News Emmys Fallout and What We Do in the Shadows Are Among This Year’s Emmy Nominees Special congrats to Walton Goggins’ nose (or lack thereof) By Molly Templeton | Published on July 17, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share It is, somehow, awards season again. Perhaps awards season never actually ends? At any rate, Emmy nominations were announced this morning, and genre shows made a respectable showing. I’m not sure I ever expected to write the words “Emmy nominee Fallout,” but the Prime Video videogame adaptation is up for Outstanding Drama Series, and Walton Goggins is nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his work as the Ghoul. Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner are also nominated for writing the episode “The End.” True Detective: Night Country, one of the most satisfying series of recent years, is nominated in just about every category possible. The series is nominated for Outstanding Limited Series or Anthology Series; Jodie Foster is up for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or Movie; John Hawkes for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series; and Kali Reis for Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series. The show as a whole is also nominated for outstanding casting, cinematography, costuming, editing, makeup, music supervision, and writing and directing (for showrunner Issa López). This nomination makes Reis—along with Lily Gladstone (who’s nominated in the same category for Under the Bridge)—one of the first two Indigenous women to be nominated for acting Emmys. And at least one other Indigenous performer is on the list this year: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, for his work in Reservation Dogs. Reservation Dogs is also up for Outstanding Comedy Series, which it well deserves, and for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series (Half Hour), specifically for “Deer Lady” What We Do in the Shadows is also nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series, and Matt Berry is up for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series. Jake Bender and Zach Dunn are nominated for writing the episode “Pride Parade.” And 3 Body Problem has a nomination for Outstanding Drama Series, as well as one for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series (One Hour) for “Judgment Day.” The Emmys are one of the rare awards that recognizes stunt work, and this year Twisted Metal and What We Do in the Shadows are recognized for Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy, while Fallout gets the same nod but for drama, and Fallout and The Continental earned nominations specifically for Outstanding Stunt Performance. When you dig into the slightly-less-attention-getting categories, there’s more good stuff to be found: X-Men ’97, Scavengers Reign, and Blue Eye Samurai are nominated for Outstanding Animated Program. The Outstanding Fantasy/Sci-Fi Costumes category is full of things we like: Ahsoka, Echo, Fallout, Loki, and What We Do in the Shadows. Ahsoka also gets a nomination for hairstyling. Fallout and 3 Body Problem are also recognized for editing (Fallout for “The Ghouls” and “The End” and 3BP for “Judgment Day”). Fallout, Silo, and 3 Body Problem are nominated for Outstanding Main Title Design. Fallout also has a nomination for makeup, which makes sense, given Goggins’ nose situation. Ahsoka and The Witcher pop up in the prosthetic makeup category, along with True Detective: Night Country, again. Silo also gets a nod for Outstanding Music Composition for a Series. Ahsoka, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Fallout, Avatar: The Last Airbender, True Detective: Night Country, Loki, Black Mirror, What We Do in the Shadows, and 3 Body Problem are nominated in the assorted sound editing and mixing categories. Ahsoka, Fallout, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Loki, True Detective: Night Country are nominated in the various visual effects categories. [end-mark] The post <i>Fallout</i> and <i>What We Do in the Shadows</i> Are Among This Year’s Emmy Nominees appeared first on Reactor.

