syria,” Gatopoulos said.
“NATO is clearly training to respond to this, not only to defend front line states but also to retake them in case there is any future conflict,” he added.
‘Anti-Russian’ exercise
Several recent overtures from NATO – including briefing the Kremlin on the drills and extending a monitoring invite to Russian officials – appear to have done little to placate Russian grievances.
On Wednesday, Russia’s embassy in Oslo said it considered Trident Juncture 18 an “anti-Russian” exercise.
“Such activity … comes across as provocative, even if you try to justify it as being of a purely defensive nature,” it said.
The comments came after Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, speaking earlier in October, condemned what she termed as NATO’s “sabre-rattling”.
“All these NATO preparations cannot be ignored, and the Russian Federation will take the necessary tit-for-tat measures to ensure its own security,” Zakharova told Russia’s state-run TASS news agency on October 2.
“Such irresponsible actions will inevitably destabilise the military and political situation in the north,” she added.
US-Russia tensions
For months, Moscow has been irked by a growing Western military presence in the region, with the US and Britain – both NATO member states – increasing troop deployments in Norway to condition their forces for cold weather combat.
Tensions between the US and Russia appeared to ramp up this week after US President Donald Trump saidhe would withdraw from the landmark Cold-War era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty.
The INF, an arms-control agreement which rid Europe of land-based nuclear missiles by banning all nuclear and conventional missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500km, was signed in 1987 at a Washington summit between the then-US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General-Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.
Washington and Moscow have frequently traded barbs over the accord in recent years, accusing one another on several occasions of breaching the terms of the treaty.
Following a meeting with US National Security Adviser John Bolton in Moscow on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the Kremlin would respond in kind if the US withdrew from the deal and deployed missiles in Europe.
“If they will deliver them [missiles] to Europe, naturally our response will have to mirror this,” Putin said.
Before we dive in with this review, a word about development crunch. In recent weeks, Rockstar Games has been mired in controversy after studio co-head Dan Houser suggested in an interview that the final sprint to Red Dead Redemption 2‘s release sometimes involved 100-hour work weeks.
Houser later clarified his quote, noting that the “100-hour work week” comment applied only to the four guys on the senior writing team and adding that “we obviously don’t expect anyone else to work this way” at Rockstar.
On the Tuesday before RDR2’s release, Houser’s assertion fell into doubt after Kotaku published an investigation into the work-life balance and corporate culture at Rockstar. The in-depth feature paints a nuanced picture of a company filled with passionate artists who, yes, often do work above and beyond their weekly hours, at times because they want to and at times because of pressure from the company leadership — all the way up to Houser.
Crunch is an industry-wide issue, and when cases like this become public they actually can lead to meaningful change. If you’re at all interested in playing RDR2, which I’ll say right now is a wonderful and expertly crafted game, you should read Kotaku’s report so you can better understand the circumstances under which it was made.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is a journey.
Over the course of its 50-hour-minimum story, you’ll wheel your way across the entirety of a mirror universe America in 1899, on the eve of its industrial revolution. It’s a place where all the names are changed, but the society and the culture is instantly familiar. It’s a (virtual) living version of what we’ve read about in history books and seen at the movies.
The propulsive force moving you from location to location is the game’s star, Arthur Morgan, and his association with the Dutch van der Linde gang. In Red Dead Redemption 2‘s America, outlaw gangs represent a dying breed. There’s no space in civilized society anymore for their robbin’ and shootin’, and the walls are starting to close in.
Your shifts around the sprawling map — the gang’s camp is your constant home base — all follow a pattern: Dutch and company settle in with the intent of lying low, but the constant, pressing need to squirrel away money for an eventual escape to some nebulous idea of “freedom” leads to more criminal behavior, and more attention from local law enforcement and the dreaded Pinkerton detective agency.
The story plays out as a series of extended vignettes in which Arthur and his pals do their outlaw thing against the various backdrops of early industrial era life in America. When things get too hot and trusted friends inevitably start dying, Dutch orders everyone to pack up, move out, and start over.
Each location you visit features a plotline that flirts with the assorted popular ideas and myths of what early American life looked like in that region. It starts you off on familiar ground, with your cowboy outlaws staging a train robbery and hiding out in an Old West-style setting, but it’s not long before they’re on the run and looking for a new home in the American heartland.
