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Allison Brocato last saw her sister alive on the afternoon of January 13, 1995. It was a Friday, and Catherine Edwards, Allison’s 31-year-old identical twin, had just gotten off work at Price Elementary School, in Beaumont. On her way home, Edwards stopped to pick up her beagle, whom Brocato had been dogsitting. She lingered a few minutes to chat and to play with Brocato’s infant daughter. “She seemed kind of sad that day,” Brocato would later recall. “I think she had had a fight with an ex-boyfriend the night before.”
Brocato and Edwards considered themselves best friends. After graduating from Lamar University, they both got jobs as public school teachers and moved into a modest town house in west Beaumont, where they lived together until Brocato got married. The sisters looked so alike—a bit shy of five feet tall, slim, with pale skin and shy smiles—that their high school yearbook had mixed up their photos. Later, as teachers, they would occasionally fool their students by pretending to be each other.
The two women spoke again by phone that evening, as they usually did before bed. Edwards had decided to break off all contact with her ex-boyfriend. The sisters both planned to be at the family’s traditional Saturday lunch the next day at their parents’ house, but Edwards never showed up. When her parents drove to her town house to check on her, they found their daughter’s body in the second-floor bathroom, slumped over the tub. She was nude from the waist down, and her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. Her father sounded frantic when he told Brocato what they’d found. “He said, ‘Your sister’s dead, your sister’s dead.’ ”
The brutal murder made front-page news for days in Beaumont, where Edwards was known as a dedicated teacher and a lifelong Presbyterian. She volunteered at St. Elizabeth hospital and served as a mentor for the “I Have a Dream” Program scholarship. Neighbors remembered her walking her dog each evening. “She was loved by everybody,” recalled Steve Thrower, a now retired investigator for the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office who was assigned to assist Beaumont Police Department detectives with the case. “Great family. Never had any kind of criminal issue. Usually that really shrinks your suspect pool.”
Read the rest of this article at: Texas Monthly
Who is normal and who is weird? When it comes to those of us in the American media, it’s obvious that we are all weird and way too online. Yet part of our job is to gauge, and sometimes even inhabit, the mind of the normie voter. There’s a bit of theatre to this process, in which a cast of supposedly regular people—cabdrivers, people in diners, truck drivers, elementary-school teachers—is paraded upon a stage so that each can deliver a soliloquy about the candidates and the state of the nation. We in the media, the producers of this little play, adjust the lighting and hit the Applause button.
But we are mostly guessing about who these average voters may be. Highly educated upper-middle-class people are hugely overrepresented in the ranks of the national media and national politics, two labor forces with a lot of overlap—many journalists at prestige networks have at least one or two classmates who work on a campaign or on Capitol Hill. The “average voter” gets defined through the speculative synergy of these two groups, and elections can sometimes come down to an imagined common man. This has been happening for a while. In 2006, for example, Rahm Emanuel, then acting as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, helped spearhead a campaign to win a House majority by recruiting centrist and even right-leaning Democrats who would have Everyman appeal, including the former N.F.L. quarterback Heath Shuler. Whenever the Democrats are in crisis, it seems, someone will point out that the Party’s leaders all come from the same élite and out-of-touch background; those leaders will then shuffle a few steps to the right and venture deeper into the suburbs or the countryside in the name of the common man and what he allegedly wants.
Kamala Harris, by this logic, should tack right. She is a Black and Indian American woman from the Bay Area who ran on a progressive platform in 2020, parts of which she has already, in just the past two weeks, repudiated. But it’s not entirely clear which center-coded turns actually matter to the voters she needs to reach and which ones might just be ignored. Consider the discussion over her Vice-Presidential pick. The conventional wisdom holds that she must choose a white man who can talk to the “common voter,” preferably one from a swing state where he enjoys broad popularity. Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, does not fit the last billing—his state is reliably blue—but his star turn during the past two weeks has depended on video clips in which the former high-school football coach tells viewers that the Republicans are “weird” and want to invade your bedroom and set up a whole bunch of nonsense laws aimed at restricting your freedoms. He has also called Donald Trump a “robber baron” and J. D. Vance a “venture capitalist” and has said, “My hillbilly cousins did not go to Yale.” His appeal, according to the New York Times, can be captured by a string of adjectives that all mean more or less the same thing: “steady,” “down-to-earth,” “everyman.” There is no question that Walz is a talented speaker who can sell a type of Midwestern authenticity without strain or self-importance, which, hypothetically, could sate the concerns of voters who might have misgivings about Harris being Black, or being South Asian, or being a woman, or being too progressive.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Fellas, is it illegal for brands to refuse to advertise on my social media site? If you’re Elon Musk, the answer is yes.
This week, Musk’s social media company X (formerly Twitter) filed an eyebrow-raising lawsuit against an advertising industry group and several major brands, including Unilever (maker of Dove soap), Mars Inc. (maker of lots of candy), and CVS. It argues that the companies coordinated an advertising boycott against X that not only led to “massive economic harm,” but even violated antitrust law because they colluded to specifically target X, making it less competitive in selling digital ads.
