agent link rich9
FBI Director Wray says he intends to resign at the end of Biden's term in January
NoneScholastic Corporation Announces Third Quarter DividendScholastic Corporation Announces Third Quarter Dividend
QB Daniel Jones disagrees with the Giants' decision to bench him and says he wants to play
Jones alleges fraud and collusion marred the bankruptcy auction in which The Onion was named the winning bidder on November 14 over a company affiliated with him. US bankruptcy judge Christopher Lopez had been scheduled to hear an emergency motion to disqualify The Onion’s bid, but decided to put it off until either December 9 or December 17. That is also when the judge will hear arguments on a request to approve the sale of Infowars to The Onion. Mr Lopez said similar arguments are being made in both requests. He could allow The Onion to move forward with the sale, order a new auction or name the other bidder as the winner. At stake is whether Mr Jones gets to stay at Infowars’ studio in Austin, Texas, under a new owner friendly to him, or whether he gets kicked out by The Onion. The other bidder, First United American Companies, runs a website in Mr Jones’s name that sells nutritional supplements. Regardless, Mr Jones has set up a new studio, websites and social media accounts that would allow him to keep airing his show. His personal account with 3.3 million followers on the social platform X was not part of the sale, although Mr Lopez will be deciding whether it should be included in the liquidation and sold off later. In a new court filing on Monday, lawyers for X objected to any sale of the accounts of both Mr Jones and Infowars, saying X is the owner of the accounts and that it has not given consent for them to be sold or transferred. Mr Jones has praised X owner Elon Musk on his show and suggested that Mr Musk should buy Infowars. Mr Musk has not responded publicly to that suggestion and was not among the bidders. Mr Jones’ bankruptcy and the liquidation of his assets came about after he was ordered to pay nearly 1.5 billion dollars (£1.19 billion) to relatives of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Mr Jones was found liable for defamation and emotional distress damages in lawsuits in Connecticut and Texas for repeatedly calling the 2012 shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators a hoax staged by actors to increase gun control. Proceeds from the liquidation are to go to Mr Jones’s creditors, including the Sandy Hook families who sued him. Mr Jones alleged The Onion’s bid was the result of fraud and collusion involving many of those families, the humour site and a court-appointed trustee who is overseeing the liquidation. First United American Companies submitted a 3.5 million dollar (£2.7 million) sealed bid, while The Onion offered 1.75 million dollars (£1.3 million) in cash. But The Onion’s bid also included a pledge by Sandy Hook families to forego some or all of the auction proceeds due to them giving other creditors a total of 100,000 dollars (£79,400) more than they would receive under other bids. The trustee, Christopher Murray, said that made The Onion’s proposal better for creditors and he named it the winning bid. He has denied any wrongdoing. Mr Jones and First United American Companies claimed that the bid violated Mr Lopez’s rules for the auction by including multiple entities and lacking a valid dollar amount. Mr Jones also alleged Mr Murray improperly cancelled an expected round of live bidding and only selected among the sealed bids that were submitted. Mr Jones called the auction “rigged” and a “fraud” on his show, which airs on the Infowars website, radio stations and his X account. In a court filing, Mr Murray called the allegations “a disappointed bidder’s improper attempt to influence an otherwise fair and open auction process”. Mr Lopez’s September order on the auction procedures made a live bidding round optional. It gave broad authority to Mr Murray to conduct the sale, including the power to reject any bid, no matter how high, that was “contrary to the best interests” of Mr Jones, his company and their creditors. Hi friends! I wanted to give a quick update on The Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, which we can’t wait to relaunch as the dumbest site on the internet. Long and short of it: We won the bid and — you're not going to believe it — the previous InfoWars folks aren't taking it well. — follow @bencollins on bluesky (@oneunderscore__) November 16, 2024 But at a November 14 hearing, Mr Lopez said he was concerned about the process and transparency. “We’re all going to an evidentiary hearing and I’m going to figure out exactly what happened,” he said. “No one should feel comfortable with the results of this auction.” The assets of Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, that were up for sale included the Austin studio, Infowars’ video archive, video production equipment, product trademarks, and Infowars’ websites and social media accounts. Mr Jones is appealing the 1.5 billion dollar (£1.19 billion) in judgments citing free speech rights but has acknowledged that the school shooting happened. Mr Jones has brought in millions of dollars a year in revenue by hawking nutritional supplements, clothing, survival gear and other merchandise from his Infowars Store website, according to court documents. Many of Mr Jones’ personal assets, including real estate as well as guns and other personal belongings, also are being sold as part of the bankruptcy.Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size In mere months – March, to be exact – cult comedian Kate Berlant will complete her first-ever trip to Australia to perform. What she’ll perform when she gets here, though, she’s not yet sure. At this stage, she doesn’t even have the title. “What is the show?” Berlant deadpans, looking skyward as though contemplating a philosophical quandary she has no literal answer to. “That’s a really good question ... I mean, it’s just standup. I’m really just going to be doing standup.” Anyone familiar with Berlant’s comedy – her taped special Cinnamon in the Wind , for example; or her decade-long partnership with outlandish foil John Early (including their sketch special Would It Kill You To Laugh? ); even her podcast POOG (a play on GOOP) with fellow comedian Jacqueline Novak, and its spin-off Berlant & Novak – would understand that “just standup” is a loaded concept with Berlant. Although well-recognised from her acting work – she’s starred in films including Don’t Worry Darling , Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Dream Scenario , and on TV in A League of Their Own , The Other Two and Search Party – her cerebral comedy, an act of onstage pomposity that folds the form in on itself with absurdist, and delightfully silly, abandon (“intellectual vaudeville”, a critic once branded it), has made Berlant a beatified icon of alt-comedy. If the fact she hasn’t got her new show sorted four months out from her booked dates fills you with secondhand anxiety, fear not: this is how Berlant works, working bits out on stage with the improvisational acuity of a surgeon. Since February, she’s been regularly taking the stage at Largo’s in Los Angeles, her hometown club, to riff on “themes of contemporary alienation”, with the goal of putting together a new hour. “Relying so much on improvisation is terrifying and oftentimes I’ve been doing standup and thought, wow, it would be so nice to just know what you’re gonna say every night,” says Berlant of her process. “But so much of standup is about hiding the work, hiding the fact that you’ve said this thing a million times, and I’ve always struggled with that because it’s just hard to keep up that performance in a way that feels authentic.” Advertisement It’s a dry autumn afternoon in Los Angeles when we speak over Zoom, and the twilight sun splashes through Berlant’s bedroom window (not to mention her incredible curls) like Cheezel dust. She’s spent the day dealing with a sudden and, at 37, completely unexpected allergic reaction to tomatoes and nightshade. “If I sound a little weird it’s because my mouth is inflamed,” she offers apologetically. And yet, she’s eager to discuss her return to standup because for the past couple of years she’s been focused entirely on her play, Kate . Berlant ended Kate in February after a string of sold-out runs across New York, Los Angeles and London. A one-woman show about a flailing actor’s desperate bid to be taken seriously, the conceit went deep. Shows reportedly featured Berlant herself mingling in crowded foyers before doors opened, holding a sign saying “Ignore me”. It premiered off-Broadway in September 2022, and earned rave reviews for its metatextual skewering of artistic self-indulgence. The Guardian labelled it the “one-woman show to end all one-woman shows”. Berlant says it was her biggest success yet. Which begs the question: why did she end it? Why is she not just bringing Kate to Australia? “Again, a really good question,” Berlant jokes. “It’s not that I’ll never do it again, but I do think it’s healthy to step away from things. I think things ripen and they absolutely rot. It just felt to me like it was time to do something else, just for my own brain.” “I just wanted to step away from it for a second”: Berlant during the opening night performance of her acclaimed play Kate in Pasadena in January. Credit: Getty Images She very well could have kept Kate going, Berlant concedes. But her hope is that, as the show operates in a separate universe to her standup, she can revive it a year from now, or two years from now, or even five years from now, and the material will organically grow with her. In the meantime, she’s been in discussions with her director, Bo Burnham, to potentially film and release it. “But that’s something for down the line. Because the show is extremely meta, it’s not just a show you throw a camera in front of,” says Berlant. “I just wanted to step away from it for a second and get back to what I really love doing the most, which is standup.” Advertisement When I speak to Berlant, it’s the week after Donald Trump’s crushing win in the US election – a desolate new landscape in America made real. “It’s scary, it’s dark, it’s intensely depressing, and kind of just surreal. It’s such a bizarre time to be alive,” Berlant says, staring into the camera, eyes like saucers to underscore the understatement. “It’s a really bizarre, rather depressing time.” Is that mood already affecting her new standup? “I’m reacting to it maybe in, like, a subtextual way, but not directly,” says Berlant. “No, certainly the show I’ll be doing will not be about me wrestling with, like, how to live in America under Trump. Like, I would sooner die.” It’s for the best. Because if there’s a through line to Berlant’s work, it’s that her performances have always been about the act of performing. Onstage, whether in a scripted play or in a standup set, she’s Kate, but she’s also “Kate”. The persona she’s made her own is of the self-serious artist desperate for attention, for fame, to be noticed as special. A piss take of the narcissism inherent in showbiz, it’s also a well-wrought personification of today’s wider condition, where social media has given everyone main character syndrome. “It just turns out that way with everything I do. My comedy is often about comedy and my performance is usually about performance, and so inevitably with my standup it’s hard for me to ignore how bizarre standup is when I’m doing standup, and it’s hard for me to not kind of call out how inherently strange the dynamic is and how strange it is as a form,” says Berlant. ‘Performing is inherently embarrassing and, I would say, something to be avoided if you can.’ “The idea of a person standing there and just talking about what’s on their mind, it denies that standup is such a highly constructed persona and performance, down to the shoes you wear. I’ve always looked at the conditions of performance as being really bizarre and also funny. And also just the fact that performance is, of course, a naked plea for attention and adoration. I can’t pretend that that’s not what’s going on in the room, you know?” The focus on performance is never far from Berlant; she’s been thinking about it forever (she even has degrees in the cultural anthropology of comedy and performance studies from New York University). A child actor, she scored her first onscreen gig at 15, playing Student #2 in an episode of Lizzie McGuire , and believed it would set her on a path to screen stardom (it didn’t). There was enough self-awareness in her failure to fuel another mode of expression: when she started doing comedy at 17, she quickly found that her standup landed on a self-referential conceit. Advertisement “I would end up kind of talking about standup in the standup. Which sounds awful,” Berlant laughs. “But, I mean, just talking about the encounter between performer and audience, and how performing is inherently embarrassing and, I would say, something to be avoided if you can.” She’d experienced something similar to that indescribable ick in her upbringing, too, as the only child of two artists – her father Tony Berlant is a prominent US sculptor; her mother Helen Mendez performed in experimental theatre before becoming a set designer. In an episode of Netflix’s The Characters , she portrayed an insufferable Marina Abramović type, lampooning the pretentious art world egos she’d witnessed growing up. “The self-importance of the art world, like the self-importance of Hollywood, there’s almost nothing to comment on because it’s so in plain sight,” Berlant says. “From an early age, I think I was aware of performance as not just being something people do on stage, but just as a child watching adults perform: perform being smart, perform being interesting, perform the performance of being an artist. “I mean, if you call yourself an ‘artist’ ...” she glances into the camera with an are you serious? stare. “That’s quite a part to play.” Berlant with her comedy partner John Early at this year’s Creative Arts Emmys, where their sketch special was nominated. Credit: Getty Images Is she never not aware of the performance? Like, even in this interview: me, playing the role of the politely probing interviewer, trying to dig at some defining childhood trauma; she, the subject, playing at being revealing, as if she’s never considered these stories before. “Yeah, it’s hard to separate, I think I’m always aware of it,” says Berlant. “But what I really find funny are people who don’t know that we can see them performing. We live in a world now where everyone’s a performer, even people who aren’t performers are used to performing for social media. So there’s been a huge breakdown in those terms and in their definitions.” Advertisement Complicating Berlant’s obsession with the artifice of authenticity in comedy and theatre is a sincere love of live performance. In a world where standup careers can thrive exclusively through crowd-work clips on TikTok, she still craves the sacredness of the club. Loading “When I started standup, the only way to get good or build a career was to perform, do shows, as many shows as you could do. Even just, like, spiritually, I feel so lucky that was how I came up,” she says. “So I do think that in today’s world, it’s still very exciting when people show up physically to see a show. I think that’s something that will persist, but it is feeling more and more rarefied and less valued.” It’s why Berlant is excited for the set she’ll be bringing to Australia, whatever shape it ends up taking. After her journey with Kate , a return to the spontaneous possibilities of her standup has been calling. “There’s something that feels good about just being like, okay, this is where I am right now in my life, this is how I’m reacting to it, and not being too precious about it or spending years crafting it. I think that’s what makes it feel alive, for me and the audience.” Kate Berlant will be performing at Melbourne Recital Hall on March 7 and at Sydney Opera House as part of All About Women on March 9. To read more from Spectrum , visit our page here .The future of a social media ban has become less clear as opposition politicians defy their leader's position and make their concerns known. or signup to continue reading A federal government proposal to ban children under 16 from accessing social media platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram is expected to be debated in Parliament on Tuesday. Though the world-leading proposal has received bipartisan support, and strong backing specifically from Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, there is some dissent within coalition ranks. "This is a test for Peter Dutton, about his leadership," cabinet minister Amanda Rishworth told the Today Show. Nationals politicians have expressed worries over privacy issues relating to age verification with Senator Matt Canavan noting this would affect all social media users. "You're going to have to verify everyone's age and so there's huge privacy and free speech implications," he told ABC radio. The bill doesn't require social media companies to destroy information, according to Senator Canavan, and the way users provide digital consent is often a rushed process, which breeds concerns about the way people hand over their information. There are also serious questions about whether the change will keep children off social media. "Despite the good intentions behind this bill, it may be completely ineffective or worse," Senator Canavan said. "If we make clumsy hurdles for social media use, my eight-year-old will be able to get around them, but your 80-year-old grandma won't." Fellow Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie added that the use of digital ID was worrying to some, though the government had ruled out its use in age assurance. The coalition has said it would reserve its final decision on the bill until answers had been received from the government, though concerns have arisen over the legislation's rushed consultation process. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland introduced the reform to parliament on Thursday, which she said would make the online environment better for young people. The consultation period for groups and individuals to make submissions closed a day later on Friday. A senate committee on Monday held a one-day hearing and is due to report back on Tuesday. In submissions to the inquiry, a number of groups, including social media companies, pointed to the short notice period. Snap Inc, which runs Snapchat, wrote the "the extremely compressed timeline" had allowed stakeholders little more than 24 hours to provide a response which "severely" constrained thorough analysis and informed debate. X, formerly Twitter, also criticised the "unreasonably short time-frame of one day". Meta, which owns Facebook, wrote there had been "minimal consultation or engagement" and urged the government to wait for the results of the age assurance trial before progressing with the legislation. TikTok said despite the "time-limited review" there were a range of "serious, unresolved problems" that the government must clarify to ensure there wouldn't be unintended consequences. Given the widespread support for the ban, Senator Canavan insists there is no need to rush analysis. The Greens and some independents have opposed the ban and called on the government to address social media harms through other paths like implementing a statutory duty of care on tech giants. "The problem with a ban is that you're basically letting the platforms off the hook," independent MP Zoe Daniel told ABC. "We need to get the platforms to take responsibility for what is in their environment." DAILY Today's top stories curated by our news team. WEEKDAYS Grab a quick bite of today's latest news from around the region and the nation. WEEKLY The latest news, results & expert analysis. WEEKDAYS Catch up on the news of the day and unwind with great reading for your evening. WEEKLY Get the editor's insights: what's happening & why it matters. WEEKLY Love footy? We've got all the action covered. WEEKLY Every Saturday and Tuesday, explore destinations deals, tips & travel writing to transport you around the globe. WEEKLY Going out or staying in? Find out what's on. WEEKDAYS Sharp. Close to the ground. Digging deep. Your weekday morning newsletter on national affairs, politics and more. TWICE WEEKLY Your essential national news digest: all the big issues on Wednesday and great reading every Saturday. WEEKLY Get news, reviews and expert insights every Thursday from CarExpert, ACM's exclusive motoring partner. TWICE WEEKLY Get real, Australia! Let the ACM network's editors and journalists bring you news and views from all over. AS IT HAPPENS Be the first to know when news breaks. DAILY Your digital replica of Today's Paper. Ready to read from 5am! DAILY Test your skills with interactive crosswords, sudoku & trivia. Fresh daily! Advertisement Advertisement
Rape allegation against Jay-Z won’t impact NFL's relationship with music mogul, Goodell says
Pakistani police fire tear gas as thousands supporting Imran Khan arrive near capital
Millions more Americans might get access to GLP-1 drugsVacmaster Announces Black Friday DealsJonah Goldberg Among elites across the ideological spectrum, there's one point of unifying agreement: Americans are bitterly divided. What if that's wrong? What if elites are the ones who are bitterly divided while most Americans are fairly unified? History rarely lines up perfectly with the calendar (the "sixties" didn't really start until the decade was almost over). But politically, the 21st century neatly began in 2000, when the election ended in a tie and the color coding of electoral maps became enshrined as a kind of permanent tribal color war of "red vs. blue." Elite understanding of politics has been stuck in this framework ever since. Politicians and voters have leaned into this alleged political reality, making it seem all the more real in the process. I loathe the phrase "perception is reality," but in politics it has the reifying power of self-fulfilling prophecy. People are also reading... Like rival noble families in medieval Europe, elites have been vying for power and dominance on the arrogant assumption that their subjects share their concern for who rules rather than what the rulers can deliver. Gobble up these 14 political cartoons about Thanksgiving Political cartoonists from across country draw up something special for the holiday In 2018, the group More in Common published a massive report on the "hidden tribes" of American politics. The wealthiest and whitest groups were "devoted conservatives" (6%) and "progressive activists" (8%). These tribes dominate the media, the parties and higher education, and they dictate the competing narratives of red vs. blue, particularly on cable news and social media. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of Americans resided in, or were adjacent to, the "exhausted majority." These people, however, "have no narrative," as David Brooks wrote at the time. "They have no coherent philosophic worldview to organize their thinking and compel action." Lacking a narrative might seem like a very postmodern problem, but in a postmodern elite culture, postmodern problems are real problems. It's worth noting that red vs. blue America didn't emerge ex nihilo. The 1990s were a time when the economy and government seemed to be working, at home and abroad. As a result, elites leaned into the narcissism of small differences to gain political and cultural advantage. They remain obsessed with competing, often apocalyptic, narratives. That leaves out most Americans. The gladiatorial combatants of cable news, editorial pages and academia, and their superfan spectators, can afford these fights. Members of the exhausted majority are more interested in mere competence. I think that's the hidden unity elites are missing. This is why we keep throwing incumbent parties out of power: They get elected promising competence but get derailed -- or seduced -- by fan service to, or trolling of, the elites who dominate the national conversation. There's a difference between competence and expertise. One of the most profound political changes in recent years has been the separation of notions of credentialed expertise from real-world competence. This isn't a new theme in American life, but the pandemic and the lurch toward identity politics amplified distrust of experts in unprecedented ways. This is a particular problem for the left because it is far more invested in credentialism than the right. Indeed, some progressives are suddenly realizing they invested too much in the authority of experts and too little in the ability of experts to provide what people want from government, such as affordable housing, decent education and low crime. The New York Times' Ezra Klein says he's tired of defending the authority of government institutions. Rather, "I want them to work." One of the reasons progressives find Trump so offensive is his absolute inability to speak the language of expertise -- which is full of coded elite shibboleths. But Trump veritably shouts the language of competence. I don't mean he is actually competent at governing. But he is effectively blunt about calling leaders, experts and elites -- of both parties -- stupid, ineffective, weak and incompetent. He lost in 2020 because voters didn't believe he was actually good at governing. He won in 2024 because the exhausted majority concluded the Biden administration was bad at it. Nostalgia for the low-inflation pre-pandemic economy was enough to convince voters that Trumpian drama is the tolerable price to pay for a good economy. About 3 out of 4 Americans who experienced "severe hardship" because of inflation voted for Trump. The genius of Trump's most effective ad -- "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you" -- was that it was simultaneously culture-war red meat and an argument that Harris was more concerned about boutique elite concerns than everyday ones. If Trump can actually deliver competent government, he could make the Republican Party the majority party for a generation. For myriad reasons, that's an if so big it's visible from space. But the opportunity is there -- and has been there all along. Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch: thedispatch.com . Catch the latest in Opinion Get opinion pieces, letters and editorials sent directly to your inbox weekly!
Switzerland's biggest bank, which is among the world's largest wealth managers, said the number of dollar billionaires increased from 1,757 to 2,682 over the past 10 years, peaking in 2021 with 2,686. The 10th edition of UBS's annual Billionaire Ambitions report, which tracks the wealth of the world's richest people, found that billionaires have comfortably outperformed global equity markets over the past decade. The report documents "the growth and investment of great wealth, as well as how it's being preserved for future generations and used to have a positive effect on society", said Benjamin Cavalli, head of strategic clients at UBS global wealth management. Between 2015 and 2024, total billionaire wealth increased by 121 percent from $6.3 trillion to $14.0 trillion -- while the MSCI AC World Index of global equities rose 73 percent. The wealth of tech billionaires increased the fastest, followed by that of industrialists. Worldwide, tech billionaires' wealth tripled from $788.9 billion in 2015 to $2.4 trillion in 2024. "In earlier years, the new billionaires commercialised e-commerce, social media and digital payments; more recently they engineered the generative AI boom, while also developing cyber-security, fintech, 3D printing and robotics," UBS said. The report found that since 2020, the global growth trend had slowed due to declines among China's billionaires. From 2015 to 2020, billionaire wealth grew globally at an annual rate of 10 percent, but growth has plunged to one percent since 2020. Chinese billionaire wealth more than doubled from 2015 to 2020, rising from $887.3 billion to $2.1 trillion, but has since fallen back to $1.8 trillion. However, North American billionaire wealth has risen 58.5 percent to $6.1 trillion since 2020, "led by industrials and tech billionaires". Meanwhile billionaires are relocating more frequently, with 176 having moved country since 2020, with Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and the United States being popular destinations. In 2024, some 268 people became billionaires for the first time, with 60 percent of them entrepreneurs. "The year's new billionaires were mainly self-made," said UBS. The report said US billionaires accrued the greatest gains in 2024, reinforcing the country's place as the world's main centre for billionaire entrepreneurs. Their wealth rose 27.6 percent to $5.8 trillion, or more than 40 percent of billionaire wealth worldwide. Billionaires' wealth from mainland China and Hong Kong fell 16.8 percent to $1.8 trillion, with the number of billionaires dropping from 588 to 501. Indian billionaires' wealth increased 42.1 percent to $905.6 billion, while their number grew from 153 to 185. Western Europe’s total billionaire wealth rose 16.0 percent to $2.7 trillion -- partly due to a 24 percent increase in Swiss billionaires. UAE billionaires' aggregate wealth rose 39.5 percent to $138.7 billion. UBS said billionaires faced an "uncertain world" over the next 10 years, due to high geopolitical tensions, trade barriers and governments with mounting spending requirements. Billionaires will therefore need to rely on their previous distinctive traits: "smart risk-taking, business focus and determination". "Risk-taking billionaires are likely to be at the forefront of creating two technology-related industries of the future already taking shape: generative AI and renewables/electrification," UBS predicted. And more flexible wealth planning will be needed as billionaire families move country and spread around the world. The heirs and philanthropic causes of baby boom billionaires are set to inherit an estimated $6.3 trillion over the next 15 years, UBS said. rjm/gv