Books Reading the Weird The Worms Crawl Out: Megan Chee’s “The Worms That Ate the Universe” Worms! They’re everybody’s worst nightmare! By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth | Published on July 17, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Megan Chee’s “The Worms That Ate the Universe,” first published in July 2024 in Uncanny Magazine. Spoilers ahead! Summary On a barren, sunless world live the worms. They don’t think, and they feel nothing but the hunger that drives them to their sole endeavor: eating. They gnaw away at their planet from surface rock through molten core. In addition to material, though, they consume space—distance. If you tried to walk a straight line on the surface, you would find yourself taking detours to the far side of the planet. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the universe, faster-than-light travel remains a dream. A dream, that is, until the worms evolve, and then FTL travel becomes a nightmare. One worm escapes the dwindling substance of their home—it gulps atmosphere and just keeps going, engulfing the other planets in their system. Most of its fellows devour each other. A few follow the explorer. Eating. Multiplying. For eons, the worms munch their way through lifeless expanses of space, with only a few advanced civilizations aware of their baleful progress. Still, myths spring up. On desert Sutera, nomads tell of a strange oasis and impossible lake filled with ravenous monsters. One pair of exiled lovers leap into the lake and manage to swim to an island on which they can love each other safely, surrounded by horrors. Eventually the worms tunnel into occupied space and become fact rather than legend. Some peoples search for ways to close the wormholes, to no avail. Others, like the warlike folk of Grirri, see opportunity. The Grirri hordes plunge through a wormhole, only to be crushed under the paws of the giant felines who rule the other end. Some planets die in a millisecond, gulped by particularly large worms. Others perish to swarms of smaller worms. Millions of societies condense into one fractured civilization. It’s an age of “chaos, of confusion, of spectacular strangeness,” In cities built on “the fragments of disparate worlds,” citizens wear protective suits, drive armored vehicles, shop in marketplaces that boast “dizzying array[s] of oddities and curiosities,” while their children play in the low-gravity zones between planetary shards. As “the remnants of civilization stagger in discordant harmony toward the end of all things,” the worms eat on. Finally, only two bits of intelligent life remain: a generation ship carrying the last best minds of Earth, and a young woman living alone in a house on the last sliver of her planet. From her bedroom window, the woman can look through one of the generation ship portholes into the quarters of a young officer. The women share no common language, but they wave, gaze, smile and laugh and play out little charades. In the end, with the worms converging on ship and house, the pair press palms to their respective windows. The young woman mouths what can only be “a wish for something that never was.” When their remnant worlds are gone, the worms turn on each other. They tangle into a writhing ball “squeezed into the last speck of the universe,” and there’s— “A great bite, a huge chomp— “A squelch, a crunch— “And that’s it.” What’s Cyclopean: Chomp. Squelch. Crunch. The Degenerate Dutch: The warriors of Grirri believe the wormholes are proof of their interplanetary manifest destiny. Unfortunately, the first species they encounter offworld are giant cats. Never cross the cats. Weirdbuilding: Wormholes are a longstanding trope of science fiction. An actual biological source for those wormholes not so much, though it isn’t unheard of. Ruthanna’s Commentary Cosmic horror can be minds and dimensions beyond human ken—Cthulhu’s incomprehensible moral guidance or whole ecologies swirling around us unseen. Or Azathoth, “mindless” because what it has instead is so vast and all-encompassing as to make mind-ness irrelevant. But cosmic horror can also be implacably simple—hunger, say, combined with being further up the food chain than we apex omnivores would like to believe possible. Maybe much further. Chee’s wormhole worms fall into the latter category. They’re not only hungry, but capable of eating anything: molten planetary cores, atmospheric gases, the fabric of spacetime itself. Nothing eats them, though they’ll eat each other if nothing else is available. After a while, that becomes an extremely existential definition of “nothing.” It could be a one-note idea/joke story about “what if wormholes are really created by worms,” but the answer to that what-if—taken seriously—is practically symphonic. It’s an overture of loneliness, with all the universe’s sapients imprisoned by the speed of light. The worms become legend, and a source of possibility and togetherness for a select few—the folklore they inspire is about star-crossed lovers finding safe havens, more than the surrounding monsters. Then a crescendo of connection: conquest and crossover and the ultimate cosmopolitan society. The universe gets smaller, and the worms keep eating… and then finally we’re back down to loneliness again, and a