Gwynn Guilford

The mainstream media account of the Unite the Right rally and the alt-narrative ultimately diverge regarding the weekend’s violence: Who started it, what kind occurred, who let it happen. Both tell roughly similar stories, with the perpetrator roles inverted. According to alt-right commentators, the white nationalist protesters were thrust defenseless into crowds of armed thugs, beaten, and forced to defend themselves to the extent that one of their ranks killed in self-defense.

In late July, North Korea tested a type of missile some say can hit Chicago, announcing that “packs of wolves are coming in attack to strangle a nation.” This week, US president Donald Trump hit back, vowing on Aug. 8 to attack North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Pyongyang’s next move was a suggestion that it might bomb Guam, prompting Trump to take to Twitter to declare that “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”

It was a not-very-dark and semi-cloudy night. An Australian teenager named Sam went wading in the sea in a Melbourne suburb to cool off after a soccer match. When he stepped back onto the beach, he was covered shin-to-toe in blood, which was streaming from tiny holes. It took a trip to the ER to stop the bleeding.

It’s hard to solve a problem if you don’t understand its magnitude. And thanks to faulty data collection, America seems to have been greatly underestimating the severity of its opioid epidemic. According to a new study that corrected the rates, opioid mortality rates in 2014 were 24% higher than the official statistics. Heroin mortality rates were 22% higher.

A Google employee created an uproar this weekend when his manifesto about criticizing the company’s diversity initiatives went viral among employees. The senior software engineer claimed the diversity programs discriminated against employees like himself by creating an “ideological echo chamber where some ideas are too sacred to be discussed honestly.”

One of the eeriest mysteries of the sea is the sudden surge in jellyfish over the last few decades. Consider the tale of the moon jellyfish. Since the first big moon jellyfish bloom was recorded in the Adriatic in 1910, moon jelly populations seemed to follow a predictable cycle. They’d turn up in normal numbers most years, and every couple of decades, clog the shores in huge gummy swarms.

When was it, exactly, that petite Toyotas and stubby Hondas came to rule the American road? One milestone in the compact-car takeover dates back to the summer of 2009. Times were, as you’ll recall, pretty dark. The US economy was bleeding jobs. Trillions of dollars in wealth in stocks and home equity had been vaporized. People were clinging to what cash they had—and definitely not spending on cars. With sales nosediving, several flagship US auto companies were on the brink of ruin.

There were 4,819 public US companies in 1975. Forty years on, that number has fallen by more than a fifth, hitting 3,766 in 2015. This peculiar dwindling is but one of the dramatic changes in US public corporations described in a new study published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Degrees from fancy schools do help catapult individual poor kids into the uppermost income bracket. Yet the most-efficient engines of American upward mobility are a slew of mid-tier public institutions like the City University of New York, California State-Los Angeles, and the University of Texas-El Paso according to a NBER working paper (registration required) published Monday (July 24).

If there’s one thing you really don’t want scattered across a highway, it’s live hagfish. But last week, five vehicles collided on an Oregon highway, flinging 7,500 pounds of hagfish—also known as “snot snakes” and “slime eels”—across the blacktop, and making a very unusual mess.

On his first visit to America in 1842, Charles Dickens found plenty to ridicule—Americans’ obsession with money, their manners, their tobacco chewing. But the biggest target of Dickens’ humor was New Yorkers. Specifically, their pigs.

The sealing of America’s fiscal fate began in 1974, over cocktails.

During a meeting of her war council in June 1482, as she plotted the siege of a town in Granada, Queen Isabella went into labor

When Chinese president Xi Jinping rolls up to Mar-a-Lago today for his powerful-guy pow-wow with US president Donald Trump, it’s bound to be a little awkward. Trump has blamed “cheating” China for the decline of US manufacturing. He has undermined previous US policy by recognizing Taiwan’s president as an equal (China claims the island nation remains one of its provinces). And he continues to tweet ominously about the summit.

George Borjas, a veteran labor economist at Harvard, just made a strange discovery. Since the early 2000s, unauthorized immigrants have gotten paid around 9% less, on average, than legal workers with the same skills and backgrounds, he found. Then all of a sudden in 2008—just as the American economy tipped into the abyss of the Great Recession—the average hourly wages of unauthorized immigrants started to climb. And as their pay rose, that “wage penalty” started shrinking, falling under 6% in 2010. By 2014, unauthorized immigrants, on average, earned only 3.4% less than their legal peers.

Americans are deeply divided about how their country should be run, a chasm that seems to widen with each passing election. The notion that the internet is a leading culprit of this increased polarization makes plenty of intuitive sense: The more people can hole up in their own digital echo chambers in places like Facebook, the harder it is for opposing views to seep in.

After enduring the worst recession in its history, Brazil finally seems to be finding its footing. There’s one problem it won’t as easily outrun, though. Its ranks of elderly are growing way faster than its population of workers. That’s putting Brazil on track to suffer the worst demographic crunch of any emerging market save for Chile and China.

Hours after the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates yesterday, China’s central bank followed suit, hiking rates for the second time this year. But, wait—no it didn’t.

Seafood is a classic luxury item in China. But until recently, people there weren’t big on lobster. The iconic, bright-red crustaceans were known as the “Boston lobster,” and were a rarity compared to other fancy oceanic eats like sea cucumbers or geoduck clams.

Something about Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes it worth returning to again and again—and it’s not the mom jeans and Cibo Matto cameos. As with any classic, the casual quinquennial binge-watch of the American show, which ran from 1997 to 2003, reliably rewards its viewers with new insights.

Americans aren’t big on seafood. Worldwide, the average person eats about 44 pounds of fish and shellfish a year. A typical American eats roughly a third of that amount.

The Chinese government has announced its annual GDP target for 2017, projecting growth of “around 6.5%, or higher if possible in practice.” Though somewhat lower than 2016’s target, it’s still pretty high: The authorities want to keep growth bumping in advance of October’s party congress, a crucial opportunity for Xi Jinping, chair of the communist party, to consolidate power.

Opioids continue to wreak deadly havoc in America, even after a half-decade of efforts to stem the epidemic. In 2015, more people died of overdosing on opioids than ever before: 33,000 people in 2015, according to a new study (pdf) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Thanks largely to surging opioid use, the age-adjusted rate of fatal drug overdoses is now 16.3 per 100,000 people, about twice what it was in 2002.