Image: Rockstar Games
You’ll ride your horse across the openness of a Great Plains stand-in while a setting sun sends rays of light bouncing across the scrubby desert landscape. Deal with feuding, plantation-owning families in an eye-poppingly gorgeous rendition of America’s Deep South, bayou and all. Mix it up with high society types in the dusty, sweat-soaked, and perpetually filthy Saint Denis, a spitting image of the IRL New Orleans melting pot.
The vignette approach makes sense given the larger story’s length, but the quality of each one swings in both directions. I found a section of the story dealing with the plight of Native Americans in pre-industrial America to be surprisingly deft and thoughtful (though I’m very interested in hearing a Native American perspective on that). But another stretch, dealing with an early form of the Italian mob, felt rushed.
Throughout the game, race relations and the immigrant experience in early America occupy pieces of the story both large and small. The writing isn’t nearly as over-the-top as it is in Grand Theft Auto — the edginess and satire are shifted to the background in favor of a more grounded, human tale — and RDR2 is better for it.
Race relations and the immigrant experience in early America form a big part of the story.
The gang you ride with through all of these locations is a living entity inside the game, populated by a growing cast of individuals who all have a story. Not everyone traveling with Dutch is an outlaw; he’s introduced as a character who has compassion for the downtrodden. People join the gang during your journey because Dutch extends to them the shelter and safety of the group, provided they can make peace with the outlaw’s life.
In a significant evolution beyond past Rockstar efforts, Arthur can talk to and maintain relationships all of his fellow travelers (as well as people in the wider world in a more limited sense). Sometimes a person will have a story to tell or a task they need help with, but Arthur can greet or antagonize anyone and then have to deal with the repercussions of his behavior, good or bad.
Being a dick to your gang, your family, helps to flavor the story. Keep antagonizing Dutch, for example, and he’ll just get mad enough to stop engaging. But talking shit to some random passerby can easily set off a gunfight. Arthur is more than capable in those situations, but sustained dickishness has consequences — I only saw one ending, but there are apparently four in total, influenced by the choices you make.
Your good and bad behavior is tracked on a visible morality meter, defined as “Honor.” Starting fights, committing crimes, and gunning down innocents swings Arthur toward the red, dishonorable end of the meter, while refusing payment for good deeds done and helping people in need edges it into honorable territory.
I played Arthur as a mostly good dude, and I tended to see big payouts from bounty hunting activities — you’re not the only one out there committing crimes, after all. Rockstar’s review documentation suggests that dishonorable behavior carries effects of its own, such as more money earned from petty larceny.
Image: rockstar games
You can ostensibly avoid some of the heat from committing crimes by wearing Arthur’s trusty bandit mask. But it’s buried in a sub-menu and seems to work only some of the time — or at least, I didn’t notice a benefit whenever I put the mask on. The police still found me out and made my life hell.
Good and bad behavior also earns you a reputation wherever you go. As you commit crimes in a particular area, the bounty on your head grows, which in turn makes it harder to get around and manage your resources — shops close their doors to you, paid stagecoach rides (a form of fast-travel) won’t welcome you, and bounty hunters appear intermittently to collect the price on your head.
Complicating all of this is the basic challenge of just getting around in RDR2‘s world. This must be the largest and most detailed virtual space Rockstar has ever built. The entire world map from the first Red Dead Redemption is in there (sans Mexico), but it’s just one U.S. state out the five you pass through over the course of the game.
The map’s size alone doesn’t pose a problem for long-distance travel, it’s your means of transport. Arthur spends the bulk of the game getting around on horseback; trains and stagecoaches become increasingly viable as you uncover more of the map (as does a camp-based fast travel), but you’ll inevitably end up riding your horse from any drop-off points in order to reach your final destination.
The slower pace of long distance travel helps to keep this story focused.
You can build up a bond with your favorite horse over time, unlocking new skills and better stats in the process (the same goes for Arthur’s other stats, like health and stamina). But even the best, $1,000-plus horses (a pricey purchase in this game) can only go so fast, and taking them off road is often a recipe for disaster — especially since your horse is dead forever when it loses all its health, unless you happen to have a horse reviver tonic in your inventory.