pair of women stretching the last possibility of connection across barriers—before barriers (and reality itself) go crunch. We talk about modern communication technologies making the world smaller, and fostering connection. And it’s also true that sometimes they seem voracious. They consume the very things they enable. Don’t you just hate a good metaphor? That symphonic middle reminds me of Ng Yi-Sheng’s delightfully cacophonous “Xingzhou,” and I could easily believe that they take place in the same universe, with Yi-Sheng zooming in on one of many wormhole-enabled epics. But nothing so lively can last, and the epic is all past tense: What was it like to live in Xingzhou, the Continent of Stars? That story doesn’t give much insight into the later period from whence that question is asked, but it might easily be one of Lovecraft’s fever-dream apocalypses—which aren’t too far off from the worm-riddled universe here as the symphony winds down.  The horror is that not only the universe’s fate, but its entire arc, is shaped by simple, unsated hunger. The worms themselves get no pleasure from their feast. They don’t notice differences in taste and texture between lunar schist and glorious interplanetary capitol. They aren’t part of a well-balanced ecosystem. They don’t create intricate philosophies around their biological necessities. They aren’t even cute when they sleep, because they don’t sleep. But the saving grace is that the sapients who live with wormy inevitability make meaningful lives from the worm’s mindless consumption. They get pleasure and philosophy and joy in difference that they wouldn’t have found in a universe without the worms. John M. Ford’s “Against Entropy,” a gorgeous sonnet on mortality and memory, also starts with hungry worms as the source of loss. I have the poem’s last line in a calligraphic print on my side table. Really I could just quote the whole thing as sufficient commentary on Chee’s story. What do we do about the fact that “The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.”? We tell stories. We make connections. We do it again, iterating in the hopes that something is preserved for as long as possible. We hope to be remembered in the Archives. For as long as we have a choice, we do not look away from each other. Anne’s Commentary Worms! They’re everybody’s worst nightmare! The screenwriters got it wrong in Raiders of the Lost Ark—when the real Indiana Jones gazed down into a pit full of squirming, crawling, writhing beasts, he didn’t groan, “Why’d it have to be snakes” but “Why’d it have to be WORMS.” You do know Indiana Jones was real, right? Anyhow, he developed a pathological fear of worms following a boyhood fishing accident. In fact, he had all the worm-dread pathologies: helminthophobia, the fear of being infested with parasitic worms; vermiphobia, the fear of being infested by worms of any species; and scoleciphobia, the fear of worms in general. It probably would have killed him to read Megan Chee’s story, so luckily he died before it was published. One of his numerous enemies would surely have sent him a link, without trigger warnings and after hacking the title to “The Giant Fluffy Kittens that Ate the Universe.” Fair enough, as Chee does mention such creatures. It has been written that “In the beginning was the Worm.” I’m not on board with this, because it’s established ultrametaphysics that in the eternal beginning (which therefore never began, begins or will ever begin) was Azathoth. Besides, as Chee explains it, there was an awful lot of universe already begun before the worms began gnawing through their home world. In the context of her eschatology, it would be more accurate to write: “In the Beginning of the End was the Worm.” Specifically, this Beginning began when the species evolved to use its distance eating ability to traverse the vasty expanses of outer space via, what else, wormholes. Those wily worms, but then, isn’t survival the greatest driver of innovation, and for the worms, isn’t survival the satisfaction of their limitless hunger? The worms haven’t yet reached our insignificant sliver of the universe (or I wouldn’t be writing this), but rumor of their coming and ultimate conquest must have visited Chee in some premonitory dream. Cassandra-like, she tries to warn us! Uh, no. Warning could do no good, for when the worms come to dinner, there will be no barring them from the table, only futile attempts to keep them out on the front lawn while we pack our vittles into generation RVs and sneak out the back way. The back way is still the universe, and the universe must be eaten. It’s the Way of the Worm. As before, as now, as in the future, some among us will more or less hazily perceive our world’s wormy doom. Here are just a few examples of how such sensitives have sublimated their perceptions into legend and art. Variations on a World-Serpent or Ouroboros occur in many cultures and philosophies. The snake or dragon eating its own tail (thus forming a circle) can be a symbol of eternal cycles, life to death to rebirth, destruction to renewal. Or those notions could be optimistic interpretations of the last universe-eating worm, which having devoured all matter and space and its fellows must now devour itself, oops, the end. Edgar Allen Poe dreamt (or at least wrote a poem) about a “tragedy, ‘Man,’ and its hero the Conqueror Worm.” The Worm is “a blood-red thing” bearing “vermin fangs/In human gore imbued.” Sounds like a good description of Chee’s ever-ravenous omnivores. Bram Stoker produced The Lair of the White Worm, which features a giant white serpent that preys on every living thing it can find, but not apparently on inorganic matter or space itself, which leaves it way behind Chee’s worms on the indiscriminate gluttony scale. In his Dreamlands stories, Lovecraft mentions a vast wormlike creature called a Dhole, which riddles whole planets with its tunneling. One theory about how it travels is that the Dhole can swim through space when magically summoned; another is that it can force its way through the interdimensional fabric of dreams to jump planet to planet. Brian Lumley wrote about subterranean horrors called Cthonians: part worm, part squid, all trouble. They, too, had the nasty habit of “drilling” such extensive tunnels and cavities that they destabilized infested land masses. Finally, there’s the traditional ditty often called “The Hearse Song.” It has many variants. I learned this one in grade school, not from the teachers but from certain classmates who spent many hours in the cloakroom thinking about their sins. Don’t ever laugh when a hearse goes by,For you may be the next to die.They wrap you up in a linen sheet,And throw you down about six feet deep. The next three days are all alike,And then the worms begin to bite.The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,They poke their knuckles right up your snout. Goodbye, Jimmy! [or the name of whatever kid you were tormenting at the moment.] If T. S. Eliot had written about “Hollow Planets” instead of “Hollow Men,” he might have ended the poem: This is the way the worlds end/Not with a bang but a squish. Or as Chee puts it with equal eloquence, regarding the ultimate triumph of the worms: “A great bite, a huge chomp— “A squelch, a crunch— “And that’s it.” Unless, of course, the worms in their self-destruction pop out into another of Azathoth’s countless bubble-universes and start chowing down on a new smorgasbord. Next week, Louis definitely doesn’t follow good advice in Chapter 22 of Pet Sematary[end-mark] The post The Worms Crawl Out: Megan Chee’s “The Worms That Ate the Universe” appeared first on Reactor.

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A microcontinent has been discovered in the Davis Strait between Canada's southeastern Baffin Island and southwestern Greenland. In a new study, researchers from the UK and Sweden mapped the microcontinent using gravity data, and seismic reflection data to create a plate tectonic reconstruction of the region.Though the geology of the region has been extensively studied beforehand, a few mysteries remained."A prolonged period of rifting and seafloor spreading between Greenland and North America formed the Labrador Sea and Baffin Bay oceanic basins, connected by the Davis Strait," the team explains in their paper. "However, disagreement exists regarding the exact plate motions between Greenland and Canada, as well as the tectonic evolution of the Davis Strait, with previous models unable to explain the origin of anomalously thick continental crust within the seaway."While reconstructing the area's past as Greenland separated from Canada, the team found the anomalously thick crust is in fact its own microcontinent; a tectonic block that became detached from a continent, and is surrounded by thinner oceanic crust."The reinterpretation of seismic reflection data offshore West Greenland, along with a newly compiled crustal thickness model, identifies an isolated terrane of relatively thick (19–24 km [12-15 miles]) continental crust that was separated from Greenland during a newly recognised phase of E-W extension along West Greenland’s margin," the team wrote. "We interpret this continental block as an incompletely rifted microcontinent, which we term the Davis Strait proto-microcontinent."The researchers believe that rifting – where tectonic plates split in two – began around 118 million years ago, before continental breakup occurred around 61.27 million years ago in the Labrador Sea. The continents continued to drift apart, before Greenland collided with and joined the North American plate. It was during this time that the new microcontinent was created."As our seismic reflection interpretations indicate an extensional event in the eastern Davis Strait between 58 and 49 Myr, spatially coincident with the zone of thinnest continental crust between the continental fragment and Greenland, we infer this extensional event led to the separation of this fragment from Greenland."The team hopes that the research could help us better understand plate tectonics, and the hazards they can cause to Earth's inhabitants."Overall, this work not only recognises several new first order tectonic features of the Earth, the Pre-UTM and Davis Strait proto-microcontinent, but also points to a strong lithospheric control on plate motion directions," the team concludes. "It is therefore fundamentally important to further study this phenomenon to understand the operation of plate tectonics on our planet."The study is published in Gondwana Research.