We need a strategy to deal with a hydra. It’s Sunday, January 14, 2024, more than 50 hours since the annual MIT Mystery Hunt kicked off at noon on Friday, and Setec Astronomy is one of more than 200 teams racing to solve hundreds of puzzles over three days. The 60-some members of Setec, many of whom are joining remotely from as far away as Australia, are making good progress, even though many of us are running on limited sleep and questionable nutritional decisions. Several of the chalkboards in the Building 2 classroom we’ve been assigned for our team headquarters are covered in lists of puzzle solutions or messy diagrams charting out theories about how to crack the various challenges—all of them constructed, as Mystery Hunt tradition dictates, by the most recent winner, in this case The Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later. The “hydra” we’re dealing with is a metapuzzle: We have to find a way to use the solutions from other puzzles that we’ve already solved to extract one more answer. If we solve this one, we’ll be rewarded with more puzzles. We know we need to diagram the answers for this round of puzzles as a binary tree. In keeping with the hydra metapuzzle’s mythological analogue, every time we solve one puzzle, two more branch off until we have a diagram five levels deep. We’re still missing answers from several unsolved puzzles that would help us figure out how the diagram works and how to extract an answer to the metapuzzle. The diagram we’ve drawn, in green chalk, gets more chaotic with every addition, erasure, and annotation we squeeze onto the overcrowded chalkboard. But we can sense that we’re just one “aha!” away from a solution. MIT’s Mystery Hunt has been challenging puzzle enthusiasts every year since Brad Schaefer ’78, PhD ’83, wrote 12 “subclues” on a single sheet of paper as a challenge for friends during Independent Activities Period (IAP) in 1981. The answers led solvers to an Indian Head penny he had hidden on campus. Today’s Hunts are still built around that basic concept, but what constitutes a challenge has changed over four decades. One of the clues from the original 1981 Hunt is just a missing word in a quote: “He that plays the king shall be _____; his majesty shall have tribute of me.” It’s easy to solve today with Google, but in 1981, even if you knew it was Shakespeare, if you didn’t notice the subtle hint that you should look for a character referring to a play within the play, it might have taken a few hours of skimming the Bard’s collected works to find the answer. We add a few more solutions to the hydra diagram over the next few hours. Eventually someone notices that all the answers in the fifth level of the diagram seem to have an odd prevalence of Ls and Rs. This is the “aha!” moment: They tell us how to navigate the binary tree. From the first node at the top of the tree, we follow the Ls and Rs in the order they appear in each of the 16 solutions on the fifth level. Take the left branch, then right, then left again, landing on a word that starts with H. The second fifth-level answer leads us to a word that starts with E. Repeating the process with all 16 answers spells out an apt way to deal with a hydra: “HEADTOHEADBATTLE.” (Puzzle solutions are traditionally written in all caps with no spaces or punctuation.) Those of us who’ve been tackling the puzzle take a moment to enjoy our victory before splitting up to find new puzzles to work on. Some elements of the Mystery Hunt are hard to describe, the kind of must-be-seen ingenuity that also inspires hacks on the Great Dome and any number of above-and-beyond engineering projects showcased around campus every year. Most of the puzzles are utterly unique, although they do often incorporate logic and word problems as well as more mainstream elements like crosswords, sudoku, and Wordle. But almost anything can be turned into a puzzle. For example, chess puzzles might be combined with the card game Magic: The Gathering. Or solvers could be asked to organize a Git repository with 10,000 out-of-order commits (that is, find the correct sequence of 10,000 changes to a file as it was tracked in a version control system), identify duets from musicals, or draw on their knowledge of pop culture trivia. For most of its history, the Mystery Hunt had little official status on campus. By tradition as much as any organizational effort, teams simply showed up in Lobby 7 on the Friday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday for the kickoff. In 2014, the was formed to help provide year-to-year continuity and other support, such as securing rooms for teams to work in and reserving Kresge Auditorium for the opening ceremonies. Puzzle Club also hosts other events, such as mini puzzle hunts and sudoku and logic puzzle competitions—which Becca Chang ’26, the club’s current president, says “has helped a lot with outreach to new students or anyone who might be interested in [puzzles].” Technology has enabled the Mystery Hunt to grow and evolve in significant ways, and not just in terms of the kinds of puzzles that are possible. Through the mid-1990s, a single person could take