Day: August 28, 2020

Just last week, Facebook finally banned militia groups and pages that advocate for violence on its platform. But Recode’s quick Facebook search for “militia” groups and pages on Friday surfaced over a dozen results for national and local militia groups, most of them private, with many of them openly calling for violence against protesters.

Two of these groups that Recode accessed had a combined 25,000 members and included posts where members encouraged and celebrated shooting people involved in recent Black Lives Matter protests. Some groups did not contain “militia” in the title but still encouraged members to take up arms. …

One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.

At the end of High Flying Bird, a rookie NBA player receives a gift bestowed to him by his former agent: 1969’s seminal The Revolt of the Black Athlete, by sociologist and civil rights activist Harry Edwards.

It is then that the full meaning of Steven Soderbergh’s unconventional sports drama, released on Netflix in February 2019, becomes clear. In a crisp 90 minutes, the film covers thorny issues of labor and class, of dreams lost …

Neuralink, the mysterious neuroscience company backed by Elon Musk, is expected to reveal more details about its plans to connect computers to human brains on Friday. While the development of this futuristic-sounding tech is still in its early stages, the presentation is expected to demonstrate the second version of a small, robotic device that inserts tiny electrode threads through the skull and into the brain. Musk says he’ll “show neurons firing in real-time. The matrix in the matrix.”

Like building underground car tunnels and sending private rockets to Mars, this Musk-backed endeavor is incredibly ambitious, but it builds …

As a general rule, President Donald Trump likes talking about the stock market. Throughout his tenure in the White House, he has tried to set it up as a measure of his success. And during the Covid-19 pandemic, his focus on stocks has become perhaps even more pronounced as he and his advisers point to its quick (and somewhat confounding) recovery as evidence that the US economy is fine.

Heading into the Republican National Convention, I figured the Dow Jones Industrial Average would be a star of the show. And then it just … wasn’t. In fact, mention of one …

The text of President Donald Trump’s rambling 70-minute-long RNC-closing speech wasn’t particularly impressive. Trump read laboriously and largely stayed on script. His remarks consisted of now-familiar lies about his record, overheated attacks on Democratic nominee Joe Biden, and authoritarian bluster.

But the optics of it were striking — for all the wrong reasons.

Trump shredded norms and laws like the Hatch Act that have restrained previous presidents from using public property as a political prop, and delivered his speech from the White House. The result was gauche images of “TRUMP/PENCE” signs on property that isn’t supposed to belong to …

The first hour of the final evening of the 2020 Republican Convention had two clear, albeit somewhat contradictory, messages.

On the one hand, a parade of nonwhite speakers vouched for President Donald Trump both as a nonracist individual and also as a policymaker who delivered criminal justice reform. On the other hand, Black Lives Matter protests are responsible for rioting and rising crime all across America and only Trump can save the suburbs from inner city chaos. His election rival Joe Biden, by the same token, was both an avatar of the tough-on-crime excesses of the 1990s and also …