You’d think it’d be hard to lose something as large and with as many legs as a giant millipede – but lo and behold, scientists managed to do so with one species for 126 years. Luckily, it’s been found again in Madagascar’s Makira Forest, joined by 20 other lost species ranging from ant-like flower beetles to iridescent fish and even jumping spiders.The giant millipede in question, the long, dark-brown Spirostreptus sculptus, was first described by entomologist Henri de Saussure and naturalist Leo Zehntner back in 1897, having been discovered in Madagascar. Since that time, however, it had never been documented by scientists again – that is, until Re:wild’s Search for Lost Species came along.The project, which has team members from multiple different organizations, seeks to find animals that have been lost to science for over a decade, but aren’t believed to be extinct – the number of which is thought to be at least 4,300.As part of this search, they spent several weeks last year combing Makira Forest, one of Madagascar’s largest protected areas.“Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot and Makira is an underexplored area within the country, so we decided to pilot a new model for lost species searches there,” said Re:wild’s lost species officer Christina Biggs in a statement sent to IFLScience.The search began in September 2023.Image credit: Re:wildAfter setting off with a list of 30 lost species to find, that search proved to be successful, with one of the more unexpected findings being the giant millipede – although it’s suspected that it hadn’t been lost to local communities at all.“I personally was most surprised and pleased by the fact that the giant millipede Spirostreptus sculptus, not uncommon in Makira Forest, appeared to be another lost species known only from the type specimen described in 1897,” said Dmitry Telnov, an entomologist with BINCO.Adding a particularly massive cherry on top of this find, the expedition member also noted: “The longest specimen of this species we observed in Makira was a really gigantic female measuring 27.5 centimeters [10.8 inches] long.”Ok, now I'm starting to see why it was so easy to lose.Image credit: Re:wildAlthough the team was unable to find a number of the species on the lost list, there were plenty that they did rediscover, including two species of ant-like flower beetles that hadn’t been documented since 1958 and a jumping spider, Tomocyrba decollate, that had been lost since first being discovered in 1900.On top of that, the expedition uncovered a never-before-discovered species of zebra spider – quite the find considering they weren’t thought to live in Madagascan rainforests.Having found some adult guarding egg sacs in a cave, Brogan Pett, director of the SpiDiverse working group at BINCO, commented: “[T]hey were quite large spiders and it was remarkable that they had gone unrecognized for so long.”It’s hoped that the team will be able to return to Makira to get a second attempt at finding the species they couldn’t locate this time around – not just for the satisfaction of ticking something off a list, but because of the impact that rediscovering a species, or even finding brand-new ones, can have.“It’s important to continue researching the biodiversity of Makira because although it is one of the largest rainforests in the country we still have relatively little idea which species occur, and there are likely to be many completely undescribed species as well,” said Julie Linchant from the Wildlife Conservation Society Madagascar.“Having a better understanding of the biological riches of Makira will enable us to better target our protection efforts.”

