Someday I’m going to come here with a bunch of really happy true news stories. But yesterday, while I was out with a bunch of friends at a park in Manhattan on a sunny day, I made the mistake of checking Twitter and found out that Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin, a hilarious and outrageously talented Jewish moppet a full five years younger than me, died suddenly in the night. I never had any kind of emotional relationship with Prince or Bowie or, in fact, most of the rest of the luminaries 2016 has taken from us already, but losing Yelchin has hit me very hard, despite not having an emotional relationship with him or his work either. That he was so young, that he was an only child, that his parents were figure skaters who fled the Soviet Union and that the accident was so strange and lonely and horrible, just feels like too much to bear.
Most of the links I’ve collected over the past week have been reactions to the Orlando massacre. The first one I think everyone should watch is Samantha Bee’s not-even-contained fury at the state of politics that allowed such a thing to happen.
- Two other stories related to the mass murder, immensely worth your time: “I bought an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in Philly in 7 minutes,” from the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Dahlia Lithwick’s “The Second Amendment Hoax,” from Slate.
- Another story I can’t get out of my head: a Storify documenting the atmosphere from within a Donald Trump rally. Pair with Dave Eggers’ very different but still distressing take for the Guardian, “Could He Actually Win?“
- From the world of jurisprudence and intellectual property , an interesting, if also consequentially unnerving, story: AMC is threatening a copyright lawsuit over spoilers leaking from The Walking Dead.
- Science is still exciting, though, right? From the blog at Scientific American, a headline that caught my eye: “Is Particle Physics About to Crack Wide Open?“