Don’t take these constraints as a negative, however. Sure, exploring widely and at your leisure isn’t as easy here as it is in something like Grand Theft Auto V. But Arthur’s existence is very gang- and family-centric by design. You can range out farther, but the game gives you few reasons to do so because your story is inevitably unfolding in (relatively) close proximity to Dutch and company.
In other words: The slower pace of long distance travel helps to keep this story focused. It also encourages you to really engage with the mind-boggling level of detail layered into RDR2‘s early America. Unmarked points of interest and unexpected gatherings don’t crowd in enough to be a nuisance, but they pop up frequently.
This is all good stuff, but it comes with a heavy investment. You won’t finish in a week without putting in an unhealthy amount of time (trust me, I know from personal experience). This is a game that raises a middle finger to the content binge. You’re meant to soak in this world, this story, over multiple weeks if not months.
Like I said at the outset, it’s a journey.
Not for everyone, however. If the pace and style of action prevalent throughout Rockstar’s open world games isn’t usually your thing, RDR2 won’t change your mind. This is a bigger, better version of the first game in terms of the story structure and feel, so those who lean more toward RDR than GTA will find a lot to like.
Image: rockstar games
There’s also a lot of features that the game doesn’t do a great job of teaching. There are multiple challenges you can chase, for example, and completing them often leads to the unlocking of stat-boosting items. But it’s easy to miss out on all of this unless you dive into the pause menu and start poking around.
Also, technical performance wasn’t an issue for me as I played the game on a PlayStation 4 Pro, and I’d guess it’ll be a similar experience for Xbox One X players. But I didn’t have a chance to check it out on the first generation of PS4 hardware and can’t speak to how it plays.
Before we put a cap on this, there’s one final thing I want to highlight: the music.
Fans of movies from Sergio Leone and the “Spaghetti Western” genre will perk up at every suspenseful chase or gunfight. While there’s nothing quite as iconic as Ennio Morricone’s instantly recognizable theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, all of RDR2‘s top musical moments capture that same spirit. It’s perfectly fitting for what Rockstar delivers in this Old West story.
So there you have it. I haven’t even touched on the heavy spoilers (and won’t!), but I can tell you that this sequel makes both the first game and John Marston’s overall story better and more meaningful. Red Dead Redemption 2 is at once a startling evolution of the Rockstar Games formula and everything a fan could hope for from a Red Dead Redemption sequel.
Ever wondered what most people say when asked what their favourite novel is?
Well, now you know. The answer isn’t To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Great Gatsby, or any of the other classics. The answer, at least according to the (admittedly very small) sample size in the video above, is that people simply don’t read all that much.
Shoutout to the guy at the end though, and here’s hoping he enjoys Moby Dick.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, also known as Mullah Baradar, is a cofounder of the Taliban movement [Screenshot Al Jazeera]
Pakistan has released the Afghan Taliban leader from prison, a spokesman for the Taliban said on Thursday.
Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, also known as Mullah Baradar, is a cofounder of the Taliban movement in Afghanistan. He was arrested by Pakistani authorities in the southern port city of Karachi in 2010.
Pakistan has released Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, and he joined his family on Tuesday, Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, told Anadolu Agency.
On Tuesday, local English daily The News reported that Pakistani authorities released Baradar on the solicitation of the government of Qatar.
Qatar’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al Thani visited Islamabad last Friday and held meetings with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi.
Two unnamed Pakistani intelligence officials also confirmed that Mullah Baradar was freed “after high-level negotation,” AP reported.
The development came after Taliban confirmed that they had held talks with US Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad in Doha, the capital of Qatar.
Taliban set up a political office in Doha in 2013 at the request of the US to facilitate peace talks.
Baradar is one of four men, including Mullah Omar who founded the Taliban movement in 1994. He served in several key positions when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996-2001.
He fled to Pakistan after the US-led invasion toppled the Taliban government and was later arrested during an operation near Karachi city.
BOSTON—One Sunday night two years ago, Marc Ebuña and Ari Ofsevit stayed up past 1 a.m. to watch the city’s transit system grind to a pointless halt.
Sitting in their respective apartments, they were monitoring a website that tracks Boston’s rapid-transit trains in real time. “I live-tweeted the late-night ballet, the last-trains ballet,” Ebuña says. Except what they were seeing was more of a citywide muscle spasm than an elegant dance.