A start-up is literally making butter out of thin air. Using a host of biochemical wizardry, the company is developing ways to make fats out of carbon dioxide taken from the air and hydrogen from water, all without the need for animals, plants, or farmland.The brains behind the initiative are called Savor, a company run under the umbrella of Orca Sciences that has received investment from billionaire Bill Gates. By cutting farming out of the equation, the aim is to slash the amount of greenhouse emissions produced by agriculture, which accounts for up to 8.5 percent of global emissions.“The process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does,” Gates explained in a blog post about the work.One of Savor’s latest products is butter, which according to Bill, tastes just like the real deal."Most important, it tastes really good – like the real thing, because chemically it is," Gates added. “I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eating real butter,” he said. Fats are simply made out of varying chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms. It’s possible to obtain these chemical building blocks from water and air, and then use biochemical processes to rejig them into fats that are molecularly identical to those found in animals and plants. A hot pan melting butter that was created using the newly refined chemical processes.Image credit: Steven Davis / UCIAlong with fashioning fats like the ones in meat, butter, and milk, Savor is also looking to tackle the problem of palm oil, the most widely consumed plant-based fat in the world that has a hefty impact on the natural world.Together with scientists from the University of California – Irvine, Orca Science published a paper in the journal Nature Sustainability last year explaining their vision of how many dietary fats could be artificially synthesized.They showed that farm-grown animal fats create around 1 to 3 grams (0.04 to 0.1 ounces) of carbon dioxide per thousand calories, while they can make the same amount of lab-grown fats with less than a gram of equivalent emissions.“Large-scale synthesis of edible molecules through chemical and biological means without agricultural feedstocks is a very real possibility. Such ‘food without the farm’ could avoid enormous quantities of climate-warming emissions while also safeguarding biodiverse lands that might otherwise be cleared for farms,” Steven Davis, lead study author and professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, said in a statement. “I like the idea of not depending on photosynthesis for everything we eat,” Davis added. “At whatever scale, synthesizing food will alleviate competition between natural ecosystems and agriculture, thereby avoiding the many environmental costs of farming.”One of the biggest challenges is making the process cost-effective, thereby lowering its potential price and making it more attractive to consumers. However, the researchers have said that scaling up the manufacturing shouldn't be too much of a problem in theory. “The beauty of the fats is that you can synthesize them with processes that don’t involve biology. It’s all chemistry, and because of that, you can operate at higher pressures and temperatures that allow excellent efficiency. You could therefore build big reactors to do this at large scales,” said Professor Davis.

Comedy Central’s The Daily Show returned to New York on Tuesday after the security reassessment at their Milwaukee theater changed in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump. However, host Jon Stewart did not take well to NBC’s Lester Holt challenging President Joe Biden if he had done any “soul searching” since Saturday because Biden, according to him, has simply been quoting Trump. After recapping the goings on at the Republican National Convention, Stewart switched topics, “Meanwhile, back at the Batcave, Joe Biden was sitting down with NBC News anchor Lester Holt to answer questions about what he would do to cool our nation's overheated rhetoric.”     Stewart then played a clip of Holt asking Biden, “Have you taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced?” Biden responded, “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says? Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody? [jump cut] My opponent has engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there will be a bloodbath if he loses. Like, remember the picture of Donald Trump when Nancy Pelosi's husband was hit with a hammer going—talking about—joking about it.” Holt then observed, “This doesn't sound like you are turning down the heat though.” Greatly displeased, Stewart ranted, “He's not turning down the heat, he's telling you what the other guy has been saying. How are you supposed to discuss the temperature and the rhetoric if you are not allowed to mention the rhetoric? It became clear that Biden was ready to turn it down for everybody but Lester Holt.” Stewart’s anger has two problems. First, on bloodbath-gate, Trump was clearly talking about the economy, and it is a phrase that the media themselves have used plenty of times over the years, including just days before Trump’s comments. Biden himself has also used the phrase. Second, Stewart is being hypocritical. Earlier in the show, he reacted to a clip of Sen. Ron Johnson calling for unity on CNN, declaring, “I, for one, look forward to hearing his unifying remarks on the convention floor.” He then played a clip of Johnson declaring in his speech that, “Today's Democrat agenda, their policies are a clear and present danger to America.” After an extended pause, Stewart opined, “I'm sorry, I guess he's what's known as "unity in the streets, divisive in the sheets." But to be fair, to be fair, and I want to be fair in this new environment, Senator Johnson did not mean to stoke anger. His teleprompter did.” That last bit refers to Johnson claiming that a wrong version of his speech was loaded into the teleprompter, but if it is fair for Biden to call Trump dangerous, why is it not fair for Johnson to call Democrats dangerous?   Here is a transcript for the July 16 show: Comedy Central The Daily Show 7/16/2024 11:04 PM ET JON STEWART: I, for one, look forward to hearing his unifying remarks on the convention floor. RON JOHNSON: Today's Democrat agenda, their policies are a clear and present danger to America.  STEWART: I'm sorry, I guess he's what's known as "Unity in the streets, divisive in the sheets." But to be fair, to be fair, and I want to be fair in this new environment, Senator Johnson did not mean to stoke anger. His teleprompter did. ... 11:11 PM ET STEWART:  Meanwhile, back at the Batcave, Joe Biden was sitting down with NBC News anchor Lester Holt to answer questions about what he would do to cool our nation's overheated rhetoric. LESTER HOLT: Have you taken a step back and done a little soul searching on things that you may have said that could incite people who are not balanced? [jump cut] JOE BIDEN: How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says? Do you just not say anything because it may incite somebody? [jump cut] My opponent has engaged in that rhetoric. He talks about there will be a bloodbath if he loses. Like, remember the picture of Donald Trump when Nancy Pelosi's husband was hit with a hammer going — talking about — joking about it. HOLT: This doesn't sound like you are turning down the heat though. STEWART: He's not turning down the heat, he's telling you what the other guy has been saying. How are you supposed to discuss the temperature and the rhetoric if you are not allowed to mention the rhetoric? It became clear that Biden was ready to turn it down for everybody but Lester Holt.