on the responsibility of writing and running the event. Today it’s a yearlong commitment for the winning team to design the next year’s Hunt. Doing so requires managing creative output and technological infrastructure that rival those of a small business. Duties include spending thousands of hours writing and testing puzzles, constructing physical puzzles and props, and building a dynamic website that can withstand the huge influx of puzzle-hungry visitors. Just organizing a team of solvers can be a major undertaking, especially now that more and more participants are joining remotely. Anjali Tripathi ’09, who started the team I’m Not a Planet Either in 2015, got her introduction to puzzle hunts through a miniature Mystery Hunt that Simmons Hall runs for first-years. After tackling the main event with the Simmons team on campus as an undergrad, she participated remotely for the first time in 2010. “I was abroad in England and still wanted to do Hunt, and I remember how hard that was,” she says. The team “had no infrastructure for it.” Today, solvers can work together across the room or across a continent. Platforms like Slack and Discord have become indispensable to many teams, which use them for updates and announcements as well as creating separate channels where people can tackle a given puzzle together. Many teams use applications that organize the convoluted deluge of puzzles into a workflow so everyone can see which have been solved, which need attention, and who’s working on what. Google Docs and Google Sheets make it easy for multiple people to contribute to progress on the same puzzle whether they’re sitting side by side on campus or are separated by several time zones. “I think especially post-2020, there is just the expectation that everything is going to be accessible online,” says Tripathi, who still has a Hunt-related Google doc from 2008, just a couple of years after the service launched. But even as the Mystery Hunt has adapted to the internet—and to increasingly powerful search engines, smartphones, the Zoom era, and even some machine-learning applications—at its core it remains a very human experience. “It’s about connecting with other humans—that’s why we do it,” says Erin Rhode ’04, a longtime Mystery Hunter whose team has won twice. She recalls being inducted into the Hunt as a first-year in 2001. “An upperclassman came in and was like, ‘You’re coming to the math majors’ lounge. We’re doing this puzzle hunt thing.’” The name of Rhode’s team changes every year, though they might be best known for the year their name was the entire text of Ayn Rand’s . Last year, they were . (That’s not a typo or a missing word—it’s the zero-width space, a Unicode non-character primarily used in document formatting.) Like so much of the Hunt, team names are an exercise in creativity. The full name of the team running the 2024 Mystery Hunt was officially The Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later. Some teams keep their name every year, like Setec Astronomy (an anagram for “too many secrets,” in a reference to the classic 1992 heist film ). Others change every year or every few years, or when teams merge, as when Death from Above joined forces with Project Electric Mayhem to become Death and Mayhem. Rhode remembers one particular puzzle from her first Hunt that she and her team (known that year as the Vermicious Knids) worked on through the night. They had to figure out that a list of enigmatic phrases were clues to song titles. For example, “Of course; you just go north on Highway 101” clued the song “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” “I think today, we would have solved that puzzle in about an hour,” Rhode says. “There weren’t song lyric databases back then. And so it was a lot more sitting around on your own trying to come up with songs as opposed to just finding some master list and then searching it.” Writing puzzles with the knowledge that solvers will have a slew of tools at hand is just part of the process. “Use whatever technology you have at your disposal to solve the puzzle is the general rule of thumb,” says Jon Schneider ’13, a machine-learning researcher who hunts with ✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️. (The ✈️✈️✈️ in their team name is pronounced like a plane taking off and landing, respectively.) Schneider has been hunting since 2010, when it was common for solvers to have to identify clips of songs or other audio. He’s seen that change in the past decade, though: “Audio recognition [technology] like Shazam has become a thing, so it’s harder to create puzzles that require the skill of music recognition.” “When you’re a constructor, you try to figure out: What is my challenge for the solver?” says Dan Katz ’03. Katz has solved and written a lot of puzzles. (In fact, he created a five-puzzle mini Hunt for this issue’s .) He attended his first Mystery Hunt in 1998, as a junior in high school, before he had even applied to MIT. He’s been part of a winning team eight times (probably a record) and competes in events like the World Sudoku Championship and US Puzzle Championship. In Katz’s view, technology should make puzzling more interesting for the solver. While solvers might need to, say, code a program, organize information in a spreadsheet, or navigate a video-game-like interface to arrive at an answer, what he prizes most is the mental challenge of figuring out to solve a puzzle. Rhode misses the days before an app was able to listen to a few seconds of a song and identify it. “One of my superpowers in the early days of the Hunt was: Play me a bunch of pop songs and I can identify like 90% of them,” she says. “Now everybody’s got Shazam on their phone. And so as fast as I might be, Shazam was always going to be faster.” That doesn’t mean puzzles can’t be based on song identification—or image identification, another common puzzle element that has