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The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority barely acknowledged this nightly jam, and wasn’t doing anything about it. So Ebuna and Ofsevit, who had plenty of the personal experience waiting on trains during these puzzling delays, enlisted two fellow members of their advocacy group TransitMatters and did their own audit.
On that September night in 2016, Ebuña and Ofsevit could see the last trains on the Red, Orange and Blue lines, and the westbound Green Line streetcars, as they reached downtown transfer stations and stopped. The only trains still moving were two lonely streetcars on the Green Line’s E branch. Nothing could move until these two stragglers reached Park Street. Across Boston, Ebuña and Ofsevit knew, 56 buses, many carrying tired shift workers, were idling outside stations, awaiting the trains’ arrival before they fanned out with their last passengers. For a quarter-hour, the Green E trains had held up the entire system.
Ebuña took screenshots and fired off a tweetstorm that night. Ofsevit blogged about the 1 a.m. bottleneck the next afternoon. Another member scraped daily data off a transit website that tracks MBTA trains. The numbers showed that the last Green E train caused about 75 percent of the delays in the transit system’s nightly shutdowns. James Aloisi, TransitMatters’ token Baby Boomer and a former state secretary of transportation, announced the group’s findings in a magazine op-ed headlined, “Shutdown process costly for the T.”
Three months later, after initially trying to discredit the article, MBTA officials acknowledged that the last Green E train of the night carried, on average, one person. One person! Sensibly, officials announced that the other trains would no longer wait for the laggard streetcars. TransitMatters had saved the MBTA, or the “T,” as it’s known by everyone in Boston, most of the $500,000 it was spending per year on the late shutdowns. They’d also shortened the early-morning journeys of countless fellow passengers. “It took a little bit of internal calculation for them to realize: ‘No, wait a second, these guys are right!’” says Ebuña.
Over the last three years, Ebuña, Ofsevit, and their comrades in transit-nerdiness have emerged as leading voices in the debates over how to improve Boston’s beleaguered transit system, which runs the oldest train and bus fleets among the nation’s major transit agencies and faces a $7 billion backlog of repair and upkeep work. TransitMatters, run mostly by millennials and using everything from encyclopedic knowledge of train schedules to a network of government insiders, has scored several wins with its data-driven proposals to improve the MBTA’s service. This year, TransitMatters’ advocacy convinced the MBTA to launch overnight bus service for the first time in decades. Members of the group also played a major role in convincing the city and state to add a bus lane to the design for a renovated bridge over the Charles River between historic Charlestown and downtown—a change that will speed up some of the T’s most popular, overcrowded and often-gridlocked bus lines.
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With success has come a more receptive response from the transit officials who once pooh-poohed their findings. “They’ve been terrific in asking us to think about things differently,” says Joseph Aiello, chairman of the Fiscal and Management Control Board, a governor-appointed panel that oversees the T for the state department of transportation. “The board and staff listen to them very carefully. We don’t always agree with them, but we frequently adopt their work.”
In Boston, a town stocked with more than a dozen major universities and colleges and full of urbanists and transit enthusiasts—the kind of people who actually get together over beers just to geek out about transportation policy—Ebuña, 31, and Ofsevit, 34, have become spokespeople for the city’s younger generation of transit riders: millennials who’ve rejected suburban life to go car-free or car-light in the city, who track the T’s open-source data via smartphone to gain a speedier edge on their commutes. “I think as millennials, we see the folly of the previous generation’s emigration to the suburbs,” says Ebuña. Instead, they want to revitalize urban life in fast-growing Boston by improving how people get around. They’re not making small-bore changes, like organizing car pools or encouraging bike commuting, or griping about fare increases. They’re challenging an entrenched and cumbersome bureaucracy that should be one of the most innovative sectors of big-city government, but isn’t. And their talent for collaboration with change-skeptics in the corridors of government serves as a model for how motivated outsiders can help drive quality of life improvements in cities around the world.
“I’m a fan. I like what they do,” says former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who rode the T to work at the State House in the 1980s and is still, at age 84, a respected voice in the Bay State’s mass-transit debates. “I like the fact that they’re bold and fresh,” says the former Democratic presidential nominee. “They dig deep, but they’re also creative and imaginative.”