A Missouri man once entrusted with protecting and serving his community as a firefighter has now effectively admitted that public trust was misplaced after he pleaded guilty to charges related to stealing a wallet from the victim of a deadly car crash.The circumstances surrounding the crash are both heartbreaking and infuriating. Around 1:30 in the morning on Feb. 26, 2023, Cedric Dixon, then 34, blew a red light and struck a Chevy Tahoe carrying eight passengers — all of whom were under the age of 21 — in St. Louis. The force of the impact sent the Tahoe over a guardrail before it crashed upside down on the street below.He had just celebrated his 18th birthday, and his wallet contained $200 worth of gift cards and nearly $700 in cash as well as credit and debit cards.Four young people — 20-year-old Corntrail McKinley, 19-year-old Anthony Robinson, 19-year-old Richard Boyd, and 18-year-old Bryanna Johnson — died as a result of the crash, and four others were injured.One of the injured was Seven Robinson-Laney. He suffered broken bones, a concussion, and a back injury. While he awaited transport to a hospital, a first responder who he assumed was a police officer approached him.The first responder asked for Robinson-Laney's wallet on the pretense of checking for identification. The young man produced his wallet and handed it over. The official returned Robinson-Laney's ID almost immediately but slipped the wallet into his jacket, bodycam video later showed.About two weeks later, when Robinson-Laney recovered enough to begin thinking clearly, he recalled that he never got his wallet back. He had just celebrated his 18th birthday, and his wallet contained $200 in gift cards and nearly $700 in cash as well as credit and debit cards.Robinson-Laney reported the incident to police, who later identified the individual who interacted with Robinson-Laney: Arnold Britt, a former wide receiver for the University of Missouri who had spent the last nine years working as a firefighter in St. Louis.Britt initially claimed he mistook the debit card as his wife's since it had been issued by the same bank. He then used the debit card to make about $120 in purchases. Whether he ever offered an explanation for the missing cash and gift cards is unclear.The fire department placed Britt on administrative leave, but then-St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner — one of several district attorneys affiliated with George Soros — declined to prosecute him, so Britt was allowed to return to his duties. However, since Britt made the debit card purchases in St. Louis County rather than the city, County Prosecutor Christopher King eventually charged him in connection with those transactions.On Monday, Britt, now 41, pleaded guilty to felony receiving stolen property and misdemeanor fraudulent use of a credit/debit device. Britt's sentencing hearing is scheduled for early September.Though Britt has no prior criminal record, prosecutors reportedly want to deter other public servants from committing similar violations and are pushing for concurrent sentences of five years in prison for the stolen property and one year for the debit card fraud. The fire department has since issued a statement claiming that Britt is "no longer a member."Robinson-Laney didn't appear convinced the incident was just an honest mistake: "Everything he did was, like, this is not his first time doing this. It was just, like, this is what he does.""It's hurtful," he continued. "It wasn't just an accident; it was the deaths of youth. You took from people that could have been dead."Cedric Dixon, the driver of the vehicle that caused the crash that killed four of Robinson-Laney's friends, also was prosecuted. He ultimately pleaded guilty to four counts of involuntary manslaughter, four counts of second-degree assault, and one count of leaving the scene of a crash. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!