been made trivial by tools like Google’s image search capabilities. It just means constructors must become more creative. “You have to obscure the images or the music in such a way that the technology can’t find it quickly,” Rhode says. She describes a puzzle she wrote when she wanted solvers to identify songs without using technology: “I arranged eight songs a cappella and sang them myself, but buzzing like a bee. And the whole idea was you can’t Shazam that.” Schneider’s team took a similar approach to constructing a puzzle in which solvers had to identify specific visual artists—not by their work, but by their distinctive style. Solvers were prompted to upload an image of their choosing, and a generative AI tool similar to DALL-E rendered it in the style of the artist they were supposed to name. That’s not the only puzzle to have incorporated some machine-learning elements in the last few years. A few examples have used semantic similarity scoring systems where solvers have to guess words or phrases—a kind of machine-learning-enabled version of “hot or cold.” Even if machine learning has potential as a tool for puzzle constructors, generative AI is unlikely to solve Mystery Hunt puzzles anytime soon. ChatGPT can answer questions that might be helpful in getting started and maybe even help solve a crossword clue or two, but the puzzles are often so unusual that it doesn’t know where to begin. When presented with them, it usually responds by stating that it “would need more context or clues” in order to proceed. Schneider did find ChatGPT very helpful, though, in solving a non–Mystery Hunt puzzle about navigating the byzantine rules of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, which he admits he’s never played. A few years ago, there would have been no way around spending hours digging through the rulebooks and figuring out each step, but giving the puzzle to ChatGPT worked. “It was really good at doing this. I guess it had trained on enough data of people playing Dungeons & Dragons that this was within its capabilities,” he says. Schneider is optimistic that new technology will be integrated into Mystery Hunt in creative ways, expanding the scope of what puzzle constructors can come up with to entertain solvers. Ultimately, he says, “I mostly just want to be surprised.” As the sun sets on Sunday, Setec continues solving puzzles at a steady pace, but we’re also still unlocking new sections of the Hunt—a sign that we’re still some distance from the endgame, though rumors (but never spoilers) from friends on other teams suggest that a few teams might be closing in. As midnight rolls around there’s still no announcement, and so we push on. Ultimately, the 2024 Hunt ends up running into Monday morning, one of only a handful of times it’s taken more than 60 hours to complete. A little after 5 a.m., team Death and Mayhem solves the final puzzle to win the 2024 Mystery Hunt—and the responsibility of developing the , which kicks off on January 17. In the end, 266 teams have solved at least one of the 2024 Hunt’s 237 puzzles and Setec Astronomy has solved 174. (Teams typically care less about postgame rankings than about how many puzzles they get to before time runs out.) The Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later sends out an announcement that a wrap-up event, at which they’ll give a full overview of the weekend and hand over the reins to Death and Mayhem, will begin at noon in 26-100. Because creating a Mystery Hunt is such a daunting task, Death and Mayhem got to work on this year’s within hours of winning, says James Douberley ’13, who assumed the title of “benevolent dictator” to orchestrate and oversee the team’s puzzle writing. The weight of expectation is not lost on Douberley and his teammates: This is a once-a-year event that holds a lot of meaning for many participants. The Mystery Hunt is about solving puzzles, but it’s also far more social and immersive than puzzle books and escape rooms. In 2024, nearly 2,000 people representing 91 teams showed up on campus to participate—and another 2,450 or so signed up to puzzle from afar. All told, solvers included 52 faculty members, 278 students, and 950 alumni, ranging from recent graduates to those who got their degrees decades ago. For Chang, the Hunt is an opportunity to connect with the broader community, including alumni from her dorm whom she doesn’t see often. “This is the one time in the year that we get to all just be in one place together and do this thing that we love,” she says. “It’s just a really great bonding experience.” The MIT campus plays a special role in the Hunt. Maybe you have to use the walls of the List Visual Arts Center lobby as a grid for a logic puzzle, or find certain names on the memorial plaques in Lobby 10 whose first letters spell out an answer. But it’s not just that clues can be part of the physical space—it’s that campus is the epicenter for the MIT spirit of creativity, inventiveness, and industriousness that makes the Mystery Hunt unique. “People talk about New York being a character in movies,” Katz says. “I feel like MIT is a character in Mystery Hunt.” For Douberley, the Mystery Hunt takes him back to his student days, when he tackled hard challenges through marathon work sessions and all-nighters. “You fall asleep on the floor, and you’re in the dorm lounge and your friend comes and wakes you up and says, ‘Here’s a coffee—I need your help with something,’” he says. “And that is something that lives with you for the rest of your life.” The kicks off on January 17, 2025. But if you’re eager to start puzzling before then—or get a taste of puzzling if you’ve never taken part before—check out the , a pre-Hunt round of puzzles written by the Mystery Hunt team known as the Providence Crime Syndication. Learn more and solve at .
- Previous: 5 richest person in the philippines
- Next: agent rich9 com login password
