The third season, starring Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, is a welcome return to form, but while it purports to mock our recent obsession with true-crime shows, it actually copies them.
LINK: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/how-true-detective-season-3-apes-true-crime-podcasts
With the release of so many true crime documentaries from Netflix that feature incompetent police, bungled investigations and an often, at times, unnecessary “artsy” vibes, one longs for the old days of true crime where the most interesting thing to discover was the nuts and bolts of how a famous serial killer operated. This is the best thing Conversations With A Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes has going for it.
Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, a top researcher at the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics has predicted that the doomsday on the earth will be triggered when the sun will turn into a crystalline ball. The researcher made this grim prediction after discovering that white dwarf stars usually turn solid at the end of their lives.
Tremblay revealed that the sun will also face a similar fate in the future, and it will happen in about 10 billion years. It should be noted that the entire life on earth depends on the sun for its survival, and in its absence, the entire solar solar system will become totally uninhabitable.
LINK: https://www.ibtimes.co.in/sun-will-turn-into-crystalline-ball-bringing-doomsday-earth-study-789882
Best Gore is not a compilation of your favorite Al Gore clips – it’s a Canadian shock site with graphic videos of things like beheadings and dismemberment. The owner of the site was actually arrested for violating Canadian public morals and obscenity laws. However, contributors continue to keep the site active by posting every day.
A man who earned the nickname of China’s “Jack the Ripper” for the slayings of 11 victims was executed Thursday, according to reports.
Gao Chengyong, 54, was sentenced to death in March during a court appearance in Baiyin, China, for robbery, rape, murder, and defiling the dead, according to the South China Morning Post.
Gao was charged for the murders of 11 women and girls between 1998 and 2002, reports AFP. Gao targeted young women wearing red and followed them home, sometimes mutilating his victims, said the report.
Admin’s note: It should go without saying that Joe Gibbons is a patron saint of this site, along with a host of others like Uncle Ted. Maybe we should put up a “Saints” page.
Out of Rikers and facing a bank robbery charge in Providence, he’s trying to complete his masterpiece of ‘autobiographical fiction’ that began with buying a dime bag
“Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth.”—Isabella Gardner, founder of Boston’s Gardner Museum.
In February 2017, Joe Gibbons sat in a Greenwich Village restaurant and calmly confessed to a role in the largest art heist in American history.
Gibbons, a filmmaker and former MIT lecturer now in his mid-sixties—back in circulation after pleading guilty in 2014 to a Manhattan bank robbery and spending a year in jail—had already confessed and would soon be charged with another bank robbery, this one in Providence, Rhode Island.
He was sitting with a Pulitzer-winning journalist, Stephen Kurkjian, and a novelist, Charles Pinning, both of whom had traveled from New England and knocked on his door that afternoon. Their visit came weeks after an assistant U.S. attorney in Massachusetts had called Gibbons’ lawyer to inquire about his possible involvement in the Isabella Gardner Museum heist.
LINK: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-sociopath-scholar-who-made-films-of-his-crimes-tried-to-confess-to-americas-most-famous-art-heist
Admin’s note: A lot of Uncle Ted nostalgia lately, hm?
Constant stories of shadowy data analytics firms, Russian hacking, and trolling make it difficult to see the wood for the trees. There are a lot of books which cover these issues – and expect more to come – but this year I’ve found it more useful to read technology books that help understand current events in a wider context.
LINK: https://unherd.com/2018/12/why-the-unabombers-manifesto-is-essential-christmas-reading/
Admin’s note: It’s kinda funny to read an article in NY Mag talking to and about friends, projects we’ve contributed to, and former collaborators on this very site. Guess it just goes to show you. Show you what, I dunno, but something.
When John Jacobi stepped to the altar of his Pentecostal church and the gift of tongues seized him, his mother heard prophecies — just a child and already blessed, she said. Someday, surely, her angelic blond boy would bring a light to the world, and maybe she wasn’t wrong. His quest began early. When he was 5, the Alabama child-welfare workers decided that his mother’s boyfriend — a drug dealer named Rock who had a red carpet leading to his trailer and plaster lions standing guard at the door — wasn’t providing a suitable environment for John and his sisters and little brother. Before they knew it, they were living with their father, an Army officer stationed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. But two years later, when he was posted to Iraq, the social workers shipped the kids back to Alabama, where they stayed until their mother hanged herself from a tree in the yard. John was 14. In the tumultuous years that followed, he lost his faith, wrote mournful poems, took an interest in news reports about a lively new protest movement called Occupy Wall Street, and ran away from the home of the latest relative who’d taken him in — just for a night, but that was enough. As soon as he graduated from high school, he quit his job at McDonald’s, bought some camping gear, and set out in search of a better world.
LINK: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/the-unabomber-ted-kaczynski-new-generation-of-acolytes.html