Now, in an election year, TransitMatters has gone big, with an ambitious, high-cost proposal to speed up and electrify the T’s diesel-chugging commuter rail system and a new suggestion for filling in a missing link in the subway system. Their ideas are gaining attention just as Republican Governor Charlie Baker runs for re-election on his fix-it-first strategy for the T, while Democratic challenger Jay Gonzalez pledges to spend more on transit repair and expansion. Amid that debate, Ebuña, Ofsevit and TransitMatters are pushing the state to think ahead about how Bostonians will get around in the booming, crowded city’s future.
“If you’re a transit enthusiast, and you know by heart all of the schedules and how the system works, that really helps with your credibility,” says Ebuña. “If you know what you’re talking about, that makes it really difficult for people to ignore you.”
***
Marc Ebuña steps onto an Orange Line car, but he doesn’t grab a pole or a hanging strap. Short and trim, his glasses squarish, he’s sharply dressed in a red-dotted, navy-blue shirt and brown slacks. Like a surfer on a wave, he braces himself for the train to accelerate and slow. “I listen for sounds,” he says. “I know when the conductor’s applying the brakes.”
Ebuña rides the train nearly every day, from his apartment in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood to his two jobs, one at a downtown coffeehouse, the other as a part-time publicist for Bluebikes, Boston’s public bikeshare system. The son of Filipino immigrants, he grew up in Flushing, Queens, at the end of New York City’s 7 line. After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute near Albany in 2009, he moved to Boston and got a job as a systems administrator for a local school district. Living along the Red Line, he started TransitMatters as a blog about his often-aggravating commute, “so my friends could stop having to read my transit rants on Facebook,” he says.
One day in late 2009, Ebuña found flyers warning about the shutdown of part of the Red Line scattered on train seats. Ebuña thought the flyers ugly, confusing and hard to read. “I got frustrated,” he recalls, “so on my 45-minute commute, I designed a mockup.” His signs, modeled after the New York City MTA’s notices, put key info—shutdown dates, the affected train line—in big block letters for easy reading from afar. When the T shut down the Red Line’s northernmost station for repairs in 2010, Ebuña printed his guerrilla signs for $50 at a copy store. “I spent an entire night hopping car to car to car, putting up signs as far south as I could,” he says. Transportation officials took notice: The T redesigned its service advisory posters based on Ebuña’s model.
From there, Ebuña teamed up with other young transit enthusiasts to build TransitMatters into an advocacy group. They held monthly Beer and Transit events, where young T riders gathered in bars to talk with local transportation planners, officials, and advocates such as Dukakis about ways to improve train and bus service in dense, congested Boston.
Chris Dempsey, director of Transportation for Massachusetts, a coalition of 70 advocacy groups, including TransitMatters, says Ebuña has helped to channel Bostonians’ love and hate of the T into citizen participation.
“Being the leader of the MBTA is sort of like being the general manager of the Boston Red Sox: every person in Massachusetts believes they could do a better job than the person currently holding the role,” Dempsey says. “Even folks who don’t ride [the T] daily have an opinion about it and want it to succeed.” But, Dempsey adds, “The average rider doesn’t have a sense of how decisions at the MBTA are made and how to influence them. Marc has helped with both. As a convener, he’s made information about the T accessible.”
When TransitMatters launched a monthly podcast in 2014, one of its first guests was Ofsevit. Tall and thin, with piercing hazel eyes, the three-time Boston Marathon runner gets around mostly by bike and transit, though he owns a car for hiking trips to the country. Like Ebuña, he’s a near-lifelong transit rider. “The first couple of years of my life, I lived on Mount Auburn Street in Watertown,” Ofsevit says. “I would watch the 71 bus go by, out my window, and wave at it.”
A grad student in city planning and transportation at MIT and a former staffer for a private bus line in Cambridge, Ofsevit reigns supreme in the surprisingly large world of Boston train-data geeks. His blog, “The Amateur Planner,” takes deep dives into ideas for improving Boston transit. He’ll use charts and graphs to point out ways to add to a bus route’s schedule, dig up a 1913 map and a 1906 photograph to reveal a T station’s original design, and mark up Google Maps screen shots to game out ways to extend a streetcar line. His sources around Boston include train nerds with even deeper memories—“people who can recite a schedule from 1925 for a streetcar,” he says. They also include moles inside the T, who give him off-the-record info and let him know when he’s onto something.
