Terror & Tokyo

Featured Articles

The School Shootings Were Fake. The Terror Was Real

WIRED • 9 Jan 2025 • ~9650 words

The inside story of the teenager whose “swatting” calls sent armed police racing into hundreds of schools nationwide—and the private detective who tracked him down.

In some calls, the person told dispatchers he wanted to kill students for Satan. In others, he said it was because he was new to town and people treated him “like shit.” In others still, like the one to Spokane, he seemed to have become bored enough with the game that he didn’t bother to make up a reason. Armed with little more than his monstrous voice, an internet-based calling application routed through an anonymous proxy server, and a recording of gunfire taken from the video game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Torswats terrorized half the state, paralyzing schools, weaponizing civilians’ own police forces against them, temporarily shutting down entire communities, again and again and again.

Eastern Promises

The Baffler • 6 Jan 2025 • ~5450 words

Dylan Levi King writes about Tokyo, the impacts of mass tourism, and the often-overlooked struggles of guest workers.

After I quit my job, I never saw Thúy An again. I could project onto her publicly available data on Vietnamese guest workers and the promises made by labor brokers to employers, and she could become an average of the five hundred thousand Vietnamese workers in the country. A woman, young, not necessarily undereducated but without prospects at home, willing to work long hours ripping squid guts, spreading fertilizer, and driving forklifts—jobs for which too few Japanese workers could be found. I might substitute her essence for a composite of other acquaintances so she could become a socialist-realist hero: homesick but brave, poor and self-sacrificing, loyal to her own culture while open to the world. That is not what I want to do. She is a cipher because that is how the guest worker is deployed: concealed in dormitories and closed worksites on the margins of the city, foreign agents adopting a new language and new lifestyle only to be spirited out of the country before anybody more permanent gets to know them.

Recommended Articles

The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows

The Atlantic • 9 Jan 2025 • ~4850 words

Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.

At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement's central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

The Power of Prayer

Aeon • 9 Jan 2025 • ~3950 words

Praying is a cognitive practice full of problem-solving resources. You can learn from it even if you don’t want to do it.

Paul did the genre-appropriate prayer language. He began his prayer by addressing God, thanking God. He ended his prayer with an Amen. But when I looked closer, beyond the expected language, Paul followed Pólya’s problem-solving process. He began his prayer by describing the problem he’s facing: mornings are tricky for him. He identifies his goal state: he wants to feel happy and not anxious in the mornings. And he makes a plan, saying he wants to ‘find ways to meet God in the mornings’ and works backward to determine that he needs to find a new morning routine.

Why Did We Start Drinking Milk? On the Ancient Rise of Dairy Consumption

Literary Hub • 9 Jan 2025 • ~2350 words

Anne Mendelson Explores the Prehistoric Origins of Modern Agriculture and Human-Animal Relations.

It is impossible to pinpoint a place or date where some inquisitive person first tried to milk one of the animals being kept for meat. The idea must have occurred to people in more than one corner of the general region, though adopting it as standard practice may have taken many centuries. Two things are certain: the subjects of early experiments did not have the large, capacious udders of today’s dairy animals, and did not share their compliant attitude toward being milked. Not only is shoving oneself between a nursing mother and her young a good way to get attacked, but simply yanking on a teat will do nothing but agitate her more.

The mysterious novelist who foresaw Putin’s Russia – and then came to symbolise its moral decay

The Guardian • 9 Jan 2025 • ~5050 words

Victor Pelevin made his name in 90s Russia with scathing satires of authoritarianism. But while his literary peers have faced censorship and fled the country, he still sells millions. Has he become a Kremlin apologist?

Pelevin’s oracular quality has been heightened by his total absence from public life. Even when someone announced his death online in 2016, he did not come forward to offer a correction. This erstwhile prophet is so elusive that rumours have swirled that he has been replaced by a neural network or a team of ghostwriters. As his fellow writer Dmitry Bykov once put it: “No one knows where Pelevin lives – because Pelevin lives on the astral plane.” His only communications are through his annual novels. In Russia, a new one appears every fall amid a flurry of press.

How Venture Capital Flattens Neighborhoods

The Progressive Magazine • 8 Jan 2025 • ~2650 words

A new level of super-gentrification is rapidly remaking your favorite places.

This newest phase, which has unfolded to various degrees in neighborhoods like Andersonville and Wicker Park in Chicago, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or Silver Lake in Los Angeles, is the result of venture-capital-funded corporations trying to cash in on the cool factor of gentrified neighborhoods that draw traffic with quirky coffee shops or community gardens. But unlike Starbucks or Target, these newer VC-funded chains often try to disguise themselves as, or at least co-opt the ethos of, local institutions.

The Secret to a Better City Is a Two-Wheeler

Mother Jones • 8 Jan 2025 • ~4050 words

E-bikes get cars off the road and reduce pollution—and that’s only part of why places like Denver are giving them away.

Underlying the urban-transportation culture wars is the wretched state of bike infrastructure. American cities were famously built for cars; planners typically left precious little room for bikes and pedestrians, to say nothing of e-bikes, hoverboards, scooters, skaters, and parents with jogging strollers. Cars hog the roadways while everyone else fights for the scraps. Most bike lanes in the United States are uncomfortably narrow, don’t allow for safe passing, and are rarely physically separated from cars—some cyclists call them “car door lanes.”