Since having to buy the site for a painful $44 billion in 2022, Musk has tried to turn it into a haven of unmoderated speech. Critics have argued that the site, often called a “hellsite” for how toxic it could be even before the Musk era, became an unusable cesspit of vitriol and incoherent porn bots. Advertisers fled, because businesses don’t want to risk their ads showing up next to objectionable or outright illegal content, like child sexual abuse material. This is very bad for X, since, like other social media companies, it would go belly up without ad money. X contends this cessation of business is a “naked restraint of trade” because advertisers collectively forced the site to adhere to their content standards. It even had to lower its ad prices, the filing alleges.
Read the rest of this article at: Vox
You’ve heard the dramatic weight loss stories. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, can help people lose 15 percent of their body weight. Tirzepatide, sold under the brand names Mounjaro and Zepbound, may be even more effective at shedding pounds.
Known as GLP-1 agonists, these drugs were originally developed to help control diabetes. But there’s increasing evidence that they have other health benefits, beyond controlling weight. They seem to boost heart health, protect the kidneys, improve sleep apnea, and lower the risk of certain obesity-related cancers. Recent studies have also hinted at their potential to treat addiction and even slow the cognitive decline that comes with dementia. As researchers test these drugs for various conditions, they’re trying to untangle the mysteries behind how exactly they’re working in the body—and they have a few theories.
“Many of us in the medical community are really beginning to think about these drugs as health promotion drugs, not just weight loss drugs or even anti-obesity drugs,” says Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist and professor at Yale University School of Medicine.
In March, Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy became the first weight loss medication to also gain approval to help prevent serious heart problems in people with cardiovascular disease. In an international trial of more than 17,600 people with excess weight, weekly injections of Wegovy significantly reduced the risk of a major cardiac event. Researchers followed participants for an average of three years and found that those who took Wegovy were 20 percent less likely to die of a heart attack, stroke, or other cardiovascular cause.
Eli Lilly, which makes tirzepatide, is also looking to expand Zepbound’s uses. The company announced this month that its weight-loss drug improved symptoms in heart failure patients with obesity and led to a 38 percent reduction in hospitalizations.
One in every four deaths each year in the United States is due to heart disease, and obesity is increasingly a factor. Excess weight can cause high blood pressure and cholesterol, which increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. Weight gain can also affect how the heart muscle functions, increasing the risk of failure. It’s perhaps no wonder then that a drug that helps people lose weight would also improve heart health. But there are reasons to think there are other factors at play beyond weight loss.
Read the rest of this article at: Wired
“Threat!”
In a flash, 50 people pull replica handguns and raise them above shoulder height, careful not to point the mock weapons at the heads of those sitting in front of them.
It’s a Saturday morning on the South Side of Chicago, and the heat is rising in the classroom as firearms instructor Mike Brown leads students through gun-handling drills. They hold the model guns aloft until he yells, “Chest!,” which is their cue to draw the weapons back to their bodies. He drills them over and over, so pointing the gun feels like pure instinct, a reflex each time they hear him shout, “Threat!”
A few hours earlier, just before 8 am, the students began lining up with coffee cups and water bottles outside of Brown’s storefront office, where they’ve committed to spending 16 hours of their weekend learning about gun safety.
It’s a diverse group: Over half are women and the majority are Black, but there are white and Hispanic students, too. Some are as young as 18, and a handful are older, but most of them are 20- and 30-somethings. Several are new to firearms or are planning to get their first gun soon. Everyone is there for a common reason: to complete Illinois’s required training to get a concealed carry license, which will allow them to bring their guns in public.
Brown teaches these classes most weekends. For the past few years, he says, they’ve been packed.
That’s partly because Brown, a charismatic 43-year-old with a large social media following, offers something different from the dry legalese you might expect from a firearms safety course. His class is more like standup comedy meets group therapy meets self-defense seminar, taught by a drill sergeant.
But there’s another reason why Brown’s classes are full, week after week.
The beginning of the 2020s marked a significant shift in America’s relationship with guns and gun violence. The Covid-19 lockdowns, combined with nationwide protests and a police reckoning following the killing of George Floyd, worsened an ongoing breakdown of trust in institutions and society.
In 2020, violent crime increased across the United States, with the homicide rate rising faster than at any time in more than 100 years. Guns became the leading cause of death for children and teens, rising 50 percent over two years. In 2021, a year that began with more political unrest and a violent insurrection, more Americans died of gun-related injuries than in any year on record. The rise in gun deaths was a major factor in Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s decision this summer to declare gun violence a public health crisis.
Amid the violence, millions of Americans made a potentially life-altering decision: They decided it was time to buy their first gun.
One in 20 American adults bought a gun for the first time between March 2020 and March 2022, according to survey data from independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago.
Read the rest of this article at: Vox