“He has an element of a mad scientist to him, in the best meaning of that,” says Aiello, the T control board chair. “He is really not constrained by historical process…He looks at every dimension of a problem…His talent level is amazing.”
***
In early 2015, just as Ofsevit was getting to know Ebuña and TransitMatters, Snowmageddon struck. A series of colossal blizzards dumped more than 80 inches of snow on the city. Nearly every outdoor stretch of the T’s rapid-transit lines shut down. Inside the aging trains, many dating from the 1960s and 1970s, systems froze and failed. It took the agency 56 days to get its entire fleet back on the rails. The storms exposed the T’s inefficient, insular culture, which hadn’t kept up with best practices, such as using anti-icing fluid on tracks’ electrified third rails.
Baker, sworn in as governor just weeks before the first storm, was thrust into the role of fix-it reformer. A former health-system CEO, Baker took aim at the T’s finances, aiming to reduce its $5 billion debt. In summer 2015, the legislature gave Baker the power to appoint a new board to improve the agency’s finances and management.
One casualty of Baker’s new austerity was the T’s late-night train service, a pilot program that kept the rapid-transit lines running until 2:30 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Launched in 2014 in a bid to make the city more attractive to millennials, late-night service cost $14 million a year. The board cancelled it in March 2016, declaring it a money-loser.
That’s when Ofsevit brainstormed an alternative. “The T actually runs some early morning buses that they don’t publicize,” he says. He’d found them by studying the footnotes in bus schedules, which revealed the little-known fact that some buses began running before 5 a.m. —and that those first runs extended their routes to end in downtown Boston, to substitute for the trains, which don’t start running until 5 a.m. or later. His blog post, “The T’s ‘secret’ early AM service—unmasked,” which showed riders how to get downtown and to Logan Airport by bus between 3:30 and 5:15 a.m., caused traffic on his site to surge.
Ofsevit and two TransitMatters board members went even further. They proposed replacing the missing late-night trains with seven-day, all-night bus service. Boston, they pointed out in an op-ed, was one of only three of the nation’s 15 biggest transit agencies that didn’t run buses 24 hours a day. The canceled trains, they argued, had been “perceived as focusing on the ‘drunk college kid’ demographic on Friday and Saturday nights only.” Actually, they pointed out, there was an important economic benefit to the late-night trains. The T’s own analysis showed that low-income night-shift workers, not partiers, were the people who really relied on those trains. “Our plan,” they wrote, “[is] geared primarily toward getting people to their late-night and early morning jobs.”
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s administration ultimately endorsed TransitMatters’ proposal, as did four surrounding towns. Boston helped the volunteer group compile census statistics about overnight workers to help make the case; Boston and neighboring Cambridge distributed a survey to gauge interest in overnight ridership. Ofsevit, Ebuña and other TransitMatters members studied the T’s own ridership data about the day’s first trains.
“Our task was to get numbers for our assertions that there are people who need this service,” Ebuña says, “to build that narrative, and then to drill down on what sort of service pattern is required.”
After long negotiations with TransitMatters, the MBTA in April launched a $1.2 million early morning bus service. It added a total of 282 weekly trips on several popular existing bus routes, some starting as early as 3:20 a.m. In September, it added late-night bus service to several routes, with some buses running until 3 a.m. Both are pilot programs; they’ll be made permanent, adjusted, or cancelled based on ridership.
Aiello, the T board chair, says the early-morning buses are popular with riders. “We’re very pleased with the early results,” he says. “They were very rigorous on this. It wouldn’t have happened if not for them.”
***
In Waltham, an outer suburb of Boston, Ofsevit steps off an MBTA commuter-rail train onto a platform, then turns and looks behind him. His train car has already emptied, but the rear cars haven’t. Instead of stepping quickly onto platforms, riders are stepping slowly and gingerly from the train to footstools, then to the ground. To Ofsevit, this slow exit, repeated at nearly every station, is an example of why Massachusetts’ trains don’t get where they’re going as fast as they could. Finally, the train starts again, slowly chugging west, leaving an odor of diesel fumes in its wake. “I think the engine on that train’s about 40 years old,” he says.
Early this year, TransitMatters’ leaders released their most ambitious proposal yet: a “regional rail” plan to speed up and electrify the MBTA’s sprawling, aging commuter rail system, which covers most of eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. With faster, quick-accelerating electric trains, and high-level platforms for every train car in each station to speed up entry and exit, TransitMatters predicts that its plan could cut the commuter rail’s Boston-to-Providence travel times from as long as 73 minutes down to 45 minutes.
“It’s a no-brainer,” says Dukakis of TransitMatters’ plan. “The single biggest problem Massachusetts faces today is how to keep people moving around, and in the most environmentally responsible way. Regional rail does that for you.
The Massachusetts Senate backed a study of TransitMatters’ idea this spring, but with its price tag of $2 billion to $3 billion, it’s got a long way to go to become reality. Baker, the frugal governor, is skeptical of big-budget transit expansions. “You know what my vision is? Making the thing work,” Baker said about the T in a radio interview in June.
Ofsevit and TransitMatters have also played a key role in getting the state to re-examine a once-shelved proposal to connect the T’s Red and Blue lines, Boston’s only rapid-transit lines that don’t cross. The Red-Blue Connector would link Logan Airport and working-class Revere and East Boston with high-tech Cambridge. Former Governor Deval Patrick’s administration dropped its plans for the Red-Blue Connector after pricing the quarter-mile project at $750 million.
This year, the T began to reexamine the Red-Blue Connector. Aiello says he and other T leaders are intrigued by Ofsevit and TransitMatters’ new arguments that the Blue Line could be extended for less than $400 million if the T used a long-forgotten, 300-foot tunnel at the Blue Line’s end and excavated with a cut-and-cover technique instead of a tunnel borer. This month, a new estimate from the T confirmed Ofsevit’s argument, finding that the tunneling could be done for $200 million to $300 million, with total budget between $260 million and $420 million. “They put enough fact and analysis on the table for us to say, ‘Let’s take another look,’” Aiello says.
For now, TransitMatters is looking to apply lessons from its victories to the next battle—lessons that Ebuña and Ofsevit think could help transit advocates in cities around the country.
They approach transit officials as potential collaborators, not antagonists. “Some people get really defensive about how you don’t understand how they have limited resources and staff,” says Ebuña. “Part of making your arguments is recognizing that you’re there as an ally, and that you both care about the system.” They also forge other alliances. “You build credibility by talking to people outside of the agency who have more credibility,” Ebuña says, “building that case with local leaders, with your city councilor.”
And they keep it local. “If you’re worried about what Trump is doing, and you’re waiting for that $1 trillion infrastructure investment package, you’re in the wrong place,” Ebuña says. “Your local, state, and city government decide how your tax dollars are spent for your transit network.”
It’sTroll Weekon Mashable. Join us as we explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of internet trolling.
The conventional wisdom is that you shouldn’t respond to people who send you hate mail online. Don’t feed the trolls, the adage goes. They’re doing this to get attention, so don’t give them what they want.
But is this advice truly sound, or is it just something people keep saying because they’ve been hearing it forever?
According to Lauren Hoffman, a clinical psychologist and instructor at Columbia University, the advice is solid from a psychological standpoint. But that’s only part of the story.
“Research shows that the typical internet troll posts nasty comments in order to provoke others, trigger conflict, and receive attention,” Hoffman says. “When trolling efforts are successful in achieving those outcomes, the nasty behavior is rewarded and therefore likely to continue.”
But what about the trolling that gets worse and worse, even if you ignore it? Hoffman chalks that up to something called an “extinction burst,” during which a troll might escalate their behavior in the hopes that something even more toxic will elicit a response. This could mean more vitriolic language, more targeted hate, or more frequent abusive messages — you know, all the stuff that shouldn’t be on the internet in the first place.
Hoffman explains that if the person on the receiving end of the abuse can “ride out” the extinction burst, the trolling behavior is likely to stop. That’s a relief. But what about the time in between? Why should that time have to exist at all?
Online creators, including journalists, have often spoken out against the “don’t feed the trolls” axiom, particularly people who have experienced trolling themselves. It’s easy to understand the frustration: Why should they have to consider their behavior so carefully when they’re the targets? Why should they have to tread lightly when all they wanted to do was be online?
Why should the target have to tread lightly when all they wanted to do was be online?
Ultimately, it’s a framing issue: we as a culture put the impetus to improve a toxic situation on the victim.
Writer Film Crit Hulk spoke to this burden in an essay for The Verge earlier this year. “The biggest mistake we ever made with trolls was making the question of abuse about how to placate and fix them,” they wrote, “instead of how to empower the people they hurt or manage your own well-being in the face of them.”
When you’re targeted by trolls, the mental and physical toll can be severe. I have lost whole days, felt foggy and anxious for entire weeks because of messages I’ve received. I’ve spent even more time agonizing over whether I should respond. (It’s worth noting that I am white and cisgender, and that other people on the internet experience much worse.) I also have friends and colleagues who have left social media entirely because of targeted, often violent harassment.
And according to Hoffman, the psychological effects of engaging with trolls can veer into the physiological, including “sweating, rapid heartbeat, muscle tension, or trouble breathing.” It’s a vast physical price for sticking up for yourself.
So do we stick up for ourselves? Can targets feasibly be the “bigger person” when the trolls make the rules? As troll culture becomes more pervasive online, it becomes harder to pick a blanket answer. In some instances, it’s beneficial to expose troll-y bots — especially if they’re spreading political lies. (You never know which impressionable people might be reading.) In other situations — including many instances of hate speech — it’s likely best for the target’s health to just block and move on.
Hoffman agrees. “Pick your battles and set limits for yourself,” she says. “Decide what you’re willing to ignore, what you might reply to, and what you will block or report.”
She also emphasizes the importance of leaning on your community. “It’s vital to seek social support, particularly from people who have also experienced online abuse, as well as professional support if distress is intense, frequent, or impairing,” she says.
But we also have to change the way we talk about trolling. There’s no clear way to deal with trolls because we can’t deal with them — not on a large scale, anyway. That’s a job for big tech companies, and it’s unclear if they’re up to the task.
What we can do is stop relying on adages like “don’t feed the trolls” without considering a person’s specific circumstances. Trolling sucks, after all. All we can do is operate with a bit more empathy.
More than 200 people have been killed by Israeli forces since the Great March of Return protests began on March 30 [File: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa /Reuters]
Israeli warplanes hit several locations in the Gaza Strip early on Thursday causing extensive damage to property in the besieged territory, according to the Palestinian news agency, WAFA.
The fighter jets targeted a military compound in the northern Gaza Strip and a training facility and a munitions manufacturing and storage site in the south, the Israeli military said in a statement.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said the raids were in response to a rocket fired from Gaza which caused no casualties or damage but which evaded Israel’s Iron Dome defence system, triggering an inquiry.
Hamas, which governs the besieged strip, said there were no casualties in the strikes.
It comes a week after Israel carried out 20 air strikes following a rocket attack in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Palestinain protesters in Gaza have demonstrated for their right of return in an organised movement since March [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]
Israel also announced temporary suspension of fuel deliveries to Gaza, which has been under an air, water and land blockade imposed by Israel since 2007.
Crippling blockade
Hamas and its allies disavowed the recent rocket fire blaming fringe groups bent on sabotaging UN and Egyptian efforts to broker a long-term truce in return for a relaxation of the crippling 11-year blockade of the territory.
But Israel has vowed repeatedly to hold Hamas responsible for any rocket fire regardless of who launched it.
The protesters have been demanding an end to Israel’s blockade and the right of return to land now inside Israel, from which their families were expelled in the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel.
Palestinians refer to the war and accompanying displacement of roughly 700,000 as the “Nakba,” or “Catastrophe”.
More than 200 Palestinians have been killed in the territory by Israeli fire since the Great March of Return protests began on March 30. One Israeli soldier has been killed in the border area over the same period.
The air force on Wednesday struck a position in Gaza used by protesters to launch incendiary balloons into Israel, the military said.
Though the protests have been largely peaceful, some protesters have employed fire kites and balloons that burned large areas of Israeli farmland causing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of crop losses.
![Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, also known as Mullah Baradar, is a cofounder of the Taliban movement [Screenshot Al Jazeera]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2013/9/21/2013921201058475734_20.jpg "Afghan Taliban founder Mullah Baradar 'released' by Pakistan")
![More than 200 people have been killed by Israeli forces since the Great March of Return protests began on March 30 [File: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa /Reuters]](https://i0.wp.com/www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2018/10/17/7778b59f20f441beae57dd0408d493b5_18.jpg "Gaza: Israeli warplanes strike 'Hamas targets'")
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